Arts interviews

Interview: Amy Herzog

John Nathan — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:59:06 +0100

What do you do with a family heirloom such as Marxism? It’s not the kind you can sit on a mantelpiece or hang in a wardrobe. But it is the kind you can write a play about, which is what New York dramatist Amy Herzog has done — twice.

The first, After the Revolution, hinged on the readjustment that Herzog’s family had to make when it was revealed that her late grandfather Joe, a communist from the Jewish, paternal side of Herzog’s family, was not quite the star of socialism that many had thought — indeed not to anyone but the most committed of communists.

“In 1999, my family learned that my grandfather Joe Joseph had passed secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II,” Herzog explains. “This was a big blow to my family because he had been a hero.”

Herzog ruffled a few familial feathers by turning the family drama into a stage play. But perhaps most sanguine of all about production was Joe’s wife Leepee, who not only inspired the character of Vera in After the Revolution but turns up again as a frail but formidable Jewish communist grandmother in 4,000 Miles, which makes its UK debut next week at The Print Room in west London, having won a prestigious off-Broadway Obie award when it was first staged in 2010. The New York Times hailed it as “altogether wonderful”.

The play centres on the relationship between Vera and her neo-hippy grandson Leo who visits his nonagenarian grandmother after an epic cycle ride across the US.

It’s as much a play about drawing connections between generations as it is about the passing on of political idealism.

Although Leepee died in April, it is likely that she and her political beliefs will live on — at least in her granddaughter’s plays.

“I think there will be one more play about the Josephs,” says Herzog, whose latest work, Belleville, is described as a thriller and has just opened to critical acclaim at the New York Theatre Workshop.

The next play with Vera (who will be portrayed by Sara Kestelman at The Print Room) will no doubt also draw on Herzog’s family politics.

“I grew up much more conscious of a political legacy than a religious one,” adds the writer, who is married to director Sam Gold, who made his Broadway debut with the comedy, Seminar, which most recently starred Jeff Goldblum.

She recalls from her childhood that “most of the dinner-table conversations were political. There was some pressure on the grandkids to be politically aware — to study Marxism and carry that torch.

“My grandmother took a lot of pride in being Jewish in a cultural way. But — like most Marxists, I would say — she was disdainful of organised religion.

“She had real faith in Jewish genes though. I guess she was concerned that when my father married a gentile that it would mean her grandchildren wouldn’t be very intelligent. But she had no interest in the Jewish god.”

He’s conquering all his Demons

John Nathan — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:39:41 +0100

In just a few weeks actor Elliot Levey’s profession has propelled him through genres ridiculous, sublime and downright bizarre. The extremes of his work go from the cabalistic sub-plots of the new multi-million dollar American TV series, Da Vinci’s Demons — whose chest-baring alpha-male hero (played by Tom Riley) is embroiled in Jewish mysticism — to an episode of Silent Witness, where Levey portrays a London Jew who has a whispered conversation with a Mossad agent. “You know, like all North London Jews do on a regular basis,” says Levey, a few hours before he films the scene.

It’s a long way from the role of Francesco Pazzi, the 15th century power-broker Levey plays in Demons, a swashbuckling fantasy categorised as historical drama, which is a bit like calling Star Trek educational.

Created and written by David S Goyer — the man behind the later and better Batman movies — Demons has just started here on the Fox Channel.

“He’s just one of these vain, glorious pompous fops,” says Levey of his character, the enemy of the Medicis. “He’s a brilliant, deliciously awful character. Everything hateful in humanity is within this dreadful man.”

Levey could almost be talking about Robespierre, who he played in the 2010 National Theatre production of Danton’s Death. Not that the austere Robespierre was a fop. But as with Pazzi, he is the kind of character audiences love to hate. Other roles of the Leeds-born, Clifton College and Oxford-educated actor include The Author in Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art with the late Richard Griffiths. But more often than not Levey is the go-to man for directors seeking a dose of dastardliness.

In Da Vinci’s Demons — and, Levey says, in real life also — Pazzi waged a war against the Medicis, the powerful patrons behind Florentine renaissance art. According to Levey, in series one Goyer’s plot thickens with a quest for something called the Book of Leaves.

“It’s a mythical text that many people think is what the Kabbalah was connected to. All those people who devoted their lives to the secrets within the Mishnah were infused by this cultish religion which predated Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt.” So that clears that up, then. Or if not, apparently Goyer’s Jewish storyline forms what Levey terms “the dark heart” of the first series and involves a Jewish character Da Vinci is convinced is a member of a sect called the Jewish Sons of Mithras.

The 38-year-old actor is about to start working on series two. When he got the job a year ago, he had visions of going to Florence. But filming is not in Florence. It’s on a specially built soundstage in, erm, Swansea. Cast and crew are about to return to the city of measles.

Yet despite the sheer size and budget of Da Vinci’s Demons, the recent work that has had the biggest impact on Levey is easily the most modest. Radio 4 recently broadcast a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto poet Wldyslaw Szlengel. The programme, What I Read to the Dead, marked the 70th anniversary of the 1943 uprising and was presented by the writer, Eva Hoffman. Levey was the voice of the poet shot by the Nazis during the uprising.

“Having spent my life reading this sort of Holocaust literature, I think there is a challenge to anybody who is broadcasting or making programmes about this moment in history to come up with something undiscovered,” he says. “When we were recording Szlengel’s poetry, for the the first time in my life I just wept and wept in the studio.

“Szlengel called himself the chronicler of the drowning man,” Levey adds. “Some of the poetry is written from the relative safety of 1939. As each month goes by, his poems take on this harshness and immediacy.

