>> rose: welcome to the program. on this christmas eve, we look at two new movies. we begin with "concussion." i am joined by peter landesman and will smith and gugu mbatha-raw. >> how i try to understand a character, i start first and foremost to try to figure out what they want. we all want lots of things, but we all have primary desires that most of our life is directed towards. what did i found with bennet is he wanted to be accepted as an american. from the time he was a little boy, he wanted to be accepted as an american because he thought america was the place where god sent all his favorite people. so everything in his life, he

had 8 degrees -- where he dressed, where he lived, who his friends were, everything was about living up to this spiritual ideal of what it means to be an american. >> rose: and we conclude with director tom hooper, his new film is called "the danish girl." >> to not identify with the gender you're assigned at birth, i cannot imagine a more profound block a human being can experience and can be the cause of such distress. >> rose: "concussion" and "the danish girl" when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide.

captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: "concussion" is the new film starring will smith. he takes on the role of dr. bennet omalu, the real life neuropathologist who discovered football's specific head trauma and brought ut it to the public's attention. the attention is on and off the film. while the n.f.l. declines to comment, players like tom brady say they plan on seeing the film when it is released christmas day. here's a look. >> when i was a boy, heaven was here and america was here. you could be anything, you could do anything. i never wanted anything as much as i wanted to be an american. >> hearts here in pittsburgh are broken over hall of famer mike webster who in recent years

suffered from mental illness and slipped into financial ruin. >> died of disgrace at 50. i can tell something is wrong. >> in 25 years, i've never requested a test like this. >> what are you looking for? i am the wrong to discover this. >> if you don't speak for them, who will? >> repetitive head trauma chokes the brain, it turns you into someone else. >> needles, vicodin, torodol, whatever it takes to keep them in the game. get me to the commissioner. >> they don't want to talk to you. >> the n.f.l. has known about concussion for years. >> they're terrified of you. you're going to war with a corporation that owns the day of

the week. >> it's as bigwq they have to listen now. >> where is the science coming from? >> from nowhere! you continue to deny our work, your men continue to die! >> they want you to say you made it all up. they're accusing you of fraud. >> drop it or they will be doing your autopsy, mr. omalu. >> you have no idea how bad this could get. >> i have to keep going. men are not machines. we must honor our warrior. >> do you understand the impact of what you are doing? >> tell the truth! tell the truth. >> i think you're going to be an american hero. >> i'm not even an american. that's even better. >> rose: joining me is writer and director peter landesman, and two of the stars will smith and gugu mbatha-raw.

what brought this together for you and you and you? >> there was a silent epidemic of football players committing suicide, disappearing, falling into financial ruin over the years. an 2009g.q. article is how the film came to be. it's a critical mass at the right time, the right place, the right story. >> rose: did you reach out to talk to dr. omalu? >> he was involved from the very beginning. he's such a fabric of our families as filmmakers. i'm an old journalist. i immerse midself completely. it was the first and last stop. >> rose: and casting will smith? >> what's great about will m things, is will's joy and preciousness and professionalism matches bennet's. the two of them were like opposite sides of the coin. >> rose: tell us how you

choose and why did you choose this? >> well, this one, in particular, was very different from my normal process of choosing. how it happened, you get a screenplay on a friday night, in hollywood everybody sends a screenplay friday night so you can read it over the weekend so they can know by monday if they're going to somebody else. so i get a phone call and my daughter says, daddy, some man on the phone named ridley scott! i said, girl, that's not no "some man," that is sir ridley scott. (laughter) and ridley said, i have a gift for you. >> rose: a gift... a gift. he sent me the screenplay, and i remember reading it and thinking to myself, this ain't no damn gift.

