I've read that you like to do many takes of a scene. Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?

SD: It's so hard, because I don't have another director to compare it with. I don't know, is the honest answer. It is a comparative question --- to be more of a perfectionist than somebody else --- and I don't know the answer because I only know myself!

Just as a point of discussion, Danny Boyle told us recently that most films should be imperfect; that he liked to spend a small amount of time on a movie so that he could capture everything that he could at that time.

SD: How interesting! It's fantastically interesting. That's part of Danny's brilliance, I think, and I can see how that would work. I suppose I fret, and I like spending time on things. But I love that and I think it's a wonderful idea. The truth of the matter is, every film is imperfect. It's the nature of the beast. One of the things that people ask me all the time is, what's the difference between theater and film, and one of the biggest differences is, in the theater you always get another go. There's always another night, always another opportunity to fiddle and play and explore. And of course in film, you get to a certain point and it's just finished, for all its flaws and imperfections. And you can't fiddle again; it is what it is at that time and at that moment, and what you came up with at that time and that moment with that group of people. There's also something wonderful about the completion of that, and also something terrifying.

One aspect of The Reader that I liked very much was how the books that Hanna and Michael read together tied thematically to the story. But the Chekhov story --- The Lady with the Little Dog --- that one in particular is known for ending without a resolution. Do you consider there to be a definitive resolution in The Reader?

SD: You did your homework. Nobody knows that! [SPOILER ALERT] There's only resolution in that Hanna dies, and the inevitability of that generation dying. [END SPOILERS]To be honest, I think there's a resolution in our story, to the extent that the character of Michael decides and elects to tell his daughter, so there is something of an act of confession and an act of release, which is what we were after. We were trying to find the equivalence of the act of Michael Berg in the book, writing the actual book. That was one of the key decisions we had to make in adapting it for the screen.

Speaking of the changes you had to make in adapting the book, Bernard Schlink's novel is told in the first person and without any time-jumping element. Why was removing the first person necessary?

SD:Well, what options are available in telling it in the first person, do you think? There's always the cheat of a voice over, and another idea is that you start with a man on a typewriter and you finish with a man on a typewriter, but those all felt quite banal choices to us.

Another less-than-easy choice you made was making your characters fairly ambiguous, to each other and to the audience.

SD: Particularly in this story, because this story is a very complicated one, politically, socially, sexually, and even narratively -- what the characters do is a complex series of actions. To try to tie them up neatly into little parcels of cause and effect seemed rather facile to me. The issue of the inactive hero at the center of it, which is Michael Berg; the question of the inactive hero has been a fascination throughout literature. You could say, why doesn't Hamlet just nail Claudius in Act I? Well, he could do that, that would certainly be one way of dealing with the story, but you wouldn't really in the end have Hamlet.

The nudity in this film -- well, there's a lot of it.

SD: Is there? I thought there was very little!

Oh, could there have been more?

SD: There could have been a lot more. I thought I was being incredibly spare. [Laughs]

One critic of the nudity in your film called it manipulative, in that the nudity and eroticism seems counter to the horrors of the Holocaust.

SD: Well, it's not a Holocaust film, so they're starting off on the wrong track in the first place.

David Hare has said the same thing, that The Reader shouldn't be considered a Holocaust film.

SD: No, it's definitely not. It's about German guilt, the act of and the responsibility and the consequences of being so-called "born guilty."