“We think the poem called Counter Attack was written possibly hours before his death, during the uprising. And the legend is he was writing it on scraps of paper.
“And through the tunnels, messages were being carried to the fighters who were his friends and family and at one point the rhythm of the poem follows the beat of the machine guns being fired on them by the Germans. It’s an astonishing thing to read.”

Born and raised in Leeds, Levey attended a “very, very Orthodox cheder” and says he was the most observant Jew of his generation at Clifton. The Hebrew he will use in the Silent Witness scene will be of the liturgical kind he was taught as a child [“I expect the Israeli actor I have to whisper it to will fall off his chair when he hears it”].

Yet the impulse to pass Judaism on to his two sons (his wife is documentary maker Emma Loach, daughter of director Ken) was never particularly strong. But with his eldest son approaching barmitzvah age that has begun to change. And Szlengel is partly responsible.

Merrily she rolls along with a hit show set for West End

John Nathan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:08:55 +0100

It is the second day of rehearsals and one of the West End’s favourite leading ladies, Maria Friedman, is at the Harold Pinter Theatre singing every note and saying every word in Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical, Merrily We Roll Along.

But the three-times Olivier-award-winning actor/singer is not on stage — she’s in row D. And the singing and the saying is not being performed out loud, but in her head. From row G you can see the back of it, the tousled blonde hair tilting slightly to one side as she listens intently to her cast, Jenna Russell, Mark Umbers and Damian Humbley.

They play three old friends — Mary, Franklin and Charley — whose love for each other turns from sweet to sour. Except in Sondheim and George Furth’s musical, the story is told in reverse — from sour to sweet. And instead of performing the role of Mary, as she did in 1992, Ms Friedman is directing. This is both her first production and her first West End transfer. Not a bad directorial debut.

“Thank you everyone,” calls the stage manager. “It’s six o’clock,” a signal that the day has come to an end. Although the production has already garnered an award from the hard to please Critics’ Circle after it opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark, Ms Friedman has countless crucial decisions to make in transferring the show from the wide, shallow stage at the Menier to the narrow, deeper space at the Harold Pinter, where previews begin next week.

A contented Ms Friedman settles back into her stalls seat, apparently happy with a day of big decisions, some of them about the tiniest details. Just how many steps should Umbers take stage left in a moment of high drama? (“A bit to the left, Franklin,” says Ms Friedman, addressing the actor by his character name. “A bit more. Back a bit. There! Lovely!”)

“I love the staging of it,” she adds, while the cast, still on stage, put in a bit of overtime. “There are moments of clarity when you know that’s the place. Two inches the other way and it’s not right.” On her lap, sits Dot, a pug named after the role she played in another Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park With George, for which she received one of seven Olivier nominations.

That was her first Sondheim show. The list of notable, often award-winning productions since includes Ragtime, Chicago, Passion and her own show, By Special Arrangement, for which she won her first Olivier. But it was her 1990 appearance in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Ghetto, by Israel’s best-known dramatist Joshua Sobol, that launched her on this trajectory. The play with music, set in the Lithuanian town of Vilna (now Vilnius) tells the story of the Vilna Yiddish Theatre group and its extinction by the Nazis. Ms Friedman had not known that her grandparents had come from the town until she was told in a telegram from her father Leonard. He was an eminent violinist who worked all over the world, which is how she came to be born in Switzerland. The telegram read: “Your grandparents love and thank you for keeping their thoughts and words alive.”

This was well before Nicholas Hytner landed the top job in theatre as artistic director at the National and Ms Friedman became known as one the classiest performers in musical theatre — and a Sondheim favourite.

“He was here yesterday on our first day of rehearsal,” says Ms Friedman of the master lyricist and composer, a friend for years. Many of Friedman’s cabaret shows — the latest called Lenny and Steve (after Bernstein and Sondheim) — have been constructed around the maestro’s work. It must be a special kind of terror to make your directorial debut with a show written by someone so close.

“It’s like everything. When you think about it, you’re terrified of it all. When you’re doing it, you’re ‘in the moment’. The nerves come when you’re not working.”

But there must be an added burden of responsibility with a production that is co-produced by her long-time collaborator and producer David Babani of the Menier Chocolate Factory and her sister Sonia, one of the most powerful producers in the West End and Broadway. On top of that, Merrily — a show based on a 1934 play by Moss Hart and George S Kaufman — lasted just 16 performances when it first appeared on Broadway in 1981. Although there was a critically acclaimed Donmar Warehouse production in 2000, it has never played an unsubsidised West End playhouse. So no pressure, then.

“I know the piece inside out. And I know its psychological elements and its structure,” Ms Friedman says. Well, of course she does. She performed in the very production that Sondheim and Furth rewrote into the version that has been done ever since.

This latest revival comes into the West End with a superb cast but no one who is a bigger star than the show’s director. Still, if the Menier run is anything to go by, the transfer will be one the West End’s must-see productions, not just for its matchless singing but for the intelligence of the staging, which sets the show in a Frank Lloyd Wright-style Palm Springs apartment instead of the usual New York environment.

“People said: ‘It’s set in New York’. And I said: ‘No it’s not. It’s set in his [Franklin’s] head.” So this is what the director means by “psychological elements.” As Sondheim said recently, it will be interesting to see what show Ms Friedman directs next.

There is talk of two musicals and a play but she can’t say more until they are green-lit. But it sounds like the musical will be American. That’s where the vast majority of her singing repertoire comes from. Not just American, but Jewish. Why?

“There are certain chord sequences, keys and relationships to keys that are Jewish,” she says. “And that makes me feel comfortable. It’s genetic. I really do think it is.

“Because when I first sung the Vilna songs I thought I’d come home. And I had no idea there was any connection in my family to Vilna. I just thought: ‘I know how this goes.’ It felt right.”

