Was your character an amalgamation or was he one real guy?
"He was an amalgamation of two real guys. There were two guys, two different intellectuals that Ed kind of morphed into one. As Ed was writing the script he gave it to his partner, Marshall Herskovitz. Together they made thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Once and Again. I knew Ed because I was on the show Once and Again that he created. And Ed gave it to Marshall who’s his best right-hand man and Marshall said, 'Ed, it’s great, great characters, but where are we in this movie?' My character and the school teacher were not in the script at that time. And Ed said, 'Okay, I see what you're saying. Yes, where are we? Where are the thinkers? Where are the guys who examine everything?'"
You need those guys.
"You need those guys. So Ed wrote, he was literally… I mean I haven’t even mentioned this today in my 20 interviews, but he was literally writing our scenes in Lithuania. Allan Corduner and I - Allan Corduner is the teacher - we got these pink pages with like four to five scenes on them and we were just like, I remember Allan Corduner, like beggar actors that we are, he said to me, 'Less is not more, more is more. This is great!' So we were very excited."
Zwick prominently featured you and Corduner in the story. It counterbalanced the brutality.
"Well it’s just amazing to me that Ed can write a period movie about this depressing subject and manage to inject levity and humor and give such humanity to characters that are, in a majority of Holocaust movies, ghost-like. You know, ethereal, inaccessible… He just manages to find a way to write in a period style with accents, guys who you can somehow access."
And speaking of 'Holocaust movies', it's so strange to hear people say – and I've seen this in print a couple of times now – that there's too many of them. What the heck are they talking about? How can there be too many films about the Holocaust?
"All I can say to you, all I can say to those people is when I was making a movie about the Holocaust, as I was walking through the park in the middle of Vilnius, the European city of 2009, I saw a swastika, an enormous swastika written on the side of a building in the town square. So when that's going on and there is still such anti-Semitism in France, in the world, such anti-Jewish sentiment, you know, and that's separate from the anti-Israeli sentiment which is political and it has to do with current events and I'm not going to get too deep onto that subject because it’s not the same. Anti-Jewish is just ethnic hate and when that's still alive, well how can you be against [more movies]? And when they say you're exploiting history, like what does that mean? What movie about history doesn't exploit it, doesn't look for the good, dramatic elements about it?"
'Exploit' is a terrible word to use. It's 'examining' it.
"You show a naked woman in a scene where it's not essential to the movie, that's exploiting a woman. You show a scene where a school teacher is examining whether or not he could believe in God and that a man was sent to him and showed him that God exists, that's exploitative of, of like what? Tragedy, reality, what happened? You know, I say, and the reviewer who wrote…that it was like they were doing it to make it impossible to be a critic because you can't assail a movie about the Holocaust."
Like that's exactly the reason why you signed on to do this movie, because it was critic-proof.
[Laughing] "Yeah, right, we had to make a movie that he couldn't review well. Don’t pull your punches because it’s the Holocaust. Write what you feel, but don’t accuse the film community of making too many Holocaust movies so you can't review them."
Did you meet any survivors who knew the Bielskis?
"I met Robert Bielski, not on set but in New York. He’s the son of Tuvia and he’s the one that said Tuvia was such a humble man and that he never wanted to be a hero. He also told me a great story about the son of the villain in the camp. You remember Arkady, the guy who starts to try to usurp Tuvia’s power and then Tuvia shoots him?"
Yes.
"Well his son in reality was there that day. You know, there's too many stories and you don’t get to tell them all, but Robert Bielski told me the story of how he grew up with that guy, the son who was five who watched Tuvia, Robert’s dad who was also around in Brooklyn with this kid, shoot his dad. And they grew up together and the kid resented Tuvia Bielski and hated him all his life, but he couldn't do anything about it because he was a hero and he was a savior and he knew his dad had done something wrong and what can you do? But it’s complicated and it was real, and Robert grew up around these guys."
You were in Vilnius and there are Jewish people there who survived World War II. What's it like there now?
"There was a whole Jewish community in Vilnius that's just very small and it’s still growing because 95% percent of the Jews were decimated in 1941 and ‘42. But to have them on set and to light the candles… We lit the candles in the forest to sort of bless the set on a Sabbath night, on a Friday night at about five o'clock as the sun is setting on the forest in Lithuania."
