In their current roles, Liev Schreiber and his half-brother Pablo play schemers clawing toward what passes for success. Liev just won a Tony as a sleazy, gum-chewing real-estate shark in the Broadway revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross." In the Off-Broadway hit "Manuscript," Pablo is more cerebral but just as cutthroat as a manipulative Yalie jockeying for status in this celebrity-driven culture.

On this day, they are sharing a table at Manhattan's Bond's 45 before their evening performances. Liev, 37, with the snaky mustache and close-cropped hair his role requires, just has to walk across Broadway to the Jacobs Theatre. The shaggy-haired Pablo, 10 years Liev's junior, will manuever his BMW motorcycle downtown to the Daryl Roth Theatre just off Union Square.

Sons of Tell Schreiber, a West Coast actor and acting teacher, the two rarely saw each other, "except once when he was 6 and I was 16 and then when he was 16 and I was in 'The Tempest,'" Liev says. When Pablo graduated from college, he moved to New York to find himself labeled "Liev Schreiber's younger brother."

Carving out his own niche

Since then, he's been diligently striving to supplant that label with his own credentials, notably in the recurring role of corrupt longshoreman Nick Sobotka on HBO's acclaimed series "The Wire." His next film, "Into the Fire," is scheduled to open in the fall. Establishing himself as an actor - and a brother - has been "both fabulous and frustrating," Pablo says.

Liev became a star with the trilogy of "Scream" movies. More important to admirers of his craft, he has done substantial roles in a half-dozen of the Public Theater's Shakespeare productions, as well as the 2000 movie of "Hamlet" with Ethan Hawke. He has been praised as one of his generation's foremost Shakespeare interpreters on both sides of the Atlantic.

Also lauded for his versatility, he has tackled modern-day rhythmic wordsmiths Harold Pinter ("Betrayal" on Broadway in 2000) and now with "Glengarry," David Mamet. In September, he will make his directing and screenwriting debut with "Everything Is Illuminated," based on Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel. The story, set in Ukraine, reminded Liev of his heritage on his mother's side, he says. Elijah Wood stars.

The Schreiber brothers have worked together only once, in Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," with Liev starring as brainwashed antihero Raymond Shaw and Pablo in a minor part.

"It wasn't until I got a job on 'The Wire' that I felt comfortable even being in the same room with him professionally," says Pablo, who lives in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

"Wow, you're more neurotic than I am," Liev says affectionately, before confessing reservations of his own. "I was this greedy little egotistical actor worried I'd have to share." He also reveals personal insights. "I was used to being alone in my life, and I was paranoid about new relationships."

Nonetheless, mutual admiration has blossomed between the two siblings. "We like each other," says Pablo.

Liev, who lives in the East Village and upstate, describes their complicated family dynamics: "My mother had three boys before she met Tell. Pablo and I share a sister with a different mother than either of ours." After his parents' divorce when he was 4, Liev's mother, an artist, brought him to New York, where she sometimes drove a cab before moving to an ashram in Virginia.

Hippie moms

Pablo grew up on the West Coast. His mother is a Hakomy body-based psychotherapist, which he describes as "a love-based counseling helping people deal with their emotions in non-Freudian ways."

"She's a hippie!" exclaims Liev, quickly adding, "My mom, too." Apparently, all the parents. "Why do you think we have so many half-siblings?"

Growing up with his father absent, "I was drawn to whatever he did because I was trying to get closer to him," Liev says. "I was really, really curious when he finally came to see me in a play in college. It was awful, and he didn't pull any punches, but he was also very, very encouraging. He was just glad I was in the arena."

The day before the brothers' dinner date, Tell Schreiber returned to the Pacific Northwest after seeing both of their shows - and discussing Liev's with him.

"They have a meeting of the minds around every show," Pablo says. "But we don't talk about acting. I did have him around when I was growing up. Acting was what he did, what he talked about." When Pablo was in high school, Liev began to make movies. "It seemed to be the family line," Pablo says, "and, I thought, one to be avoided."

Pablo and Liev don't talk about acting, either. "The questions I pose are about my career," Pablo says, "and he's been incredibly helpful. When I was still in college I asked him for help, if he knew someone and would set me up. He said, 'Is that how you want to start?' and I thought about it, and it wasn't. The subject was never broached again."

Afraid he wouldn't make it

Says Liev: "I was worried about Pablo when he got out of school and came to New York. I knew him as this little kid in Seattle who was a good ballplayer but otherwise seemed really innocent. I was afraid he wouldn't make it. So I've been most impressed that he went right to work. And I could see he had the stuff."

Some things are still daunting to Pablo. Although he has done an occasional Shakespearean role, "I don't have a burning desire to do that. Maybe that's because I've been spoiled by watching him do it," he says, nodding toward his older brother. "But also [I'm] a little scared."

"He'll do Shakespeare, lots of it," Liev says firmly. Sharing what he calls "a little trick," he says, "If you do the right playwrights, not only do you get something from the play as an individual artist, but the audience does, too - and on top of that, they think you're smart. There's nothing like playing Hamlet to make people think you're terrific."

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

Glengarry Glen Ross's ruthless real estate salesman has become a surefire prizewinner. Liev Schreiber's got the Tony Award to prove it.

The distance between Ricky Romas on Broadway is one and twenty years, and the difference between Joe Mantegna and Joe Mantello is Liev Schreiber, who just snarled out a Mantello-directed Roma that took the Tony for Featured Actor in a Play — as did Mantegna's equally vicious Roma in the original 1984 edition of Glengarry Glen Ross.

David Mamet has given the stage many vivid characters, but Roma — top dog and point man among the pit-bull realtors in his Pulitzer Prize play — is the only one that wins Tonys.

"In all fairness, I should say — and it's probably the worst thing an actor could say," Schreiber said in the press room immediately after his Tony triumph, "Glengarry Glen Ross was the first Broadway show that my father took me to, and I saw Joe Mantegna in the part. I'm not afraid to say, if I could have ripped Joe off, I would have ripped Joe off."

A week or so later, after the heat of victory had subsided to room temperature, Schreiber was still singing — full out — the praises of his predecessor. "He sent me a card recently. It was just such a terrific treat because he's a hero of mine. I don't know that I would be acting today if I had not seen Joe Mantegna play Ricky Roma. He sent me a note saying, 'People often say, "I know how you feel," but in this case I really know how you feel.'"

Director Mantello also really knows, having said that if he still acted, Roma would be the role he'd go for. It definitely bonded him with the actor he picked to play the part. 

"I didn't know Joe, really, before," Schreiber admitted. "I took the job because they told me he'd be directing it. I said yes because of Joe. It wasn't the play or anything else. It was Joe. I admired his work and always wanted to work with him. We worked really well together, too. We could complete each other's sentences. It was like that. I always knew, within a split second, what he wanted and where he was going. And he always knew, within a split second, what I wanted and what I was going for. So it was kind of a wonderful, seamless, symbiotic relationship — the kind you wait your whole life for."

Plus, how many actors get to win a Tony for a role that turned them into actors in the first place? Like Medea and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum's Pseudolus, Richard Roma could become a given Tony role — although he has never been a sure thing, if only for the competitive barks and bites coming from the other corners of this Mamet-made kennel of hustling real-estate hucksters. Mantegna had to arm-wrestle co-star Robert Prosky for the prize, and Schreiber got a good run for the Tony from deskmates Alan Alda and Gordon Clapp.

When a reporter asked Schreiber if he had been afraid that the Tony vote would be split because so many Glengarry guys were going for it, he took a commendable high road: "I consider it a great compliment and great honor there were so many of us in that category."