The return of Sara Sugarman

Stephen Applebaum — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:44:54 +0000

‘I love making films,’ says Sara Sugarman. “I don’t get to do it that often, just because it’s so hard to make a film, and it breaks your heart. You fall in love with each project and they often don’t come to fruition. But when you get the privilege of shouting ‘Action’, it’s fantastic.”

It has been nine years since the Welsh film-maker’s last film, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, starring Lindsay Lohan. Now she is back with Vinyl, a lively comedy about the middle-aged members of a disbanded punk group who plot to use a younger band as a Trojan horse to smuggle a new song into the charts, after being told that they’re too old to have a hit. Incredibly, the film is based on a real-life hoax pulled off by Mike Peters and his band, The Alarm, in 2004.

“Mike, being Mike, wasn’t having it,” laughs Sugarman. “So he got four kids to mime the song and it went straight into the charts. Brilliant!”

Made with very little money, a lot of love, and a ton of goodwill, Vinyl took Sugarman back to her home town of Rhyl, north Wales, where, as a young teenager, she had played in a punk outfit called The Fractures. Peters, coincidentally, was their manager. Despite this personal connection, the film was not her idea, but the brainchild of writer Jim Cooper.

“I was the last man in,” admits Sugarman, revealing that she was one of 10 names sent to Peters when Vinyl was being set up. “They said: ‘This is our list of directors. Do you know any of these guys?’ And Mike went: ‘What? Sara Sugarman? She comes from my home town. We were in a band!’ So they brought me in.”

She took on co-writing as well as directing duties, “because it was my childhood. It was my rite of passage, that summer with The Fractures, just before I left home. So it was a no-brainer.”

The resulting film fizzes with energy and gentle humour, much like Sugarman herself. Sat at a table outside a pizza restaurant on the Portobello Road, she is warm, garrulous, and generous. There is a dark cloud, however. Her father passed away in February, and the loss is painfully present.

Fighting back tears at the beginning of the interview, she apologises (unnecessarily) for becoming emotional, and then picks herself up by relating the circumstances that had led to him having a funeral under Chabad-Lubavitch.

“Dad wasn’t religious,” she says. “He married Jewish and had the kids, and everything was as it should be. But then his second partner wasn’t Jewish. She said he would have turned in his grave to have an Orthodox funeral, but it turned out that it was fantastic.”

In return for their services, Sugarman and her brother had to promise to spend a Friday night with Chabad. She will never forget it. “We had the best time. They had 13 mad, wild kids there. They were, like, throwing themselves down the stairs. Oh my God, we had such a laugh.”

Sugarman has not yet explored her Jewish roots explicitly in her work but says that as she gets older, the artist in her “wants to be truer to my own soul”. If she ever decided to do her own Radio Days — Woody Allen’s nostalgic film memoir — she would not be short of memories to draw on.

Growing up in the Jewish wasteland of north Wales, her family were like a community unto themselves. Hebrew and Yiddish were spoken at home, while her grandfather ran a shul in a “tiny room” above a local branch of Lloyd’s Bank. “We just had a minyan,” she recalls, “and all the men had to make a concerted effort to make that happen.”

She talks affectionately about how her grandparents struggled to keep kosher during the war, and how when the parcels of kosher food supplied from Manchester each Friday shrank to almost nothing, her grandfather started koshering food himself.

“They all decided that if they said prayers over the food, God would forgive them and it would stay kosher.” By the time Sugarman was born, the practice had spread to the point where her grandfather, who wore tefillin every day, was even koshering bacon. “My dad’s sister used to say that, until she was about 10, she thought that knives and forks grew in the earth, because they were always rekoshering them.”

Sugarman’s father instilled in her a strong sense of pride in her roots, while encouraging her to assimilate and not make herself stand out. This was easier said than done, sometimes.

“Someone at school, a little kid, asked me when I was about nine: ‘Are you a monkey?’, because I looked so different. And I didn’t know if I was or not, but I knew I was different. I said: ‘Mum, am I a monkey? And where is Jewish Land?’ I couldn’t work it out. But I didn’t feel persecuted — I just felt special and different.”

Sugarman now lives in LA, where conversely, “everyone’s Jewish and they take it for granted. They don’t even like each other. We didn’t have that option in Wales. If you were a Jew, you were my best friend, because there was that tie that bound us. I feel really grateful for it because it created a stability.”

The same cannot be said of being a film-maker, as illustrated by the gaps between Sugarman’s movies. She recently handed in a draft of a script for another project, Stiff — based on an original screenplay by Dan Mazer, with Meg Ryan on board — which she says is “quite late in development”. So we won’t have to wait too long for the next one, hopefully.

One thing that is certain is that, however tough things get, Sugarman will always battle on. If Vinyl has one message — embodied by its lead character, Johnny Jones (Phil Daniels) — it is that you must keep going. “Do not give up your dreams,” says Sugarman. “Live. Celebrate. Because around the corner there is always hope.”

Ready, aim… best-selling scientist targeted for his ‘dangerous’ views

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:00:28 +0000

I have spent less than three minutes in the company of Jared Diamond and he assures me that he does not pose a threat to my life.

“I can promise you that I have not made a move to kill you yet. Nor have I detected any move on your part to kill me. But in a traditional society both of us would have made a move to kill each other by now, or else run away,” he says solemnly.

Over a light breakfast in a hotel lounge in central London, the Pulitzer Prize-winning polymath, and popular science writer is talking about his new book The World Until Yesterday. The narrative looks at behavioural differences between human beings in tribal stateless societies, versus those living under the all-powerful bureaucratic system of the nation state.

