"Hitler was a human being, and it is the fact that he made a choice to become a monster that is essential to understanding him. There are Hitlers of the future lurking, and I think if you want to comprehend what makes evil tick you have to begin with ordinary human emotions."'
Writer-director Menno Meyjes

When producer Andras Harnori read the script Max, his initial reaction he admits was "Let's not make this movie." He confesses that although he was impressed with the script, he was scared to go where Menno Meyjes' had gone, especially since he hails from a Hungarian family that was persecuted by the Nazis. "The very word Hitler was taboo in my family," he explains. " It was mentioned in the same breath as Antichrist - as if he was this pure, otherworldly evil that happened to humanity but now we didn't have to worry about him anymore. Not only did I feel Hitler was a taboo but I felt he also had become a cinematic cliché - the stereotype with the moustache, the hair-do, the brown uniform, the screaming on stage, and I wondered how even this fantastically written script could get past that. Politically and emotionally I couldn't imagine making this movie."

And yet, Max continued to whirl in the back of Hamori's mind, and he ultimately agreed to meet Meyjes - for the purpose of explaining to him why he couldn't make the movie. "Menno showed up, this tall, crazy Dutchman with a huge album - an entire storyboard almost like a comic book of the movie - and I thought 'Oh no.' But then he started showing me these wonderful, starkly drawn, moody scenes and we started talking about ideas and philosophies and the hours just evaporated. By the time I got him to go I was convinced the movie had to made," he says.

Hamori began to face his own fears of breaking the Hitler taboo. He says: "I began to see that in order to understand the monster of Hitler you have to accept that he had a human face - you have to see where he came from, this nobody from Austria, this man who failed at art, and how he turned himself into the most feared man of the 20th century, and perhaps all of history. Even though I still felt it was a risky idea to examine, I now saw that it was even more risky not to."

Hamori came to access the film's difficult themes through his fascination with the character of Max and his humorous, energetic take on life, love and art. "I found his character really, really funny," says Hamori. "He is always pushing the boundaries. And this is a very important part of the film because it is a contrast with Hitler and the tragedy that surrounds him. Hitler's whole life is missing humour and light - he's all about desperation, his inner life is brittle and dry. Meanwhile, Max. who has lost his arm in the war and could be bitter, instead can still see the hilarity in the world. I think Menno creates an enchanting portrait of the intelligent lightness of families in Max - in the conversations and jokes and jovial bickering that surrounds the Rothmans - and then into this circle comes Hitler, which is very powerful."

Menno Meyjes, who received an Oscar-nominated adaptation for the screenplay for The Color Purple, also worked with Spielberg on the scripts for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Empire of the Sun, and also wrote  The Siege. He now steps into the spotlight as writer and first time director of Max, a deeply unsettling historical fable concerning two friends facing an uncertain future and one's fateful decision to embrace a nightmare vision of evil. A tale that careens through art, politics, love, hope, intolerance, obsession and destructive malevolence to provide an original and intimate portrait of a major turning point in modern history.


Max Rothman is also many other things: witness to history, savage wit, adoring husband, philandering lover, passionate intellect, forward thinker, outrageous optimist, unabashed idealist, not to mention artistic advisor to the young and unaccomplished homeless veteran Adolf Hitler. Told with bold humour and infused with the fervent spirit of' modern art, Max's story parallels that of the 20th century - as he encounters a man who cannot channel his fury and loneliness into art and instead chooses to become an architect of evil and mass destruction.

Max Rothman may never have existed, but his roots lie firmly in history. He is a fictional creation sprung from the imagination of Menno Meyjes, who based Max on an amalgam of historical figures.

These range from leading avant-garde European artists who, in the aftermath of World War One, tried to convey the madness of the age to a variety of Jewish art buyers who helped Hitler sell his paintings. Many influences went into the makeup of Max, but the ultimate result is a man consummately of his times - one who has survived the horrors of war and is electrified by the promise of the future.

