With Freedom Come Expectations
As in most films, the director has a profound impact on the themes and values that make it to the screen. The Emperor's Club was directed by Michael Hoffman and stars Kevin Kline as William Hundert, a Classics instructor and assistant head master at a private boys school.
One might expect that the historic Greek and Roman content of the movie would be close to a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford student like Hoffman. But, it was the moral nature of the story's undergirding — the Emperor's Club — that ignited his passion.
WILLIAMS: What attracted you to The Emperor's Club?
HOFFMAN: I was interested in making a movie about how we make ethical and moral choices, and the kind of existential crisis we experience in a moment of having to make a very hard decision.
When we as individuals, like the film's protagonist William Hundert, get into the labyrinth of moral decision making — where we're compromised by our own neurosis, power and our own anxiety about our self-worth — we really become blinded in many ways and believe we're making decisions for one reason when in fact we're making decisions for a different one.
WILLIAMS: You've said, “Every one of us is confronted with the question of what it means to live an ethical life. It's not always completely clear.”
HOFFMAN: Hundert considers himself as a very ethical man. Sedgewick Bell (played by Emile Hirsch) comes into his life and challenges him as I'm sure other boys have. But Sedgewick gets to him enough that Hundert goes to Sedgewick's father to find an ally. But instead he finds a powerful man who humiliates him and says to Hundert, “What's the good of what you're teaching those boys? You think you'll mold my son. You won't mold my son, I'll mold him. You just teach him his times-tables. You teach him who killed who and where; I'll take care of shaping and molding him.”
WILLIAMS: But Hundert does try to shape Sedgewick.
HOFFMAN: Hundert, I think, has a lot of anxiety about his own personal self-worth. There's a way in which Hundert's own relationship with his father is what he sees in Sedgewick. When the gauntlet is thrown down by Senator Bell, Hundert picks it up and says, “No, I will mold your son.” At that point, Hundert becomes neurotically attached to that kid; and that neurotic attachment leads him, at a critical moment, to make an ethical choice that I really don't think is in keeping with what he would describe as his code of conduct.
WILLIAMS: The movie also reiterates that the sins of the father weigh upon the son.
HOFFMAN: I do think there is a way you can see the movie as a fairy tale about a kind of evil wizard (Senator Bell, Sedgwick's father) who has enchanted his son; and Hundert is an alternative good wizard who might have the power to break that spell. But, because Hundert compromised himself, he loses his power to do that.
WILLIAMS: What message does the film have for parents — fathers in particular?
HOFFMAN: I think it's something about freedom. It's something to do with providing a kind of love and being free enough from your own narcissism that you really encourage that person, to give that person a base of love and support. I think that is why Sedgewick Bell responds so strongly when Hundert comes in and says, “I believe in you.” Because Sedgewick is desperate for a paternal voice that's saying that. At the same time you need to provide instruction, both moral and otherwise…you have to tell them that a lot of responsibility comes with that freedom — that it's understood there are expectations.
A Franciscan Notion
WILLIAMS: At one moment in the film, Hundert gives up teaching.
HOFFMAN: Yes. His own ego involvement has gotten him off his path. I mean, it's a very Franciscan notion about Hundert.
WILLIAMS: Why do you say Franciscan?
HOFFMAN: Because St. Francis talks about how the bird prays by flying. Well, Hundert prays by teaching. And when he stops teaching there's a way in which he stops praying. The connection, to wherever his inspiration and power comes from, sort of dies.
WILLIAMS: Let me ask you about your religious upbringing…
HOFFMAN: My paternal grandfather was a revivalist preacher, a Free Methodist [a small Evangelical denomination started in 1860 in Pekin, New York that historically bordered on separatism from the world]. It was a funny thing with Free Methodism, there was almost no sense of forgiveness. It took me going to the Riverside Church in New York City and listening to William Sloan Coffin stand up and say after the prayer of confession, “You are forgiven.” It was the first time in my life, I think I was 27 at the time, that it actually occurred to me that this notion of forgiveness, which is quite obviously at the center of Christian faith, had any relevance whatsoever. It never crossed my mind. How could you spend all of your childhood in Christian churches and never, ever feel that forgiveness could be on some level of reality?
Free Methodism was confusing and it created a great deal of guilt and anxiety, and every week there were these altar calls. They were nice people, but again it seemed strangely narcissistic — this obsession with the state of your soul that would prevent you from taking any action in the world. I was much more drawn to the notion that if this is relevant, it has to be relevant in the world. And that is one reason I've been drawn to Catholicism.
WILLIAMS: Are you Catholic?
HOFFMAN: I'm not, but I've spent an awful lot of time at Mass. I have a number of Catholic priests who are friends of mine, and I'm in constant dialogue with them.
“…You Have Found Me”
WILLIAMS: Could you please tell me about…
HOFFMAN: …when I finally had a kind-of conversion experience?
WILLIAMS: Yes.
HOFFMAN: I felt like the character in Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979)…who no matter where he looks…or where I looked…I was seeing something that said, “Jesus Saves.” It was like the world was attacking me. It was this weird phenomenological kind of constant anxiety that Nazarenes associate with being “under conviction.”
Well, I was up in Seattle where I went to this film festival and saw a Krzysztof Zanussi movie. Krzysztof's Polish and Catholic and the movie was called Imperativ (1982). It's about a guy who's in the midst of his own existential crisis…goes to a Russian Orthodox Church. There's a priest there but there's no congregation, none. No one is ever there, except the priest. So he starts harassing the priest: “Why would you do this? Why does this matter? Why would you waste your time when in fact there is no one here? What good is this religion?” In the meantime he finds out about the Holy of Holies in the church. At one point, when the priest goes out to get groceries, he goes in to profane the Holy of Holies and test God. He reaches behind the screen and touches the icon or something, I don't remember exactly what it is. In the moment he touches it, he goes mad. There's a long sequence where he's institutionalized and he can't speak. It culminates in a moment when he's working in the kitchen chopping food with this huge knife…and he chops off his finger, the finger that had profaned the Holy of Holies. And in that moment, the movie, which has been so far in black and white, goes to color, and he's healed.
And he's talking again, he's joyful, and he quotes St. Augustine: “You have sought me because you have found me.” As soon as I heard those words I began to cry and I must have stayed in that movie theater and wept for half an hour.
What was interesting is this: I realized that all my life it was God that I had sought. But because I had so much intellectual curiosity and capacity — I had been taught at home, all my life, that I was on the road to hell, I was in this constant sort of battle feeling like there had to be some room for alternative truth,…and somehow in that moment, it felt very much as if those words, “You have sought me because you have found me” were addressed to me. Since then I have never had any anxiety, ever again, about any of this stuff. Never, ever, one minute since that moment.
(Editor's Note: The USCCB rates The Emperor's Club A-II — adults and adolescents for mild sexual innuendo, fleeting topless photos and a few instances of profanity (PG-13). The full review is available at: www.usccb.org.)
The above interview is an edited complication of excerpts from the full-length interview available here. Stan Williams is Executive Producer of SWC Films. He can be reached at [email protected] or via his website at www.StanWilliams.com.
