Everything is Illuminated told the story of a Jewish American man who travels to Ukraine in order to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II. And Schreiber, who made his directorial debut with Everything is Illuminated, believes Defiance is a continuation of something he's been interested in for a long time. "When I began researching Everything is Illuminated and some other Holocaust films that I did, in speaking to survivors I found that most of them were really reticent about talking about what had happened to them. And that led me to a really wonderful documentary by a guy named Menachem Daum called Hiding and Seeking. I won’t go into that at any great depth, but basically it’s about a guy who takes his children to meet the Polish woman who hid his parents during the Holocaust, to prove to his rather conservative rabbinical sons that there were good goyim in the world. What I discovered in that film, and in talking to a lot of the people that I talked to, that every year when we memorialize all of these people who died in the Holocaust, in a sense we’re forgetting about the ones who survived. And some very hurtful things obviously happened to those people."
Schreiber added, "I think because they haven’t had an opportunity to deal with it, it brought a tremendous amount of rage, insularism, self-inflicted anti-Semitism. For whatever reason, in order to survive those people had done truly horrible things and so that was what I was interested in in Illuminated - the grandfather character - is that somehow at the core of that survivor’s guilt was the person who believed that they had no right to be alive. That if, in fact, they were honest with everyone and themselves, death was the only conclusion. That they felt that they had deserved to die, and for one reason or another, escaped it by generally doing something bad. And when I started to read [The Bielski Brothers and] the other book and I started to realize what these guys had done, I realized why this story isn’t more well-known. Because the Bielski brothers didn’t want anyone to know it. And that fell in line with my understanding of what surviving the Holocaust cost people."
Schreiber feels that belief they deserved to die, and the fact they don't want to mentally go back to that time, contribute to why survivors choose not to talk about their experiences. "There’s no reason for them to remember it. Why should they recall that horror? I’m sure they’ve had to recall it for 50 years now. Why should they recall it to you, so you can make a film? Hardly a good enough reason to them, if you think about it," said Schreiber. "You know, we’re all in the movie business so we think, 'Well, why not?' Well, no!"
Getting It Right - The Language and the Brotherly Bond
Schreiber had to learn Russian in order to play Zus Bielski, one of the heroic brothers who saved so many lives during that horrible time in history. "The language meant everything to me," explained Schreiber. "I really loved it when Ed [Zwick] called me and said, 'I want you guys to speak some Russian in these scenes.' I got together about three months before we started with a UCLA student here who’s a linguist. A guy named Stanislav Srabin who’s a wonderful teacher, who started to teach me Russian. That was really useful to me because I felt that there are a lot of things culturally in the language that were terrific clues into the character. It’s a very masculine language; it’s a very direct language. And I enjoyed it. I also think if you’re going to do a dialect, at least spend a month trying to learn the language. You’ll get the dialect that much better. "In order for Defiance to work, the audience has to believe the bond between the three actors playing the brothers – Schreiber, Daniel Craig and Jamie Bell - is real. "As far as getting to know Daniel…we were in the middle of the woods in Lithuania. I was just so impressed with the fact that this major motion picture star wasn’t going back to his trailer, you know, in between takes. It was freezing out," said Schreiber. "He was out there. You know, some of those set-ups took an hour and a half, two hours to accomplish, and he’s out there the whole time."
According to Craig and Bell, part of the reason why they hung out on the set instead of going back to their trailers was because it was a long hike to get there from the set. But Schreiber says that wasn't the only reason why they opted not to escape from the set. "He could have," said Schreiber about Craig, "It wasn’t quite a 30-minute hike. They might have been exaggerating a little bit. We were out there with nothing to do but sort of spend time with each other, telling stories, and having snowball fights, and kind of re-creating the [past]. We were very childish. There was a lot of goofiness. And I think that was about us recreating the childhood that we hadn’t spent together."
And Now for Something Completely Different
Schreiber will next be seen in one of 2009's most anticipated movies: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Starring in a comic book-inspired film isn't necessarily something Schreiber ever thought he'd be doing. In fact, he joked about going from Defiance to a big budget film. "It was a sort of natural graduation from Defiance, actually. It’s true. It was a natural next step."More on X-Men Origins: Wolverine