Happily, there was more than the illusion of reflected glory for the rest of the Glengarry gang (Frederick Weller, Tom Wopat, Jeffrey Tambor and Jordan Lage) in the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance and the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

"I don't know that I've ever been in an experience theatrically that was so reliant on the ensemble jelling in the way that we do. Many times in a play there's one person who carries the show. Part of why the text of this play is so wonderful is because it is truly an ensemble piece. There's a buoyancy created by the exchange between the characters. It's wonderful to feel — I don't know how to describe that to someone, but, as an actor, to be suspended in the air by six other cast members is a remarkable feeling. It never drops."

Some would find it ironic that now, just as a Tony tops his 12 years of acting, he's busily opening new windows, adapting and directing a film of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, "Everything Is Illuminated." Schreiber finds it inevitable and not entirely incompatible: "It makes sense to me. The greatest thing I learned about directing was an appreciation for acting. I think I needed that. I've been acting so much that I had kinda lost touch a little bit with what it was that was so wonderful about it. Glengarry certainly brought that back."

Playing Orson Welles (to Emmy-nominated effect, in the HBO movie "RKO 281") also pointed him in this new direction. "It certainly made me feel old — he'd done everything I'd done by the time he was 23 — but also made me feel it could be done. As an actor, I've always thought like a director. Acting, for me, has always been about supplying the demands of the scene so you look at the play as a whole, understand what it needs and then figure out how you fit into that rather than thinking about it as a character who's looking for a world to inhabit. My philosophy is the play's the thing."

True to his name (Schreiber is German for "writer"), the 37-year-old actor is keeping his writing hand in, adapting a play by a Yale classmate, Charles Evered, called The Size of the World. "Basically, it's about a homeless guy who reinvents himself, based on Dale Carnegie's 'How To Win Friends and Influence People.'" Carnegie's modus operandi would seem to be 360 degrees from Glengarry Glen Ross, but not at all to Schreiber.

"Primarily what Dale Carnegie was writing about was sales etiquette, and it is typically American that this became cultural etiquette because sales is such an integral part of American culture. If you take that to its farthest conclusion, which I think Mamet does, it eventually corrupts and goes into something horrible because it's not really culture — it's sales. Dale Carnegie started by saying, 'Make sales about people,' and eventually Mamet comes to the conclusion, 'Make people about sales.' It brings it back home, in a sense." 

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Seeing the Light
What happens when one actor (Liev Schreiber) directs and another (Elijah Wood) leaves his furry feet behind?
Everything is Illuminated

by Tom Roston

IT JUST SEEMS… weird that it was the underappreciated journeyman actor Liev Schreiber—who often gets more recognition for his stellar theatrical performances than his spot-on supporting roles (A Walk on
the Moon, The Sum of All Fear) on film—who scored the rights to the highly hyped, and very lucrative, literary novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002). Why didn't Scott Rudin jump on this? Where was
Anthony Minghella? Sorry, guys, Schreiber got there first. Almost four years ago, months before the novel had even been published, he read a short story by Jonathan Safran Foer and was floored by the
humor and compassion with which the author depicted a young Jewish-American man's madcap travels with a couple of locals and their slobbering dog in the contemporary Ukraine, as he seeks to understand
his grandfather's experiences during the Holocaust. As it turned out, Schreiber had been working on a script with a similar theme, inspired by the death of his Jewish grandfather, who had grown up in the same region. The 37-year old actor set up a meeting with Foer, who told him the story was part of a much larger novel, to which Schreiber quickly optioned the rights. It took more than two years, but last summer, Schreiber turned his screenplay adaptation of the novel into his directorial debut, shooting the $7 million film in the Czech Republic and the Ukraine, with a cast made up predominantly of locals (including newcomer Eugene Hutz, see sidebar) and Elijah Wood in the lead role.

PREMIERE figured it would be fun, and at least marginally appropriate, to discuss Everything Is Illuminated with Schreiber and
Wood at Russian Samovar, the renowned restaurant in midtown Manhattan. PREMIERE arrives to find Schreiber and Wood already sharing a small carafe of ginger vodka, discussing Schreiber's current workload, which includes eight performances a week in the Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross (for which he will win a Tony award two weeks later), as well as the editing of Illuminated. Schreiber sports a smartly clipped mustache, which he grew for the play, as well as a nicely tailored blue suit; Wood who sits next to him on a banquette, wears a dress shirt refurbished with a ghostly stake-in-the-heart image.

Schreiber insists on blinis and chicken noodle soup (he's nursing a cold), and Wood wants to try the stroganoff. Everyone present is a foodie, but our readers may not be, so we'll spare you the multiple ruminations about the food and Schreiber's soliloquy on the history of Jewish cuisine and the dangers or eating aspic. Suffice it to say, as Schreiber does, that by the end of the evening, everyone's satiated, content to be "drunk and full of pickles."

PREMIERE: Liev, how would you describe your movie?
SCHREIBER: I wanted to make a film like the films that I love.

Such as?
SCHREIBER: I've always been a huge fan of Terry Gilliam and Emir Kusturica films. I love strange, fun, wonderful things. And I love rides, and this story lent itself to that—an insane road movie.

A Jewish Holocaust road movie, right?
SCHRIEBER: Yeah, that's the backdrop of it, and there is a really strong tonal shift in it, but I love that about both the book and the movie.
WOOD: Whenever I would describe it to people, I'd describe it the way that Liev just described it, as a kind of self-discovery road movie, set in the Ukraine, And I've never thought about the Holocaust element. It's there, but as much as it's describing that event or making a comment on the Holocaust as a whole it's really just about what his grandfather went through and that little village. And there's no bigger picture.
SCHREIBER: What I like about what Jonathan did is he took a new perspective on the Holocaust. He took a very personal perspective on it, and he never went for the big political overview. He said, "What was it like for one man's life, and how did that affect his family, generations later?" And that's what's compelling to me. Because I had a grandfather—like many Jewish people—who wouldn't talk about the Holocaust. We're supposed to revere it, and we're supposed to celebrate all of the people who died, but what I was concerned with this film is, what about the people who survived? What did they go through to survive? And how did it affect what is contemporary Judaism? You had the Eastern European immigrants coming [to America]
with huge chips on their shoulders, going, "That will never fucking happen to me again. I will control the economy, I will control my neighborhood, I will control my life, I will control my family." 

These aren't issues that come up when discussing the typical Hollywood product. Elijah, how do you feel, after the fame of The Lord of the Rings, that you're returning to your indie roots of The Ice Storm?
WOOD: I don't know if I have any roots, really. I rather like floating, to be honest. As an actor, I always want to do something
different, I always want to move on and challenge myself. 
SCHREIBER: I think that, because of The Ice Storm, people are used to seeing Elijah as this kid, and not many people realize that he's gotten older since then. And he's a very strange guy, you know. I mean, he's a very strange cat.
WOOD: [laughing] I can't believe he just called me a strange guy.
SCHREIBER: I mean that in the best possible way.
WOOD: I know, that's what's beautiful.
SCHREIBER: Well, there's this assumption about him that he is this sort of ingénue-ish sweet young…and he's really very weird. And I think that people are going to see it in the next couple years, with the kind of choices that this guy makes. They're going to see a really interesting actor emerge.

And what are we about to see an interesting director emerge? As a first-time director, what was your darkest night during the production?
SCHREIBER: I think it was a critical mistake for us to shoot a huge big dialogue scene on the second day of shooting. Eugene was just not prepared.

That's pretty early.
SCHREIBER: I mean, well, we weren't prepared, not just Eugene.
WOOD: Which shoot?
SCHREIBER: It was the one in the car. With the rain…
WOOD: Oh, yeah.
SCHREIBER: We lost that whole day and we had to go back and get those close-ups like three times.
WOOD: Yeah, that's right. Scene 71.

"Scene 71." That's not one of the early scenes in the movie.
SCHREIBER: No, it's the hardest dialogue scene in the movie. But there was no other way to get that [because of the budgeting
schedule], before I had warmed up to what it was, before anyone had warmed up.

