Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., December 03, 2009 Kislev 16, 5770 | | Israel Time: 20:15 (EST+7)
Haaretz israel news English
web haaretz.com
Jewish World Haaretz Toolbar
Diplomacy
Defense Opinion National
Print Edition
Car Rental
Focus U.S.A. Strenger than Fiction Business Travel Magazine Week's End Anglo File Books
Share |
Director's cut
By Doron Halutz
Tags: Israel news

Up until two years ago, Danny Lerner had never heard of Ninet Tayeb, but that's okay - she hadn't heard of him either. They met for the first time when he was searching for an actress for his new film, "Kirot" ("Walls"). The casting director said: "What do you think of Ninet?" And Lerner replied: "Who?" and made a face.

"I hadn't seen 'Our Song' or 'A Star is Born' [the Israeli version of "American Idol"], he explains, but since he'd already tested about 50 actresses for the part of the battered woman and still hadn't found what he was looking for, he agreed to have her come in. And then he experienced the same thing that happens to everyone who meets Ninet Tayeb: He was utterly captivated by her.

"I was in shock from her audition," gushes Lerner. "It was right on the money. The camera is crazy about her. I understood why people love her." But how did Lerner, 36, a young and relatively anonymous director, get to be the one to direct the nation's sweetheart in her first movie role?
Advertisement
"Kirot" was originally written as a 50-minute television drama. It's the first script Lerner ever wrote, and he completed it during the year and a half between getting his bachelor's degree in film and starting on his master's. "I submitted it to the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts. The feedback I got was that it was a great idea and a good script. They said they'd invest if we got a television concessionaire on board too. But no one knew me then and no one wanted to invest. So I was left with plenty of compliments, but no budget."

This rejection just spurred him on. "I thought it was a shame to waste this script on a 50-minute drama, so I expanded it to feature-length. But I knew that I needed a more serious calling card than the 25 short films I made during my film studies." He therefore delayed his work on "Kirot" and focused on "Frozen Days" ("Yamim Kfuim"), a dark and unsettling psychological thriller he wrote in the meantime.

Lerner raised $25,000: $10,000 from the Israeli Film Foundation, $1,500 from the university ("a grant for a final movie project"), and the rest he and his brother put in from their personal savings. The script, which follows a female drug dealer on her nocturnal wanderings in Tel Aviv and the identity crisis she goes through, was planned from the start to be made on a sparse budget: The nighttime setting meant filming could take place after the crew members were done with their day jobs (Lerner was working at the time as content manager for the HOT Prime television channel) and was spread out over 27 days in four months. The focus on a lone main character (Meow, played by the impressive Anat Klausner) meant there was no need for supporting actors, and made it possible to shoot with a single camera.

The crew all worked on a voluntary basis. Instead of professional lighting, they used street lamps, and when they wanted to show continuous movement, they rolled the camera on a skateboard. It was basically a guerrilla production.

And it was an artistic success: "Frozen Days" won the prize for best film at the 2005 Haifa Film Festival. The reviews were glowing: "A skilled and witty piece of work," said Uri Klein in Haaretz; "A sparky debut," enthused the American entertainment magazine Variety. Klausner's performance also earned rave reviews. Lerner decided to divide the monetary prize from the festival, which happened to exactly match the outlay for the movie, among the members of the crew. "I didn't take a single shekel of it," he says with contentment.

The film was not quite as big a hit at the box office, and only about 14,000 people went to see it in Israel. "I didn't make money from it, but from the start the goal wasn't financial, but to present it as my calling card," says Lerner. And in that sense, "Frozen Days" succeeded way beyond expectations. The award in Haifa attracted lots of attention, and Lerner became something of an emissary for independent Israeli cinema, and began attending film festivals all over the world. "I was in Sydney, Warsaw, Munich, Paris, the U.S. Anat went to Shanghai and everyone there fell in love with her. The crew became a family and went on to work on 'Kirot' together as well."

In his travels he met some of the filmmakers he most admires. "In Sydney, which was the first festival we went to, I talked for three hours with the producer of 'The Matrix.' Two hours after landing in Munich, I found myself on a boat with Terry Gilliam. Mike Figgis, the director of 'Leaving Las Vegas,' invited us to lunch and couldn't take his eyes off Anat. But the most thrilling of all for me was meeting Roman Polanski here in Israel."

Polanski is one of Lerner's favorite directors; his movie "The Tenant" was a key inspiration for "Frozen Days." "We were introduced when he came to the Jerusalem Film Festival and I told him that 'Frozen Days' drew on his work," says Lerner. "I gave him a DVD of the movie, but he didn't get back to me." Sam Raimi, whom Lerner met at a press conference abroad, was also sent a copy and wrote back a polite thank-you letter.

