thedrifter
01-01-09, 06:56 AM
Uncovering layers of rage in 'Defiance'
By Edward Zwick
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
My grandfather Itchky was a tough Jew. I am named after him; my Hebrew name is Yitzhak. In 1920s Chicago, his five brothers (the Uncles, as they were known) - Dovie, Fat, Zus, Zell and Jules - were "betting commissioners" (read: "bookie") for the Capone mob. As a boy I secretly relished my family's unsavory past.
Of course I had more conventional heroes, too. Like my non-Jewish schoolmates I thrilled to World War II accounts like "PT 109," or of the leatherneck marines of Guadalcanal. Hidden inside my Hebrew school texts were typical war comics of the time; Sergeant Rock and Nick Fury were particular favorites. But other tales distinguished my adolescence from that of my gentile friends, stories whispered only when the grown-ups believed me to be out of earshot, accounts of lost relatives and places with unpronounceable names, accompanied often by tears and sighs.
Eventually I came to know the grainy out-of-focus images of hollow-eyed survivors in striped pajamas or corpses piled high in freshly dug pits, or saw the documentaries with panning shots of living skeletons clinging to barbed wire. Such grisly iconography of passivity and victimization became, to an adolescent boy, not only a morbid obsession but also a source of shame.
And so, 30 years later, when my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec's book "Defiance," I groaned, "Not another movie about victims."
"No," he said, "this is a story about Jewish heroes. Like the Maccabees, only better."
The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance.
I knew of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, yet it seemed to stand alone in the popular imagination as the only moment in which organized opposition took root. Yet I have learned that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the impulse to fight back was everywhere: from the streets of Vilnius to the forests of Bialystok, even unto the concrete slabs of Sobibor and Treblinka, thousands of Jews doing whatever they could, whether seeking refuge in the sheltering woods or recklessly taking up arms against overwhelming odds.
Learning of these defiant acts awakened in me something utterly primitive and deeply personal, a wave of awe, humility and admiration.
And outrage, too. Why, I wondered, had I not known these stories while growing up? Could it be that the necessary commemoration of six million dead had so eclipsed the struggles of those who survived and how?
This story needed to be told.
Those of us who make films are forever searching for heroes. More often than not they're imaginary. Luke Skywalker battles the Galactic Empire; Frodo Baggins duels with the Dark Lord. We have Spider-Man, Batman and Iron Man, but few ordinary men. The closer one looks at real-life heroes, the less they conform to the simple verities Hollywood finds easiest to peddle.
Of the Bielski brothers (portrayed in "Defiance" by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell) it was said "they were like blocks of wood." They were miller's sons, raised wild in the woods. Uneducated, unsophisticated, casually violent, sexually predacious, fiercely loyal, at times murderous, at times merciful, they were the least likely of leaders. Yet these flawed men confronted daunting moral decisions - whether to seek vengeance or to rescue others, how to recreate a sense of community among those who had lost everything, how to keep faith alive when all evidence was that God had turned away - and gradually, reluctantly even, they rose to the task, discovering in themselves something extraordinary.
We began filming their story in August 2007 in Lithuania, just across the border from Belarus, where the brothers built their hidden camps. Dwarfed by pines so immense and thick the sunlight rarely penetrated, we worked from dawn until dark, never growing accustomed to a perpetual half-light so dim even at midday that we needed super-fast lenses to gain enough exposure to shoot. Most mornings a low-hanging fog would rise from nearby bogs, enveloping us and chilling to the bone. Arriving on the set before first light, hundreds of spectral figures, dress extras clothed in tatters, with blankets wrapped around their heads, would huddle together for warmth. These hollow-eyed men, women and children seemed to suggest we were not only presuming to honor the dead, but conjuring forth their spirits as well.
To work at northern latitudes is to be acutely aware of winter's approach. By September there was frost on the ground. By mid-October we were knee-deep in snow. By November dawn wasn't until 8 a.m., and the pale sun began to fade by 3. Despite our sophisticated outerwear, we were always cold. Yet for three long winters, with subzero temperatures and a mind-numbing wind off the Baltic that brought Hitler's assault on Russia to a frostbitten halt, the Bielski partisans wrapped themselves in skins and rags, braved starvation and dug burrows into the hillsides, living like moles.
If it can be said a director's job is to create an aura of verisimilitude, then it was as if my work were being helped by an unseen hand. There was no need to instruct the actors to shiver; they were shivering for real. Nor did it require any conversation about Stanislavski to communicate a motivation as simple as survival.
Whether an actor was digging a trench, peeling a potato or loading a weapon with frozen fingers, the story was telling itself. And so, while looking through the camera, I would sometimes drift off, projecting myself into the scene I was filming. Inevitably, as I imagined myself standing sentry in the icy twilight on lookout for German patrols, I couldn't help but ask myself a single humbling question: How would I have fared in the forest? Would I have dared go into the forest at all?