You didn't get what you wanted?
SCHREIBER: We had pieces of it but we didn't have it.

Did you realize you didn't get it, Elijah?
WOOD: Well, by the… yeah. –ish.
SCHREIBER: The problem was that the stuff we had that was good didn't match the other stuff. The clouds came over, and then by the time the scene was working we had a different sky.

Did you just want to pack it in?
SCHREIBER: Can't. You got all these people invested and you got all this energy, moving forward; you just can't. It's like stopping a show in the middle or stopping a play.. In my case you stop killing yourself and you rely on the people who know what they're doing.

I noticed you had Matthew Libatique [Requiem for a Dream], a great director of photography, on board.
SCHREIBER: He is just amazing. I think he's as much responsible for that move as anything. This guy was willing to put his ass on the line to achieve what I wanted. And I didn't understand, `cause I didn't know him, and he didn't particularly like me very much, and I wasn't very nice to him. But every day this guy would put his ass on the line to achieve these impossible shots that I had written. And he would beat himself up if he didn't get there. But in reality, he got there every fuckin' time with cranes and all this insane shit. I mean that guy lit up this forest in the middle of the Czech Republic, with these balloon lights that he just pulled out of his back pocket. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

You sometimes hear that local crews can be hard to work with.
SCHREIBER: They were great, they weren't the problem. No, it was me.
WOOD: Noooo.
SCHREIBER: It was me. No, I mean we were working eighteen-hour days. We shot everything in that script.
WOOD: Considering the budget that we were working under and the time frame that we had, that is such an ambitious fuckin' task.
SCHREIBER: It was downright stupid.
WOOD: And we did it. We fucking did it.

As the director, what's the difference between your day and your actor's day?
SCHREIBER: I was violently jealous of them. Sitting around having really attractive Czech makeup artists applying makeup to them. And they had guitars, they're sitting out in the fields singing. I'm flipping out. Trying to figure out how the viewfinder works. And these guys are like, "Woo-hoo!" And I want nothing more than to be in a makeup chair having a latte.

But will you go back to directing?
SCHREIBER: I don't know. I mean, that's kind of like asking a woman in the midst of a Cesarean if she wants to have another baby.

Quite often, eventually she says yes.
SCHREIBER: Eventually she says yes… probably.

WASHINGTON Liev (LEE'-ehv) Schreiber is running on fumes today.

He slept only an hour and a-half last night because once his four-month run in "Glengarry Glen Ross" ended on Broadway, he had to hop on a plane to Washington to promote his movie "Everything Is Illuminated." It's Schreiber's first time directing and writing a movie.

Ross (NOTE: this should read "Schreiber") told A-P Radio that he can sense there's something he needs to decompress from, but he "doesn't have the time right now."

He says the trick is not to look back. He says if he stops to realize what he'd just gone through, he'd "probably faint."

"Everything Is Illuminated" opens next month.

Back to Top

Liev Schreiber is best known for his roles in such movies as "The Manchurian Candidate," "The Sum of All Fears," the "Scream" trilogy, "The Daytrippers" and "Big Night."

Now he's moving into the role of filmmaker with the upcoming "Everything Is Illuminated," the big-screen adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel about a young man searching for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Schreiber wrote and directed the movie, which stars Elijah Wood and opens in limited release Sept. 16. (It comes to Washington on Sept. 23.)

Schreiber will be online Monday, Aug. 29, at 1 p.m. ET to answer questions about the film and his career as both an actor and director.

Washington, D.C.: Off topic, but I have to ask:

I read that you're slated to work on a re-make of "The Omen." Aren't you a-scared of messing with a classic? (I know, I know, you got this with "The Manchurian Candidate" and never dreamt folks would have the same concerns about "The Omen.")

Liev Schreiber: Yes, always scared of messing with a classic, but like "Manchurian Candidate," the updated "Omen" promises to be timely and exciting.

_______________________

Hampton, Va.:

How was Elijah Wood selected? Did you consider other actors and if so, who were they?

Liev Schreiber: When Jonathan Safran Foer and I started to talk about making this film, it was in the fall of 2001, shortly after Sept. 11. I told him that part of the reason I loved his book so much and wanted to make this film was because I wanted to present a different kind of American character, especially to international audiences. I had been working in Europe and given the events of the past few years, we were not exactly popular. Also, there seemed to be a lot of cliches about Americans, which is probably the fault of our own media. But the idea behind "Illuminated" is that we presented an American who was vulnerable and innocent and open and, more than anything, searching for his roots beyond the boundaries of his own country.

It seemed like that kind of American character could maybe bridge some of the gaps we had created in the last decade or so. I had considered other actors but ultimately felt that Elijah represented this the best.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: I am a big fan of the "Scream" trilogy and your character Cotton. I was wondering how you got the part in the film and what impact the trilogy has had on your career.

Liev Schreiber: It's had a lot of impact. It's probably the most recognizable film I've ever done, which is ironic because I was only in it for a couple of minutes total. I think it definitely gave me a leg up in the business.

I had done a film for Bob Weinstein, who was the head of Dimension, called "Phantoms." And he asked me if, as sort of a favor, I would do that.

_______________________

Alexandria, Va.: Liev, I caught you in "Phantoms" the other night on TV and I gotta say, you make a very effective and creepy villain. Any chance we'll see more of your dark side in upcoming movies?

Liev Schreiber: I'm looking for a comedy right now. After "The Omen," I think I will have done enough of the dark side for a while. "Glengarry" really made me eager to do some more comedy.

_______________________

Chicago, Ill.: Loved you in "Glengarry" -- did you spend time in Chicago? You seemed to have nailed a certain personality type that was spot-on.

Also, what advice do you have for those auditioning for MFA acting programs?

Liev Schreiber: First of all, thank you. No, I haven't really spent much time in Chicago at all. I worked off some recordings I had made of Chicago natives.

In terms of the MFA program, pick audition material that is appropriate to you and that you enjoy performing. More than anything I think it's the pleasure you find in performing that really comes across.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: Are there any problems involved with directing and shooting an actor like Elijah Wood who is famous for one particular role? Did you find yourself cutting anything because it looked too canned, or too Frodo-y?

Liev Schreiber: No. I was most influenced by Elijah from a performance that he gave on a film called "The Ice Storm." I enjoyed his work on "Lord of the Rings," but it played a very small part in my decision to cast him.

_______________________

Cleveland Heights, Ohio: Hello. How did you come to know Jonathan Safran Foer (or, do you?); when did you first read the novel?

Thanks for your time.

Liev Schreiber: Before the novel was published, I read an excerpt from it that he submitted to The New Yorker to be a part of their new writers fiction series. I was asked to do a reading of the piece by The New Yorker. And I was so taken with it that I asked them if I could meet him.

We met at a bar and found we had a lot in common, similar backgrounds and similar stories. He agreed to let me make the film out of the book. We spent a considerable amount of time together.

_______________________

Peter, Chicago, Ill.: Enjoyed your documentary/narration work very much.

Can you talk a little about some of your favorite narrations? Especially enjoyed the documentary on the 1980 Olympic hockey team.

Liev Schreiber: I think my all-time favorite is a series of shows for WGBH called "The History of Rock-and-Roll," which is, I think, probably the best music documentary I've ever seen. I also enjoyed "The History of the CIA." Very creepy but really insightful.

_______________________

Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.: You're among the top five actors in my book -- one of the few whose movies I watch for your participation, even if I'm not necessarily interested in the movie itself. OK, enough gushing: Why did you get into acting? Did you have a career goal or path before this? Thank you.

Liev Schreiber: No, no the gushing is good.

I studied animal behavior and playwrighting in college. I suppose if you combine the two, you end up with acting.

_______________________

Portland, Ore.: So much of what made the book special was Alexander's marvelous broken English. Did you do anything to bring that humor and absurdity across in the film?

