http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=11338
Curt Schleier - Special To The Jewish Week
The actor and first-time director’s real-life roots journey to Ukraine parallels the action in his adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.
Roots journeys back to the Old Country — real and fictitious — are all the rage in the Jewish community these days, so when Liev Schreiber’s film, “Everything is Illuminated,” opens next Friday, it will be the culmination of a fateful series of events that began in Ukraine over a century ago.
It is where his grandfather was born. It is also the birthplace of Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandfather. Both set out in search of their roots, in different ways. Foer journeyed to Ukraine and wrote a fictional account of his journey. Schreiber took parts of the book and made a film of it — and then took a journey back to Ukraine, as well.
Chapter One: In Which Schreiber’s Career Is Explained
Schreiber, 37, is an actor of considerable repute. He studied at both the Yale School of Drama (MFA, ’92) and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. About a decade ago, he launched a Joseph Papp, Shakespeare-centric theater career (more on that later), followed by a successful run in movies: “Ransom,” HBO’s “RKO 281” (as the young Orson Welles) and the teen “Scream” pictures, among others.
He also played Mischa, the prizefighter, in the Holocaust film “Jakob the Liar” and Marty Kantrowitz, the TV repairman/cuckold in “A Walk on the Moon.”
But effective Sept. 16, when “Everything is Illuminated” opens, Schreiber won’t be just an actor anymore. He’ll enter the pantheon of Show Business Achievers; he’ll be a hyphenate: actor-screenwriter-director.
Chapter Two: And So The Interview Begins
Schreiber is on the phone from his dressing room at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. It’s 40 minutes before curtain, before he performs his Tony Award-winning role as Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Normally his pre-show ritual is to take a nap. And certainly, if anyone is, he’s entitled to doze off.
For the past months, he’s been working 16-hour days putting the final touches on his film mornings and afternoons and then rushing to the theater at night. However, he has a lot riding on the reception, so a few minutes less sleep is the price he reluctantly is willing to pay.
Chapter Three: Why Liev Loved His Grandfather
Schreiber was born in San Francisco, moved to Canada when he was just a year old and then to New York after his parents divorce. Growing up, he was very close to his grandfather, Alex Milgram.
“He came to this country when he was a young man, before 1920, before the [Second World] War,” Schreiber says. “He was a butcher, and when my mother and father split up there was a very difficult custody battle. My grandfather spent his life savings to help my mother win custody.”
Milgram was an old-fashioned, Reform, socialist Jew and his mother, Schreiber says, was a hippie. “She believed in all that deep stuff and that money wasn’t cool and that you should live off the land. And when you live in New York, living off the land means driving a taxi.” Which his mother did.
Mother and son at times lived in flats that didn’t have electricity or hot water, but they always had books.
And while Schreiber (his father was not Jewish) was not a bar mitzvah, he remembers going to Grandpa Alex every year for a seder. Another memory Schreiber conjures: a visit to the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn, where Alex had a friend.
“He [Alex] pretty much raised me as if he was my father, and in many respects he was my dad.”
Chapter Four: Fate Lends A Hand
“I didn’t know much about him, and after he died [in 1993] I tried to find out more,” Schreiber says. He was largely unsuccessful but nearly completed a screenplay vaguely about him. In it, a young man goes to the Ukraine to try to find out more about his grandfather and what it was like to be raised there. He falls in love with a prostitute, who persuades him to help retrieve her daughter from the local mob. Eventually he’s robbed and left penniless. It was, he understates, “a very dark story.”
But then Schreiber was shown an advance copy of a Safran Foer short story about to be published in The New Yorker. It was the basis for what became the award-winning (including the National Jewish Book Award) and bestselling book, “Everything is Illuminated.”
“He had accomplished in 50 pages (of the short story) what I had only grazed on in 107 (in my screenplay). What he had done, and I was unable to, was keep that sense of the grandfather present.”
The book, a post-modern marvel according to most critics, has funny chapter headings, switches back and forth in time between the present and the shtetl, and has a protagonist named Jonathan Safran Foer, who goes to the Ukraine to see if he can find the woman who may — or may not — have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
Reading the short story, Schreiber saw the similarities between Foer and himself and Foer’s work and what he wanted to accomplish. He saw potential. “I think I laughed and then I think I felt jealous. I immediately saw the possibilities for the film.”
He loved the full book, as well, “as a piece of literature. I found it insanely hysterical and really moving. I started to plot out the film as I read the book, and immediately saw it as a road movie.”
Chapter Five: Taking A Leap Of Faith
Foer liked Schreiber’s body of work and happily sold him the film rights. And the process, according to Schreiber, was easier than it had any right to be. The screenplay came easily, he says, and is more based on the original short story than the book as a whole. The shtetl portions were eliminated and, as a result, the film is more linear.
Still, it seems a tough sell for a first-time director, the equivalent of someone who works out on the climbing machine at the “Y” deciding he or she would try the real thing — and starts off by trying Everest. The movie had to be shot overseas (it was filmed around Prague) with many unknown actors whose English was limited.
Potentially more troubling, a central character of book and film is a dog, named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. Schreiber admits he had some trepidation about whether he could pull it off.
“I was absolutely frightened. I was constantly terrified. I was most terrified that I wouldn’t finish and someone else would tell the story first.”
Chapter Six: The Film And His Grandfather
“One of the things I did while I was on the scout [looking for locations] was to mimic the journey Jonathan took and tried to find the town where my grandfather was born. I never did find it, but the entire experience brought me closer to him. The whole film was motivated by my desire to learn more about him. And I feel much closer to him just thinking about him all the time for the two years I was making the film.”
Chapter Seven: A Quote For The Film’s Ads
“‘Everything is Illuminated’ is luminescent” — Curt Schleier, The Jewish Week. Schreiber makes it work. He captures both the humor and pathos of the book. And while he made a change at the end (to mention it would spoil the film for people who read the book), it works.
Chapter Eight: What He Learned
“So much has changed,” Schreiber says. But he already knows he came away with a better knowledge of those members of his family who survived the Holocaust, and the impact it and generations of anti-Semitism had on them.
“A lot of Jews came to America with some very heavy burdens, both emotional and physical.” He talks about the “guilt of surviving” and how hundreds of years of anti-Semitism may be responsible for the “JAP, the girl who doesn’t want to look Jewish and has blonde hair and a nose job.”
Beyond that, he says, “I just finished the film, and I think it will take a couple of months for the impact to sink in.”
Chapter Nine: Finally, We Go Back To Shakespeare And Joseph Papp
One of the things that the late Joseph Papp introduced was free Shakespeare performances for New York area school children. Classes would be bused to the theater and often the kids reacted the way kids react to Shakespeare and were disruptive.
Schreiber (he’s told this story on TV) remembers one day when a group of yeshiva bochers were brought in. He recalls feeling a sense of pride, convinced the other actors would be impressed with how well behaved there’d be. One of the kids in particular caught his eye.
“Every time I looked at him, he’d give me the finger.”
Apparently, not everything is illuminated.
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