Not just another thriller

Dressed in faded blue pajamas, a weary Michael Caine slumps on the bed of a tumbledown apartment constructed inside a suburban studio set. Worriedly rubbing the grizzled stubble on his chin with one hand, he tentatively cradles a telephone with the other as filming begins. “You won’t forget my passport, will you, sir?” he stammers into the phone. “Sir, sir?” he pleads, desperate that his interlocutor has hung up on him.

Standing behind the camera video monitor, director Norman Jewison throws up his hands in exasperation. “I hate these phone calls!” he groans to no one in particular. “There’s no dramatic concentration; they’re totally shot out of continuity. Otherwise, you were just great, like a trapped rat.”

Giving a reflexive tug on his ever-present baseball cap, the 77-year-old Jewison crosses over to the bed to speak with Caine. “But what about trying another take to make him sound more suspicious, even threatening?”

Caine’s character, Pierre Brossard, a 70-year-old man on the run from justice, may be worn-out and cornered, in urgent need of a passport to flee France, but it would be a potentially fatal mistake to underestimate him. Ask the much younger hit men he shoots dead. Based on Brian Moore’s sparely told 1995 novel of the same name, “The Statement” is a taut historical thriller centering around the hunt in the early 1990s for Brossard, a former Nazi collaborator, torturer and convicted murderer. The $18-million Sony Classics film opens Friday in Los Angeles.

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning scriptwriter of “The Pianist,” adapted the book. In that film, Harwood followed a peaceful Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw. This time out, he’s tracking Wladyslaw Szpilman’s polar opposite, a remorseless killer sheltered by conservative members of the Catholic Church and evasive figures in the French government for more than four decades.

“The French still have difficulty facing up to that period,” says Harwood. “They handed over their Jews rather willingly.”

The scriptwriter suspects more collaborationist secrets remain to be revealed and hopes the film will encourage audiences to question the involvement of its political leaders in the cover-up of crimes.

“One always wants to create suspicion of that kind in the established order,” he argues. “It’s one of the duties of a citizen in a democracy.”

What makes “The Statement” so provocative is its accusation of conspiracy between the church and state to shield a self-righteous nationalist bully who killed in the name of God and country. . In a passage from the book, Moore takes aim at an ecclesiastical rogues’ gallery, ranging “from nakedly anti-Semitic members of the old French church to the arrogant abbots whose attitude was that the church always had the right of sanctuary, and others who simply feared the Communists more than the Nazis.”

Shunned by church

The statement of the title is a three-sentence note identifying Brossard as the executioner of seven Jews; his would-be assassins have been instructed to pin it on his body to make the death look like a revenge execution ordered by relatives of his victims.

As Brossard scrambles from one abbey to the next in an attempt to elude his pursuers, an investigating gendarme, played by Jeremy Northam (“Gosford Park”), and an implacable judge, played by Tilda Swinton (“The Deep End”), try to catch him first and solve the mystery of which influential politicians have been protecting him all these years. Clergy who once warmly welcomed him now turn the elderly fugitive away under orders from a new, more progressive cardinal, anxious to polish up the church’s tarnished image as a haven for Nazi collaborators.

Both Moore’s book and the upcoming film are closely patterned after the grimly incredible odyssey of Paul Touvier, the Vichy commander who became the first Frenchman in history to be convicted for crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 and died in a prison hospital two years later.

Touvier was part of a collaborationist machine that deported 75,721 Jewish French citizens and European Jews seeking refuge in France to Nazi concentration camps from 1942 to 1944. This number represented close to one in four of the country’s 330,000 Jews. Fewer than 2,000 returned. A committed acolyte of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief for Lyons, Touvier was the local head of intelligence for the murderous pro-Nazi Milice, the paramilitary French militia that enforced Nazi control in Vichy, the puppet regime set up in the southeastern part of the country.

Shortly after the war, he was tried and convicted in absentia of treason and killing members of the Resistance. Sentenced to death, Touvier went into hiding, eking out a living by passing counterfeit money and selling bootleg chocolate to candy stores. Provided refuge by friendly priests, he even managed to marry and raise two children. As a staunch defender of the faith, Touvier was seen as deserving sanctuary by conservative Catholics who were convinced that godless Communism represented a graver threat to French values than Nazism.

In 1971, Touvier was pardoned by French President Georges Pompidou, under pressure from powerful Catholic authorities. When Touvier tried to claim property in Lyons belonging to some of the exterminated Jews he had deported, the French press found out and raised a national outcry, resulting in an indictment against him for crimes against humanity. Again, he went underground, finding asylum in a series of abbeys, monasteries, presbyteries and priories. Ultimately, he was captured at a monastery in Nice in 1989.

Touvier’s trial and conviction launched a belated round of national soul-searching and long-simmering accusations against former Vichy officials. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac became the first French head of state to admit France’s guilt in the deportation of Jews.

A sore subject

Interestingly, it took a director and producer who are both Canadian and a British Jewish writer born in apartheid-era South Africa to bring this controversial chapter of French history to the cinema. Moore, a lapsed Catholic from Northern Ireland, who lived in Canada and Malibu and died in 1999, would no doubt be delighted. Even though a number of books have appeared in France on the Touvier case, Moore’s incendiary novel has not been published here.