"Max is a sort of combination of many people but most importantly he is representative of the height of this kind of profoundly idealistic and humanistic European Jewish life that reached its zenith or apogee before the Holocaust," says Meyjes. "He comes from a world in which everybody is highly educated, thrives on wit, and where people truly believe, in a way we no longer do - - that Culture can change the world. It's a way of life that has been lost to a certain degree, a very un-ironic view of life and art, but one that profoundly influenced the last century. It is into the periphery of Max's life that Hitler comes, and he is just one aspect of it, but one that will ultimately alter Max's destiny. For it is Max who asks Hitler to make art of his despair and frustration and it is the one thing Hitler, tragically, is unable to do...or is he, but in a way that nobody ever could have foreseen?"

From the beginning, Meyjes dared to conceive the fictional Adolf Hitler who appears in MAX to be something he has rarely been in cinema: a human being relieved of his clichés. Meyjes perceived of this Hitler as the anonymous man people met when he was just another ragged veteran on the street, before there was even an inkling he would change the future. This Hitler is, for a while, just another wanna-be artist in Max's extraordinary life who nobody viewed as all that important. 

Meyjes knew he was taking a big gamble of turning the Iconic Hitler of myth into flesh, but he also felt strongly that such a portrait would more starkly reveal the extreme profanity and horrifying consequences of Hitler's choices. He explains: "What Hitler did was so awful that we all desire a kind of extreme grandeur to surround him - we want to believe he was a force born in a cloud of sulphur who disappeared in a puff of gasoline and now, thank God, we're rid of that forever. But that's not the truth. Hitler was a human being, and it is the fact that he made a choice to become a monster that is essential to understanding him. There are Hitlers of the future lurking, and I think if you want to comprehend what makes evil tick you have to begin with ordinary human emotions."'

The question of where Hitler's painting career fits into the overall picture of his life has recently come to the fore. For decades a rumour persisted that Adolf Hitler had been a house painter before he became dictator of the German state - but this is far from the truth. In fact, Hitler was serious about becoming a real artist, although he would never prove to have the talent. He had developed a particular passion for Wagner as a boy and dreamed that he too would one day create classic works of architecture and art. When he was 18, he applied to the Vienna Art Academy, where he was promptly turned down. Nevertheless. Hitler continued to paint, sketch and follow art until the seminal period just before he made his political debut on September of 1919, first in Vienna, then in Munich.

In 2002 an exhibit of Hitler's paintings entitled 'Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics' and 'Hitler's Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913' was shown at Williams College Museum of Art, drawing both controversy and acclaim for the curator's courage and the shows relevance to contemporary discussions on the intersection of art and politics.

Meyjes comments: "The biographer Roll Rosenbaurn quotes Hitler's architect Albert Speer as saying 'If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was all artist first.' This is what inspired me to write MAX. The reality is that if you showed somebody the Hitler of 1918 and said in 15 years this man will be Chancellor of Germany and in 20 years he'll have set the world on fire, no-one would have believed You. Because. at that time, he might have gone in any number of ways. He was the man everyone thought was just a joke, a nerd, the guy who could riot fit ill. So where did his power come from'? In the film, we take the view that the root of his evil was his disappointment in his inability to express himself. He makes a decision in  the end to focus his energy on anti-Semitic speeches, but knowing that he could have chosen a different path makes it far more powerful and meaningful. In the end, the roots of Fascism are always the same: rage, envy and frustration."

Meyjes delved into intensive research to create Max Rothman and the alternately light-and -dark modern- art world in which he dwells. For his research he delved into Modris Ekstein's 'Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age' (a controversial history about how World War One influenced the avant-garde), Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New' (about the rise and fall of modernism), and George Mosse's 'The Fascist Revolution'.

Meyjes also found himself pouring through biographies of Hitler including Ron Rosenbaum's 'Explaining Hitler',  lan Kershaw's 'Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris' (which explores Hitler's transition from a shiftless nobody living on the streets to all-powerful dictator of the German state) , as well as reading Mein Kampf. Meyjes further immersed himself in as much WWl-era art as possible. becoming fascinated by the outrageously optimistic and often comically strident Futurist Manifesto, which celebrates a brave new modern world of speed, action, machinery, technology and aggression. And, in addition to all of that says Meyjes, "a major beacon that I looked to in this was Hannah Arendt, referring to the philosopher who wrote about the "banality of evil" and the notion that only through "the activity of thinking" can humankind abstain from evil.

