Avi Nesher is one of the most successful and beloved filmmakers in the history of Israeli culture.
Today (Tuesday) he turns seventy, and as part of his birthday celebrations, Cinematheque Tel Aviv is organizing a comprehensive tribute to his work - from "The Band" and "Dizengoff 99", through the films he directed in America to contemporary hits such as "The End of the World Left" and "Another Story".
On the side of the celebration, Cinematheque also published a special editorial issue of its journal.
One of the articles in it is a collection of questions and answers from interviews we conducted with him and previously published in Vala!
culture on various occasions over the years.
Nesher is the type of director whose conversations are just as interesting as their films, and the dialogues with him were always fascinating and rich.
Only one thing is missing here: a conversation about "Monkey Garden", his new film, the editing of which he is completing these days.
There is something to wait for.
"I asked if my doctor had told them anything I should know"
What sentiment do gestures in your honor evoke in you?
"Last year, the Bima Theater staged a musical tribute to my films. I asked the organizers of the tribute to whom else they had paid such a tribute, and they answered - Ephraim Kishon, his memory is a blessing. In response, I asked if my doctor had told them anything I should know."
If we go through all the scripts you've ever written and co-written, what's the word that repeats itself the most?
"Rebellion. From the beginning - 'The Band' is about rebellion against conventions, against the previous generation. The original name of 'Dizengoff 99' was 'Damage' and in the first scene of the original script, Gidi Gov burns down the BCM.
There is a rebellion in 'Rage and Glory', in 'The End of the World to the Left', in 'The Secrets', in 'The Sins', in 'Another Story', in every one of my films."
"I have a constant desire for change. I consider each of my films to be the first I made, and I have never made a sequel. I advocate Trotsky's idea - the constant revolution. Indeed. The constant confrontation between the old world and the new world - old hegemony against revolutionaries and young and young revolutionaries - repeats herself from 'the band' to 'the victory picture'. However, every time I try to come up with a different narrative concept. I have a huge interest in constant change. I've always liked that the day after winning the Super Bowl, the football coach starts preparing for the next season."
"I find myself repeatedly creating films that, in their simplicity, are coming-of-age films and in their sermons are my repeated attempts to understand where I come from and where I am going. Perhaps because Israel is such a young nation and a culture that is still searching for self-definition, quite a few of the films that are made here deal with the search for definition Such. The dialectic between Israeliness and sectarianism, secularism and faith, the 'must be happy' and 'the whole nation is an army', the individual and the group. All of these create constant internal conflicts that seek harmony. Perhaps because of the years I have been involved in music, I suppose my cinematic path signifies a constant search after a combination of voices".
Another thing that runs through your work is the characters of women.
In almost all of your films women are central characters, and most of the time they are main characters.
"As a teenager, I was never one to admire Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot. My stars were Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, the educated, powerful, independent actresses. I always thought of women as equals and never saw them as different characters than men. There's the Bechdel test The famous one, that in order to pass it, a film has to present at least one scene where two female characters talk about something other than men. There is no film of mine where women don't have their own storyline. In recent years, this has become even more intense and I'm increasingly writing women as main characters, who lead the narrative and strive for change".
"There is no film of mine where the women don't have their own storyline."
Avi Nesher with Joy Rieger in the filming of "The Victory Photo" (Photo: Iris Nesher)
"I've been wrong in everything possible in my life, but not in casting"
You worked with the best actors and actresses in Israel.
In some cases, you also discovered them and them.
Can you tell us about your approach to casting and directing actors and actresses?
"I've made mistakes in everything possible in my life, but I almost never make mistakes in casting. This is the thing I do in the most careful way, because you can't make mistakes in it, and I can't think of any casting mistake I've made along the way. Here and there there were people who behaved in a less sympathetic way than I would have liked, but they did their job to the best of their ability. Actors are part of my extended family."
"I think the most important quality in an actor, at least for me, is the courage to go to the darkest and most secret corners of a given character. Interesting cinema requires testing new territories, and to me an actor is not someone who should do the director's bidding but a worthy and true partner in the creation, someone who becomes a part important from the thinking process and design of the character."
This year we celebrate your seventieth birthday.
Next year we will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which you experienced as an Israeli army soldier. Did this trauma affect your work as a filmmaker?
"I will repeat something I have already said: I do not repeat the same film twice.
The failure of the 'concept' in the Yom Kippur war is the reason I refuse to believe in concepts.
I'm not fixed, I don't use formulas, I don't work within genres, and I've never made a sequel, despite repeated requests.
When I rehearse with actors for the shoot, no word is sacred.
