Showing His ‘Character’

“Character,” which won the Oscar for best foreign film, is a superb period piece. Based on the classic Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk, it is set in Rotterdam in the ‘20s.

Its hero (Fedja van Hue^t) has the most forbidding parents imaginable: an implacable court bailiff (Jan Decleir), also a banker and entrepreneur, who after a one-time sexual encounter, leaves his stoic young maid (Betty Schuurman) pregnant.

Defiantly independent, this near-silent woman refuses to marry him or to accept any financial aid. Their son grows up determined to be a success in law and banking, which only inflames his father’s rage at having been rejected by his mother. There is a Dickensian sense of passion and obsessiveness to “Character,” a tale of emotion strangled by pride.

Remarkably, this accomplished, mature work, which opens Friday, was a first feature for director Mike van Diem. A lean, witty man of 39 who speaks American-style English with only the slightest trace of an accent, admitted that it was a “huge, frightening, scary experience” in a recent interview on a West Hollywood hotel rooftop. The challenge of sustaining his actors at an intense emotional pitch throughout three months of shooting was made more difficult by the fact that Van Diem re-created ‘20s Rotterdam, heavily bombed in World War II, by filming in 10 cities across Europe.

“They don’t call me 16-take Mike for nothing,” quipped Van Diem, about how he kept actors in character who might begin a scene in one country and complete it another. “Seriously, we knew the challenge going in and prepared for it the best we could. Since the film would be an epic with an operatic quality, I decided that I had to cast classically trained stage actors--although I did test some of the Dutch Brat Pack. I asked for a Steadicam for my cinematographer since I wanted to keep everything flowing. That was scary: I had only directed TV, so I had never used a Steadicam before.”

But taking risks seems to be Van Diem’s style. At the University of Utrecht, he picked Dutch language and literature as a major but never attended classes, spending his time instead directing student stage productions and programming film series, something he started doing in high school in Amsterdam.

“I and my friends just wanted to get away from home by going to university and discover the good life without parental interference--you know what that means: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

Van Diem managed to get admitted to film school at 26, and in 1990 his 45-minute psychological thriller “Alaska” won a Student Academy Award, and became the first student film to win a Golden Calf, Holland’s equivalent of the Oscars. “In the summer of 1990, the academy flew me first-class to Hollywood, and I stayed in a hotel [the Century Plaza] on a street called the Avenue of the Stars. It was great.”

Van Diem’s second trip to Hollywood brought him down to earth. He had written in English a psychological thriller, but he said philosophically, “Nothing happened. It got lost in the hills that surround us.” He admitted very cautiously that the success of “Character,” which took the audience award at Cannes, is reviving some interest in this script.

When “Alaska” failed to launch a film-directing career, Van Diem wound up in television and made his name directing the 1993 and 1994 seasons of “Called to the Bar,” a hit TV series, which he described as “a cross between ‘L.A. Law’ and ‘thirtysomething.’ All these 30-year-old lawyers had personal problems. I got on so well with actors that I was able to make a name for myself as an actors’ director. I was one of six directors on the series, but did the most segments, a total of 30. It was like a very chic miniseries and a great learning experience.”

Before going into television, he had been given his first job by producer Lauren Geels, and worked as a writer, script doctor and as a first assistant director. Years later, when he and Geels were having dinner, the producer asked him, “How about taking a shot at a literary classic?,” and invited him to select something out of a stack of novels. Van Diem chose “Character,” which he said was “obligatory reading in high school. We figured that from first pitch to opening night the film could be down in two years.”

Geels sent Van Diem off with an advance and a six-month deadline in which to finish a screenplay based on “Character.” “But I can do writing or directing only at gunpoint. I should be given only four months at most. In three months, half the money was gone, and I had yet to write a word. I did a lot of exercising and even taught myself how to cook. But I did have a life before I settled down to writing the script. And we shot a first-draft script.

“Writing is better for you than directing. You can take breaks. Directing is hard, strenuous work that can be a 16- to 18-hour-a-day job, and life passes you by. It is very important not to let life pass you by.

“Don’t shoot until you are really ready to film. Our location scout worked a year and a half before we were ready to start. Somehow Lauren had managed to raise $4.5 million, getting all the subsidies he could. That is a huge budget for a Dutch film. The usual budget is $1.5 million.”

Van Diem, Geels and their associates restructured the novel, laying on a mystery framework and developing the young hero considerably. “I’m a structure guy. When I started writing, I only knew that there should be a scene revolving around the word ‘father’--that both father and son should both reach their goals. Writing a script is like painting an Expressionist painting: You throw on a lot of red and you just know there needs to be a yellow dot in the upper left corner. People have said how visual the script is, but all I was concerned with was that for my actors and my backers that it would be a good read.”

Van Diem even took care to eliminate all the autumnal browns so typical of period films to go for grays of the harsh business world instead. To convey the somberness of his young hero’s existence, he did not allow any trees to be seen until 45 minutes into the film. All this imaginative concern for mood and detail paid off handsomely.

During production, Van Diem became romantically involved with his casting director’s assistant and said that he’s going through a particularly happy, stable time in his life. He said he deliberately continues to live in Amsterdam as frugally as he did as a student to maintain his independence.

In recent months he’s been on the road promoting “Character” from Tokyo to Toronto and has yet to begin even to think of what he’ll do next, suggesting that, knowing himself, it will probably be later rather than sooner. “I need to sit down before the blank screen of my word processor, waiting for someone to put a gun to my head.”