Diamond’s argument is fairly simple: if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, humans have spent much of their time throughout history as wandering nomads. As modern nations are relatively new concepts, we have much to learn from traditional cultures.

Having spent the past 50 years visiting New Guinea on field research trips, Diamond, who was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, and is now professor of geography at the University of California, uses a mixture of personal anecdotes, and academic research, to prove his thesis. The ways in which traditional societies raise their children, spend their leisure time, and communicate, are often superior to normal practices in the First World, his argument goes. But his praise for the tribal lifestyle stops there.

“Traditional societies do things that we disapprove of,” he explains. “Some of them abandon their elderly. Some of them kill their babies if they happen to be weak. We in the West think that is terrible. But they do it not because they are evil, but simply because they are living under a certain set of circumstances.”

Diamond does not get involved in moralising. When I ask him whether human beings are bloodthirsty violent creatures, or gentle peaceful souls, he tells me, politely, that it is a pointless question. Human behaviour, he argues, is always a matter of circumstances.

In state societies, the institutions we take for granted, such as a police force, a justice system, and a functioning democratic government, all help to minimise violence, he claims. As traditional societies lack the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the state, its people, he says, are in a chronic state of war. He gives an example to back up this claim.

“Just look at the deaths caused by Germany participating in two World Wars in the 20th century. Although this was no doubt horrible, it was also averaged out in a century in which they were in no wars for 90 years. In traditional societies, without a state government to declare war, or to sign a peace treaty, wars tend to be chronic.

“In state warfare it is considered bad and evil to kill women and children. Even in Germany on the western front in World War Two — the eastern front was another matter—it was not the policy to kill women and children. But in traditional societies, it’s routine to kill women and children in war. So the outcome overall is that the death toll in traditional societies is 10 times higher than in state societies.”

Diamond does stress in his chapter on war that peaceful traditional societies do exist. Yet this has failed to stop a torrent of criticism from certain reviewers, as well as from organisations like Survival International, who fight to protect tribal people’s lands and livelihood.

The campaign group’s director, Stephen Corry recently lashed out at Diamond in an article in the Observer, calling his book “completely wrong— both factually and morally— and extremely dangerous”.

Diamond responds by saying that Survival International is trying to publicise its campaign.

Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond looks considerably younger than his 75 years. He is the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, who fled to the United States to escapes the pogroms.

For a man so interested in traditions, it grieves him that one in particular among Jews in America has declined — that of speaking Yiddish.

“It’s a terrible loss”, he says. “My father’s parents probably spoke Yiddish at home. That just shows the gap in the United States between immigrant parents and their children. The immigrant language is so often lost, and that is sad.”

Diamond specialises in bold statements, but sometimes his arguments suffer for a lack of nuance. For example, his claim that the state always has its own interests at heart is certainly true. But it is debatable that every state “wants to preserve peace”.

Many critics have spent considerable time focusing solely on his coverage of traditional societies. But his book touches upon other subjects, where his views are fascinating, albeit less controversial. Religion is good example.

As a non-practising Jew, Diamond says his wife still attends synagogue on the High Holy Days, while his two children chose to be barmitzvahed when they came of age. These family reasons could help explain why a rationalist atheist like Diamond affords religion such respect. It is more likely, however, that he thinks religion serves a very useful function in society.

“An evolutionary and common sense perspective would say that some societies would have abolished religion by now, that atheist societies should gain an advantage over religious societies. But this is not the case,” he says.

If religions’ role of explaining how the natural world works has been replaced by science, Diamond argues that it can still be effective in helping humans deal with stressful situations to defuse anxiety.

“In my book I discuss an incident in 2006 during the Lebanon War where people in an Israeli town of Sfat, near the Syrian border, were being subjected to rocket attacks.

It turned out that those Israelis who were chanting Psalms, managed to defuse their anxiety and they didn’t explode in anger and do stupid things.”

We have finished our breakfast, and Diamond is getting ready for an afternoon of lectures, interviews and more publicity. No doubt he will meet his critics throughout the day, but he does not seem too bothered. After all, it is not as if he will pose a threat to their lives.

Lore: Inside the mind of a Nazi

Stephen Applebaum — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:23:43 +0000

Cate Shortland is crying. The Australian Jewish convert has been discussing her use of images of Holocaust victims in her disturbing new film, Lore, when tears suddenly fill her eyes.

The making of the movie — Shortland’s first since her award-winning debut, Somersault, in 2004, and Australia’s entry for this year’s best foreign language film Oscar — was a troubling experience from beginning to end. But nothing appears to have caused the sensitive director/co-writer as much anguish as those Yad Vashem photographs.

“Using them was the hardest part for me. Because, morally, the people within them don’t have a choice,” she says, her voice cracking with emotion. “Ethically, it was hugely problematic to me.”

If she had had the budget, she would have recreated the briefly glimpsed, but potently utilised, pictures of Nazi atrocities. “I didn’t want to use the real people,” Shortland insists, “because I felt so close to them.”
Lore is not all horror, much of it is beautiful and poetic; it is none the less uncomfortable to watch. Adapted from a story in British author Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 Booker-shortlisted novel, The Dark Room, and shot in German, it focuses on five siblings as they trek across the German countryside, led by the oldest sister, Lore, to their grandmother’s house near Hamburg, amid the collapse of Hitler’s regime.

As in Somersault, which also charted a young woman’s traumatic coming of age, Shortland adopts an approach that is intimate and empathetic. What makes Lore more challenging, however, is that the children are the offspring of Nazis (their SS father is a member of the Einsatzgruppen — mobile death units).

