Trivia / Funny Games

• Creator Backlash: Tim Roth refuses to watch the English-language film owing to Devon Gearhart (Georgie) strongly resembling his son. He also says that the film was incredibly difficult to make, psychologically speaking.
• Creator's Oddball: Haneke normally takes measures to have his movies match reality as closely as possible; for example, it's rare for him to include non-diegetic sound in his movies. However, Funny Games breaks Haneke's conventions from the very beginning with the movie opening with a rendition of loud metal Background Music that only the audience can hear. In addition, the character Paul subverts Haneke's usual realism as Paul is able to Break the Fourth Wall to communicate with the audience and even manipulates reality with a remote control, all of which make Funny Games unusually fantastical for a Haneke film.
• The Production Curse: Three of the four main actors of the original movie are already dead. Actor Ulrich Mühe died in 2007 at the age of 54 and his wife Susanne Lothar in 2012 at the age of 51. Frank Giering, the actor for Peter, died in 2010 at the age of 38.
• Real-Life Relative: Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar, who play the father and mother in the original, were a couple in real life from this movie until Mühe's death in 2007.
• Self-Remake: Michael Haneke directed both the original movie and the remake.
• Trolling Creator: An interesting example. While Haneke admits that he deliberately wrote in the remote-control rewind to play with the audience's emotions, he also wanted to teach the viewers firsthand that movies are manipulative by design and that the viewers can easily fall for a movie's smoke and mirrors.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Haneke in the Criterion interview, the original script was a standard thriller story about a husband and wife finding a fugitive hiding in their weekend home, which then ended with the wife shooting the husband.
  • The original 1997 version was supposed to set in the United States and filmed in English, but ended up shooting in Austria with German-speaking cast due to its budget restraint. Haneke would redo this in English-language ten years later after getting some clouts from the success of Caché.

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