Monday, September 19th, 2005

Liev Schreiber, EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Liev Schreiber, EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
Written by Emily Christianson


Liev Schreiber recalls heading to a New York bar for his first meeting with Jonathan Safran Foer expecting a 90-year-old Jewish man from Nantucket who only communicates through his agent.


“I walked in and there was this 20-something-year-old kid with glasses waving and smiling at me,” says the 37-year-old. “I remember thinking this must be some guy who’s seen Scream or something but he kept waving at me so I went over to him and it was Jonathan. I was blown away.”


After bonding over drinks, jokes, and discussion of women, grandfathers, the Ukraine and what it means to be Jewish, Schreiber had what he wanted; permission to adapt Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated, into a screenplay.


There was just one problem … Schreiber wasn’t a screenwriter or a director … at least not yet. The film presented several challenges for any seasoned director, let alone a first timer. Most of the film takes place in a car, with a dog, in a foreign country, with a high percentage of non-English speaking first time actors.


Illuminated follows Jonathan’s (Elijah Wood) journey as he travels to the Ukraine searching for his grandfather’s village and the woman who saved him during World War II. Upon arrival he meets his interpreter Alex (Eugene Hutz) and their driver, who also happens to be Alex’s grandfather. Of course Grandfather can’t be without his “seeing eye bitch,” Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.


The trip becomes a surprisingly meaningful one as the young American and his traveling companions face the importance of remembrance, the perilous nature of secrets, the legacy of the Holocaust, the meaning of friendship, and most importantly love.


“It’s really about people’s need to be connected,” Schreiber says. “We follow these two people from vastly different cultures who should have absolutely nothing in common, but come to realize that there’s a deep connection between them that is emotionally and spiritually binding.”


Although Schreiber had aspirations to write when he was younger, a teacher suggested acting instead. The Hollywood actor went on to star in The Manchurian Candidate, Kate and Leopold and all three Scream movies. He was writing his first screenplay about his own late grandfather when he stumbled across a portion of Foer’s novel in the New Yorker.


“When my Grandfather died I became curious about his history in the hope that it would somehow inform my own,” he says. “I started to write a lot more and in particular about Ukraine. When I read Jonathan’s story I felt deeply connected to it. What’s more, he had done in 15 pages what I had been trying to do in about one hundred, and he had done it with humor.”


Schreiber says the “The screenplay came out of me very quickly.” He focused on the story of Jonathan and Alex and the excerpt printed in the New Yorker, rather than the entire novel.


Foer and Schreiber both admit others struggled to see the material as a film, luckily Peter Saraf wasn’t one of them. Although the two had never met, the producer contacted Schreiber to inquire about the screenplay.









“At the time I didn’t know he was a writer and I didn’t know he had ambitions to be a director,” Saraf says. “I did know he had never written a screenplay and that it would be incredibly difficult to adapt. Liev sent me the screenplay and I thought it was one of the best things I’ve ever read.”


Schreiber says after he wrote the screenplay, directing it was a “natural progression.”


“I was primarily interested in writing, but as an actor I have always approached my work as being a part of or piece of the whole picture,” he says. “I think that awareness of the larger picture is part of what made me want to direct but I never imagined anyone would say yes.”


While Schreiber waited for his project to move forward, he started work on the set of The Manchurian Candidate. When the director, Jonathan Demme, found out about Illuminated, he used the opportunity to teach Schreiber a thing or two about filmmaking.


“We would be in between takes on Manchurian and he would start explaining the shot to me but not for his movie, more as advice for mine,” Schreiber says.


Although the film was shot in Prague, Schreiber filmed much of the road trip during an earlier visit to the Ukraine while he mimicked the journey of the characters in the book and searched for his own grandfather’s village between Kiev and Odessa.


“I took with me the closest match to an Alex that I could find,” he says during a press conference at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. “We met this Ukrainian DP club kid and he was just insane. He had big huge pompadour hair and they swore he was a good camera man, and he wore these like Boca Raton Jewish old lady sunglasses and huge bell bottoms.”


Much of the movie’s success hinged on hiring the right pooch, so they hired two. Dog trainer Boone Narr provided the two border collies, Mickey and Mouse.


“I remember thinking I would give up my entire salary to make sure we had the right dog,” Schreiber recalls. “I said we had to get the best dog in show business and thought, well let’s get the best trainer in the business.”


Schreiber was looking for the “credibility of face and character.” For him, that meant hiring as many real people as possible and letting them speak their own language.


“It was more important to me that they felt and looked real than that they were actors, which was rather naïve,” he says with a smile.


One of those actors was Eugene Hutz. The lead singer of Gogol Bordello met with Schreiber to discuss the use of his music on the soundtrack, and left with the role of Alex opposite Elijah Wood.


“It was probably about five minutes into the meeting when I started thinking what I think everyone in the room was thinking,” Hutz says. “So when the character of Alex came up, I just said it out loud, ‘I am that guy.’”


The film’s star power rests on Wood’s shoulders. Schreiber confesses the 24-year-old’s many years of acting proved to be a huge bonus while he was busy helping others on set.


“What I was looking for in the lead actor was somebody who could present an image of Americans that broke some of the stereotypes and the mold,” he says of choosing Wood. “I felt that at this time in American history the most important thing we could present was a character who was vulnerable, who was flawed, who was open, who was nostalgic, who was defeatable, but more importantly than anything looking for his own history beyond the boundaries of his own country.”


Schreiber says he dreamt of using a sunflower field to create an almost “magical” feel to one of the crucial scenes in the movie. His plans quickly dissolved after he learned that sunflowers only last for one day and they follow the trajectory of the sun.


After consulting with local farmers, his crew decided to grow their own. “as if it is that simple and all of us film types with our green thumbs were going to grow sunflowers.”


“Mattie (Libatique) went out in the middle of the field with a compass and he followed the trajectory of the sun and he used an almanac and he found the week that we would probably be shooting that sequence … and I said ‘well shit, we’re not going to do it in a sunflower field.’”


He now admits, despite everyone’s enthusiasm he secretly planned to shoot the scenes in a hay field and forgot about the sunflowers.


“One morning they drive me to set to look at the field and they are all smug and smirking because they know what they’ve got, and you’ve seen what they got,” he remembers. “I’m convinced I’ve got to be ready to replan this. We drive up and it was just exquisite. They planned it to the day. The next morning the sunflowers sagged and were brown.”


Schreiber admits he may never direct again, “it is kind of like asking a woman in the middle of a caesarian section if she would like to have another child.” 


“That is hard work,” he says. “I would look over at the actors with their lattes sitting there, pretty girls putting make up on them … I’m thinking ‘what am I doing.’ It was awful, it was really awful. There were 500 questions a day and I’m not a terribly social person, it was not something I really should have done.”

2 Comments:

1. Emily do you remember the word that was used in the film that described The conept “two banks of land , on opposite sides that share the same river. The word that I can’t remember haunts me.

   My email is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

   Thank you,
   KDO

   Posted by Emily Christianson  on  12/11  at  01:45 PM

2. 500 questions a day - that’s cool ....))

   Posted by nikon buckmasters riflescope  on  11/04  at  01:40 AM