i was, like, i mean, i'm a football dad. my son plays football for four years. i grew up in philadelphia with my philadelphia eagles, and i was deeply conflicted about being the person to bring this film to life. >> rose: conflicted because you love football, your son played football? >> yes, it's a very inconvenient truth, you know. a part of me was like, well, would i be being hypocritical? how do i really feel? so i met with dr. omalu. there's a line that was in the trailer and in our first meeting, that was the line he said to me that, when he was growing up in nigeria, heaven was here and america was here, and he said it was the place that got sent all his favorite

people, you know. and i was just so moved by his life and his story, and i became deeply impedal as a parent -- deeply impelled as a parent because i didn't know this information. i didn't know. and if i didn't know, i newtons of other parents -- i knew tons of other parents didn't know and i had to do it as a parent. as a human being, they had to hear his story. >> rose: the message is human beings shouldn't play football. >> that wasn't the part of the message that i connected to. the part i connected to is that for the elevation and the evolution and the advancement of human-kind, we can't discard scientific truth. >> rose: right. and the idea that repetitive head trauma can potentially

cause long-term brain damage shouldn't be something we have a hard time accepting, yet we did. >> rose: so peter and gugu, why were you insisting on being a part of -- >> we have the to do this right now, right here (laughter) >> rose: it's time. a large part of bennet's journey is his journey as a man. >> rose: right. he was a man about revelation, exposure and spiritual simplicity of truth, but he was incomplete as a man and he knew that he could not fulfill his mission unless he had the right partner. gugu's character prima who would later become his wife were like two puzzle pieces and together they were a whole. so we wrote the part, went after

actresses, and the moment i laid eyes on her, it was a no brainer. >> rose: tell me what the film is about. >> in a strange way, about joy and discovery. bennet is living in pittsburgh from nigeria. i can't he disassembles bodies and body part. his job isish to sure these people to heaven by solving the riddle of their deaths. in other words, our cycle cannot be complete until we answer the question how did we get here, meaning the slab, and, one day, unlikely, he got the body of one of the most mythological football players who ever played, mike webster. he didn't know football, who the center was or who the steelers were living in pittsburgh. so his idea was to find how did this man, 50 and homeless, die

so mysteriously and strangely. everyone wanted him buried, but bennet said how could you voluntarily not know something. why would you not ever not know something. so he essentially spiritually stole the brain and found out webster died of a disease no one had ever seen before and had never been written in medical books and that was the repetitive blows, not necessarily concussions, but the thousands and thousands of sub concussive blows a football player takes to the head from youth, high school, college, through professional game, 70,000, 90,000 hits he calculated webster had taken unlocks a killer protein that moves through the brain like sludge. >> rose: is it any different than what might come from boxing? >> completely different disease. boxers, once they get hit, once they get the knock-out blow and they're down, they don't get back in the ring for weeks, months, sometimes longer than that. in the professional game, it's three months before they can get back in the ring. in football, it's not the

knockout blow. it's the thousands of little -- one single play -- i played center in high school and college. in one play you can take six blows to the head, the knee, the ground, the ball, the face mask, and you add those up and it's tens of thousands. boxers are more like a.l.s. or parkinson's, a very different biological mechanism. >> rose: why don't helmets protect you? >> they protect you from the outside. we're talking about the inside. the brain sits in a cavity surrounded by fluid. if we were to move our heads back and forth, it bounces the brain back and forth. and thousands of times, that's what we're talking about, not blows from the outside. >> something bennet said there t was very interesting, he feels that the helmet is part of the problem and he says that, you know, in american football, because the equipment is so good, the helmet is so seemingly

protective, that the players feel comfortable using the head as a weapon when, in actuality, it's not stopping your brain from slamming into your skull. it's the g force that the helmet doesn't assist with. >> rose: when you begin to make the film, any contradictions for you? any pushback for you as you set out to make it? >> you know, we knew what we were walking into. you know, we know that football isn't a sport in this country. it's part of a social and cultural fabric. alec baldwin says it in the movie. otonon thanksgiving and christme think of football. we knew we were walking not into a sport but a cultural phenomenon. we stayed true to our mission

which was character. the man who played beautifully on the film was one to have the most joyful whistle blowers, whistle blowers are complex people driven by complex things. you stay focused on character, the consequence of the cultural, the political, the sports, the continue vearks that's what's happening around us. >> rose: he did it because it's the right thing to do? >> yeah, he -- what's really interesting about bennet, how i try to understand a character, i start first and foremost with i try to figure out what do they want, you know. and we all want lots of things but we all have primary desires that most of our life is directed towards. and what i found with bennet is he wanted to be accepted as an american. from the time he was a little boy, he wanted to be accepted as an american because he thought that america was the place where