I remember the meetings before the war, the arrogance and excessive confidence.
Since then, the word that scares me the most in the Hebrew language is 'close'.
Therefore, I check myself every day six times in every direction."
"Francois Truffaut once said that the scariest thing in cinema is that the film will always be less successful than you dreamed. The only question is how much less successful. I treat each shooting day like the Entebbe operation. Everything is planned down to the last detail. From Yom Kippur I learned that we can all be too safe or Too arrogant. Therefore, before each shooting day I have a list of estimates - what will disrupt the shooting day. Every day I sit with the assistant director for the next day, and we make a list of what will go wrong. For years I have been doing this, not out of paranoia but out of Pure love and complete dedication to the film. This obsession brings me, of course, to constant anxiety during filming, but also to a kind of spiritual transcendence, and therefore I think that I make films that do not play according to the dictated rules of play of tragedy or comedy, but on the level of life itself, where anxiety sometimes meets transcendence and lives with it in one subjugation."
"You have to find what is tolerable."
From "Another Story" (Photo: Avi Nesher)
"When you live in a place where there are essential existential contradictions, radicalization can reach very dangerous places"
In your first films, religion is hardly present.
From "Secrets" onwards, this is a central theme in your work.
Where did it come from?
"The research officer in me very much experiences the reality in which I live. In 'The Band', religion plays a very small role in Israeli reality, although Uri Zohar appears for a moment as a repentant, and there is a signal of things to come. At the time, the main struggle in Israel was the question of whether we are a progressive country or conservative; if we remain fixed in the socialist space, as the old establishment wanted and therefore also forbade the arrival of the Beatles, or we align with the West. At the time, the debate was not yet between religious and secular."
"In the Israel of the 21st century, the real challenge is not us and the Palestinians. The more serious problem is that religion has never been separated from the state, and this leads to an inevitable conflict - because religion is inflexible, it cannot compromise. People like you and me are sure that our path is right? Even religious people We are sure that their way is correct. This is what 'Another Story' is about. There is no one in it who is completely right, and you have to find what is tolerable. It is not for nothing that this is the word with which the film ends."
"When you live in a place where there are fundamental existential contradictions, extremism can reach very dangerous places. After all, a prime minister has already been murdered here because of a very particular point of view. My small contribution to this matter is to try to create a dialogue. In Jerusalem, where Israeli films are not watched very often, not only That 'Another Story' was the most successful film at Cinema City, but the audiences were mixed. It was seen by both religious and secular people - together. It's a phenomenal achievement in my opinion."
"When a critic writes that it's an 'audience film' it's so stupid to me."
Avi Nesher (Photo: Reuven Castro)
"I didn't want to destroy the books of Oz, Yehoshua and Grossman"
What is your opinion on the separation that is sometimes made between "film for the audience" and "film for criticism"?
"I really believe in the audience. When a critic writes that it's an 'audience film' it's so stupid to me. Who is the audience? It's the one who saved you in open heart surgery, who designed the building you live in, who teaches philosophy at the university, who very skillfully drives the taxi you ride in , who is charged with maintaining order and the law. This is a very large group of people, armed with life experience, insights and diagnoses no less sharp than the skilled film critics. At the same time, as a former film critic, I strongly believe in the great importance of the film critic and, at the same time, in the dialogue between the critic and the creator. I enjoy reading what is written about my films and sometimes even discover insights that I myself had not thought of. I also believe strongly in film theory as a solid foundation for a film work, as the saying goes - 'the end of the act is the first thought'."
"In other words, I have a great faith in art that believes both in the legitimacy of the work's exposure to criticism - and in the need, the duty in my opinion, to play a real role in the fabric of the identity of a given society. For me, this belief is also valid for other arts, and not only for cinema. What What I respected in AB Yehoshua and Amos Oz, peace be upon them, is that they did not write for a drawer. They wrote for the readers. They wrote about important things with wonderful and eloquent writing, but one that should be read."
Why have you never adapted a book by these authors?
"Because I have enormous respect for them, and as soon as you turn a book into a screenplay, you change its DNA. It's like going into someone's house and moving all their furniture. Hitchcock rightly said that only mediocre literature allows for excellent cinema. At the time, I was offered the 'A story about love and darkness' and I didn't want to, because I knew that any film based on it would be redacted, which indeed happened. Producing an adaptation of the book is something that was on the agenda many times, and the only time it came to fruition for me was with 'Once upon a time', but then Amir Gutfreund and I worked like in jazz: we both worked at the same time on the same materials. He wrote a book about it, and I wrote a screenplay."
