At the Los Angeles press junket for Adam Resurrected all it took to get Jeff Goldblum to explain in depth his role in the film was the right question. Feed him a decent question and Goldblum is able to run with it, no pausing, no grasping for the right words – Goldblum speaks his mind fluently.
Based on the novel by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, Adam Resurrected tells the story of Adam Stein (Goldblum), a Seizling Institute (a hospital for Holocaust survivors) patient and former magician/clown. Adam is in the mental hospital receiving treatment to help him deal with the horrors he witnessed as the Germans murdered Jewish citizens at the Stellring Death Camp. While thousands of his peers (and his own family) were slain, Adam was forced to act like a dog (literally) for Commandant Klein (played by Willem Dafoe). His experiences have left him understandably scarred and his condition's difficult to treat, yet some doctors and nurses, as well as his fellow patients, find him incredibly intriguing.
Jeff Goldblum Interview
On Figuring Out His Character and How to Play Adam:Jeff Goldblum: "…I'm nothing if not conscientious whenever I get a part, I figure that's the time I should start working on it and preparing it because I like to prepare – I've [taught] for the last 20 years and I like [the] craft, and new investigations, new experiments with how can best prepare so good things come out. I had this a year before I did the part. So early on, some people do it differently and sometimes I've done it differently, but I figured I wanted to learn it. I kind of learned the nuts and bolts of it early on, and had students in my backyard - I have a guest house that is like a acting space and my students are often times eager to, and it's good for me, to apprentice me on these things that I'm doing - so they would come and I would learn the whole thing like a play. And so they would come and do the other parts. Sometimes different ones every day, and I would do it every day. I'd have a kind of run through every day."
"I started to do that, and then in that year, I went to Germany. I went to Israel for the first time - I'd never been to Israel before - to suss out where my character might actually be living kind of thing, what that life might be like, because we don't know. It's the tip of the iceberg these last few weeks or whatever that is, a month, I've been out. I've been there in Israel for what? 10 years or so? The war is '45, that's the period where I'm in that mansion is another four, five years, '50, and this is the '60s, so I've been there 10 years, so I had to sort of put together what exactly happened to me after you see me lose my mind in that graveyard and eat dirt. I somehow got to the place and lived in someplace and meet up with that German woman, and live in that place and go back and forth to the place. Anyway, kind of put that together for myself."
"Early on there we spent a couple of days going through the script. So one of the things we talked about is the dialect. I saw as many holocaust fictional movies as I could, and holocaust documentaries as I could, read as much as I could in this year, that only can scratch the surface really. But one of the things that I was interested in some of these holocaust movies were the movie conceits that you speak accented English. Really, I would have been speaking German and then for Mel Gibson maybe I would have had a subtitled German or Yiddish or whatever we had. But we were going to do this movie conceived, of course, speaking English. So then I'd seen some versions of that, where they have American actors doing, talking like this, and saying, you know, 'Let's get out of this concentration camp, yada, yada, yada.'"
"That didn't feel right to me…but I was funny about. I knew how tricky that other thing was, the dialect was, because we were working alongside wonderful German actors, Joachim Krol was Wolfowitz, a very well known national treasure along with Juliane Kohler, who played Eva Braun in Downfall. Did you see that? Wonderful actress, but you know they speak accented, real accented German accents. And Moritz Bliebtreu who was the lead in Run Lola Run, who's very well known, beloved there, he does that little part with the husband there. So, anyway, so Paul and I, amongst other things, said, 'Oh, you should start working on the dialect.' 'Maybe yes, maybe no,' so I worked with people and spent a month in Berlin."
"I'd worked with German people from Berlin that I knew in America, too. We went through the whole script. I added, I suggested some German words that sound English. You know, 'university' and things like that that I thought could pepper in, along with the accented English and he accepted many of those. Paul finally made a kind of a determination on those. Plus which I added, I suggested many of those Yiddish things so you'd spot them that I thought might be right for this kind of show business guy in Europe and yada, yada, yada. But I'm getting around to the specific of what you said. So, I did that."
"Then in fact in preparation I talked to many survivors here in Los Angeles who were very sweet and generous to me. There's a group called Cafe Europa and I took part in that year in a Purim party - just for survivors - so it was kind of like a little bit the scene in the movie. And from that group, one door would open another door. Somebody, a lovely woman, told me, she said, 'If you want to go there, many concentration camps,' and I'd never been to any, she said, 'If you want to visit one that's the most intact, and will give you the most powerful, I think, experience of what it must have been like, that's what you need to act out and experience, there's this one called Maidanek in Poland, near Lublin.'"
