Bryan Singer

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Many of today's filmmakers don't have the same level of recognition as those of Hollywood's second Golden Age in the late 1960's to mid-1970's. Just because they don't necessarily have the quality or brand power of your Steven Spielbergs, George Lucases, or Martin Scorseces doesn't mean they are not there.

On the contrary, this past decade has not only crawled with so many big brand-name comic book movie franchises, but by many talented filmmakers actually working at the helm of them. The director that, in retrospect, was undoubtedly responsible for setting the quality of the Hollywood superhero film so high is none other than Bryan Singer.

Singer started out directing intriguing character pieces like 1995's The Usual Suspects and 1998's Apt Pupil. In this past decade, his quality work as a director reached internationally stratospheric new heights with his helming of three back-to-back megahit comic book films, X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns.

Now, the 43 year-old filmmaker has returned with a new kind of 'global film', the period war thriller Valkyrie, starring none other than the equally global Tom Cruise. We first asked Bryan what compelled him to do a war thriller as his newest film.

'The first time I was exposed to the subject is when my mother was hosted as an environmental activist in Germany in the early eighties by the family of Helmuth von Moltke,' Singer recalls, ' He was part of the Kreisau Circle, the intellectual wing of the resistance, and he was executed, in relation to the conspiracy, and she told me about it.'

'And when she got home, I realized, wow, there were a bunch of German military men who tried to kill Hitler, how odd, how strange, because as a kid, you thought all Germans at that time were Nazis,' he adds, ' It wasn't till later that after I read Chris McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander's script that I was completely educated as to the extent of the assassination attempt, as well as the plot to overthrow the government, that came only a couple of years ago.'

Singer also explained why he felt a story on a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler would particularly make for a compelling Hollywood thriller.

'Well, because a lot of people [in Nazi Germany] liked him,' Bryan believes, 'I mean, for the hundreds of generals who opposed him, there were still 3,000 generals fighting in the field, over 9,000,000 soldiers, so definitely an uphill battle for the conspirators. But they were around a good deal before Hitler engaged in war.'

We asked the director why he feels Nazi Germany has continually been a popular period for war dramas in film, particularly in the last few years.

'I think one, because the Nazi holocaust was so huge and it affected the world on such a global scale, that it was a world war, unparalleled to anything we had ever seen,' he believes, 'And he recorded it all. The Nazis filmed everything. So as a result of that, we have the evidence. And it gives us something to look at that's very definable, symbols, Hitler, the swastika. When you're teaching the holocaust, you have this extraordinary reference.'

'A lot of films are made about it because it was such a great war,' Singer adds, 'And particularly by the American film industry because we won the war against Hitler with the Russians and the Allies and the British and that's probably why they see a lot of it. I think that it's a coincidence. I have no idea. I'd like to distinguish this film though because it's not about the Holocaust. It's a thriller about killing Hitler and it's more like Day Of The Jackal than Schindler's List.'

Bryan also notes that Operation Valkyrie particularly stood out for him from the many assassinations that were attempted on the dictator during his infamous rule over Germany.

'There was a number of attempts,' Singer notes, ' don't know if any of them would make compelling movies to the level of this because of the coup and the nature and the level of who was involved in this one. The Tresckow group had tried. Earlier, there was one attempt where it was probably the case of the first suicide bombing where a guy was going to walk up to Hitler with the same kind of bombing mechanism when he was viewing a bunch of new uniforms at a ceremony.'

'And, just in typical Hitler style, he walked in, viewed the stuff, and walked out in two minutes,' he continues, 'And the guy who had already triggered his bombs, in a fever sweat, ran into a restroom and disarmed the explosives and survived. I think he actually survived the war. So there were a lot of attempts like that by Germans. And then, there were radical Germans like one who had a beer hall where he put a huge bomb behind the podium where Hitler was speaking. Hitler left early, the bomb went off, and killed nine people and brought down the building. Hitler certainly had Satan's luck when it came to these assassination attempts.'

Despite his films having grown increasingly grandiose with his superhero films, Singer claims that he originally intended for his war thriller set in 1940's Nazi Germany to be 'just a little film' by comparison.

'My original intention was I had made three large movies back-to-back and was perfectly content with getting together with my old buddy Chris McQuarrie and making a smaller film about an intimate subject,' he recounts, 'So we brought it up to United Artists and then, after that, in the back of our minds, we thought wouldn't it be great to have Tom Cruise play this role because he embodies a lot of stuff in Stauffenberg's character, his physical resemblance is undeniable, and he's a great actor, I've always wanted to work with him. And so, the film grew in its size and scope.'

'But ever since I made The Usual Suspects, I've always strived to mirror the films I loved in the seventies and those are films that somehow bridged a gap between the independent and the mainstream,' Bryan continues, 'You had studios making very outrageous, very ambitious, and very exciting films and sometimes very thrilling, edge-of-your-seat kinds of films that had very unconventional plots and I'll always try to make those films. I think I tried to do that with the X-Men films, even though they appeared on the outside as blockbusters. I go in as movies. That's why I like to shoot outside the country, too, because the studio's not around. It began as a little film. I'm not telling you what it became. I don't think I can make a little film. This was my attempt. I failed. Now I'm going to go make another big film.'

Despite Bryan's intent of Valkyrie to be enjoyed ultimately more on an entertainment aesthetic than a historical one, he discusses how that didn't stop the director from being as highly detailed as humanly possible in recreating 1940's Nazi Germany for the film.