"I don't like getting up at four in the morning, and I don't like telling people what to do, and I don't like being told what to do."
Avi Nesher (Photo: Reuven Castro)
"I wasn't very successful in all kinds of things. Not a good enough musician, not a good enough basketball player"
Do you enjoy making movies?
"No. I don't like getting up at four in the morning, and I don't like telling people what to do, and I don't like being told what to do. I enjoy working in the fellowship before filming, but in themselves, I don't like having a very stressful ticking clock, and production people who inevitably point on the same clock and make it clear that it must be finished quickly. In the filming of 'The Band', I said 'action' so quietly that Gidi Gov exclaimed 'What is this?!' Rehearsing for months and allowing each actor to improvise as much as they want and test each idea. Because I see the actors and crew members as full partners in the creation, my favorite periods of time in cinema are the months of preparation for filming, in which you can allow all those creative partners to contribute to the complexity and versatility of the film. I started my way as a writer, but in the end I chose cinema. One of the reasons for this was that it is a collective art that allows for different, sometimes contradictory, perceptionsto function within a given narrative, and that's how it is in life itself, isn't it?"
You grew up as a teenager in America and went to middle school there.
You probably know the song "The Road Not Taken".
There must also have been a phase in life where you could have made a different choice, followed a different path, and become something other than a director - what was that?
"Perhaps I could develop as a research officer in intelligence, go in an academic or intelligence direction, intellectual decoding. I was not very successful in all kinds of things. A musician is not good enough, a basketball player is not good enough, but in cinema it works differently, and that is what is wonderful about it for me. The art of a director It's to get the best out of whoever he works with. I'm a less good photographer than my photographer, a less good actor than my actors, and so on, but I understand enough about music to get out of my composer the best work he can write."
Excerpt from the movie "The Victory Picture" (United King)
"Out of embarrassment, I said something stupid to Ephraim Kishon"
Your films have also spawned Pantheon soundtracks.
Can you get us back to work on them?
"Before I write a script, I must decipher the music that will make up the soundtrack. After all, music is the most emotional of all the arts, and in order to understand the dominant emotion of a certain script, I must understand its music. While writing, I play to myself a selected playlist that varies from a movie to the movie, which of course after a few weeks makes the neighbors beg me to change the music a bit."
Let's go back to the starting point.
We started the conversation with a mention of the late Ephraim Kishon.
What did you learn from him?
"Kishon is one of the most important creators in the history of Israeli culture. He is an immigrant who came to Israel and reinvented the Hebrew language. He continued Ben Yehuda's enterprise. When I was filming 'The Band' at Herzliya Studios, he was there filming 'The Fox in the Chicken Coop' and was kind enough to come and explain to me how to direct. When our films came out, mine succeeded and his failed and I felt terrible. I called him and out of embarrassment I said something stupid to him - 'I saw your film and it's not that bad'. There was silence for a moment and he told me in a Hungarian accent 'I saw yours, and also He's not that bad.' He added something difficult that I think about often - 'If I didn't like my film, I'd fix it in the next film, but I love my film and yet it failed, so I guess my time is up. You know, That I will not make any more films'. Indeed, he did not continue to direct."
"I believe you should make personal films that speak to you."
Avi Nesher with his partner, the photographer Iris Nesher and their daughter, the journalist and filmmaker Tom Nesher (Photo: Rafi Deloya)
"When my film fails, I don't say the floor is crooked"
Was there ever a point where you thought about retiring too?
"I believe you should make personal films that speak to you, but at the same time you must also create a dialogue with society and culture. When my 'Rage and Glory' came out in the mid-eighties, it failed, and I'm not one of those dancers who blames the floor, I saw it as my failure, And I didn't forgive myself. There were months when I thought I might want to do something else, but as fate would have it, and following this film I got the call inviting me to create in Hollywood, so I didn't have time to ponder those thoughts.
"As a young film critic I had a strange obsession with recent films by directors I really liked. Most recent films are not good films, and as someone who has yet to make even a first film, this is a phenomenon that absurdly worried me. Years later I saw the last film of my favorite director More than any other director, Robert Altman, 'The Guide to Village Life', finally won me over. This is not only a wonderful film, but also a prophetic farewell film - not only to the cinema but also to life itself. In its final scene, Death appears, in the form of a glamorous Hollywood star , and accompanies the heroes of the film on their way to the next world. The year the film was released, Altman passed away with a good return. A good end."
culture
Theater
Cinema news
Tags
Avi Nesher
Ephraim Kishon
the band
Dizengoff 99
Another story