Click for the big picture

Left Luggage is actor Jeroen Krabbe's film directorial debut and it deals with a subject close to his heart - the legacy of the Holocaust. He tells Nick Roddick how the film became a 'family' affair.

It's always good to have a father who's younger than you are," chuckles Jeroen Krabbe, the Dutch actor whose first major roles were with Paul Verhoeven (he was Rutger Hauer's wartime partner in the classic Soldier of Orange and the writer who falls into a sexual nightmare in the surrealistic cult flick, The Fourth Man) even if he is best known in the rest of the world as the bad guy in The Living Daylights.But Krabbe is not talking about his directorial debut, Left Luggage, in which he himself plays a father: he is talking about his relationship with the film's producer, Ate de Jong, who is indeed younger than him but who has directed him in two movies.

"Ate is concerned about the movie, not the money," he says, broaching a theme to which we shall return, "and it was like having a father around on set. I've always wanted to direct movies, even as a child," continues Krabbe, who evidently believes in taking things slowly, since he is now 53, "but I thought that I needed to find my way as an actor first. I've directed a lot on the stage, and then I did a big production of The Diary of Anne Frank, in which I also played the father. We did that for television as well, and that was my first time behind the camera."

After that flurry of activity in the mid-80s - from stage to TV director in less than a year - the Krabbe pace resumed, the acting roles flowed, and it wasn't until a couple of years ago that he was given a copy of Carl Friedman's novel, The Shovel and the Loom, which struck a real chord. Being, as Krabbe is, a postwar Jewish child from a country that was occupied during World War II leaves a legacy - the 'left luggage' of the title - that is not easily understood by others. Friedman has obviously done so, and Krabbe wanted to spread the word.
Left Luggage's central character is Chaja (Laura Fraser), a young student whose parents (Maximilian Schell and Marianne Saegebrecht) have retreated into obsessive silence - she bakes cakes all day; he digs holes all over Antwerp trying to find two suitcases he buried during th war - designed to deny a past in which they both survived the Nazi concentration camps. She takes a job with the Kalmans (Chaim Topol and Isabella Rossellini), a family of Hassidic Jews whose five-year-old son, Simcha (Adam Monty, five-and-a-half himself when the film was made), she is to look after. The relationship (almost a love affair) between Chaja and Simcha is what the film is about - that and the way in which it enables Chaja to re-evaluate her relationship with her own parents (as the film ends, she buys a shovel to help her father in his quest).

"I'm not a believer," says Krabbe, "but I grew up in a family where only my mother survived the Holocaust. I grew up in that silence that was the 50s, where everybody kept very, very quiet in case it all happened again. That silence is more or less what reigns with Chaja's parents, and it's something I understand. The whole second-generation problem is something I understand very well."

Krabbe sent the book to de Jong without a covering note, and was not surprised when the latter called back to say he liked it a lot, but it wasn't the kind of story he felt he could tell. "No, no," said Krabbe, who'd been waiting for him to do just that. "I want to direct it. I want you to produce it."
It wasn't an overnight thing: nothing is with Krabbe. But gradually, the network of friends he has made over his quarter-century in the business lined up behind the film: screenwriter Edwin de Vries, composer Hennie Vrienten, editor Edgar Burcksen, all of whom had worked with Krabbe and de Jong on their two previous collaborations; Maximilian Schell, whom he met in Moscow when they did the miniseries Stalin together; Marianne Saegebrecht, a friend from way back; and Isabella Rossellini, also a long-time friend, wh was the linchpin of the whole project. At one stage, it was all set up but, suddenly, she couldn't do it. So Krabbe simply pulled the plug and waited.

"I saw something in her that no one else had seen before," he says. "She always plays the Italian lover or the Italian mistress. But there is this fire in her heart. And I knew if I cast her as this severe woman [Simcha's mother], still inside there would be this fire burning and people would see that."

The process of making Left Luggage turned out to be something of a revelation to Krabbe: both the joy of working with actors on a screenplay that, unlike the Anne Frank play, could evolve as they rehearsed; and the bone-crushing exhaustion of making a film, especially a film where one of the central characters is a five-year-old boy with an attention span of, at best, 30 minutes.

"I have three children of my own and I treated Adam like my own kid," he says. "I was patient up to a certain point, but then I showed him where my boundaries lay. Before we started, we got together for a whole day and I tried to teach him what a role is. We'd play games: 'When you're in this chair, you're Simcha. When you're not, you're Adam.' Pretty soon, he got it."

What, on the other hand, Krabbe himself never really got was the way filmmaking is driven by money. "I'm an actor," he jokes. "I come on set and there's a lovely warm trailer waiting for me. I don't even have to talk about the fee. My agent does that and the money shows up in my bank account!

"But when you direct a film, every bloody penny goes through your hands. If you want to do this shot, it costs a lot of money, so you have to do that one. I love directing. I love working with actors. But I hate having to talk about money all the time. One day, we had a four-hour meeting about nothing but money. I kept saying 'Can I go now?' But I had to decide. Every bloody afternoon, I had to make a decision about something. It all comes down to money. I hate that!"