Directing a film inevitably becomes personal for me. This one, though, felt as if some private boundary were breached. The faces of the local extras looked like my face, their bodies were shaped like my body. Even their East European inflections sounded familiar. And when the grown sons of the Bielskis visited the set, and sat laughing or crying while telling stories about their parents, I couldn't help but stare. Because these loud, funny, warm, rough men were utterly recognizable. They reminded me of the Uncles. And suddenly I remembered when, as a high school assignment, I had recorded a series of conversations with my "other" grandfather (my mother's father, an upstanding dress manufacturer) only a year before his death.
There, amid a remarkable narrative of his traumatic flight at 14 from Poland, was his description of several brothers and sisters who had stayed behind. "All of them lost," he whispered, "all sent to the camps. Except for one, that is. A tough character, that brother, a vildi chaya, a brawler. He wanted to fight. He went to the forest. And we never heard from him again."
As I compared his faded photo to those I had collected while researching the film - drawn faces clutching captured weapons in the Russian snowscape, staring bravely into the lens - I was struck by how much they resembled one another, and it occurred to me that here was yet another Uncle in the family mythology. Was he, I wondered, the real hero of the bunch?
I was born two generations removed from the depredations of the Holocaust. And the odds of my fighting back, had I been there, are overwhelmingly - six million to a few thousand - against it. Yet I have come to understand that resistance has many faces and continues long after the fighting has stopped.
Scholars struggle to preserve history by writing books, archivists create museums to raise consciousness, memoirists bear witness, reopening old wounds in the belief that in pain is the preservation of memory. Keeping faith, it can be said, is yet another form of resistance. Meanwhile, songwriters and novelists (and filmmakers, too) dramatize events of long ago, believing their art can bring the dead to life, if for only an hour or two in our imagination.
As December blew into Lithuania, the forest became a fortress of snow, as impregnable to filmmaking as it was to enemy assault 60 years ago. It was time to go home. On the first day of filming I had pasted into the inside cover of my script the fading daguerreotype taken at Ellis Island that accompanied my grandfather's application for citizenship (abnegating "all allegiance to the Czar of Russia").
Staring at it in the frozen night I couldn't help but feel he had been with me all along, and that I had made this film to affirm the connection between my safe, assimilated life and the lives of those hardened, proud relatives of my childhood.
As they had done for so many others, the Bielskis had led me home.
Edward Zwick, the director and co-writer of "Defiance," made "Glory" and other films.
Ellie
By Edward Zwick
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
My grandfather Itchky was a tough Jew. I am named after him; my Hebrew name is Yitzhak. In 1920s Chicago, his five brothers (the Uncles, as they were known) - Dovie, Fat, Zus, Zell and Jules - were "betting commissioners" (read: "bookie") for the Capone mob. As a boy I secretly relished my family's unsavory past.
Of course I had more conventional heroes, too. Like my non-Jewish schoolmates I thrilled to World War II accounts like "PT 109," or of the leatherneck marines of Guadalcanal. Hidden inside my Hebrew school texts were typical war comics of the time; Sergeant Rock and Nick Fury were particular favorites. But other tales distinguished my adolescence from that of my gentile friends, stories whispered only when the grown-ups believed me to be out of earshot, accounts of lost relatives and places with unpronounceable names, accompanied often by tears and sighs.
Eventually I came to know the grainy out-of-focus images of hollow-eyed survivors in striped pajamas or corpses piled high in freshly dug pits, or saw the documentaries with panning shots of living skeletons clinging to barbed wire. Such grisly iconography of passivity and victimization became, to an adolescent boy, not only a morbid obsession but also a source of shame.
And so, 30 years later, when my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec's book "Defiance," I groaned, "Not another movie about victims."
"No," he said, "this is a story about Jewish heroes. Like the Maccabees, only better."
The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance.
I knew of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, yet it seemed to stand alone in the popular imagination as the only moment in which organized opposition took root. Yet I have learned that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the impulse to fight back was everywhere: from the streets of Vilnius to the forests of Bialystok, even unto the concrete slabs of Sobibor and Treblinka, thousands of Jews doing whatever they could, whether seeking refuge in the sheltering woods or recklessly taking up arms against overwhelming odds.
Learning of these defiant acts awakened in me something utterly primitive and deeply personal, a wave of awe, humility and admiration.
And outrage, too. Why, I wondered, had I not known these stories while growing up? Could it be that the necessary commemoration of six million dead had so eclipsed the struggles of those who survived and how?
This story needed to be told.
Those of us who make films are forever searching for heroes. More often than not they're imaginary. Luke Skywalker battles the Galactic Empire; Frodo Baggins duels with the Dark Lord. We have Spider-Man, Batman and Iron Man, but few ordinary men. The closer one looks at real-life heroes, the less they conform to the simple verities Hollywood finds easiest to peddle.