The eponymous heroine (played by sensational newcomer Saskia Rosendahl) has been conditioned to be unquestioningly antisemitic. The journey — which includes an encounter with an enigmatic young Jew — becomes an odyssey that awakens Lore to the lies that have informed her upbringing, and to the crimes perpetrated by her parents’ generation.

At first, Shortland wanted to do a different story from the same novel, in which the lines between good and evil were more clearly defined, but the film’s producers pushed her towards Lore.

“I think what I was really frightened of was that we don’t have that division — we’re within the perpetrators,” she explains. “This story is the toughest one in the book because the audience has to just look at these people as human beings, and make up their own minds.” Her “biggest nightmare” was making something that appeared “apologist. So we fought hard with the material, and Rachel helped us, to make sure that wasn’t going to happen”.

To try and understand Lore, Shortland met with aged former members of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the League of German Girls). It was a surreal experience.

“We spoke to them really honestly and without judgement, and created this environment where they could just talk about what had happened, how they’d felt. There was a really strange nostalgia from a lot of them, because of the music and the dancing. The more we spoke to them, what had really affected them was that it was just drummed into them that you shouldn’t have empathy.”

If some viewers find that Shortland’s refusal to judge her characters creates a queasy tension between attraction and repulsion, they are not alone. “That’s what I felt the whole way along,” she says. “And I felt fury, absolute fury, a lot of the time.” Feeling unable to express her anger to her German cast and crew, she confided in her Jewish husband, filmmaker Tony Krawitz.

“He said kaddish on the first day of shooting, in the house that we shot in. The house had been taken from a Jewish family in the ’30s.” The reading was held privately, for family and friends. “We didn’t say kaddish in front of the crew, which has given me so much to think about why we didn’t,” says Shortland softly.

“I still feel like there’s that thing of not understanding: Jews are kind of weird and hearing the Hebrew…” She pauses for a moment. “They wouldn’t have understood why we were saying kaddish, I think. It was a strange thing, but really beautiful.”

Krawitz, who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, was Shortland’s rock throughout the whole difficult process of making Lore. “He talks about everything with me,” she says. Krawitz’s father was the head of a synagogue in South Africa, but when Shortland decided to convert to Judaism, 17 years after they met, her husband, an atheist, was not keen.

“Tony loves Judaism. His films are about his culture. But his relationship to Judaism is so complicated, and he didn’t think it was important. But we were with his family [his grandmother escaped Germany in 1935] so much, and we were always having Shabbat and Pesach and everything, I wanted to be not just an observer but more integrated into it. And I’m so happy I’ve converted.”

They now have what she refers to as a “hybrid family”, having adopted two black South African children. Like the sons and daughters of Germans who lived through the Second World War, she is sure that they will one day ask: “Daddy, what did you do in apartheid?”

“So that’s why Tony and I never looked at this film from only one angle. I’m an Australian, my family came on the first fleet and were probably involved in terrible atrocities, so I can’t sit here and say: ‘Look at the Germans’. I also have to do some soul searching. And Tony’s family have to do that because they were involved in apartheid. So you don’t point. You are a perpetrator in some form.”

Haim - the three sisters who are this year's pop sensation

Paul Lester — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:59:31 +0000

Right now, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim, from Los Angeles, are three of the hottest names in pop, rock and r&b (and their sound is a blend of pop, rock and r&b — imagine Fleetwood Mac jamming with Destiny’s Child).

Their band, Haim (Hebrew for “life”) was recently judged by music industry taste-makers to be the best new one around, beating the 14 other contenders to win the BBC Sound of 2013 poll, an accolade previously afforded to Adele, Jessie J and Keane. The group — who played their first ever show at a kosher deli in Hollywood, for which they were paid in matzah ball soup, and who once considered calling themselves The Bagel Bitches — are certainly the hottest new all-Jewish sister act on the planet.

Haim, who have already played live with Mumford & Sons and opened for Florence and the Machine, are also earning a reputation for rock ’n’ roll hi-jinks and pleasure-seeking on the road. Even music paper NME, accustomed to wild behaviour, followed them on tour recently and were taken aback by their antics. And they seemed like such nice Jewish girls.

“I’d say we’re pretty religious,” insists Danielle, however. “And we don’t play gigs on Shabbas.”

Danielle is the middle Haim girl at 23 — Este is 26 and Alana, 21. None of the daughters of Mordechai Haim, their Israeli father, had a batmitzvah — because, explains Danielle, “where my dad is from, the women don’t read from the Torah” — but they did all have coming-of-age parties. Growing up in the suburban San Fernando Valley, in a sizable Jewish community, Danielle recalls: “I went to a lot of bar- and batmitzvahs — in fact, I went to one every weekend when I was that age.” The Haims attended the LA County High School for the Arts, the same “fame school” as singer-songwriter Josh Groban and actress Jennifer Elfman.

Their parents are both estate agents with some experience in entertainment. Mum Donna showed real promise as a singer, winning The Gong Show (America’s equivalent of Britain’s Got Talent). Unfortunately, her parents pushed her to become a teacher, perhaps why Donna and Mordechai, in contrast, have always supported their daughters’ desire to pursue careers as musicians.

So Mordechai paid for music lessons and the girls became proficient on a variety of instruments. The logical next step was to form a band. But one that would feature all of them, including mum and dad? Well, it worked for von Trapps.

“I was 10 and on vocals and lead guitar,” reminisces Danielle. “Este was on bass and Alana, then only seven, played everything from piano to timbale. Mum was on rhythm guitar and dad was on drums. We would play county fairs and street fairs all over California. It was what kept our family together.”

To begin with, they called themselves The Mummys and the Daddys (a play on ’60s harmony group The Mamas and the Papas) and then Boomerang, because the Haims would cover a lot of the classic rock — The Rolling Stones, Billy Joel and Santana — that was then coming back in fashion. Finally, they settled on Rockinhaim. Donna coined the phrase “The Partridge Family of the Millennium” to describe themselve.