god sent all of his favorite people. so everything in his life, he had 8 degrees. the way he dressed, where he lived, who his friends were, everything were about living up to this spiritual ideal of what it means to be an american. so when he was presented, very ironically, with the knowledge of c.t.e., so this guy who loves america and is chasing the american dream just happens to be the guy who discovers the disease that the players of america's greatest game gets. for me, when i connected to that idea, i could see how this was a spiritual mission for him, that he had to keep going, he couldn't stop. it became how he earned the

spiritual right to have all of the gifts that he has in his life. so it was really complex, but deeply faith-based for him. >> rose: what role does his wife play? >> for me, as a foreigner to america and not growing up with football, you know, i wasn't really interested in doing a football movie, per se, because that's not really part of my personal cultural heritage. but for me, the film felt so much bigger than that in many ways, you know, in terms of this relationship, especially prema, you know, both to have the characters coming as immigrants to america and bonding over their sort of shared quest for the american dream. and prema really sort of starting off as needing the support of bennet, but actually, then, you know, their relationship sort of evolves in this sort of delicate, eccentric

way where she sort of breathes life and humanity into his very scientific world, and there is this line that albert's character has that you need to touch someone living for a while. and he's so confused by his science that she brings a warmth and human quality to him and it's also she becomes the emotional and moral compass for this journey he goes on and eventually taking on the n.f.l., she gave him courage. >> rose: this clip in which you were confessing to her you don't feel adequate to complete the mission. here it is. >> when i was a boy growing up in nigeria, heaven was here, and america was here. i have never wanted anything as

much as i wanted to be accepted as an american. a man goes mad and nobody asks why. they make fun of him. they insult him on tv. and now they want to pretend his disease does not exist. they want to bury me. i am the wrong person to have discovered this. >> also to say her character, it's almost more than that. the wife, he build her a dream house. it's like she was the intrinsic part of the american dream. he needed her to unlock the dream. not just the discovery, but family, they build a beautiful house outside of pittsburgh that they have to abandon because he was exiled and destroyed as a

whistleblower. >> rose: did you tone it down? not for a moment. it was very surreal when we were accused of something that was in the air. we had no interaction or connection with the n.f.l. i didn't want it, didn't need it. they had nothing to offer us. we were make ago story about this man, not national football. >> rose: but do you believe they want to do something about concussions and are aware of the danger of concussions and are prepared to take action? >> i believe in the n.f.l. as a corporation that wants to protect the bottom line and will do whatever they have to do. >> rose: does that mean trying to gloss over the confessions? >> including doing as much as they can. i believe they are trying to do as much as they can to protect the players but the bigger question is the sport in general and whether you can do something about this or is it just baked

into the sport and something to be taken for granted at this point. >> rose: the level of violence? >> well, knowing what we know and, you know, information, and knowing -- as long as a football player knows this can happen, it is now incumbent upon them to make the choice and the adult decision, and the same with putting your children in pee-wee and football. this is in the tap industry to have the sport. it's upon you to decide if you want to engage in this. >> rose: this is a clip from our brain series you have been watching in our audience for years and this is dr. kandel. >> the brain is a gelatinous organ protected by being encased in a rigid, bony skull. when we move about, there is minimum movement in the brain. but as a result of two kinds of forces -- impact forces or inertia forces -- it can be serious jarring of the brain as it's moved rapidly back and

forth in the enclosed space. it's only separated from this bony, inflexible skull by a fluid layer called the cerebral spinal fluid. having had a prior concussion is particularly important for two reasons. one, it takes longer to recover but also one of the interesting and sad things of a prior concussion is if you had one concussion you're more likely to have a second concussion and if you've had two concussions, you're much more likely to have a i third or fourth one. so concussion is not only bad in itself, but what it does for the future of the athlete playing. >> rose: everything he said is exactly as the reality. >> yes. >> rose: what do you hope comes out of the film, will? >> as pa parent -- as a parent, i didn't know when my son played football, and my son was on the field and i was concerned about h him breaking his leg. >> rose: how old was he?

