How Hannie Schaft Turned the Nazis’ Assumptions Against Them – and Why the Upcoming Movie THE RED HEAD Wants to Put Us Inside Her Transformation
Hannie Schaft stands among the most remarkable women of WWII, and her story forms the foundation of The Red Head, the upcoming historical thriller from director Timothy Hines and Pendragon Pictures.
The most effective disguise Hannie Schaft ever wore may not have been a disguise at all.
She was slight, young, red-haired, bookish. People who remembered her from school described a shy girl who read voraciously and earned exceptional marks. Nothing about her suggested the figure she would become: an armed resistance operative moving through Nazi-occupied Holland, gathering military intelligence, carrying weapons and false papers, and participating in assassinations of collaborators.
This apparent contradiction became one of her greatest advantages. The Germans were looking for danger. Hannie didn't look dangerous.
Director Timothy Hines intends to make that paradox central to his upcoming feature The Red Head, an intimate World War II thriller about Schaft's transformation from an idealistic law student into one of the most hunted members of the Dutch resistance.
For Hines, the interesting question isn't simply how Hannie killed. It is how someone like Hannie became capable of killing, and what happened to her afterward.
THE POWER OF LOOKING HARMLESS
Hannie's intelligence was formidable. She studied law at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in international law, and dreamed of going to Geneva to work for a more just world. She could converse with Germans, carried forged identification and learned how to navigate the bureaucracy of occupation.
But intellect alone doesn't explain her effectiveness.
Her secret weapon was other people's perception of her.
A young woman could pass through spaces where a military-age Dutch man might attract immediate scrutiny. Hannie even went swimming at Overveen, where she cultivated relationships with German servicemen and extracted information from them.
It was espionage built upon a devastatingly simple weakness: the men didn't believe the women talking to them could possibly be their enemy.
Hannie learned to inhabit that blind spot.
The same woman chatting innocently with German soldiers could be mapping coastal defenses. The young woman bicycling through Haarlem might be carrying illegal newspapers, ammunition, forged documents or a pistol.
Her forged Ausweis opened doors. Her intelligence told her what to do once she got through them. Her appearance helped keep people from asking the right questions.
She was becoming, in effect, an almost invisible weapon.
Not because nobody could see her.
Because they saw her and reached the wrong conclusion.
A BICYCLE CAN BE A WEAPON OF WAR
The iconography of World War II is enormous: tanks, bombers, artillery, armies crossing continents.
Hannie's war could be fought on a bicycle.
She and other resistance members surveilled collaborators, moved weapons and information, mapped German defenses and carried out attacks at startlingly close range. During the assassination attempt on police captain Willem Ragut, Hannie shot him from his bicycle. Her resistance partner Jan Bonekamp followed to finish the operation.
Then everything went wrong.
Ragut fired back. Bonekamp was hit in the stomach and later fell into German hands. He died of his wounds.
For Hannie, his death appears to have marked a profound psychological rupture.
The two had become extremely emotionally close. The surviving record makes clear that losing Jan devastated her. In a letter afterward, Hannie admitted that she had discovered she was considerably less hard than she had imagined. She wrote of trying to salvage the fragments of her former self.
That sentence may contain the entire movie Hines wants to make.
Because after Jan, resistance wasn't an intellectual proposition anymore. It had taken someone from her.
The occupation had already persecuted her Jewish friends, corrupted the legal order she believed in and transformed her country into a landscape of checkpoints, disappearances and executions. Now it had reached directly into her most intimate circle.
Grief hardened the war.
And the shy law student who once imagined working for international peace became increasingly committed to destroying the machinery she believed had made ordinary morality impossible.
THE GIRL WITH THE RED HAIR
The Nazis knew something about their adversary. They knew the hair.
Witnesses had repeatedly reported a red-haired young woman around resistance attacks. German security forces became intensely interested in finding the mysterious rothaarige Mädel - the girl with the red hair.
It is one of history's stranger manhunts. An occupying security apparatus could search an entire country for a physical characteristic without understanding the person underneath it.
Eventually Hannie turned even that against them.
She dyed her hair black.
She put on plain glass spectacles.
She acquired a new identity: a German girl supposedly born in Zürich.
Hannie disappeared.
The killing machine emerged.
There is something almost novelistic about the transformation, except that it happened. The young woman who once stood out because of her hair had learned that survival required erasing herself.
The Red Head intends to depart from the conventional resistance picture.
Hines doesn't want Hannie's transformation to feel triumphant.
He wants it to hurt.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU PULL THE TRIGGER?
War films are often fascinated by the moment before violence.
Hines is equally interested in the moment afterward.
What happens when the person who pulls the trigger is an intellectually serious young woman who once planned to devote her life to international law?
What happens when killing becomes necessary in her mind but remains emotionally devastating?
How does someone reconcile compassion with assassination?
And at what point does the person fighting evil begin to fear that the fight itself is consuming her?
Hannie's surviving words suggest that this wasn't theoretical.
After Jan 's death she struggled profoundly. The emotional armor she had built around herself cracked. The old Hannie was becoming difficult even for her to locate.
That psychological territory is where The Red Head intends to live.
The film will have assassinations, pursuit, sabotage, clandestine meetings and Nazi occupation. But its real subject is transformation: the cost of turning an apparently ordinary young woman into someone the occupation desperately wanted to capture.
TIMOTHY HINES, THE RED HEAD AND THE WOMEN OF WWII WHO REFUSED TO BE SILENCED
There is a recognizable thread running through Hines' work: women placed inside systems or circumstances that underestimate them.
