recess: Everything is Illuminated is a true road film, and I wanted to know, what makes a successful road story? It's not a type of story that is told successfully very often.
Liev Schreiber: Growing up in New York City, having never really been out of New York City, I was always sort of fascinated by these worlds that were far away, and I think that one of the things that really makes the movie work is the credibility of location and character. Part of what I respond to as a [member of an] audience is really seeing a different place and highlighting the differences and embracing them. The other part of that that I really love is the irony that's deep in the heart of Ukraine-people are partying to 50 Cent. It's amazing: culture can be a unifying element or an alienating element, as I think we've seen politically in the last 10 years, and what I love most about Jonathan's book is that he was treating it as a unifying agent.
You began as a writer, built a career as an actor, and now, you've taken up writing again. Could you talk a little bit about that arc, about your beginnings-everything has come sort of full circle for you.
I grew up in the lower east side of New York and my mom was on welfare-she was a taxi driver-[so] I grew up in a very different social strata than I ended up in. Part of that is because my parents separated when I was a baby-my father comes from an affluent family, and my mother basically believed that money was the root of all evil. So when I was about 16 or 17... My father came back into my life and said that I should go to private school. But I was thrown into a very different environment, and part of my reaction to that was [that] I developed these monologue shows, and that was the beginning of me getting into theater and acting. The monologue shows were basically my observations on the street characters I'd met growing up, so I was doing junkies and Puerto Rican hookers and Greek fry cooks and Jewish shoe salesman-very ethnic urban characters-and of course they were very popular in my kind of rarefied liberal arts school. I, of course, put all the stock in, "Well, I had written these monologue shows," but I had a very good playwriting teacher who knew that my characters and those performances were observations that were being articulated primarily through performance and not through writing. So when I was thinking about applying to Yale as a playwright or as an actor, and I had both options, he said, "I bet if you apply as an actor you'll get in." I took that as a compliment to my acting rather than an insult to my writing, but I followed his advice and it worked.
Did you feel as if you were involved in the storytelling as more than just a director, but also in terms of self-discovery, with your own Ukrainian roots? How important to you was keeping to that sense of reality and discovery?
For me, that's just part-and-parcel of the fact that I felt like the story was about me: I was in the Ukraine looking for my grandfather's stadl as well, and that was all part of the story. I feel like that translates into the film somehow, and I think also for me, that's part of the logic of not using actors, using real people-. Most of those guys in the well-diggers scene are construction workers that we pulled off the street. The guy who played Alex's father in the first scene is a homeless guy that we met in Kiev, in Ukraine, and there's just something about that, keeping it as real as you possibly can, [that] makes it very exciting.
I have to ask this as an Arrested Development fan. What is it like working with Jeffrey Tambor?
He's insane, but I love him because he's Ukrainian.
In every scene, did you have that thought in your head as an actor, "I need to give the director this," or as a director, "I need to get that."
Well an example is in the film when they actually find the woman's house, that sunflower field. I knew that scene had to be in a sense, "the money shot" of the movie. That's what [the search was]- for, and that had to be a remarkable place. But that's an example of, "you have to know exactly what you want, and you have to plan for it." Now, had something terrible happened, we would have still had to shoot that scene, and we would have had to reinvent the scene based on what had happened-had we lost the sunflowers, was there no sun, was it raining-because in film it's thousands of dollars every minute, and you've gotta make your day or you don't have your film.
And that's filmmaking in a nutshell-
Right. And so you plan and you plan and you plan and you pray, and then you look and you see what you've got and [then] you-replan.
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