he played from 14 to 18. we were on the field and i was concerned about him breaking his leg. the big thing was final injury. so i had no idea. to i know that other people have and had no idea. so for me it's strictly about the knowledge and the information so people can make informed decisions. >> rose: and if you had to make a decision now, and you know what you know now? >> fortunately, this is just a hypothetical because h he was really into it. for a parent, it would be extremely difficult. what i would do is want him to have the information. >> rose: would you make the decision? >> we have to make the decision together. what i'm going to say is really weak, but i would just, you know, support him and then make

his mother say no. (laughter) if we're going to be really honest. man, listen, you know... if it was just me and you, you know... but your mom, man... (laughter) >> rose: tell me more about the story of dr. omalu so we can understand, which is the spine of this story. it is about this concussion but it's about him, about one man against a system. >> yeah, you have a man who was born during an air raid in the jungle in nigeria, you know, so -- you know, so this is a man who came from as humble a

beginning as possible, and he looked to america as a boy and what we stand for and, you know, what we have been to and in the world, and he comes to america and he gets eight degrees, he discovers this disease, and almost loses everything. >> rose: take a look at this. this is ray lewis on this program talking about how additional rules protecting players dilutes the game which is the argument made by some. >> they're taking the game and they're diluting the game because they want to protect their claims. but if you leave the game alone, like always, the game will take care of itself. the biggest things right now that's disgusting to me -- gist disgusting -- in college football, now, they've created a

term that's called "targeting," saying if a player launches his head, which is the first thing on his body, that's what you lead with, you launch your head into someone and you collide with their helmet, that's targeting, and they're kicking them out of games, but the referee makes a mistake and they're never punished. what's the lesson we're being taught? if you make the mistake -- that's why we have helmets and shoulder pads because if i turn my neck to the side i put myself in jeopardy of being hurt. you have the people sitting at the top of the food chain and the reason they don't care because the herds are so great, they don't care and it's on to

the next one and the next one and the next one. >> rose: what do you think about that? >> i would be curious to see him revisit that 20 years from now to see if he's in tact. >> rose: he may suffer? he may, and someone who plays as aggressively as he plays, that's rhetoric of someone who has not been inside the unbelievable tragic shakespearean suffering of a family who has a man who's a bread winner and father go through this disease. they become unrecognizable to themselves, to their children. it's a shocking clip to me. >> rose: here's a clip. i just think that we should be careful with that. there is a context to what he was talking about and what he was saying that we're not aware of and, you know, i know ray, and -- >> rose: so if you know him, you must know how he feels about this.

>> well, we haven't discussed this. we haven't discussed the movie or the science. >> rose: he's a very engaging guy. >> yeah, you know, and as the science is evolving, he can make that decision, you know. he absolutely can make that decision for himself and for his family and for his kids, and i don't want us to appear to be in opposition to that. i want him to have more information so he can make whatever decision that he wants to make for himself. >> rose: in the end, in a sense, is that part of what you think as your mission here in making this film is to be a stimulus for making information -- let everybody understand how concussions happen -- >> absolutely. >> rose: -- and what the impact is. >> what the impact is. >> rose: and how we should ask the right questions about that.

>> when i had the science explained to me, it was a revelation. as much as it seems simple and logical when you say, if uh you bang your -- if you bang your head 30 times a day for multiple decades of your life that there could be an issue. when you say it that way, yes, that makes sense. but when i had the actual science broken down of the way when a brain experiences trauma, it releases protein and, as it experiences a concussion, it starts to release more protein, and as it gets locked in that loop of releasing protein, it reaches for a spinal protein called tao protein which is too big to go through pipes of your brain. when i had it broken down and

explained, it became obvious and clear to me that a human being should never launch his head at another human being for any reason. for me, it's much more about getting the information. >> rose: in an interesting ray, yo -- in an interesting wa, you would think that is the kind of thing the n.f.l. should do, it should make clear that point. and do they? >> i think they do now, and i think that this film will help that effort, and i think the film -- the n.f.l. love to have these protocols, they're pulling people out of games, they're talking about it. >> rose: they're connecting on the ground now and watching. >> and we have commercials for our film on their games. >> rose: does that say to you the n.f.l. is listening? >> i feel the n.f.l. is embracing it. >> rose: you're finding this a much more enriching career than journalism? >> i was a painter before i was a writer and before i was a journalist and to me everything was a rehearsal for filmmaking which is taking the visual and the word and the word and visual and i love actors, i love

