Beyond Hollywood

Many critics are asking why Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has remade his controversial 1997 Austrian feature “Funny Games.” It’s a nearly shot-for-shot remake, so the only differences are the actors and the language spoken — the new “Funny Games,” starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as a vacationing couple with child who are taken hostage by a pair of young sadists, was filmed mostly on Long Island.

What I want to know, however, is why it has taken Mr. Haneke so long to make an English-language film. “Funny Games,” after all, clearly was meant to provoke American audiences and shows a deep interest in the effects of American cinema.

Speaking by telephone from New York, the 65-year-old director responds simply, “Nobody asks me.” (Mr. Haneke uses a translator for a little more than half the interview, speaking English the rest of the time.)

It’s a surprising answer because Mr. Haneke’s films are well-known to art-house audiences here. “The Piano Teacher” won the Grand Prix at Cannes. His last film, 2005’s “Cache,” won Mr. Haneke a best-directing prize at Cannes and played in America to mostly glowing reviews.

His films take no prisoners; hence the name of a series running in the District: “Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation.” However, in an interview on the DVD of the original “Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke says, “It’s the only film I made to provoke.”

“Funny Games” is something of an intellectual exercise — a condemnation of the way violence is treated in film — and also an example of what it condemns. It entertains at the same time as it provokes.

“That’s the whole point of the movie,” Mr. Haneke says. “The suspense is the glue which glues the viewer to his seat.”

What led to this provocation? “I was upset, I am upset, about this cynical exploitation of violence in the media,” Mr. Haneke declares. “Violence is something horrible. In the movies, it becomes a consumer article. I abhor that. I detest that.”

In “Funny Games,” Mr. Roth’s character asks his tormentors a simple question: “Why?”

“What would make you feel better?” one responds, coming up with a number of explanations based on the environment in which they grew up. It pokes fun at the easy answers offered by American movies.

“It’s an ironic commentary to these simple explanations,” Mr. Haneke says. “They comfort the viewer that all is OK, because you understand he’s so bad because his mother was not nice to him.”

One might ask whether the people who most need to see this film are also the people least likely to see it. It’s gripping as a thriller, but there’s no hiding the cerebral element.

“The risk is there,” the director says, “but I hope it’s not going to be that way. That was one of the reasons I did make it with well-known American actors, to at least have a shot at it. I don’t think one should start from the premise that this is purely an art-house movie. Let’s wait and see.”

(Actually, Miss Watts is British-Australian and Mr. Roth is British, but both are well-known to American audiences. Michael Pitt, who plays the lead psychopath, is a rising American just named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 30 Actors Under 30.)

If the new “Funny Games” is a success — and with a budget of just $15 million, it might not take much — it’s difficult to know what that would mean. Would it imply that American audiences are eating up the kind of violence-soaked dramas Mr. Haneke is attacking?

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