"Directors can be very competitive," Lerner explains coolly. Because to him, the most important achievement of "Frozen Days" wasn't' the reviews or the tributes but "the chance to make 'Kirot' with a much bigger budget."

Not just any star

Lerner describes 'Kirot' as an "action drama," a relatively under-represented genre in local cinema. It's a drama "because at the center of the film is the story of the friendship between two abused women - Elinor, who is a battered woman, and Galia, who is trafficked." And it's an action movie "because they live in a violent environment and so there is violence and action in the movie."

"Kirot" has a budget of over $2 million, raised from producers in Israel, France and the U.S.. The relatively high budget allowed Lerner to work this time for a salary plus a percentage, and to recruit a star-studded cast. Luck also played a part: Olga Kurylenko, the most famous actress on the set, was cast before she gained international fame for starring in the James Bond film "Quantum of Solace" (alongside Daniel Craig and Judi Dench) and in "Max Payne" (with Mark Wahlberg and Chris O'Donnell, both released last year.

"I met her at a thriller film festival in Cognac," says Lerner. 'I watched her work and there was something dark but inviting about her - just what I wanted for the character of Galia."

But in Israel, no one attracts more media attention than Ninet Tayeb, who is playing her first movie role here (she also contributed the closing song, entitled "My Friend"). Lerner says he wasn't worried about Ninet's glamour taking over the film. He also had no fear that the automatic resentment she arouses among those who are fed up with her ubiquitous media presence would sabotage its success. "Her being a star is a plus," he insists. "People told me that it would be referred to here as 'Ninet's movie' and I have no problem with that. In France it'll be Olga's movie and in Timbuktu it'll be Danny's movie."

Aren't you afraid that she'll overshadow you? Were you at all envious of her?

"No. If I wanted to be famous, maybe I'd become an actor. My heroes are directors, not actors. I like it better behind the camera." Tayeb is not just any star, Lerner adds. "She may not have come from the world of acting - 'Our Song' isn't acting - but she has superb timing, and she did her research. She went to a shelter for battered women to hear about their experiences. I sent her to work at a supermarket in Jerusalem disguised as a young religious woman, but she was found out after a few hours on the first day and had to leave."

Unlike the guerrilla production of "Frozen Days," an action movie requires careful planning beforehand: "You have to plan which gun each actor will fire, where you want the shot to hit; you have to coordinate everything. On 'Frozen Days' we snuck around in the middle of the night, but on 'Kirot' we had to get permits from the city and the police, put a police officer in front of every apartment building during a car chase scene to make sure no one left their apartment, and you can't fire guns after eight in the evening. Lots of restrictions."

Do you have any personal experience of the kind of extreme violence shown in the film?

"I'm not a violent person. The violence in the film is an outgrowth of the characters and this subject interested me because it hasn't been dealt with in Israeli movies. Are we just going to talk about the war in Lebanon? There are other subjects.

"The industry is very successful now and it's incredible, but where are the modern romantic comedies? The horror films? 'Sex and the City' couldn't take place in Tel Aviv? And if you're going to make a movie about Israeli-Palestinian relations, you need to find a new angle. That's why I liked 'Waltz with Bashir' - it does something new, it's exciting, it has a completely different look than anything else that was ever done here."

An anti-action movie

Lerner is a total movie freak. He keeps every movie ticket he's ever bought since 1985 in albums, up to and including a ticket for 'Frozen Days.' "I got a kick out of paying for my own movie," he says. "Just like with people who keep pictures, it gives me a feeling of nostalgia. The ticket says: I sat here in this cinema, in this seat, on this date."

Eight years ago, he began writing the cinema column in Maariv Lanoar, [Maariv's youth magazine] which is when we first met (I appointed him to the position). Since then he's been watching movies on a daily basis: On days when there are no press screenings, he goes to the Cinematheque with his girlfriend, Limor, an attorney and cinephile like him. In their apartment, the couple has a collection of hundreds of DVDs and thousands of video cassettes, the result of decades of obsessive recording.

Lerner was born in Jaffa and grew up in Bat Yam and Holon. His paternal grandfather fought in the Russo-Japanese War alongside Joseph Trumpeldor and Lerner's late father, Yosef, was named after Trumpeldor. Yosef (Joe) Lerner, who was born in Manchuria and spoke Japanese, English and Russian, was a Prisoner of Zion and spent eight years in a Siberian prison before being allowed to immigrate to Israel. "Since he knew perfect English, he was automatically considered an American spy," says Danny. Joe Lerner wrote a memoir entitled "Farewell to Russia," which was published in English about 10 years ago. Danny says he might make it into a movie one day.

