Did either of you read the book, and if so did you read before, during or after filming?
Sophie Nélisse: I started to read the first 20 pages because at my first audition I didn’t read either the book or the script, so I went in really unprepared. But then in the plane going to my second audition, because it was in LA, I read the script and it’s the first time that a script made me cry and I just thought that I had to do this movie. On my third audition I started to read the book. I only got to the first 20 pages in French and I got the part. I didn’t want to read the book because it got confusing saying if this is in the book or is it just in the script. I didn’t have time, so I just said that I was going to read it after shooting.
But then school was on and everything, and then summer came and I just didn’t feel like reading a book during summer (laughs). So I read it about a month ago, and that was really good for me because it was 580 pages. I just really loved the book, but I should’ve read the book before because I had already seen the shooting of the movie at that point. It felt like I was reading myself. I would just see Geoffrey as Hans and Emily as Rosa. I would’ve loved to have read the book to have my own perception of the scenes and everything, so now I know that if I do another movie based on a book, I will read the book beforehand.
Geoffrey, did you read the book before shooting?
Geoffrey Rush: No. Thankfully I hadn’t heard of the book even though Markus is an Australian author, so I read the screenplay and then I instantly went to the book as well. I thought it was such a phenomenal, rich piece of writing, but it is a novel. The screenplay is sort of different in that the ideas and the narration of death can take the non-dialogue parts of the story into a different philosophical kind of terrain.
My teenage daughter said, “Dad I’ve seen The Book Thief script on your desk, are you going to be in it?” I said yes and that they were offering me a part. And she said, “Oh, are you going to be Death?” Everyone’s a casting director in my house (laughs). I said no and that I would be playing the father Hans Hubermann, and I asked her if she knew of the book. She said, “Oh yeah, we all read this book when we were 15-year-olds and it changed our lives.” And I thought, “Wow.” Firstly because she used the word book in a sentence (laughs), I found that pretty wild, and that it changed their lives. It was always an adult publication and it was on The New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists for years. It’s in 30 languages or more.
But I can understand why because for me the language of the book is like James Joyce and Laurence Sterne, and I know why teenage kids got into it because it’s a lot like Lemony Snicket with how the playfulness was structured and all the curious metaphors, things you can’t do in a film. Brian has spoken a lot about that. He said, “You know, I could have done it with chocolate colored skies, but then it would’ve been like a Ken Russell movie.”