MARC ROTHEMUND'S latest film was set in Germany near the end of the second world war, when the beleaguered Nazi regime was buckling under the Allies' onslaught. His main protagonist, now one of the best-known wartime Germans and already a central figure in several films about that era, is made to come across as a vulnerbale human being.
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days might be centred on the struggle of an anti-Nazi activist before her death-by-guillotine in 1943, but the film bears an uncanny similarity to last year's Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel's controversial account of Adolf Hitler's last hours in his bunker. The lead characters of the two films stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of good and evil - one is a young university student killed for her pacifist ideals, the other's a warmongering tyrant - but what brings The Final Days and Downfall together are their attempts to evoke a sense of humanity in both hero and villain.
Just as scenes of Hitler being courteous to his secretaries, his chef and his dog - all straight from historical records - caused outrage among Downfall's detractors, Final Days also courts controversy - albeit on a minor scale - when it chronicles Scholl's officially documented attempt to lie her way out of custody by denying her involvement in the anti-Nazi pamphlets she and her brother, Hans, placed at the University of Munich on February 18, 1943.
Earlier films about Scholl - such as two made in 1982, Michael Verhoeven's The White Rose (named after the small unit of anti-Nazi resistance activists the Scholls belonged to) and Percy Adlon's Last Five Days - portrayed the young woman as unwavering and strong-willed throughout her clandestine work and prison ordeal. The fact that Final Days focused on Scholl's interrogation at Gestapo headquarters - a process reconstructed from unpublished transcripts concealed in the East German archives until 1990 - allowed viewers a perspective that differed from previous portrayals.
'The White Rose is a political movie - Sophie Scholl is not allowed to cry because White Rose members must be strong,' says Rothemund, who first watched Verhoeven's film as a teenager. 'It was a movie about the resistance group but ends with the arrests. It's exciting to see them printing and distributing the leaflets but one thing that interests me is how you feel and behave if you're arrested.' Scholl's resilience is still omnipresent in The Final Days - she is seen breaking down only after her confession and also when learning of her impending death in 30 minutes. But in both instances she did so only when alone.
'In the beginning, Sophie Scholl was fighting for her life - she's lying, pretending to be innocent and [saying], 'I'm a non-political person',' says Rothemund. 'In Germany people thought she was a hero and that her brother was a hero, and they were arrested and were saying, 'Kill me'. This would make them martyrs - but they were normal people.'