The first movie he ever saw was "The Prince and the Pauper" when he was 3. His father, who was a teacher and also loved movies, nurtured his son's hobby, and started taking Danny and his younger brother Alon, now 33, to the Ramat Yosef cinema in Bat Yam every Friday after school.

"By the time I was in elementary school, I already thought it would be cool to be a film critic because you get to go to movies for free, but that it would be even cooler to make a movie than just to watch it."

He inherited his tenacity from his father. "If my father could manage to get to Israel after eight years in Siberia, I can make an action movie," says Lerner Jr. The same quality also helped him convince the authorities at Kiryat Sharett High School in Holon to let him write a final paper on director Frank Capra, despite the absence of a film studies track.

It was around that time that he started making his own movies. His father bought him a video camera "and I started shooting home movies." During one furlough from the army, he directed his first short film. "I took some friends and we shot an eight-minute horror film set to the music of 'Basic Instinct.' I called it 'Aftermath.'" While still in the army, he enrolled in a screen-writing course at the Open University "because I wanted to write. I had a lot of ideas."

After his discharge he applied to the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, but failed the entrance exams ("Later on they sent students to interview me for papers and invited me to lecture"). He didn't get into the Tel Aviv University film department either, because of a low mark on the psychometric exam. "I got in the back door. I enrolled in the multidisciplinary program in the arts (film, theater and art). There, it's all theory, not practice, but I screened 'Aftermath' on Student Day my first year there. The woman who was head of the film department at the time saw it and loved it and she told me: 'You have to transfer to our department.'" So he did.

Tawfiq Abu Wael, director of "Atash" ("Thirst"), was in Lerner's class. He says that even though they weren't in the same cliques, and although Lerner was "a quiet, introverted kind of guy," he vividly remembers some of the images he screened. "Danny was very creative and special," says Abu Wael. "There was something liberated and nonconformist in his cinematic vision. Not to compare him to Tarantino, but he also has that kind of childish view of movies: He gets excited by the action, by doing things that are more than just a story - it's a kind of childlike sophistication that's very charming."

"Frozen Days" grew out of a theoretical exercise Lerner wrote during his studies for a master's degree (which he did not complete). He analyzed the characteristics of the psychological thriller in cinema and compared Polanski's movies to the newer movies of the genre that were coming out at the time.

"A cinematic genre has to have certain visual characteristics," Lerner explains, "but if it's psychological then it's in the head. There are no typical images for psychological thrillers, so they borrow images from other genres. For example, 'Vanilla Sky' is a melodrama, 'American Psycho' is a horror movie and 'Dark City' is sci-fi. So the characteristics of a psychological thriller are more rationalistic - questioning a concept of reality, dealing with the effects of and the threat of technology, with questions of identity."

Apropos questions of identity: Danny Lerner is also the name of an Israeli-born Hollywood producer, and Lerner says people sometimes get them confused. "When I was at the Munich festival, they concluded my biography with information from his biography."

He searched for a local anchor to make the movie "Israeli" and found the connection in the suicide bombings that were occurring at the time. "I was across the street from the bombing at the Dophinarium and I felt the force of the blast," he says. I went home and I saw on television the people that I'd seen at the scene, but from a safe distance now. That event left a very big impression on me."

Cinematic or psychological?

"Both. Right at that moment I didn't understand what had happened, but afterward I couldn't stop thinking about it. I didn't sit in cafes, I walked on empty side streets because it might feel a little safer. There were days I was afraid to leave the house. To me, a terror bombing seems like the most powerful shake up of one's sense of reality. I was in the car, the boom came from behind me and made the car jump and I was sure I'd been in an accident. I got out of the car and saw that there was no one I could have had a collision with. I turned around and I saw white smoke, and then it hit me - a terror attack! At first I was focused on the smoke. Afterward I noticed: lots of people standing around not moving, as if watching a movie, and then it was like someone yelled 'Action!' and everybody was running to the scene, to get a close-up look at what had happened. The feeling of not understanding what's happening, of wondering where the reality you knew has disappeared to, of how safe you can be in your own world - that's the feeling I had after the terror attack and the one I wanted to convey in a movie."

In his 2008 book, "The New Israeli Cinema," Pablo Utin writes that Lerner "has become the representative of a lively approach to film production in Israel. An approach that says a young spirit and the means of digital technology can expand the Israeli cinematic horizons and present a genuine alternative to the yearly mainstream output of the movie funds."