Liev Schreiber: I agree; for me, Alex's malaprops and cultural eccentricity is the heart of the film. A lot of Jonathan's lines were lifted directly from the book. I hope you'll like, they crack me up.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: Off-topic...

You just completed the Broadway run of "Glengarry Glen Ross," which, unfortunately, I could not make my way up to NYC to see.

I'm a big fan of actors who do both stage and screen ... what appeals to you about each medium, and do you have plans for any future stage roles?

Liev Schreiber: Yes, I will absolutely be doing more plays. I share your enthusiasm for both.

I love the immediacy of performing live. The reaction and the presence of the audience is an instant reward that can sometimes take up to a year with a film.

_______________________

Bethesda, Md.: Liev,

Was is at all intimidating playing Orson Welles in "RKO 281," especially in regards to "Citizen Kane"?

Liev Schreiber: Very intimidating. I've always been a huge fan, my family as well. Very, very large shoes to fill -- literally.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: If we are continuing the gushing, I would like to speak up that you are truly one of my favorite actors! What made you decide on "A Walk on the Moon"? I would assume part of it was the fantastic cast and Tony Goldwyn....

Liev Schreiber: That's true, but like most of my choices, they had something to do with my grandfather. For me, "Walk on the Moon" was my grandfather's story. The character that I played reminded me very much of my grandfather Alex.

_______________________

Sonny Bono Memorial Park, Washington, D.C.: Was the author heavily involved with the film? Was he present on the set at all, giving notes?

Liev Schreiber: He did vist the last day of shooting and the last few days of shooting. I think he was just so tickled to see things he had imagined, to see them as actual, physical, tangible objects. But no, he didn't give any notes.

_______________________

Los Angeles, Calif.: I thought your performance in "The Manchurian Candidate" was outstanding. That movie really got under my skin.

It seems like you got to work with some fantastic talent in that movie. Is there one movie or piece of work that stands out in your minds as the most enjoyable or the one that you are the most proud of?

Thanks.

Liev Schreiber: I think "Walk on the Moon" is probably a favorite of mine. And I also feel very nostalgic about "The Daytrippers," Greg Mottola's film.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: How did you prepare for your role as Orson Welles?

Liev Schreiber: Basically I collected all of the footage of Orson that I could find, including guest appearances on shows, home movies and every film he'd ever acted in. And then watched "Citizen Kane" about 15 times.

There were a couple of books that I found interesting, one was the one by Peter Bogdanovich, "Interviews with Orson Welles," as well as "Rosebud."

_______________________

Ohio: Are you going to film both stories as part of the movie -- the realistic search for the mysterious woman, and the magic realism story of the old European village? Who will play those parts?

Liev Schreiber: One of the decisions I had to make in order to make the film was to narrow down the narrative. So our film features primarily just the road trip between Jonathan, Alex, Grandfather and Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr. We had limited resources as this was an independent film. I also felt distilled into that journey are a lot of the wonderful, fantastical elements with the story of Trachimbrod.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Off topic but bears mentioning: Your narration for the HBO Sports documentaries are really excellent. How familiar are you with the stories you narrate before laying down your narration? Keep up the good work.

Liev Schreiber: One of the things I love about those documentaries is it's like going to school. You learn something new every time. They're really fun to work on.

Sometimes I see the script several weeks ahead, sometimes several hours.

_______________________

Chicago, Ill.: I was in NYC in June and made a point of seeing you in "Glengary Glen Ross" and really enjoyed your performance. I first noticed you in "A Walk on the Moon" and have admired the way you seem to stay out of US Weekly and the like. Do you want to do more Broadway in the future? More directing and writing? More blockbusters like "The Manchurian Candidate"? A little bit of everything?

Liev Schreiber: A little bit of everything, but right now I think a lot of sleep would be in order.

_______________________

Oakton, Va.: What is your strategy or plan on how to balance working on small/independant movies, to the big budget ones?

And are there certain types of movies you just don't see yourself doing?

Liev Schreiber: I don't really have a strategy as far as doing independent films vs. big budget. I take the work where I can get it. Obviously the better it pays, the easier it is to take theater roles and smaller films. So you have to walk the tightrope, walk the line a little bit. Rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

Before "Glengarry" I probably would have said porn, but after I grew the mustache, I thought it looked good.

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Arlington, Va.: Looking at your filmography, I notice that except for "Kate and Leopold," you haven't done that much comedic work recently. Has that been a conscious decision, or has the opportunity just not presented itself?

Liev Schreiber: Opportunity has not presented itself, and it's something I would really, really love to correct.

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Washington, D.C.: Hey, Liev. Big, big fan. Any plans for you to reprise the John Clark role from "The Sum of All Fears" in another film based on a Tom Clancy novel?

Liev Schreiber: Write a letter to your local Congressman and I'll do it.

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Mark, Cleveland Heights, Ohio: Speaking of "The Daytrippers," (which I truly loved), it was a wonderful example of ensemble acting in a film: how does "ensemble" work compare with roles where you are either an isolated character or, indeed, the one carrying the narrative?

Thanks.

Liev Schreiber: It's actually much more pleasurable. "Glengarry" was certainly a great example of ensemble acting, and I agree, so was "Daytrippers." It's nice to feel like you're all ganging up on the script, and it's also nice not to carry the whole responsibility for the film.

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Washington, D.C.: Saw you in "Glengarry" last weekend, and was convinced by my companion to wait by the stage door to get your autograph, which I normally don't do because it makes me feel pushy, stalker-like, intrusive, etc. But enough about me, how do you feel about "fan" behavior? Does it make you uncomfortable being approached by people you don't know? (Thanks for the autograph, by the way).

Liev Schreiber: Autograph-seeking fans are pushy, stalker-like, intrusive, etc.

Just kidding. You'd be stupid not to know where your bread's buttered.

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Newport News, Va: You've worked with quite a crowd of actors in the past, i.e. Denzel Washington, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Alda. What was it like working with them?

You're one of the greats yourself, by the way.

Liev Schreiber: Thank you. And you know, for me working with all of these people has been like going to school. It's a continuing education for my whole career. Each one brings their own sort of unique style and sensibility to it. I had a really smart director once, Carol Rice, who told me, "Steal don't borrow." And I try to at every opportunity.

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Annapolis, Md.: Hey Liev -- I'm not sure if you're doing this discussion from Washington, D.C. or not -- but when you visit our wonderful city, what places do you frequent? What's your favorite restaurant in the area? Mind meeting me for cocktails?? Thanks!

Liev Schreiber: I haven't been in years. But I remember going to a fantastic Ethiopian restaurant, 10 years ago, when I was working in Baltimore at CenterStage.

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NY: Hi Liev,

You were great in "The Manchurian Candidate." There was one scene, though, with the mother and son, that seemed a bit too close for comfort, when Streep's character ran her hands over her son's torso. Did that come out as it was intended?

Liev Schreiber: I think it made me feel uncomfortable about the nature of the relationship between Raymond Shaw and his mother. I'm not sure if that's what Jonathan Demme intended, but it made sense to me.

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Silver Spring, Md.: Liev, might I say ... you are a talented and handsome actor! But one question -- do you ever regret doing "Kate and Leopold"?

Liev Schreiber: No. Je ne rien regrete pas!

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Mt. Lebanon, Pa.: With all the talent, technology, and billions available to the American entertainment industry, how come most of the product is the same slick, special effect, noisy, self-promoting crapola? Ugh. I can't tell you how awful that stuff is.

And if you're not making that you folks are making the endless sequels of somebody else's fine work. Don't any of you high flyers want to make tasteful, significant, lasting and ORIGINAL works of art?

You know what movie I watched last night on TV? "Sunset Boulevard." Nope. Not the remake Glenn Close is reportedly working on. The ORIGINAL.

You know what DVD I last watched? "Dr. Strangelove."

Top that! When you do, I'll return to the theatre.