Nerves are still so raw over the Touvier case and the covert role of the Catholic Church that the production, which carefully avoided publicity during filming in France, lost several promised locations, including monasteries and municipal government buildings. At one point, the movie’s producer, Robert Lantos, feared the film might not be completed.

“We would secure locations and people would change their minds because of the film’s subject matter,” Lantos says. “There seemed to be lingering sympathies for the character, or if not sympathies, then a desire to avoid the subject.”

Touvier himself never recanted his conviction that his acts of torture and murder were justified to save France from the Communists. “Like quite a number of French people, he [the Touvier-Brossard character] really believed he was fighting for a cause that was just and right,” Jewison explains.

Over lunch in his trailer during a break in filming, Jewison pulls out his copy of the film’s script to show a visitor the chilling photograph he keeps clipped to the first page. It’s a grainy snapshot he located on the Internet. Members of the Milice stand over the sprawled bodies of the seven Jewish victims near Lyons who’ve just been shot against a wall.

“Touvier had their names written on cardboard scraps tied with string around their necks to humiliate them,” he explains. “I keep this photo as a reminder of why I’m making the film.”

Jewison says the book grabbed him the moment he read it several years ago. He got in touch with Lantos who owned the film rights and eventually persuaded the producer to hire Harwood to write the script. Although the director hasn’t made a thriller since the 1979 film “And Justice for All ... “ with Al Pacino, “The Statement” deals with many of the same themes he’s covered in previous movies.

“I’ve made three films about racism -- ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ ‘A Soldier’s Story’ and ‘The Hurricane’ -- and this is the fourth,” Jewison explains. “It’s also a story about justice being served and betrayal, one of my favorite subjects. Brossard is finally betrayed by the church and the very people he’s supported all his life; he’s betrayed by his own ideals.”

Joined in the fight

Growing up in a Toronto neighborhood in the 1930s, Jewison encountered discrimination from people who mistakenly thought he was Jewish. “I think that also has something to do with my wanting to make the movie,” he says.

The director vividly remembers listening to Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes on the radio in the seventh grade while a classmate translated from the German. At 17, Jewison enlisted in the Canadian Navy. “I joined up as soon as I could to fight against this terrible evil of fascism,” he recalls.

Reading “The Statement” triggered wartime memories, prompting him to research the Vichy era, a process that corroborated Moore’s condemnation of the regime. Even so, the director is reluctant to view the film as a polemic against Vichy or the church. “I don’t think the film takes sides or is an indictment of the Catholic Church,” Jewison maintains. “But it’s clear where support for Brossard is coming from because he was protected by 50 different monasteries, abbeys and church organizations. These were all old, right-wing, conservative men who were protecting him because they felt he was a patriot.”

Brossard’s logic of self-justification came in handy for Caine in trying to get a handle on the morally repugnant war criminal. “You have to reason that no man is a villain to himself,” the actor explains by phone from Los Angeles after the film has finished shooting.

In “The Statement,” Caine, who won one Oscar as the loving head of an orphanage in “The Cider House Rules” and another as an emotionally vulnerable accountant in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” goes completely over to the dark side. Although the versatile actor has played some cold-blooded deviants (the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic doctor in “Quills,” a vicious gangster in the 1971 film “Get Carter”), “the hangman from Lyons” represented a formidable challenge.

“He’s really, really unforgivable,” says Caine, “someone with no redeeming qualities. That’s why I was hired, because Norman and Robert think I can play reprobates and still keep you interested. I don’t say that, mind you; they do.”

Apart from the opportunity of working with Jewison, Caine took the role because he wanted to bring the Touvier story to a broader public without preaching a history lesson. “You’re talking to the guy who played Sandy Bullock’s beauty consultant in ‘Miss Congeniality’ and Austin Powers’ dad,” he says.

“I don’t spend my life lecturing people, but I thought this story was fairly unknown and was important to bring to the attention of the world. The other reason is that this character is completely different from anything I’ve ever done before. I do like to ‘variety-up’ the stuff, you know.”

To play the aging, hunted collaborator, Caine underwent a thoroughgoing physical transformation.

“Norman said you look far too glamorous for this guy; you don’t look old enough or nasty enough,” the 70-year-old actor recalls. “So I gained weight and put on crap clothes. Then I turned nasty, which is not a pretty sight.”

When he hides out with his estranged wife Nicole, played by Charlotte Rampling -- one of the rare occasions when Brossard has extended face-to-face conversations with another human being -- he insults her, polishes off her Port and kicks her German shepherd.

Harwood and Jewison invented dialogue, created new scenes and expanded characters, particularly Swinton’s Livi, making the crusading judge more of a hot-tempered foil to Northam’s Roux, a by-the-book detective. Even with invented characters and fleshed-out dialogue, the script proved a bit schizophrenic for Caine.

“It’s really two movies,” he explains. “You’re either with the people who are trying to get me or you’re with me. Since I’m on the run, I hardly meet anybody. I’m still just as mystified by the story and my performance as ever -- and I made it,” he adds with a laugh. “It’s one film where I’ve relied more heavily on the director than I’ve ever done. There were times I felt as if I were blinded in one eye, so I just trusted Norman to guide me through it all.”