This is a most apt description of the movie "Paranormal Activity" directed by Israel-born Oren Peli, which was made on an even tinier budget than "Frozen Days" and has become a huge box-office hit in America. "I applaud him for his success; in terms of the buzz and the interest that the film is generating, it's brilliant," says Lerner. "But the movie itself isn't brilliant at all. It's pretty amateur. It bored me and didn't scare me."

Does "Frozen Days" have a chance of conquering Hollywood?

"It got good reviews abroad, too, but that's a long way from someone being ready to distribute it in the United States. Peli said all the studios said no to him until someone from DreamWorks happened to see the movie and loved it. All it takes is luck and people who believe in you."

"Kirot" is a very direct movie, without the symbolism and thought-provoking illusions of "Frozen Days." Would Danny the critic say that Danny the director is selling out?

"I haven't sold out. The emphasis in the movie is on the story and not on effects. In what other action movie would you get a main character who is uncertain, dreaming, weak? It may be an anti-action movie, or an art house action movie. I took an American genre and made it Israeli. We're not competing with Hollywood action, but trying to connect on an emotional level."

Despite all the gunfire and explosions that happen in the city, there is no trace of the police anywhere in the movie.

"It doesn't bother me that people will come out of the movie and ask where were the police, because this is a question that the two characters are always asking. They understood that they wouldn't get help from the police, that's part of the film's message. The police make them victims - they either expel them or imprison them."

"Kirot" was shown for the first time in September, as part of a tribute to films about Tel Aviv at the Toronto Film Festival, in the shadow of an anti-Israeli protest by some intellectuals and actors. Lerner insists the protest didn't reach him. "All we felt was encouragement. There were lots of Jews in the audience who applauded twice during the movie."

One might think that the success of "Frozen Days" and the respectable budget for "Kirot" would mean his career is set now, but Lerner maintains that the minuscule scale of the film industry in Israel means he can't rest for a moment. "When I made 'Frozen Days' I told one of my professors that I was making the movie to help me 'break out.' She told me that in Israel there's no such thing as 'breaking out.' You make a movie, and then the war starts all over again. Now 'Kirot' is being released, and what comes next? As of January, I'm free. I'm still chasing after film foundations, always submitting proposals and not always getting anything. So I want to teach filmmaking, and if I get an offer to direct commercials, that's what I'll do. But I'll also make all the movies I want."

He and two friends already have a script written - "an adventure film for kids and the whole family." He is also supposed to direct a movie that his brother Alon is currently writing, "and I'm going to write another screenplay for a thriller that I've been researching for two years now."

Who would direct the movie about your life? Who would play you? What genre would it be?

"I would definitely direct it and it would be a psychological thriller or a crazy comedy. Maybe John Cusack would play me - He's my favorite actor today. But as much as I love movies about movies, I don't know if my life is all that interesting."
PROMOTION: Mamilla Hotel
Bookmark to del.icio.us  
 
Hezbollah, armed
Lebanon gov't lets Hezbollah keep its weapons; confirms group isn't intending to disarm.
Soccer politics
Scottish trade unions urge Celtic fans to wave Palestinian flags at match against Tel Aviv.
Special Offers
Advertisement
Eldan Rent a Car
Israel's leading car rental company offers you a 20% discount on online reservations
Award-Winning 'Obsession'
Watch 'Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West' Online FOR FREE!
Protea Hills
A Retirement Village in Nature Nestled in the Foothills of Jerusalem
Date Local Jewish Singles
Ready to meet your match? Join Jdate today!
Junkyard
Junk a car - get free towing nationwide and a tax-deductible receipt
More Headlines
18:03 U.S.: Time running out for Iran to avoid sanctions
17:01 Putin: Russia has no evidence Iran trying to build nukes
18:47 Settlers reject Netanyahu plea to respect settlement freeze
15:41 Revealed: The secret war over IDF officers' exorbitant salaries
18:41 Hamas to introduce death penalty in Gaza for drugs
19:50 Ukraine academic: Israel imported 25,000 kids for their organs
15:44 Thanks to Sarkozy, Bar Refaeli graces French magazine cover
23:18 TV ROUND-UP: Hezbollah, Hamas discuss ties; Barak meets settlers
18:39 Several killed in blast on Iranian pilgrims' bus in Syria
09:24 Israel must crack down on settler lawlessness
17:47 Man suspected of burning his children's tongues with hot knife
09:20 How ElBaradei misled the world about Iran's nuclear program
11:49 Medical marijuana supplier to High Court: Don't revoke our license
Home | TV | Print Edition | Diplomacy | Opinion | Arts & Leisure | Sports | Jewish World | Site rules |
| Advert: Recommended Restaurants | Makom: Engaging on Israel
| Search engine marketing
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
© Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved