Markus Zusak's Blog, page 12

WE WENT TO BERLIN…and all I got was this lousy jacket!

Of course, I can only be joking because it’s pretty insane how magnificent that jacket is – and how surreal it was to see people walking around The Book Thief film set in it. Then again, it was even MORE exciting to see a guy wearing an Inglourious Basterds one from years gone by, at the fabled Babelsberg studios in Potsdam, outside Berlin… 

To update things properly, though? As of a week ago, filming of The Book Thief finished in Germany. In early April I was able to visit the set – and what can I say? (I have to do it like this for old time’s sake…) 

***FOUR SMALL FACTS ABOUT THE FILMING IN BERLIN***

1. The cast was brilliant.

2. The script had been given everything by Michael Petroni, who wrote with the required love and courage to make the hard calls.

3. Himmel Street truly was the colour of Europe; it looked and felt just right.

4. Brian Percival is a director the cast and crew clearly loved…

To sum it up, if I know one thing for certain, it’s this:

No matter how different the film is from the book, it will have the same heart, and what more could I ask for? I’m eternally grateful, and I wish Brian all the best for post-production.

Lastly, I doubt writing it here will ruin the surprise. I’m giving the jacket to my dad.

And then, my other trusty wake-up guy.

Yes, he’s blond.

Yes, he’s innocent and angelic –

And a nasty piece of work.

Trust me when I tell you that his most-oftenly-thought thought is a certain something a villainous kid once said a great arch villain once said. You’ll likely know who I mean.

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(Time: 11 minutes. Words: 52.)

How do you wake up everyday?

For me, it’s always, frighteningly, this:

MY 45KG ALARM CLOCK

The irony?

He’s aged me 20 years in no time at all…but I’m in peak physical condition. (That is, I can run two K’s without dying – not much, but I’ll take what I get, I s’pose.)

___________________________________________________________

 (Time: 11 minutes. Words: 52.)

words of thirteen

Every morning I wake in the dark. I walk the city with two wild dogs. We run, we amble, we argue, we scrap. Our breath is smoky against the road and park and rising sun…When we return, I write to warm up. It’s too hard to write a book right away, and for a long time now, it’s been like this – I aim for fifty-two words on what I wrote out there in my head, on the street, in the slow-but-climbing light.

In the end, it’s just another training run – to work as hard as it takes to feel like play. Yes, the typical goal is 52 words, although 13, 26 or 39 would actually be better. That said, I’ll take 65, 78 or even 91. Any more and I’ve gone too far – like now. 143 is way too many.

We are:

___________________________________________________________________

 (Time: 17 minutes. Words: 143)

The simple answer is that I thought of the expression that war and death are like best friends, so who better to tell a story set during World War II? After all, Death was everywhere during that time…

The truth, though, is that I stumbled across it, which is usually what happens with our best ideas; the trick is to recognise them as they stare you in the face and not ignore them…This time around I was working in a high school with some kids and we wrote about colour. I wrote about three deaths in that story and realised I’d used Death as the narrator. I immediately thought, ‘Maybe I should use this idea for that book set in Nazi Germany…’ I didn’t ask myself why.

I’ve often said that even in the parts of The Book Thief that embarrass me now, it’s the voice of Death that holds it all together. But it wasn’t as easy as that sounds. There were many problems, like I wrote 200 pages with Death narrating till I realised he was too macabre – he was enjoying his work too much and operated with a sense of sadistic pleasure…So I changed everything so that Liesel herself would narrate – which also didn’t work because it gave me new problems. (Despite my having the experience of a German-Austrian background, Liesel was the most Australian-sounding German girl in the history of all books everywhere)…but that’s the great thing about being writer:

EVERYONE THINKS YOU HAVE A GREAT IMAGINATION – BUT THE TRUTH IS, YOU JUST HAVE A LOT OF PROBLEMS.

The beauty of it is that just as necessity is the mother of all invention, your purest imagination is in solving your problems – to find a way to get it all to work. In the case of Death? I went to a simple 3rd person narration (which was everything I’d been trying to avoid in the first place) until it hit me. I heard the last line of the book in my head and thought, ‘That’s it. Death is haunted by us. He is all powerful but for the fact that he’s tired, and due to seeing humans mostly at their worst, he tells Liesel’s story to remind him that humans can be beautiful and selfless and worthwhile’ – and once I had that voice, I started the book all over again, borrowing from all the so-called failed drafts, and got there, somehow, in the end.

*Photo Credit: Quantity Postcards (www.QPFANS.com)