(The last time I went to the movies was to see "Angela's Ashes.")

Tip: No one's ripped off Faust recently. Maybe someone should make a boddice ripper out of it.

Thanks much. HLB

Liev Schreiber: Please go see "Everything Is Illuminated." I'd love to hear your opinion ... honestly.

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Washington, D.C.: I loved your work in "Spring Forward" -- which I think is one of the best movies no one has ever seen. I wish it had had a wider distribution.

Liev Schreiber: You're right. In fact, you're one of six people who saw that movie. I'm related to five of them.

I loved it, too. Thank you.

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Newport News, Va: Liev,

You're an excellent actor, each time I watch "The Manchurian Candidate" I am just as blown away by your performance.

Now I am really looking forward to "Everything Is Illuminated," especially since I went to Germany for my first time this summer.

I don't really know what to ask ... I just really appreciate your work as an actor and am looking forward to your work as a director.

Liev Schreiber: Thank you.

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Liev Schreiber: I wish I could sit here and chat with all of you for hours. Unfortunately, we are leaving for San Francisco in a few minutes to continue the press tour for "Everything Is Illuminated."

Thanks for your support, and I hope to see you at the movies.

Best always.

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WASHINGTON - For four months, Liev Schreiber did eight intense shows a week in a Broadway production of "Glengarry Glen Ross." At the same time, he was editing his film directing debut, "Everything Is Illuminated." How did he do it? The profanity in the play helped. 

"It was incredibly cathartic after spending eight hours in an editing room being frustrated by the filmmaking process to be able to go out and say the 'F' word 104 times," Schreiber told AP Radio.

Schreiber followed his Broadway run with a promotional tour for the film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer's rollicking 2002 novel about an American in Ukraine searching for clues to his family's history. The book is at turns magical, hilarious, tragic and absurd — hardly a neat complement to the ferocious confrontations in "Glengarry Glen Ross."

"I can sense that there's something that I need to decompress from, but I just don't have the time right now," Schreiber said. "I think the trick is not to look back. If I stop and realize what I've been through, I think I would probably faint. Right now the idea is just to keep moving forward."

"Everything Is Illuminated," which stars Elijah Wood, opens in October.

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Liev Schreiber Is Illuminated 
The actor and first-time director’s real-life roots journey to Ukraine parallels the action in his adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel. 

by Curt Schleier - Special To The Jewish Week

Roots journeys back to the Old Country — real and fictitious — are all the rage in the Jewish community these days, so when Liev Schreiber’s film, “Everything is Illuminated,” opens next Friday, it will be the culmination of a fateful series of events that began in Ukraine over a century ago. 

It is where his grandfather was born. It is also the birthplace of Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandfather. Both set out in search of their roots, in different ways. Foer journeyed to Ukraine and wrote a fictional account of his journey. Schreiber took parts of the book and made a film of it — and then took a journey back to Ukraine, as well. 

Chapter One: In Which Schreiber’s Career Is Explained 

Schreiber, 37, is an actor of considerable repute. He studied at both the Yale School of Drama (MFA, ’92) and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. About a decade ago, he launched a Joseph Papp, Shakespeare-centric theater career (more on that later), followed by a successful run in movies: “Ransom,” HBO’s “RKO 281” (as the young Orson Welles) and the teen “Scream” pictures, among others. 

He also played Mischa, the prizefighter, in the Holocaust film “Jakob the Liar” and Marty Kantrowitz, the TV repairman/cuckold in “A Walk on the Moon.” 

But effective Sept. 16, when “Everything is Illuminated” opens, Schreiber won’t be just an actor anymore. He’ll enter the pantheon of Show Business Achievers; he’ll be a hyphenate: actor-screenwriter-director. 

Chapter Two: And So The Interview Begins 

Schreiber is on the phone from his dressing room at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. It’s 40 minutes before curtain, before he performs his Tony Award-winning role as Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Normally his pre-show ritual is to take a nap. And certainly, if anyone is, he’s entitled to doze off. 

For the past months, he’s been working 16-hour days putting the final touches on his film mornings and afternoons and then rushing to the theater at night. However, he has a lot riding on the reception, so a few minutes less sleep is the price he reluctantly is willing to pay. 

Chapter Three: Why Liev Loved His Grandfather 

Schreiber was born in San Francisco, moved to Canada when he was just a year old and then to New York after his parents divorce. Growing up, he was very close to his grandfather, Alex Milgram. 

“He came to this country when he was a young man, before 1920, before the [Second World] War,” Schreiber says. “He was a butcher, and when my mother and father split up there was a very difficult custody battle. My grandfather spent his life savings to help my mother win custody.” 

Milgram was an old-fashioned, Reform, socialist Jew and his mother, Schreiber says, was a hippie. “She believed in all that deep stuff and that money wasn’t cool and that you should live off the land. And when you live in New York, living off the land means driving a taxi.” Which his mother did. 

Mother and son at times lived in flats that didn’t have electricity or hot water, but they always had books. 

And while Schreiber (his father was not Jewish) was not a bar mitzvah, he remembers going to Grandpa Alex every year for a seder. Another memory Schreiber conjures: a visit to the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn, where Alex had a friend. 

“He [Alex] pretty much raised me as if he was my father, and in many respects he was my dad.” 

Chapter Four: Fate Lends A Hand 

“I didn’t know much about him, and after he died [in 1993] I tried to find out more,” Schreiber says. He was largely unsuccessful but nearly completed a screenplay vaguely about him. In it, a young man goes to the Ukraine to try to find out more about his grandfather and what it was like to be raised there. He falls in love with a prostitute, who persuades him to help retrieve her daughter from the local mob. Eventually he’s robbed and left penniless. It was, he understates, “a very dark story.” 

But then Schreiber was shown an advance copy of a Safran Foer short story about to be published in The New Yorker. It was the basis for what became the award-winning (including the National Jewish Book Award) and bestselling book, “Everything is Illuminated.” 

“He had accomplished in 50 pages (of the short story) what I had only grazed on in 107 (in my screenplay). What he had done, and I was unable to, was keep that sense of the grandfather present.” 

The book, a post-modern marvel according to most critics, has funny chapter headings, switches back and forth in time between the present and the shtetl, and has a protagonist named Jonathan Safran Foer, who goes to the Ukraine to see if he can find the woman who may — or may not — have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. 

Reading the short story, Schreiber saw the similarities between Foer and himself and Foer’s work and what he wanted to accomplish. He saw potential. “I think I laughed and then I think I felt jealous. I immediately saw the possibilities for the film.” 

He loved the full book, as well, “as a piece of literature. I found it insanely hysterical and really moving. I started to plot out the film as I read the book, and immediately saw it as a road movie.” 

Chapter Five: Taking A Leap Of Faith 

Foer liked Schreiber’s body of work and happily sold him the film rights. And the process, according to Schreiber, was easier than it had any right to be. The screenplay came easily, he says, and is more based on the original short story than the book as a whole. The shtetl portions were eliminated and, as a result, the film is more linear. 

Still, it seems a tough sell for a first-time director, the equivalent of someone who works out on the climbing machine at the “Y” deciding he or she would try the real thing — and starts off by trying Everest. The movie had to be shot overseas (it was filmed around Prague) with many unknown actors whose English was limited. 

Potentially more troubling, a central character of book and film is a dog, named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. Schreiber admits he had some trepidation about whether he could pull it off. 

“I was absolutely frightened. I was constantly terrified. I was most terrified that I wouldn’t finish and someone else would tell the story first.” 

Chapter Six: The Film And His Grandfather 

“One of the things I did while I was on the scout [looking for locations] was to mimic the journey Jonathan took and tried to find the town where my grandfather was born. I never did find it, but the entire experience brought me closer to him. The whole film was motivated by my desire to learn more about him. And I feel much closer to him just thinking about him all the time for the two years I was making the film.” 