But despite such rigorous research, Meyjes mostly wanted Max Rothman to exist in a kind of state of timelessness - to look, sound and feel as if lie could exist just as easily in the 21th century, as if his idealism and energy could be part of today's culture.

For Hamori, watching Meyjes at work on Max was a sign that lie had made the right decision, no matter how risky and complicated. "Any time you start a movie, you are scared of the director and fear they will turn into an inexplicable creature," he notes. "Here, we had an Academy Award nominated writer who has worked with the best in the business. So, I knew he could write but could he control it? Could he control this very daring, complex and delicate work and these very sophisticated actors? But as shooting went on, I became a convert. I feel that with this movie we've increased the very small number of important directors working in film today by one."

casting the roles
Hamori and Meyjes had many conversations about who might play Max, but they remained uninspired until, at one script conference in Europe, they peered through the glass table where they were seated and spied a photograph of John Cusack on the cover of Details Magazine looking up at them. "Just as if we were in a bad movie, we both paused, gasped, turned to each other and said 'this is, Max Rothman,- recalls Hamori. "By some total miracle, when John read the script he become Intrigued by the script and fought for it. He became totally obsessed with Max."

When Cusack read Max he was immediately struck by this hypnotic tale about the rise and fall of a man and the modern age. Had Menno Meyjes really managed to write a funny, moving, inspired screenplay about a one-armed Jewish gallery owner in love with art who takes under his wing an impoverished would-be painter named Adolf Hitler? As far as Cusack could tell, Meyjes had - and he had somehow turned Max's unusual tale into a story brimming with romance, tragedy, atmosphere and ideas, a story that stood at the crossroads where art, politics and love collide.

Cusack felt this was the best screenplay he had encountered since Charlie Kaufman's critically acclaimed "Being John Malkovich and he couldn't resist. "Max was one of those rare scripts that just leaps off the page," he says. "I felt it was a completely original and authentic new voice, and I thought that the fusion of art, politics and the black arts of Hitler that Max is all about was a story that had never really been told and that Urgently needed to be told," he says. "It is also set in such a vital and exciting period of time, when people had come back from war and were really reassessing what they believed in and why. It's always been one of my favourite periods in art."

In addition to its rare journey into the time when modern art was exploding, Cusack was drawn to Max's story of the unlikely but revealing relationship between this Jewish gallery owner and the fledgling young artist known as Hitler. "What they share in common is having participated on the front lines and having survived the war. I think Hitler really wanted to understand modern art but was such a repressed man, and so caught up in this horrifying ideology of Teutonic nationalism, that everything he did was without emotion, without feeling. I think Max probably sees him as emblematic of everything that's wrong with Germany after the war, but in some sense lie feels an obligation to pull this guy up into the light, to get him to express himself on a deeper level."

An affinity for Max's passionate idealism drew Cusack even more strongly to the role. "Max lived in a fertile time for self-examination, a very vital time when change was 'In the air," he says. "Max is the kind of guy who really believes that a piece of art is going to save the world and obviously that's a pre-irony type of position, and yet I often wonder if the world is a lesser place because more people don't feel that way today."

Cusack's transformation into Max also extended to the physical, as he explored living in the body of an amputee, keeping one arm pinned behind his back throughout filming. "Using only one arm does change your body," he notes. "You develop a sort of a lean and one hip compensates by going out to the right. I think with Max, it also becomes part of his identity, this sort of lack that he can never quite get over. He's not really a hero or an angel - he's full of flaws like everyone."

Says Meyjes of the choice of Cusack: "When John left home to begin the shoot he called me and said 'I'm getting oil the plane and I'm bringing everything I've got' and that's exactly what he did. He offered us the entire spectrum of his genius. He was intelligent and tireless and very funny, but he also came to the project with a rare depth of knowledge about modern art. You can't say the lines that come out of Max's month unless you have a real and deep understanding of art and history, which John does. There's also a kind of fatalistic charm to John - a very sort of European quality to me - a cosmopolitan and sophisticated side that brings Max Rothman fully to life."