working with actors. to me, it was like when i was an investigative journalist i would be across the table from a source who wouldn't want to give me what they had, engage in actors and find the best of them and bring something nobody could anticipate. it's fantastic. >> rose: what do you want from directors? >> what do i want from directors? (laughter) >> rose: when you and i first met was "fresh prince." >> absolutely. >> rose: i came out to california and -- >> that was 25 years ago. >> rose: that was another show. >> yeah. >> rose: a long time. 25 years. and you've had -- you could never have imagined the experience you've had. >> no. >> rose: the career you've had. >> i have been so far beyond my dreams for so many years, i've

had to catch up and dream some new stuff. (laughter) >> rose: with all of that, with all the box office success, you know, in a sense, to create your own films, to be not just an actor but a filmmaker. >> you know, i've part inert nerd with most directors i've ever worked with. it's a partnership. >> rose: financial and otherwise. >> absolutely. so what i'm experiencing now, as an actor, you get to put on a human being, you get to wear another human being. >> rose: right. and in that process, you learn about yourself, you learn about them you learn about human beings, you learn about the world. so in this process, i'm having new aspirations, and new ways to

be able to be of service and contribution in the world. when i would play bennet omalu and muhammad ali, and i spent time with nelson mandela, so i'm deeply inspired with this second half of my life to elevate the quality of my contribution. i feel like i have so much more to give in lending my voice to the social conversation in very different ways. so i'm very inspired. i heard marvin gaye say one time, he said, i have a song inside of me and i know it's great, i just can't get it out, you know. >> rose: do you feel a bit of that? >> i feel a bit of that right now.

there is a much greater contribution inside of me that i'm trying to get in touch with to be able to get it out. >> rose: did he surprise you? oh, absolutely. i think that, you know, we know will smith the movie star, you know, and the lightness and the warmth and the charisma, but i think, you know, especially in this performance, it's such a transformation as bennet and i think your emotional intelligence and your intuitive and the emotional depth will goes to in this film i think will surprise a lot of people in terms of inhabilitying his character so entirely and really, as i say, a searing, truthful intensity that i think i've not seen in any of your other performances. it is a surprise. >> rose: thank you. great to meet you. great to see you, my friend.

your visits are all too rare and i hope you will always come back. >> absolutely. >> rose: tom hooper is here, the award-winning director of "the king's speech" and lamise rabb. and most recently "the danish girl." ihere is the trailer for the film. >> the first time we met she propositioned me. she seemed so sure. >> i was sure. i was so sure. is there something you would like to tell me? >> ? something you would like to know? >> i'm your wife. i know everything. >> you will not tell anyone

about this. >> hello, there! i'm going to call you lili. i want to sketch you. lilly, we should go out. >> lili... i feel like i need to ask your permission before i kiss you. >> what happened last night, there was a moment when i wasn't me. there was a moment when i was just lili. but lili doesn't exist. >> we were playing a game.

he's lost his way. he's a friend. >> i think lili's thoughts. i dream her dreams. she's always there. >> i need my husband. you're right. the fact is i believe that i'm a woman. >> and i believe it, too. this has never been attempted before. >> it could kill you. 's my only hope. this is not my body. i have to let it go. i love you because you're the only person who made sense of me and made me possible.

>> rose: wow. what drew you to this story? >> first, thank you for having me back on the show, charlie. i was drawn by this incredible script that i read in late 2008. it was not the first time i had encountered this story. i hadn't heard of lili elbe or gerda wegner, and i was incredibly moved of the story of this film of a marriage going through such a profound change. it's been a seven-year journey to want to move audiences in the same way i was moved by this incredible love story. >> rose: tell me more about her. >> well, when i looked her up on the internet in 2008, there was very little about her available, the information that was there,

and proved to be often inaccurate. but i was struck that this extraordinary courageous couple of pioneers had had their story marginalized by history and a lot of people think that chris clean yorgenson was the first to go through the surgery in the '30s. people could not believe 1930 was the first time it began to happen. when i researched it, people in denmark didn't know the story and i thought it would be absolutely famous in denmark and it led me to think about the way history has a way to hide prejudices in the time, in the way history is constructed and there is been decades of prejudice against trans-people and trans-stories so maybe it's no surprise the story of these

two early pioneers and their love has been pushed to the sidelines and forgotten so i wanted the film to redirect attention to this incredible couple. >> rose: it is really the story of a couple. >> yeah, who went through this transition at a time when the word transgender did not exist, when there was no road map to transition, when the medical establishment consistently said this is a condition that needed locking up or labottommizing or treating with radiation therapy. you have to wonder how did lili emerge in the 1920s, and i think there was something -- there was a space opened up by the love this couple shared that allowed lili to emerge. >> rose: i think you've said what makes a great love story is the question of do you love someone enough, support them enough, even if you know you might lose them as a result?