Chapter Seven: A Quote For The Film’s Ads 

“‘Everything is Illuminated’ is luminescent” — Curt Schleier, The Jewish Week. Schreiber makes it work. He captures both the humor and pathos of the book. And while he made a change at the end (to mention it would spoil the film for people who read the book), it works. 

Chapter Eight: What He Learned 

“So much has changed,” Schreiber says. But he already knows he came away with a better knowledge of those members of his family who survived the Holocaust, and the impact it and generations of anti-Semitism had on them. 

“A lot of Jews came to America with some very heavy burdens, both emotional and physical.” He talks about the “guilt of surviving” and how hundreds of years of anti-Semitism may be responsible for the “JAP, the girl who doesn’t want to look Jewish and has blonde hair and a nose job.” 

Beyond that, he says, “I just finished the film, and I think it will take a couple of months for the impact to sink in.” 

Chapter Nine: Finally, We Go Back To Shakespeare And Joseph Papp 

One of the things that the late Joseph Papp introduced was free Shakespeare performances for New York area school children. Classes would be bused to the theater and often the kids reacted the way kids react to Shakespeare and were disruptive. 

Schreiber (he’s told this story on TV) remembers one day when a group of yeshiva bochers were brought in. He recalls feeling a sense of pride, convinced the other actors would be impressed with how well behaved there’d be. One of the kids in particular caught his eye. 

“Every time I looked at him, he’d give me the finger.” 

Apparently, not everything is illuminated.

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Liev Schreiber on Choosing Locations for “Everything is Illuminated:” The press notes for “Everything is Illuminated” state that Schreiber wasn’t able to film in Ukraine. However, as we all know, you can’t believe everything you read. Schreiber confirmed he did shoot in Ukraine and joked about the press notes. “They lied. No, I did get some locations in Ukraine. I didn’t spend a lot of money in Ukraine so it doesn’t make it into the press notes. I went to Ukraine to scout and the way I chose to do that was to mimic the journey that the characters made in the book, which was in fact my own journey. I basically went to look for my grandfather’s [village], which was called Thomasspiel and is somewhere along the north-south route between Kiev and Odessa.
I took with me as close of a match to ‘Alex’ [the guide in the story, played by Eugene Hutz in the movie] as I could find. 

We met this Ukrainian DP - a club kid - and he was just insane. He had huge pompadour hair and they swore he was a good cameraman. He wore these old lady Boca Raton/old lady Jewish sunglasses and huge bellbottoms with croquets. And they were like, ‘Well, Liev, we thought it would be a good idea to take a camera with [you] because we were going to be in Ukraine.’ And I just felt like the movie was a road trip and I wanted to steal as much footage as I could, because I felt like that would definitely work. We hadn’t shot anything yet and I felt that would definitely work in the movie, just to stick a 35 mm camera out the window of our van. Somewhere I knew we could use that footage.
They sent me this guy and he was fantastic and didn’t speak a word of English, which made it very difficult because my translator was Russian and some Ukrainians don’t always like speaking Russian which is strange because they’re all supposed to speak Russian. We basically mimicked the trip, which was fun for me and very informative. I got a lot of ideas of how the comedy worked from hanging out with this guy. And the footage that he shot is in the movie.”

On Directing Someone Acting Out a Trip He Made Himself: “I wish it was surreal. There was nothing surreal about it. It was painfully real the entire time. The only surreal thing that happened was in the very beginning of post production I had this idea, actually had this dream about this field of sunflowers and finding a way to reveal Lista’s house. I knew that, for me, that had to feel at least emotionally and spiritually like some sort of a pay off. When you arrived at that house you had to feel that you had arrived somewhere magical. So I had this idea about putting her house in the middle of a sunflower field.

It’s a great idea, but how do you do it? We looked around and we met with sunflower farmers and we learned that sunflowers basically only last about a week and a half. One thing that Matty Libatique, the cinematographer, suggested, ‘Am I wrong that sunflowers follow the trajectory of the sun?’ And we were all like, ‘Oh yeah, hmm, sunflowers follow the trajectory of the sun.’ Which actually makes a huge difference when you’re thinking about are they going to face camera or not.

We couldn’t find a farmer that had a huge field that was willing to let us carve a huge swath out and build a house that was big enough. [Production designer] Mark Geraghty and [producer] Tom Karnowski came up with the idea, ‘Why don’t we grow our own?’ As if it was that simple and all of us film types with our green thumbs were going to grow sunflowers.

We rented this colossal field, huge field, and Matty went out into the field and took a compass and followed the trajectory of the sun. He used an almanac and he found the week we would probably be shooting that sequence. And I said, ‘Well, s**t, okay, we’re not going to do it in a sunflower field. I can see that. I have to think.’ I’ll go along with this because it’s a really nice idea and everyone seems to be really invested in it, but in my head I’m planning that we’re actually going to Lista’s house in a hayfield. That’s what we’ll do. So we shoot for about a month and a half and I forget about the sunflowers and one morning they drive me to the set to take a look at the field and they were all smug and smirking because they know what they’ve got. I’m convinced that, ‘Okay, s**t, I’ve got to be ready to replan this.’

We drive up and it was just exquisite. They had planned it to a day. The next morning the sunflowers sagged and were brown. We put the Pegasus up at the base of the road for Eugene to walk up the road. We did that for 3 or 4 hours and it probably won’t mean as much to you but how miraculous it was to me sitting there. Here’s the crane and here are the sunflowers, from the morning that we were shooting that scene, for the entire three hours, the sunflowers started facing this way in the morning. We started shooting at about nine, they hit here and for three hours they were just like this [straight up]. It was sublime.”

Liev Schreiber on Shooting Half of "Everything is Illuminated" in Russian: “I’m a big fan of Emir Kusturica’s movies and what I think he always accomplishes with such specificity is the credibility of place and character. I think it’s very important in a film like this, particularly because it’s a stranger in a strange land story, basically, that place has to be really wonderful and credible. For me that meant hiring real people, as many as I possibly could and letting them speak their language. It was more important to me that they felt and looked real than that they were actors, which I think was rather naïve. But I think it worked for me. It really, really worked for me. It took much longer because I had a hard time communicating with them. 

When I eventually did communicate, then you had to deal with the vertical learning curve of acting, which none of them had done before really. Not none of them. Some of them were actors, but the majority of them were not.
I just think there is something about human beings, we are intuitive about people. We know if they are who they say they are. If it’s a really great actor, there is a suspension of disbelief. But when it’s the person, it’s truly powerful - to me, at least. You see by the dirt under someone’s fingernails, by the color of someone’s teeth, by the redness of the skin. You know they are real. You can hear it in their voices.”

Liev Schreiber on Casting Elijah Wood: “Elijah is amazing and he grew up making films. He has an incredible vocabulary of film. He knows what’s going on, always. He’s very, very aware of the camera, marks, the needs of the day, and the schedule. He’s very, very proficient and he’s very, very professional. That was a bonus because I had to spend so much time with the other actors, I needed someone who could figure out what’s going on and find his place.

The reason I hired Elijah is because Jonathan [Safran Foer, the novelist] and I started talking about this movie in the fall of 2001, right after September 11th. I had been working in Europe a lot and was hearing a lot of frustrating and derogatory things about Americans. Not that I had really identified with being an American, but when you find yourself abroad you realize, ‘Oh, I am American.’ And it becomes acute. I don’t blame them because I think for the most part they were responding to the media that we inundate them with. The clichés and notions about who we are as a people really are ludicrous! Unfortunately, our government and our media doesn’t truly represent us culturally.

