http://www.metronews.ca/entertainment_news_detail.asp?id=11122
Sitting on the rooftop patio of a downtown Toronto hotel during the controlled chaos of the Toronto International Film Festival, Elijah Wood looks out at the world from behind a pair of spectacles only slightly less huge and owlish than the ones he wears in his latest film, Everything Is Illuminated.
Based on the bestselling novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Wood plays a character coyly named Jonathan Safran Foer, a Jew from New York who goes to the Ukraine to search for shreds of evidence of his ancestors, and the little shtetl where they lived until Nazi armies invaded the Soviet Union.
In actor-turned-director Liev Schreiber's adaptation of the book, Wood's Foer is no Frodo, the questing hobbit in the trilogy of epic adventure films that made Wood a star; he's passive, almost catatonic, especially in the scenes he shares with Alex, the film's narrator, a young Ukrainian guide played by newcomer Eugene Hutz as a tidal wave of unruly charisma.
What did Wood think, knowing that he would spend most of the film as the still centre around which Hutz would grab ever greater chunks of cinematic real estate?
"That was always the character, though," Wood says. "The incredibly funny, mad narrator that has this incredible dialogue that's so colourful and well-developed. That was all there, and to me — I loved being around it ... Eugene and everything that he brought to the character of Alex helped me develop what I was doing, because so much of what Jonathan is about is observation and letting experiences wash over him. There was so much to take in and there was such a vibrant energy coming at me all the time."
The "real" Jonathan Safran Foer gave Schreiber free reign to adapt his book, and didn't meet Wood or visit the Prague set until more than halfway through the filming. By that point, Wood had already built his own Foer.
"I never, ever looked at the character of the project as being autobiographical in any sense," Wood claims. "I was purely going on what Liev had interpreted from the book and had re-envisioned for his story ... Liev didn't see it as an autobiographical portrayal, and so I never allowed myself to see it that way."
Liev Schreiber is the sort of incredibly well-respected actor (the Manchurian Candidate, the Scream movies) who almost single-handedly rescues some films, and Wood saw him as a natural ally in making a movie that he describes as "very reliant on its characters to drive the story."
"It definitely lent a sense of comfortability to the journey knowing that he was at the helm," Wood says, "and could help shape those performances in a way that others might not be able to. And there was also just a comfort level with Liev of being from the same world, being a peer, and relating to acting in a similar way." Everything Is Illuminated opens Friday.
Rick McGinnis/Metro Toronto