Of the Bielski brothers (portrayed in "Defiance" by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell) it was said "they were like blocks of wood." They were miller's sons, raised wild in the woods. Uneducated, unsophisticated, casually violent, sexually predacious, fiercely loyal, at times murderous, at times merciful, they were the least likely of leaders. Yet these flawed men confronted daunting moral decisions - whether to seek vengeance or to rescue others, how to recreate a sense of community among those who had lost everything, how to keep faith alive when all evidence was that God had turned away - and gradually, reluctantly even, they rose to the task, discovering in themselves something extraordinary.
We began filming their story in August 2007 in Lithuania, just across the border from Belarus, where the brothers built their hidden camps. Dwarfed by pines so immense and thick the sunlight rarely penetrated, we worked from dawn until dark, never growing accustomed to a perpetual half-light so dim even at midday that we needed super-fast lenses to gain enough exposure to shoot. Most mornings a low-hanging fog would rise from nearby bogs, enveloping us and chilling to the bone. Arriving on the set before first light, hundreds of spectral figures, dress extras clothed in tatters, with blankets wrapped around their heads, would huddle together for warmth. These hollow-eyed men, women and children seemed to suggest we were not only presuming to honor the dead, but conjuring forth their spirits as well.
To work at northern latitudes is to be acutely aware of winter's approach. By September there was frost on the ground. By mid-October we were knee-deep in snow. By November dawn wasn't until 8 a.m., and the pale sun began to fade by 3. Despite our sophisticated outerwear, we were always cold. Yet for three long winters, with subzero temperatures and a mind-numbing wind off the Baltic that brought Hitler's assault on Russia to a frostbitten halt, the Bielski partisans wrapped themselves in skins and rags, braved starvation and dug burrows into the hillsides, living like moles.
If it can be said a director's job is to create an aura of verisimilitude, then it was as if my work were being helped by an unseen hand. There was no need to instruct the actors to shiver; they were shivering for real. Nor did it require any conversation about Stanislavski to communicate a motivation as simple as survival.
Whether an actor was digging a trench, peeling a potato or loading a weapon with frozen fingers, the story was telling itself. And so, while looking through the camera, I would sometimes drift off, projecting myself into the scene I was filming. Inevitably, as I imagined myself standing sentry in the icy twilight on lookout for German patrols, I couldn't help but ask myself a single humbling question: How would I have fared in the forest? Would I have dared go into the forest at all?
Directing a film inevitably becomes personal for me. This one, though, felt as if some private boundary were breached. The faces of the local extras looked like my face, their bodies were shaped like my body. Even their East European inflections sounded familiar. And when the grown sons of the Bielskis visited the set, and sat laughing or crying while telling stories about their parents, I couldn't help but stare. Because these loud, funny, warm, rough men were utterly recognizable. They reminded me of the Uncles. And suddenly I remembered when, as a high school assignment, I had recorded a series of conversations with my "other" grandfather (my mother's father, an upstanding dress manufacturer) only a year before his death.
There, amid a remarkable narrative of his traumatic flight at 14 from Poland, was his description of several brothers and sisters who had stayed behind. "All of them lost," he whispered, "all sent to the camps. Except for one, that is. A tough character, that brother, a vildi chaya, a brawler. He wanted to fight. He went to the forest. And we never heard from him again."
As I compared his faded photo to those I had collected while researching the film - drawn faces clutching captured weapons in the Russian snowscape, staring bravely into the lens - I was struck by how much they resembled one another, and it occurred to me that here was yet another Uncle in the family mythology. Was he, I wondered, the real hero of the bunch?
I was born two generations removed from the depredations of the Holocaust. And the odds of my fighting back, had I been there, are overwhelmingly - six million to a few thousand - against it. Yet I have come to understand that resistance has many faces and continues long after the fighting has stopped.
Scholars struggle to preserve history by writing books, archivists create museums to raise consciousness, memoirists bear witness, reopening old wounds in the belief that in pain is the preservation of memory. Keeping faith, it can be said, is yet another form of resistance. Meanwhile, songwriters and novelists (and filmmakers, too) dramatize events of long ago, believing their art can bring the dead to life, if for only an hour or two in our imagination.
As December blew into Lithuania, the forest became a fortress of snow, as impregnable to filmmaking as it was to enemy assault 60 years ago. It was time to go home. On the first day of filming I had pasted into the inside cover of my script the fading daguerreotype taken at Ellis Island that accompanied my grandfather's application for citizenship (abnegating "all allegiance to the Czar of Russia").
Staring at it in the frozen night I couldn't help but feel he had been with me all along, and that I had made this film to affirm the connection between my safe, assimilated life and the lives of those hardened, proud relatives of my childhood.
As they had done for so many others, the Bielskis had led me home.
Edward Zwick, the director and co-writer of "Defiance," made "Glory" and other films.
Ellie