So what I was very interested in, and part of why I loved Jonathan’s book and part of what I was looking for in a lead actor, was someone who could present an image of Americans that broke some of the stereotypes and the molds. I felt at this time in our history the most important thing that we could present was a character who was vulnerable, who was flawed, who was open, who was nostalgic, who was defeatable, but more importantly than anything, looking for his own history beyond the boundaries of his own country. Part of what had moved me so much about Jonathan’s book, particularly in the shadow of September 11th, was the recognition, the awareness of the idea that the oceans are not that wide and historically we are much closer than we know. There is a short term memory to history in America and if you go to Europe, you realize that the war was fought on European soil so the people have a more acute sense of history.

In America, part of the ideology is most Americans are Eastern Europeans and Latin American and Asian. What’s an American? It’s an immigrant. Part of the ideology and the philosophy of this country, and I’m not saying it’s a bad one, in fact it’s a very effective one - it’s probably why we’re the number one economy in the world - is that we come here and we reinvent ourselves. What I liked about Jonathan’s book, to homogenize with the American nature, is at a certain point it asks you what is the cost of not knowing your history? One of the costs that became prescient to me after September 11th is we feel no connection to another country. In fact, there is a kind of continental sociopathy that develops.

I love the idea of a white Ukrainian kid who is obsessed with Black American culture and a neurotic American kid who is obsessed with nostalgic Eastern European culture. There is a future in those two. There’s a future there. For me, there is a kind of openness and sweetness in the American that I don’t think people in the rest of the world have been exposed to as an element in our character. I don’t think anyone embodies that better than Elijah Wood.”

Liev Schreiber on His Future as a Director: “My favorite quote about this is I like to say it’s like asking a woman in the middle of having a cesarean section if she wants to have another child. This was such a personal story to me. Had it not been for my own attachment to my grandfather…I had to finish. If I didn’t finish, I had to answer to my family. I don’t know if I would have if I didn’t have something like that motivating me.

I don’t understand how professional directors do this. I don’t know. This is hard work. I would look over at the actors with their lattes sitting there and pretty girls putting makeup on them and I wondered, ‘What the frick am I doing? This is awful!’ It was really awful. 500 questions a day and I’m not a terribly social person. 

It was not something I really should have done.”
Has He Made Peace With His History or Do Questions Remain: “I never found my grandfather’s village. I didn’t have time. Have I made my peace with my history? Yes, and I owe that to Jonathan [the writer] and I owe that to this experience because part of the illumination of this process for me is that a past lovingly imagined is as valuable as a past accurately recalled.”

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By Borys Kit

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In scouting "Everything Is Illuminated," director Liev Schreiber found himself on a journey similar to that of the film's main character.

The character, Jonathan Safran Foer -- also the name of the author of the book the movie was based on -- is a young Jewish man, played by Elijah Wood, who is trying to find a woman who saved his grandfather in a Ukrainian village the Nazis destroyed during World War II. Schreiber, who adapted the book and directed the $8 million film, was drawn to the story because his grandfather's village, Tomaspil, suffered a similar fate.

"I decided that a good idea for a location scout would be to mimic the trip that the characters take in the movie," Schreiber says. "We flew into Kiev, rented a van and were going to drive to Odessa to scout locations and pick up some exteriors. And I was going to try to find my own grandfather's shtetl, which is somewhere in between Kiev and Odessa."

Schreiber and a small group consisting of producer Peter Saraf and production designer Mark Geraghty embarked on the trip, but in the end, they didn't find the village.

"We were on a pretty tight schedule, and if I had spent any more time than I should have, I would be wasting (financier Big Beach Prods.') money," he says.

In the process, the filmmakers also concluded that Ukraine was not the place to shoot the movie.

"We realised it was going to be too difficult to mount the production in Ukraine," says producer Saraf, adding that despite the American dollar going a long way in that country, the film infrastructure is still evolving and it would have been too expensive to bring in crew and equipment.

The production ended up settling in the Czech Republic capital of Prague only after serious thought. "The authenticity was very important to us," Saraf says. "From the locations to the casting to the music, we knew that if we didn't evoke the place, it was going to fail."

One of the most visually dramatic scenes in the movie occurs when the protagonists find a house in a sunflower field. The sunflowers are not in the book; it was something Schreiber added, not knowing that the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine. The production found that the flower grows in the Czech Republic but also learnt a distressing fact, something that would inhibit the scene from being realised: "Sunflowers only peak for three days ... and we had no wiggle room in our schedule," Saraf says.

"I remember (cinematographer Matthew Libatique) standing in the field with a compass and an almanac to figure out where the sun would be two months down the road," Schreiber says.

"If you look in the upper left-hand frame, there's a wheat field that cuts into part of the sunflower field, and we thought 'Oh, maybe we should fill it in,' and then we thought, 'No, we'll leave it pure so no one can ever say we CGI'd it," Saran says.

Since "Illuminated" was shot, Ukraine's film industry has taken steps forward in attracting productions. A film commission has been set up in Los Angeles, and a state-of-the-art studio is being built in Kiev. The country's first independent film, "Orangelove," set during last year's Orange Revolution, will get under way in the fall.

Saran says he has "no doubt that the country will put together a vibrant film community."

And Schreiber is already planning to return to Ukraine, though for personal reasons rather than professional.

"I'm dying to go back and continue the search for Tomaspil," he says.

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LOS ANGELES - Actor Liev Schreiber says he is a changed man thanks to a search for his roots.

That may not mean much to people who do not know him, but it says a lot to friends and fans of the rising star and recent Tony award winner who makes his film-directing debut with ”Everything is Illuminated” in the United States Friday.

Schreiber, 37, has always been a chameleon with a past he says he has a hard time remembering, and his desire to play characters on film or the stage was fueled by “the root of an identity crisis” in his youth, he told Reuters.

With “Everything is Illuminated,” Schreiber set out to discover his grandfather’s history in Ukraine and ended up learning a lot about himself.

“I know I have the potential to care in the way that he did because of this film,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber calls his grandfather, Alex Milgram, who died in 1993, a “typical mensch, just a really, really decent human being” and “a very, very strong male figure.”

“I didn’t know that I possessed any of those qualities and was suspicious I didn’t,” he said.

Now, he thinks he does.

“Everything is Illuminated” is based on Jonathan Foer’s widely praised novel of the same name about a young American searching for his Ukrainian Jewish roots. In that way, it parallels Schreiber’s life.

Schreiber not only directed the film, he adapted the book for the screen.

The novel and the movie both paint a portrait of Ukraine’s countryside and its people, set against the backdrop of the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

It is a people and history Schreiber never knew growing up on New York City’s Lower East Side with a single mother in a cold water flat with no electricity.

Life in turnaround
As a kid, Schreiber was a troublemaker who stole for thrills, and it wasn’t until he began studying drama as a teen-ager that he began turning his life around. He wrote and performed his own monologues about “junkies, Puerto Rican hookers, fry cooks and orthodox Jews who sold socks,” he said.

He later was accepted at Yale University’s School of Drama for acting, not playwriting, because one of his teachers told him he had a better shot at winning admission as an actor.

Armed with a Yale degree and experience from England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Schreiber began acting on the stage and in movies. His big break in Hollywood came with the series of “Scream” horror movies that began in 1996.

But several flops and his choice of many low-budget movie roles and stage plays failed to win Schreiber wide attention from mainstream audiences.

That began to change last year when he earned praise for playing a brainwashed politician in the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate.” This spring, he won Broadway’s Tony award, for best featured actor in a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Now, it’s on to film directing which is something Schreiber said he has wanted to do for years.

“Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed with films, and I always wanted to make them,” Schreiber said.

Finding his project
He said that in the past he had been offered screenplays to direct but passed because “none of them were at all indicative of who I was as a person.”

Schreiber even wrote his own movie about a young man traveling through Ukraine who gets involved with a prostitute and becomes a target for the mob. It sounded too Hollywood.

Foer’s novel was praised for defying literary convention, and Schreiber tries to remain loyal to the book’s eccentricity.

