Lena Dunham knows she’s typically a talkative person. That wasn’t always the case on the set of her new tragicomic film, Darling.
“Usually I have too many words, but I just didn’t have any,” she told Yahoo Entertainment about filming on location at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. “When you’re there… you have a temporary experience of what the people there had, which is a complete removal of your voice.
‘There’s a town there. Life goes on because life goes on for people all over the world, but it’s eerie,” she added.
In Darling, Dunham stars as Ruth, a recently divorced journalist who travels from New York to Poland with her Holocaust survivor father, Edek (Stephen Fry). Edek jovially sabotages their planned tour of the village where he was born and forced to leave by the Nazis by wandering around, flirting with women and singing in bars. He wonders why Ruth even wants to revisit the loss of his home and his suffering in Auschwitz.
Dunham is best known for the projects she has written and starred in, such as the ever-popular HBO series Girls. Although she didn’t write Darling, her starring role and recent discovery that one of her relatives survived the Holocaust has deepened her own connection to the film. Dunham said her character Ruth, determined to confront the trauma her family members have endured while struggling with separate personal issues, is “very relatable.”
“Hopefully inside [portraying Ruth] “I can shed light on the concept of transgenerational trauma that would welcome not only Jewish people, but anyone who came from a family that kept secrets, where darkness is passed from one generation to the next,” she said.
German writer-director Julia von Heinz adapted the screenplay of a novel by Lily Brett with the help of the author himself. Von Heinz told Yahoo Entertainment that it took her ten years to put the film together.
“I had such a strong motivation to make this film that I never lost energy,” she said. She grew up in Germany and received extensive education about the Holocaust – through facts, figures and ‘horrific documentaries’.
“We wouldn’t dare connect it with humor. No teacher would allow themselves to make a joke,” she said. “That made it so static that we didn’t really feel the horror of the Holocaust… so I wanted the humor and emotion of that [Brett’s book] to the movies.”
Fry told Yahoo Entertainment that he knows it’s every actor’s dream to star in a “blockbuster or beautiful Hollywood tentpole movie,” but bringing Von Heinz’s art to life was a “privilege.”
Fry’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. The actor said that his grandfather, like his character Edek, had a “slightly exaggerated zest for life… hugging and befriending strangers and embarrassing me.”
In preparing for the role, Fry thought deeply about what it meant to survive a death camp – and about what it would mean to relive that trauma so many years after it occurred, as his character does.
“On the surface you think they’re the lucky ones… but to actually survive… I suspect it was impossible without giving up part of your humanity. You had to take care of yourself,” he said. “For a while you only see the worst of what people are capable of. …You see each day and the next with no hope that the day will ever end…when by some miracle you make it to New York…and smell freedom on every street…why would you ever want to go back to that nightmare?’
Fry said he knows it can seem “pretentious” when actors dig into roles, but for him that’s the most effective way to embody the character — even in this case.
“The only way to get it right is to imagine what it’s really like to be that person, not just say the lines,” he said. “We have to remember where they come from, and in this case it’s from the darkest place imaginable.”
Even in the bitter darkness, there is humor for Fry. He wanted this to shine through Darling.
“If I saw a movie about a serious subject and there was no humor in it, it would be like seeing a movie where people had no noses,” he said. “Laughter is a hugely important part of survival.”