>> yeah. i mean, that's at its center, the film becomes an expiration of unconditional love because will gerda love her husband through this transition even if there is a risk of losing lili as her husband, and she goes on that journey and is able to commit that love at every stage unflinchingly. but also, i think her love allows her to see -- you know, i think her love allows her to see her husband as he truly is and allows her to see this hidden feminine identity inside her husband, so her love also involves an extraordinarily clear-sightedness. quite often tales of love and passion involve people distorting the object of their passion, that they're inlove with the fantasy of a person and not the real person. this is almost inverse where

gerda is not only love with the person but with the concealed self and fights to bring that concealed self out, and whatever happens to their marriage, that's how much she loves him. >> rose: eddie was the first cast? >> yes, sometimes i put actors in my mind to flush out a role, and eddie was the person who became lili from the first read. i got a chance to work with him when he was first starting out. eddie played a young rebel to tries to overthrow a queen and gets sentenced to death. i still remember the scene where he received the death sentence. the emotional rawness of his performance was extraordinary.

almost an emotion of transparency which is quite rare among english actors. english actors are in some kind of dialogue with their own reserve and could sometimes say repressed. >> rose: take a look at. this this is where gerda introduces einar as lilly, claiming lili is einar's cousin visiting from the countryside. >> my darling! let me introduce you to lili. einar's cousin. >> come on!

(whispering) >> that scene, we see the very first time lili comes out in public. >> rose: right. and lili is experiencing for the first time what it's like to be subject to the male gaze. >> rose: i see, yeah. and even knowing how she will be perceived. >> yeah. so she has all the nerves of whether she's passing or blending as a woman and whether people think she's a woman or not and that's tension. >> rose: transgender has really made a remarkable sense of being part of the public conversation. "time magazine," you know, and i think the editor of "time magazine" told me the year that appeared, which i think was last

year, it was the largest selling edition of "time magazine." >> i think even the seven years that i have been involved in the film, the landscape has changed to an extraordinary degree. when i started, people said this is a hard film to finance, it's too risky, it's a difficult film to get distribution. now people say it's timely, it's in the -- and i think it's transparent, sharing the story so candidly from the world. so i think it's a tipple point in terms of transgender stories breaking out into the main stream but obviously, you know, there is a huge, long way to go go -- for transgender rights to

march in this opening of stories. >> rose: you said the great challenge was not wanting lili to be "otherred." >> one of the reasons i thought eddie would make a good lili is i never wanted the transition from einar to lili to be strange or forward or confronting. i wanted to go on the journey in such an emotional and intimate way that the emergence of lili becomes inevitably necessary and i think edy's great achievement is when you watch the film you understand he doesn't have a choice and you go on that journey step by step, beat for beat, and eddie has the connections with the audiences and reveals his emotions. >> rose: hard to get financing for this kind of movie?

>> yeah, i was lucky enough with the box office of "the king's speech," i had a moment in time when i had a passion project to get made and this was the project i wanted to get made. my seven-year involvement makes me a bit of a ne newcomer and i have been fighting to get this made since 2000, late '90s. so the obstacles to get it to made speaks to the kind of climate towards transgender stories that i've certainly witnessed and i'm so pleased to share. >> rose: do you select based on a rhythm in your own when you say i just did a musical and now i want to do comedy, or i did a comedy and now i want to do drama? >> to me, it's about picking the best scripts. it's a process, i have to literally fall in love with the project to want to fight for it, to want to go through the kind of tenacious journey you do to

get a film made. i look back on the three films i just made and there was a thinking theme. i fell in love with a "the danish girl." i think the universal theme is that all of us have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves or the true version of ourselves. now that could be insecurity, addiction, depression, stammering like in "the king's speech," having been brutalized and lost your sense of self, but to not identify with the gender you're assigned at birth, i can't imagine a more profound block a human being can experience and can be the cause of such distress. but, you know, the film seems to explore how, at a time when there was no support to

transition, the way lili is loved seems to unlock something in their marriage and just the loving friendship of lionel in "the king's speech" is transformative, the priest forgiving valjon where he redead casted himself to live a life ruled by love and faith, in this film the incredible love that surrounds lili makes possible this transformation so that there is theme of the transformative power of love and i sort of feel to anyone who is blocked in any way in their life, if they're lucky enough to be truly loved, they have some kind of transformation. >> rose: this is where einar tells gerda he thought he truly was lili. here it is.

