‘Book Thief’ actor Geoffrey Rush: ‘We have to keep looking’ back

Does the world need another World War II film? That’s one of the questions actor Geoffrey Rush confronted in making “The Book Thief,” the new drama based on Markus Zusak’s novel about a young girl who develops a passion for reading while coming of age in Nazi Germany.

At a recent installment of the Envelope Screening Series, Rush talked about how the screenplay affected him and why stories about the war and the Holocaust still need to be told.

“The screenplay just deeply impressed me because the role I was reading for reminded me very much of my stepfather, who was a shearer,” Rush said. “He was a very leftist political animal, in the shearing sheds and the unions. … When I was 20, he told me about when he was 20 and he was fighting in Borneo. … At that time when I was 20, hearing these stories, I was eligible for the draft to go to Vietnam, and I had really fascinating adult talks with my stepdad about the nature of war. So I was responding to all that sort of stuff when I read the screenplay.”

VIDEO: ‘The Book Thief’: Watch actor Geoffrey Rush discuss the film

Rush called Zusak’s story “a great gift” and added, “For that period of history … we have to keep looking at it. Sixty-five million people died in a period of six years. So there are stories to be told. And there are a few cynics around who say, ‘Oh, do we need another Holocaust movie? Do we need to tell this story over and over?’ And I think we do, with many different dimensions.”

He continued: “The great thing Markus wrote about is asking us — the Allies, the English-speaking world, the Americans, the Australians, the Brits — these people [the Germans] were our enemies at the time, but what was happening in those small towns as the fanaticism of that Nazi ideology rose to complete domination? How it affected what could have been, for me, an outback town in Queensland, or it could have been a town in the Midwest in America, where you saw a kind of corruption or a corrosion of fundamental working towns.”

For more from Rush on “The Book Thief,” watch the full video above, and check back for daily highlights.

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