In 10 Days in a Madhouse, Hines adapted the true story of Nellie Bly, the young journalist who feigned mental illness and had herself committed to the notorious Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island so she could expose its brutal conditions from inside. The film starred Caroline Barry alongside Christopher Lambert and Kelly LeBrock.
More recently, The Wilde Girls turned that interest toward comedy, following two privileged young women abruptly stripped of comfort and thrown into Depression-era wilderness survival. The film asks what remains when class, money and social insulation disappear.
Even Hines and longtime producing partner Susan Goforth's War of the Worlds: The True Story played with another recurring fascination: the unstable boundary between what audiences see and what they believe. Their adaptation presented H. G. Wells' alien invasion as documentary history, complete with the recollections of a supposed survivor, years before “fake news” became part of everyday cultural vocabulary.
Hannie Schaft brings these preoccupations together.
She is underestimated because of what people think they see.
And then she becomes lethal because they fail to look again.
For audiences searching for stories about women in WWII, female resistance fighters, or the women of World War II whose courage has been overlooked, Hannie Schaft offers a remarkable example: a young woman whose intelligence, empathy and willingness to act placed her directly inside the machinery of resistance.
A PRODUCING TEAM BUILT AROUND THE STORY
Susan Goforth, Hines' longtime producing and creative partner, joins The Red Head as producer and co-creative producer, alongside executive producer and co-creative producer Kimberly Olsen.
The Red Head is being developed by Pendragon Pictures, the independent film company behind director Timothy Hines' previous productions, including War of the Worlds The True Story, Tomorrow’s Today, The Wilde Girls and 10 Days in a Madhouse.
Olsen brings an increasingly international slate. She served as an executive producer on James Gray's Paper Tiger, starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller, which competed at Cannes recently in 2026, played to a 12 minute standing ovation and was picked up by NEON, and her credits also include Killing Castro with Al Pacino, The Comeback Trial starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman and Following Harry about the life of Harry Belafonte.
Producer Lawrence Scott brings a different kind of experience: the practical machinery required to turn ambitious creative ideas into finished productions. His career has ranged across film, television and live arts, including production and post-production work for network television and media and creative development for the Martha Graham Dance Company.
That combination matters for a picture reconstructing occupied Holland while remaining unusually close to the emotional experience of one woman.
FINDING HANNIE
Casting Hannie Schaft became a search for something more elusive than a famous name. The production considered actresses across the spectrum, from established stars such as Anya Taylor-Joy to acclaimed young performers including Sadie Sink - both formidable talents with enormous screen presence.
But director Timothy Hines kept returning to a different idea: Hannie should arrive on screen as Hannie, not as a superstar the audience already knows. He calls it the “Superman effect” - the principle Alexander and Ilya Salkind utilized behind casting the then-little-known Christopher Reeve as Superman and surrounding him with extraordinary established actors. The audience believed the man before it saw the movie star.
For The Red Head, Hines wanted an actress capable of the same transformation: someone with the talent and presence to stand effortlessly opposite an A-list supporting cast, yet still allow us to meet Hannie as she really began - an intelligent, seemingly ordinary young woman whom no one in their wildest dreams would imagine could become one of the most feared resistance assassins of the World War II.
After an exhaustive search and a remarkable audition, the question of price or marquee value became irrelevant. The strongest actress for this particular conception of Hannie had emerged. “We have found our Hannie,” Hines says. Her identity will be announced shortly. The gamble, if it can be called one, is that audiences will discover the actress and Hannie at the same moment - and watch both of them take command of the screen.
NORFOLK BECOMES HAARLEM
The Red Head is now moving toward production in Norfolk, England, where historic streets, waterways and period architecture will double for Haarlem and the Netherlands of the 1940s.
There is a practical advantage to filming there as well. Recreating Nazi occupation imagery in the modern Netherlands can involve significant legal, municipal and cultural restrictions around Nazi emblems, uniforms, weapons, salutes and public display. More importantly, the production will take advantage of Norfolk's unusually compatible architecture while gaining greater practical control over large-scale occupation scenes.
But Norfolk offers more than convenience. It offers reality.
Hines wants bicycles moving down actual streets. German patrols passing real windows. Resistance fighters disappearing around physical corners. He wants the occupation to feel less like a reconstructed historical pageant than a place in which people still have to buy food, meet friends, fall in love and wonder whether the person walking toward them will betray them. Hines had vowed not to use no AI in the finished movie.
Because that is ultimately the distinction The Red Head is chasing.
There have been countless films about World War II.
This one isn't really about World War II.
It is about what World War II did to Hannie Schaft.
WHY HANNIE SCHAFT’S STORY MATTERS
A shy, brilliant young woman who believed in international law discovered that laws could be corrupted.
A loyal friend watched Jewish women she loved become targets. An apparently harmless student discovered that being underestimated could become a weapon. A resistance fighter lost the man closest to her and found herself pulled still deeper into a war she could no longer experience at a distance.
For anyone searching for a WWII resistance film centered on a woman rather than an army, Hannie Schaft's story offers a radically intimate perspective on the Dutch resistance. It is a story about espionage, courage, sacrifice, grief, moral complexity and the price of fighting back.
That is why The Red Head is not simply another WWII film.
It is a story about one of the women of WWII whose life exposes what war does to an individual - and what an individual can do when the world around her has become unbearable.
By the end, the Nazis had finally learned what they had failed to understand at the beginning.
The delicate young woman wasn't harmless.
Their mistake was realizing it too late.
The new motion picture The Red Head intends to show us how she got there.
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