>> i think it would be better if lili didn't come here again. >> why? i think what happened -- t was nothing. 's you. wasn't as simple as that. tched him kiss you. don't make innocent. >> he may have known who i was but i wasn't always me. there was a moment when i was just lili, and i think that he could see that. do you see? >> but lili doesn't exist. we made her up. we were playing a game. >> i know we were. but then --

>> rose: and that's what happened. >> i think the interesting thing is it starts -- they're two young artists, it's the 1920s, they live within a particularly group of artists, and lili starts with an aspect of playfulness or gerda certainly thinks it's fun for lili to go to the ball dressed as lili, but clearly there is some kind of ae was lili as a very young child, but, of course, that's not a thing a child can announce to anyone and expect the world to reflect on it, so, obviously,

this became fully expressed and we watched the reawakening. >> rose: how did you find vikander? >> what an extraordinary couple of years she's had. it's extraordinary when you have eddie redmayne to find an actress for him. i had seen her in another movie where she's swedish, ordainish and plays a -- or danish and plays a member of the danish royal family. i was compassionate and decided to make it in english but how

lucky for me to have a genuine scandinavian at the center of the film bringing that scandinavian energy and strength and freedom to kind of -- i suppose if there had been maybe another english actor at the center, it might have been unintentionally a moral englishness. she came in to audition with eddie and i and we did the exciting title scene 56 which was linked into the scene in the trailer in the morning after, the scene we've just seen, she confronts einar, and the first screen test was so moving that at the end of it i had tears in my eyes and he turned to me and said, there is no great suspense now. so i try to get to another take not knowing what to say. >> rose: did you do a second take? >> i did just to pretend --

>> rose: but it was over. yeah. and i'm so pleased, the fact she's gotten golden globe nominations. she was in tears and calling her mom. you forget she's so kind of -- she's so together, you forget how young she is. >> rose: how old is she? 26. her background is very english. she comes from a ballet background. the interesting thing is you're not scared of repetition because in dance you don't even get to be mediocre without rep digs, you don't get to be good without unbelievable repetition. so she doesn't have that -- some actors have a superstitious sense that if they to it too many times they will lose the essence. she doesn't have that at all. and the discipline to learn

english where she speaks unaccented english. >> rose: do you know what you will make next? >> unfortunately, i couldn't announce it on the show as much as i would like for you to be the first to know. (laughter) >> rose: is directing all you hoped it would be? >> that's a very good question. i mean, you know, i had the london premiere last week in the biggest cinema in london, 2,000 seats, built in the '30s, beautiful cinema. and i remembers a child i would have a ritual. would go to the cinema, see a film, and walk through the exit doors. i would turn back and look at the screen with the credits running and vow i would one day have a film on the screen. i was standing up, introducing myself in that cinema, and i felt an extraordinary connection to the 12-year-old with me that i as an adult did the dream of the 12-year-old and the 12-year-old was right.

i wondered after the success of the speech whether i would have that thing of going now i've done that, that i would be restless and want to do something else, but actually i was so happy to do the thing i loved doing. it took me 18 years to be a movie director. you have to have an incredible stamina of belief that you will get here. >> rose: good to have you. thank you. >> rose: for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide.

this is nightly business e. report. >> growth versus value. it is great investment debate heading into the new year. where should you put your money for 2016. >> turning point as more people shop online what does the future hold for all of those malls and all of that real estate. >> white christmas, no way, not on the east coast at least and not on the slopes and that's creating headaches for businesses that rely on snow all that and more on nightly business report for thursday, december 24th, christmas eve. >> good evening, everyone. merry christmas eve. >> welcome one and all. well, there was not, however, a lot of holiday cheer on wall street today. the grinch, yes, the grinch was out and about