I don't think I can do this.
Was?
Of course you can.
Taika, everyone calls him the signature director.
When I was your age, I had an imaginary friend.
Got me in so much trouble.
(bomb explodes)
I was very clear with him in the start.
I said, "The book is mine, but the film has to be yours.
"You have to make it into yours."
(dramatic instrumental music)
I'm Christine Leunens,
and I'm the author of "Caging Skies."
"Caging Skies" is about a boy who's in the Hitler Youth,
and he dreams of being in Adolf Hitler's personal guard,
which is very elitist.
Today you boys will be involved
in such activities as war games,
(hits tree)
Ow.
ambush techniques,
and blowing stuff up.
(structure exploding)
He actually discovers
that his mother's hiding a Jewish girl in the closet.
Do you know what I am?
Say it.
A Jew.
Gesundheit.
And that's what's going to challenge all of his beliefs.
She doesn't seem like a bad person.
(exhales loudly)
Taika and I, I do think we belong
to the same artistic family
in that we both love a fine balance
between humour and comedy.
Yorki.
JoJo. (weapon launching)
(building exploding and glass breaking)
Oh, God.
Comedy, for a film, it made it engaging for people.
I'm not saying everybody's going to absolutely love it.
I think it'll have some controversy.
I think most people will understand it.
There'll be some people who won't,
but that's always what makes art very interesting.
(mellow instrumental music)
I'd seen a documentary way back in the '90s,
and it spoke of New Zealand as an uninhabited place
with hardly electricity and hardly populated
and these things, and I thought,
oh, I'd be ready for that. (laughs)
(mellow instrumental music)
If sometimes I feel like my head
is completely clouded over
because I've done so much writing that day,
I just go walk along the beach.
You know, I have the winds of the sea.
I take a swim, and I feel like I've just erased everything.
I don't even remember what I wrote again, which is helpful.
(mellow instrumental music)
That little dog was very nervous. (laughs)
It kept shaking and nearly weed on me. (laughs)
And I had to act like I'm not noticing it. (laughs)
When I look at that, I think it's funny.
It's comical, almost as if I was playing maybe
some kind of character.
But even then I'd say you don't get any kind
of deep satisfaction saying, "I looked great in that."
When I began to write, I knew that was it.
My grandfather had told me at the time--
He had always told me,
"You're going to be a writer one day."
And when I began writing,
it just felt completely right on a very deep level.
(mellow instrumental music)
All these memories from my grandparents' generation,
from my parents' generation, really horrific memories,
they've become part of my memory.
I think "Caging Skies" was one way to try
to put some of these images on paper.
(mellow instrumental music)
My mother, who was in south Italy when the--during the war,
she told me of women in the village who were hung
because they were, you know, resistance.
And the Nazis would actually hang people in a way
so that they would twitch and die the slowest possible
so the most people could see them suffering.
(mellow instrumental music)
Actually, he never got over his trauma,
because what happened is he had to actually use his hands
which he usually used to make art,
and he had to make ammunition,
and he had to make things
that he knew were going to kill the people
who were on his side.
And that's a terrible feeling, you know, to have to--
the guilt, you know, knowing everything
you're making could actually harm someone.
And he had a lot of imagination,
always wondering where that would go.
So, when the war was over, he was quite traumatised,
and then after he started to always do paintings in metal.
I guess that was his way of trying to get it off his chest,
because he wanted to use metal not as a thing of war
but as a thing of peace.
(mellow instrumental music)
(birds singing)
Germany...
A lot of what happened was just simply economical.
When people have known something that was once better,
and then they start to, let's say,
know an economy which is more stretched,
that's when people start to feel fear,
and then fear leads to anger.
Today we're going backwards.
I think no one can deny that.
I hear even political leaders use again those same words,
infestation, or just show no respect for other people.
I'd much rather my book was just seen as a piece
of historical fiction of something that happened long ago
than to say actually it's very relevant
to what's happening today.
And my children, and their friends, and all of them are--
This is now a kind of new challenge
people are going to have to deal with.
(mellow instrumental music)