“People compared us a lot to The Partridge Family,” says Danielle of the early ’70s fictional TV family-cum-pop group fronted by pretty boy David Cassidy. “There were definite similarities. We had a van and we’d drive round LA, putting on shows, playing cover versions of rock hits. It was fun, but a little dorky.”

After several years playing second fiddle to mum and dad, the girls took the tough decision to give their folks the elbow because they wanted to move away from golden oldies towards the new harmony pop of r&b girl groups such as TLC and En Vogue.

“We started to write our own songs and decided we needed a new drummer,” says Danielle. “We were, like: ‘Sorry dad, we should probably get a drummer our own age’. He understood, although he does give us guilt for it, in a playful way.”

When they first went out on their own, the girls were so young, laughs Danielle, that “we couldn’t even get into the clubs we were playing.”

But it was not until they hooked up with producer Ludwig Göransson that Haim achieved their dream fusion of winsome country-pop and shiny r&b. “We always wrote percussively — even our melodies are very rhythmic,” says Danielle, who in her spare time plays guitar on tour with Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and Cee-Lo Green.

She explains that Haim’s debut EP, Forever, which came out last year, took months to record because they each only had two hours a day to finish it — Alana was still working as a nanny and Este as a waitress.
She is still not sure what to call Haim’s musical hybrid, and laughs at the suggestion of “folk&b”.

“I don’t mind people calling it whatever they want,” she says, “but it’s probably best to say pop-rock r&b.”
Danielle mishears when I ask what it is like to be in such a sought-after band, and thinks I am questioning their druggy credentials (“The world’s highest band? Oh, the hottest!”). She believes people are making such a fuss about them because they are so relieved to see a girl group where the females in question do not just stand there and sing.

“They see that we play our instruments very seriously,” she says. “It feels lame to say that out loud, but that’s something they respect and admire.”

Despite being cruelly dumped from their ranks, Donna and Mordechai still join their daughters on-stage during shows even now that they are becoming famous. Theirs is a family affair — the girl’s grandmother even jetted in from Israel to watch them supporting Florence and the Machine at the O2 in London.

Now all Danielle’s got to do to make them proud is find a nice Jewish boy. How about Drake? She virtually faints at the mention of the hip-hop heartthrob.

“Oh, don’t even get me started,” she sighs. “I have my eye on him.” Sadly, there is a hitch. She is already hitched. “Actually,” she says, as though suddenly remembering. “I’m in a very happy relationship.”

A romcom from the man who brought you Borat

Stephen Applebaum — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:53:54 +0000

Dan Mazer studied law at Cambridge, but from the moment that he discovered it was nothing like the American TV crime drama LA Law, he knew he had no future as a legal eagle.

“I loved that show and thought I could be like Harry Hamlin and go out and solve crimes,” he says. “Within an hour of the start of my first lecture, I realised it’s all about attention to detail, of which I have none. It’s all about scientific focus, of which I am entirely bereft. I would be the worst lawyer on earth.”

Instead, Mazer became one of this country’s best comedy writers, earning acclaim for his groundbreaking Ali G, Borat and Bruno collaborations with Sacha Baron Cohen. He has now turned his hand to directing, with the self-scripted I Give It A Year. A kind of Relate version of a Richard Curtis movie, the film injects British romantic comedy with a much-needed dose of reality, as it mines mismatched Josh’s (Rafe Spall) and Nat’s (Rose Byrne) marriage for rude laughs, sharp observations and embarrassment.

Believing that comedy comes from truth, Mazer wanted to create a film that felt relevant to his own life. He has been married to the comedian Daisy Donovan, whom he met while working on Channel 4’s controversial satirical news programme, and original home of Ali G, The 11 O’Clock Show, for seven years — “and it’s great, I love it”, he says. “But it’s really difficult.”

The first year of any marriage can be especially hard, he believes. For men, sometimes, it is as if something switches in their head and a relationship suddenly looks like a prison sentence. “Before we got married, there was some part of me that thought: ‘Oh, old Dan going out and getting drunk and sleeping with lots of women is going to be dead’. And I never did that anyway. But there’s just some part of every man, I think, that reacts against that limitation of possibility.”

I Give It A Year is possibly the first romcom to make you root for a couple’s divorce. If this sounds subversive, it is. And that is the way Mazer likes it. “I’ve always tried to do something different and not go along with the flow. My plan is to make something that feels unique, rather than fall into line with other stuff.”

He found the perfect co-conspirator in the iconoclastic Cohen. They first met at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree, aged 11. “He was in the year above me,” recalls Mazer, “so I always looked up to him as an older boy, and trailed in his wake. But he has always been a very charismatic individual that people have paid attention to.”

Unlike the Hammersmith-born future Hollywood star, Mazer did not join the Habonim Dror Jewish youth movement. “I was brought up in Ruislip, so I was kind of a less full-on, hardcore Jew.”

The director Larry Charles felt that Cohen was on a mission that came from his background when they all worked on the Borat movie. “I don’t think it was necessarily a pro-semitism mission in any sense,” argues Mazer, who shared an Oscar nomination for the film’s screenplay. “What we wanted to do was uncover bigotry in a funny way, and one arm of that was antisemitism.”

Borat, the boorish Kazakh journalist, began mainly as a voice. “And then I remember the meeting we had where we went: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if he was virulently antisemitic?’ The first port of call has always been to be funny. And then to derive some sort of satire from that is, I think, really important.”

