‘Das Experiment’ Comes With Its Own Set of Trials

When director Oliver Hirschbiegel met with Disney executives a few months ago to discuss possible projects, he says, “I told them I really want to do a kids’ movie. They didn’t believe me. They thought I was joking.” It’s easy to understand why studio execs had trouble picturing the German filmmaker as a PG-13 kind of guy. Hirschbiegel, after all, is responsible for “Das Experiment,” a disturbing look at human nature that may well qualify as the feel-bad movie of the season.

The premise of “Das Experiment”: University professors recruit 20 ordinary citizens to assume the roles of “guards” and “prisoners” for a two-week psychology experiment.

Almost immediately, the guards begin humiliating the prisoners. Torture and murder ensue. Based on Mario Giordano’s novel “Black Box,” “Das Experiment” originally included the statement that it was “inspired by” the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who declined to comment for this story but criticized the movie in a professional journal.

The reference has been removed from the film’s credits.

“Das Experiment” star Moritz Bleibtreu (“Run Lola Run”) recently joined Hirschbiegel in a Studio City deli to talk about reaction to their film in Europe.

“The way people would ask questions after they saw the picture,” Bleibtreu says, “it felt like they were saying, ‘Why are you showing me this? I don’t want to know that I could possibly be like that.’ They were shocked because it forces you to think about what you would do in that situation. People really seemed to personalize it.”

Audience members fainted at one screening; others walked out. “That’s not what we wanted,” Hirschbiegel says. “We did not want people to faint. We don’t want people to have nightmares after watching it.”

Yet it’s not surprising that “Das Experiment” has provoked extreme responses. Shot in a straightforward documentary style, the movie depicts characters being gagged, raped, urinated on, stripped naked and solitarily confined inside a vault-sized black box, stabbed, sprayed with fire extinguishers, clubbed and forced to wear “Sissy” signs.

“The book was very intense,” says Hirschbiegel, a German television director who read “Black Box” in one sitting and decided to adapt the novel for his feature film debut. “It had believable characters and the whole situation was like a Shakespearean play in a way, if you look at these characters at the beginning and how their positions shift.”

The most chilling power shift is embodied by Berus (Justus von Dohnanyi). At the start of the experiment, he’s a quiet, middle-class family man assigned the role of guard. By Day 5, he’s become an out-of-control sadist.

Bleibtreu, who played prisoner No. 77 in the film, found Berus’ transformation plausible: “If you take somebody like Berus, who maybe is a good father and has a good job but who never had power in his life, and then you suddenly give him power, something he’s never had before, of course he might misuse it. That can be a very tempting situation.”

The sight of blond, square-jawed Berus abusing barely dressed captives and barking orders in German raises the question among some viewers: Did Hirschbiegel intend “Das Experiment” as a metaphor for Germany’s World War II concentration camp mentality?

“No one believes me,” the filmmaker replies, “but it never ever occurred to me that Justus might look like a Nazi. That’s coincidental. Doing this as a German movie, of course, I was always aware of that and I did read books about behavior of the guards in the concentration camps, because I never understood how your loving family father would do these horrible things. But I didn’t think of ‘Das Experiment’ as a study of fascism. I think it’s a universal thing.”

Hirschbiegel’s research encompassed material on American prisons, British concentration camps during the Boer War and Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s electric shock “obedience” experiments in the 1960s. He says it all led to a disheartening conclusion: People in positions of authority tend to abuse power in remarkably similar ways, regardless of national boundaries.

“The techniques of manipulating and controlling people and keeping them down seems to be the same all over the world,” he says. “It must be something that just comes from the human mind, because it’s not like the people who do these things all got together to exchange this information.”

Most of “Das Experiment” was filmed during five weeks in the cellar of a Cologne cable factory. Cast members bonded on the mock prison set according to their roles in the film.

“Within two days you had the actors who were playing prisoners in one group,” Hirschbiegel says, “and the actors playing the guards in another. During the catering breaks, they’d sit by themselves, away from the other group. We were down there 14, 15 hours a day, without any daylight, and we were shooting in sequence, so it caused the fiction and reality to melt together. The more intense the scenes got that we were shooting, the more tense the real-life situation. It was hard to escape that energy.”

Two-thirds of the way through the shoot, Bleibtreu wanted out. “It got to a point,” he says, “eight or nine days before we finished, where I just did not want to scream at anybody, or get screamed at, or beat anybody, or get beaten up. ‘Let me do a comedy scene or something!’ Because no matter how much you try to laugh at the situation and keep it away, it just gets to you, physically and psychologically. Every day, I’d go to the set, put the [gown] on, go to prison, go to my cell, then at night, go home exhausted, have a drink and go to sleep.”

Hirschbiegel admits that during the production his role as director began to remind him of the psychology professor in “Das Experiment” who tries to manipulate his subjects’ behavior from afar. “In any film, the director is kind of a mad professor, looking down on the action,” he says. “But it was unsettling to sit there at the monitor and watch the actors carrying out my orders. I realized how easy it would be to see them as guinea pigs in a cage and for me to say, ‘A little more, a little bit more.’ ”

Bleibtreu says of the director, “Oliver was smart enough to pick up on this tension on the set and to use that, but never to the point where we’d exploit any kind of bad feelings between the actors. If we’d done this, we wouldn’t have been any better than the people in the actual film.”

Citing David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999) as a model, Hirschbiegel says he was careful to avoid “commenting” on his characters’ ethical judgment. He was more interested in showing how social dynamics and peer pressure shape moral boundaries. “The wonderful and the terrible thing about human beings is, we are very flexible. In a bad sense, that means if we step over a line, we will never step back. We look for the next line to step over. It takes a lot of strength and moral integrity to step aside and ask yourself, ‘What am I doing?’ ”

And if no one questions the behavior?

Bleibtreu cites a scene in “Das Experiment” in which the guards abuse their prisoners for the first time. “After the guards did their stuff with the fire extinguishers, it’s almost like they were waiting for a response from the professors. One guy said, ‘Don’t you think that was too tough?’ and another one says, ‘They didn’t say anything; if they didn’t say anything, it must be fine.’ Almost like ‘OK, good! I don’t have to think for myself anymore.’ But it’s going to come back to you.”

“If there’s a message people could take from this film,” Hirschbiegel adds, “it’s that no matter what, it is you who are responsible for what you do. No institution, and no person, can take that away.”