'We went out of our way to make things as authentic as possible,' Singer says, 'Being in Germany, we had access to a lot of props and a lot of real things, a lot of very creepy props that came out of the woodwork from the Third Reich, just like porcelain eagles with swastikas on them and other strange things that were taken from places. I have no idea who they go back to when we were done using them. But all the planes were real. We used real Mezzerschmidts, including one with a Daimler engine that has never flown, the first one to fly in a movie before, real Junkers, real P40's, enormous attention to detail.'

'It's important to create a good vibe on the set, too,' he adds, 'We even would debate things. A moment I like is when he's explaining the British time pencils, the fuses, and he's like, isn't that a little too small' He's like, look, would you like the narrow margin the time of the explosion. Well, do you want small or state of the art' You want small or efficient' Whatever he says, this is state of the art. And we debated, can we use the expression 'state of the art'. Was that expression around in the forties' So, even things like that were cause for debate.'

Singer adds that his level of thorough detail also extended to meeting with people connected to the Valkyrie conspirators, as well as Hitler.

'We had meetings,' Bryan says, 'We had extensive meetings with direct descendants of Stauffenberg. I try to keep them private, because they are private people, but they were very, very, very helpful in the process of developing the material from the time I arrived in Germany. In living there for about eight months, there's a lot of people you interact with. Historians at the Resistance Museum were also very helpful.'

'I actually had lunch with Hitler's bodyguard, Rochus Mirsch, who's 91 years old,' hw continues, 'And had extensive conversations with him about Hitler's state of mind at the time of the war, Hitler's security. I didn't get into any moral conversations with him.'

Bryan mentions that another goal fulfillment that came out of directing Valkyrie was the chance to work with Tom Cruise. He shares not only how he met the actor and tabloid magnet, but separates the real man from his on-screen and increasingly ridiculed tabloid persona.

'The first meeting I had with him, we actually met on Mission Impossible and we talked about how we both wanted to work together,' he recalls, 'And, then, since then, I've run into him a couple of times, but this time, when I went up to his house for our first meeting, this is when United Artists bought the project, when we first brought it to him just as a film, not with any idea of having Tom attached. I sat down with him and this had happened a couple of times with certain actors or artists or filmmakers that I respect. Two minutes into the conversation, I remind him I'm starstruck. It's Tom Cruise.'

'We've grown up seeing him in some of the most amazing films continuously over a quarter of a century. How could you not be starstruck'' Singer adds, 'Yet, I've spent the last year and a half of my life with him and his family and so, he's also the buddy I flew out here with, but he's Tom Cruise. So the most fun thing I always tell Tom is I love it when I introduce my friends to Tom Cruise and freak out, because he's Tom Cruise. But, then, after five minutes, they freak out for a different reason, they're like, oh, he's so cool and normal and not like everyone'oh, what, wow, oh! And it completely flips over in their mind what they previously thought of Tom Cruise and also, they don't believe anything they read in the magazines anymore.'

Singer expresses nothing but positive sentiment for his star actor and this extends to the seeming extra baggage that comes along with working with Tom Cruise: paparazzi everywhere.

'(Laughing) You have no idea,' Bryan says, 'Well, it creates an environment that's different. There's a lot of security that's needed. The first day that we were shooting outside, we had two paparazzi planes that flew over dangerously low to get pictures. I lived in an apartment down the street from Tom's hotel, so I got his spillover paparazzi from time to time.'

'So, yeah, it comes with the territory, but it adds an air of excitement to the project and to Germany and for the Germans, it's exciting to have that kind of thing going on,' he But on the set, there's no paparazzi that we were aware of. We made sure of that. We ended up taking our own pictures and having a lot of fun and making the movie and working really, really, really hard. And, after a while, it becomes part of what I imagine Tom experiences everyday of his life.'

The extra press gave way to an incredible level of scrutiny on Valkyrie. First were numerous reports swirling during production of negative reactions from the German government itself on shooting the film in their country, due to Cruise's outspoken beliefs in the controversial Scientology faith.

'It was extraordinarily exaggerated,' Singer says, 'I don't think anything was going on with the German government. We had subsidies and money coming in from the German government and we were using a lot of government-controlled locations and we were shooting quite freely. So I was befuddled when my mother called me and said, are you coming home' And I said, what do you mean' And she said, well, is Germany letting you shoot there' And I didn't know what she was talking about.'

Another bit of media scrutiny came in reaction to Singer's decision to have the actors speak in their original dialects rather than with German accents, which he does not mince words in defending.

'I think the press like things that are out of control and people like to harp on things or try to find something,' he says, 'But in reality, if you hear all these British actors and the American actors and Dutch actors speaking with German accents and the German actors having to tone down their German accents.'

'Their all German, they're all speaking German, presumably in different dialects, so they should just speak English,' Bryan adds, 'That's why we have the device in the beginning, just to let you know, that's actually Tom speaking German and he's quite good and it gets you in that world.'

Finally, Bryan shared for us the how people in early screenings in Germany have reacted to the film and why he is confident Germans in particular will enjoy Valkyrie.

'When I see the films that are popular in Germany, ultimately, the German audience, like the American audience, likes to be entertained,' he believes, 'They like the tension and the excitement and the suspense that I think the film creates, so I think that in that way, I think there will be an entertainment factor, whether there's a relationship with the history or not. I mean, obviously, in dubbed copies, all the characters will be speaking in German, so there will be no debate about the accent issue.'

'But my hope is they will be entertained and see this as a story that's respectful to the history, because we really took great pains to honor the history as close as possible, because the history's so damn exciting,' Singer continues, 'We had this wonderful screening for lots of the members of the Stauffenberg family. We had that screening and two of those and that went very, very well. We also screened the film for Peter Hoffman, who probably is the leading authority in the world on the German resistance and he's been very, very supportive.'