Mazer was raised in an environment booming with laughter. His father introduced him to Phil Silvers and the Marx Brothers as a child, and when he was dying, they watched Seinfeld together. “We bonded over a kind of mutual love of comedy and he was incredibly funny.”

As a 10-year-old he looked forward to shivahs, because “everybody would sit round and have a good laugh at each other, which is just a really odd scenario,” he admits. “The default setting for our family was to laugh at things, and I think that’s sort of a Jewish sensibility.”

Elaborating, Mazer reveals his “weird philosophy” about Jews and humour. “We don’t really like to fight. We’re not necessarily the bravest people. So where other people might resort to violence, I think we verbalise it and that sharpens our comedic senses.” Moreover, “at the age of 13, when we’re at our most vulnerable, our least attractive, we’re forced to perform and make a speech in front of all our friends and family, which is kind of the most mortifying thing imaginable, and that hones that instinct at an early age as well, I think.”

Mazer’s and Cohen’s instincts were certainly whetted to perfection. This is not to say that everyone finds them funny. The Borat and Bruno films were steeped in controversy (the backlash included lawsuits), with some critics claiming that the film-makers picked on easy targets. Mazer is adamant that they were “rigid and diligent” about who they set up.

“The idea is that there should always be a rationale about exposing this person and that we can stand up for it and justify it in any way. We always wanted to expose bigotry and prejudice in some sense with all those people, and I think we basically did that with everyone.”

That said, he admits to having “doubts” about their use of the aged Jewish owners of a bed-and-breakfast in Borat. “They weren’t doing anything wrong and they were a nice old couple. So that would probably be my one moment where I think: ‘Did we need to do that?’”

Whether he and Cohen can pull off another Borat/Bruno-style operation, remains to be seen. Mazer certainly is not ruling anything out. “People were saying since series one of The 11 O’Clock Show: ‘You’ll never get away with Ali G any more’, and we always found a way. If the will is there, maybe we’ll find a way to do it again.”

How David Cronenberg's son is joining the family business

Stephen Applebaum — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:50:51 +0000

If Brandon Cronenberg looks a little shell-shocked when we convene for an interview at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, there is a good reason. It is not only his first feature, Antiviral, that has got the world’s media buzzing, but also his background.

Not just any tyro filmmaker, he is the son of legendary Jewish Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, who also just happened to be at the festival with his chilly adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. Talk about pressure.

A few months later in London, the 32-year-old newcomer is more relaxed, but still trying to understand what happened.

“Cannes was insane,” he says, smiling wryly. “It was this weird little bubble of an experience that I can’t quite reconcile with the rest of my life. But it was interesting and fun. Being there with my family was, you know, cute,” he laughs, using an adjective that could never be applied either to his own blood-spattered film or any of his father’s edgy offerings, which include The Fly, the controversial sex-and-wrecks drama Crash, and violent London-set thriller Eastern Promises.

In truth, Cannes was the perfect launchpad for Antiviral: a provocative take on modern celebrity that chimed perfectly with film fans’ daily ritual of lining the resort’s main strip to rubberneck stars on the red carpet.
In the movie, infatuated fans buy injections of viruses such as herpes sourced from their idols, eat meat cloned from their bodies, and have celebrity skin grafts. A sick scenario perhaps — and Cronenberg says he was not in the best of health when the idea took root in 2004.

“I was having this delirious fever dream and obsessing over the fact that I had something in my body that had come from somebody else’s body, and how that was an intimate thing, if you look at it that way.”

At the time he was studying film at Ryerson University, in his home town of Toronto, and wanted to write a script. “So I was trying to think of a character who would see disease as something intimate, and I thought a celebrity-obsessed fan might reasonably want Angelina Jolie’s cold as a way of becoming physically connected to her.”

The film taps into a very modern kind of celebrity — first crystallised, Cronenberg believes, in Paris Hilton — where people are famous simply for being famous. If the filmmaker’s vision seems grotesque, it is because the whole phenomenon is grotesque, he says, and we have become inured to it. His response to this was to make Antiviral physically and intellectually unsettling.

“A lot of the time I think it’s through discomfort that you can say something,” he asserts. “We’ve actually become so comfortable with the grotesqueness of celebrity culture that we don’t feel gross about it anymore. So to push it to a place where it’s viscerally disgusting was part of the intent.”

Growing up and watching the way his father was portrayed in the media — as the “Baron of Blood” for example — Brandon came to see from an early age that a person’s media image often had little to do with the human behind it. Celebrity was an artificial construct. Or as someone says in the film, a “mass hallucination”. An atheist, his father would probably say the same thing about God, wouldn’t he?

“Yeah well, that’s my perspective too. I’m definitely an atheist,” he says. “I don’t think I was pushed towards atheism, but I wasn’t pushed towards religion either.”

Interestingly, his father’s Jewishness did not really become explicit on screen until he released At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World at the Last Cinema in the World — a 2007 short film made as a personal response to a statement by Hizbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah calling for the murder of all Jews. Brandon understands his father’s compulsion to make the film.

“Judaism is funny because it’s the race and religious thing — you can identify as being racially Jewish and still be very upset by antisemitism, and be afraid of that current in society, and not at all believe in God.”
Brandon’s maternal grandfather was Orthodox and he says he has an affection for Jewish tradition. “I would go to Passover dinners and stuff like that. So I have that weird nostalgia for those things even though I never was religious.”

Brandon is clearly his father’s son and, inevitably, is having to try and carve out his own course while at the same time dealing with people scrutinising him and his work for similarities. At film school, he consciously tried not to concern himself with such things. “It’s not that I wasn’t affected by any of it in any way,” he admits.

