Dunham stars alongside Stephen Fry in new movie Treasure.
Lena Dunham has opened up about her experience filming in Auschwitz in new film, Treasure.
Treasure, which is to be released in cinemas from Friday 14th June, stars Dunham alongside Stephen Fry as a father and daughter who go on a road trip in 1990s Poland. Based on the book Too Many Men by Lily Brett, it follows Ruth (Dunham) and her father Edek (Fry), “a charmingly stubborn Holocaust survivor”, on a journey to his homeland.
As told through the synopsis, Ruth is “eager to make sense of her family’s past” while Edek embarks on a trip “with his own agenda”.
In an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, Fry explained that they filmed in Auschwitz in the early days of production and were shown around by “a very wonderful person from the Memorial Trust”.
Dunham further elaborated on what it was like to film the movie there, admitting it broke her heart to see Fry on his own in between takes.
She explained: “It’s such a unique opportunity to be able to be shown around from the Memorial Trust so carefully, but I realised that I don’t tend to do actorly decisions about what I will and won’t do to inform my character. But I really felt as though… my character has never been there, his character knows what it is, my character is a tourist seeing it for the first time, and his character is a survivor.
“And I felt if I had a sense of what the inside of the place was, if I had a sense of, you know, the level of detail that we would have gotten that I would not have been able to maintain that kind of, you know, at times insensitive distance and nagging need that she has for her father.”
Dunham explained that when they arrived, director Julia von Heinz would allow the pair to “chat away”, but during one of the shoots, Dunham was asked to leave Fry along for the day.
“You just have to… you can’t talk to him. You have to let him be. Let him see it, let him take it in,” she was told.
Dunham told RadioTimes.com: “It broke my heart because we’d finish [the] take and we’d all walk over to have some hot tea and connect and he just cut such a lonely figure across the way by himself, looking around.
“Everything in me wanted to go over to him, but I realised that was also brilliant of Julia, because that’s the story. That’s the lonely figure that cuts through his life.”
Treasure is available to watch in UK cinemas from Friday 14th June.
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