“But I feel like it would have been paralysing, and also impossible to work from an honest place, if I was too worried about my father’s career and what people would think, and the significance of what I was doing.”
Choosing to make his debut with a horror film — territory associated with his father — seems like asking for trouble, though. But Brandon insists, that it is hard to avoid crossing paths with Cronenberg senior, because he has worked across so many different genres.

“But the truth is, the film represents my interests,” he says defiantly.

And what does Cronenberg senior think of Antiviral? “He likes it. I’m very close to my father and he likes my film and I like his film. It’s all very adorable and emotional.”

Of course, being the son of such a famous father meant that Brandon work was always going to get attention, which is what any new film-maker hopes for. However, there was never any guarantee that it would always be the right kind. A mixed blessing, then?

“It’s absolutely a double-edged sword,” he laughs. “But it was a sword that was waiting for me.”

The Hollywood director who thinks Holocaust films don't tell the right story

Jennifer Lipman — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:11:11 +0000

Holocaust films? Pah!” says Jack Garfein, shaking his head. “They’re awful. They always show the horror, not the human element.”

If anyone is an authority, it is Garfein. Born in 1930 into a Zionist Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, he was sent to Auschwitz when he was 13 and then through the hell of 11 Nazi camps. His entire family perished; he narrowly escaped the clutches of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele by lying about his age.

But Garfein also knows about entertainment. Six weeks after emerging from Bergen Belsen, weighing just 48 pounds, he crossed the Atlantic for a new life in America with a relative. He was one of the first child survivors to do so.

Despite knowing no English, within two years he was studying drama at Manhattan’s prestigious New School, the fees paid by the United Jewish Appeal, for whom he acted as something of a poster child. His teacher was Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio and mentor to Hollywood stars.

In 1953, less than a decade out of the camps and having already acted on Broadway, Garfein made his Broadway directorial debut with End as a Man, starring Ben Gazzara. The following years were a whirlwind; he worked and socialised with Hollywood legends, including Elia Kazan, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and producer Sam Spiegel, and married actress Carroll Baker.

He also produced two Arthur Miller plays — “I had a wonderful relationship with him,” he says. “We spent a lot of time talking about our divorces” — and directed two feature films, The Strange One and 1961’s Something Wild.

Given this, and how he peppers the conversation with references to Monroe, Billy Wilder and Samuel Beckett — “he was a very close friend, he didn’t like any of the Holocaust movies either,” he says — it might seem odd that Garfein is not better known.

But having clashed with Spiegel over how much screen time would be given to black cast members in The Strange One — the studio wanted to limit it to make a release in the southern states possible —- Garfein lost his studio contract. Something Wild, which broke new ground by including a rape scene and brief nudity, was made on a shoestring budget with little support from the producers.

With a reputation for being difficult and arrogant, he found industry doors closed, and turned instead to teaching, working in Budapest, London and Los Angeles. He was one of the key players in launching the Actors Studio West, the West Coast branch of the influential drama school which popularised method acting.

“It was a remarkable place. Kazan, who founded it, understood that actors needed a place where they didn’t have to impress or be accepted for external aspects like their looks, where they could experiment and where young actors could work with the most experienced.” Garfein founded theatres in New York and more recently, Le Studio Jack Garfein in Paris, where he directs and teaches. In 2010 he wrote a book on acting.

In 1987, he made The Journey Back, an autobiographical film in which he revisited his childhood home and went back to Auschwitz. It was not an easy trip, he says. “My father said to me in Auschwitz, no matter what they do to, you don’t cry. I can’t tell you how you survive a concentration camp, but I can tell you how you don’t survive one.”

Garfein’s philosophy, he says, can be summed up by his feelings about Fiddler on the Roof. “Because of that bloody musical, the Jews start saying ‘l’chaim’ and dance and sing around. When I say ‘l’chaim’ it means, ‘I’m not afraid, baby’.” He stands up, gesticulating wildly. “Life is cruel, so it’s not ‘yeah, l’chaim’. It means, ‘life, I take you on’.”

He found it just as difficult to contain his emotions when he watched Something Wild again last year, at a BFI London Film Festival screening. The film stars Baker as a lonely rape victim being rescued then held captive by her sadistic saviour.

“The moderator at the screening said he thought it was the greatest film of the Holocaust ever made, and I thought about it the next day and I realised — of course! This is my story.

“When I came to New York I couldn’t talk to anybody. Some people thought I was exaggerating, they didn’t want to face it. I was a normal kid but the moment they found out I was in the camps, people changed.

“When I saw the film again I realised how totally alone I was both with what I experienced, and in relationships afterward. This is what the girl goes through.”

Only now, after extensive therapy, does Garfein feel he is coming to accept the impact his experiences had on his relationships, including two broken marriages. “It’s such a challenge to create something real, not just to be a success or make a lot of money, but to really grasp the meaning of it all,” he says.

“I came back from London all shaken up, but then I had a class to teach. If I didn’t have work it would be terrible. Art has helped me to survive.”

So does art have a place in telling the story of the Holocaust, after all?

“They always show suffering, but never how you deal with it,” says Garfein. “They always have a train and people screaming. When we went to the camps, my mother combed my sister’s hair, she straightened up a sweater, because we were arriving at a place and she wanted us to look good.

“When you tell people a story about Auschwitz, it’s something outside of themselves, they are sympathetic but they don’t know what the real experience was.” But having watched Something Wild again, he has realised, “what I didn’t know for 50 years — that through some films, people can see what that kind of experience does to you”.

Despite having an array of projects on the go — a stage adaptation of Kafka in Paris, classes to teach — he would not say no if Hollywood came calling. “I’ve written a screenplay about my life and my mother during the war. She was amazing, really amazing,” he says.

“Someone like Rachel Weisz would be wonderful to play her. She’d win every award because it’s an amazing part.”