He introduces sections of the film by showing an ink pen writing a chapter-like titles. Shifting light blurs or sharpens images to transition between segments. The story moves at a slow, contemplative pace often with little dialogue, and the musical score includes traditional Ukrainian folk music.

Early reviews have been generally positive. Show business paper The Hollywood Reporter said the film a “effectively retains the book’s warm eccentricity and gently persuasive sentimentality.”

Elijah Wood, who stars in the film as the young American Jonathan, said he took the role in large part because he was excited about Schreiber’s ideas for making the film.

“He had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do artistically, visually,” Wood said. “I wanted to be part of that vision. It seemed so beautiful and interesting.”

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By Borys Kit

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In scouting "Everything Is Illuminated," director Liev Schreiber found himself on a journey similar to that of the film's main character.

The character, Jonathan Safran Foer -- also the name of the author of the book the movie was based on -- is a young Jewish man, played by Elijah Wood, who is trying to find a woman who saved his grandfather in a Ukrainian village the Nazis destroyed during World War II. Schreiber, who adapted the book and directed the $8 million film, was drawn to the story because his grandfather's village, Tomaspil, suffered a similar fate.

"I decided that a good idea for a location scout would be to mimic the trip that the characters take in the movie," Schreiber says. "We flew into Kiev, rented a van and were going to drive to Odessa to scout locations and pick up some exteriors. And I was going to try to find my own grandfather's shtetl, which is somewhere in between Kiev and Odessa."

Schreiber and a small group consisting of producer Peter Saraf and production designer Mark Geraghty embarked on the trip, but in the end, they didn't find the village.

"We were on a pretty tight schedule, and if I had spent any more time than I should have, I would be wasting (financier Big Beach Prods.') money," he says.

In the process, the filmmakers also concluded that Ukraine was not the place to shoot the movie.

"We realised it was going to be too difficult to mount the production in Ukraine," says producer Saraf, adding that despite the American dollar going a long way in that country, the film infrastructure is still evolving and it would have been too expensive to bring in crew and equipment.

The production ended up settling in the Czech Republic capital of Prague only after serious thought. "The authenticity was very important to us," Saraf says. "From the locations to the casting to the music, we knew that if we didn't evoke the place, it was going to fail."

One of the most visually dramatic scenes in the movie occurs when the protagonists find a house in a sunflower field. The sunflowers are not in the book; it was something Schreiber added, not knowing that the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine. The production found that the flower grows in the Czech Republic but also learnt a distressing fact, something that would inhibit the scene from being realised: "Sunflowers only peak for three days ... and we had no wiggle room in our schedule," Saraf says.

"I remember (cinematographer Matthew Libatique) standing in the field with a compass and an almanac to figure out where the sun would be two months down the road," Schreiber says.

"If you look in the upper left-hand frame, there's a wheat field that cuts into part of the sunflower field, and we thought 'Oh, maybe we should fill it in,' and then we thought, 'No, we'll leave it pure so no one can ever say we CGI'd it," Saran says.

Since "Illuminated" was shot, Ukraine's film industry has taken steps forward in attracting productions. A film commission has been set up in Los Angeles, and a state-of-the-art studio is being built in Kiev. The country's first independent film, "Orangelove," set during last year's Orange Revolution, will get under way in the fall.

Saran says he has "no doubt that the country will put together a vibrant film community."

And Schreiber is already planning to return to Ukraine, though for personal reasons rather than professional.

"I'm dying to go back and continue the search for Tomaspil," he says.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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by IGN FilmForce 

September 15, 2005 - Actor Liev Schreiber, probably best known for his roles in the Scream trilogy and The Manchurian Candidate, makes his screenwriting and directorial debut with Everything is Illuminated, a film based on author Jonathan Safran Foer's semi-autobiographical/semi-fictionalized account of his journey to Ukraine to investigate the history of his holocaust survivor grandfather. Elijah Wood stars in this offbeat mixture of comedy and drama as Jonathan, an American who hires native Ukrainians Alex (Eugene Hutz) and Alex's Grandfather (Boris Leskin) to be his guides on his trip, ultimately leading to many realizations and changes for all three men. Schreiber, Wood and Hutz all took part in the recent press day for Everything is Illuminated and IGN FilmForce was there. 

Schreiber explained that he had long wanted to direct a film and how for him, Illuminated is a story with personal resonance. "My own grandfather was a Ukrainian immigrant. And when he died I began to write about him a lot and was working on a screenplay about a guy who goes to Ukraine to research his heritage." While the set up was similar to Everything is Illuminated, Schreiber's screenplay involved his protagonist getting mixed up with a prostitute and the mob, and by his own admission, wasn't quite working. "A guy named Bill Buford, who was the fiction editor at the New Yorker, asked if me if I would read a short story by a young fiction writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, and it was an except from the novel Everything is Illuminated. Bill gave it to me because Bill knew I was obsessed with Ukraine and my grandfather and he thought it would be appropriate for me. I read it and I was just completely blown away. When I eventually stopped laughing, I realized it was the film I had to make. He'd done in 15 pages what I had only touched on in 107."

Wood's uptight character Jonathan is surprised to find himself in the company of the energetic Alex, who has grown up worshipping American hip-hop culture and has adopted the look and lingo of his rapper heroes as a result. Schreiber said he soon could relate to Jonathan's relationship with Alex and the journey they go on when he came to Ukraine to research the film. "I rented a van and drove the couple hour trip from Kiev to Odessa and tried to look for my grandfather's village. I couldn't find it, but one of the good things that happened was I hired a local Ukrainian camera man so that we could shoot while we were going down there, because I had a feeling we could use that footage somehow in the film. It would be valuable because it was the trip that the characters were making. And In Kiev they brought me this guy Armand, who had huge bouffant hair and he wore like Jewish grandmother Boca Raton sunglasses and giant bellbottoms and Pro-Keds. And he didn't speak a word of English. And I thought well, this really is the trip! This is it. And the footage we shot on that trip actually is in the movie."

Schreiber spoke about some of his experiences that helped shape the part of Jonathan and led him to cast Wood. "I had been working in Europe as an actor and I'd heard a lot of disparaging things about Americans. I didn't particularity blame the people that I was hearing them from, because every night when I'd go to my hotel I'd see the media that they were inundated with, which was coming from us. So there was this sort of cliché about who Americans were that I understood but felt very frustrated by. So I felt it was very important that we presented an American character that defied those stereotypes and presented us in all of our neuroses, vulnerability, and eccentricity. That the American that we presented to these Eastern European characters was flawed. That he was vulnerable, that he was open, that he was innocent. And more importantly then anything that he was looking for his own heritage beyond the borders of his own country. And Elijah Wood fits that mold to me. There's something insanely sweet about him. He is a very very good-natured person. He is a truly kind person. I put him in some of the worst circumstances that you could put a human being in. And there were homeless guys that I hired to be in the movie because I liked the way that they looked and they complained sooner then Elijah Wood."

For Wood, it was an odd transition, as he'd just finished filming Green Street Hooligans, in which his character becomes part of a violent and brutal lifestyle that clearly would never call out to the quiet, strange Jonathan. Speaking about what it took to change gears from Hooligans to Everything is Illuminated,, Wood explained, "There was a sort of month buffer between the two which was definitely helpful. And I think actually in that month I did the two days on Sin City. But there's something about an environment that also informs upon the way you feel and the way you would acclimate to a new character. Going to Eastern Europe, suddenly I was in a completely different environment. Meeting with Liev, talking about the character, it was quieter and more intimate. So that already immediately changes things and wipes the slate clean from what you'd just done. I think had there only been a week I think it would have been relatively difficult. But there was a month of being home and being able to settle out of the one and get into something else."

Asked if he read the book upon which Everything is Illuminated is based before he shot the film, Wood replied, "I didn't and I'll tell you why. Actually I have a much better reason for it then not reading Lord of the Rings! I got to Prague and had already been developing this script and discussions with Liev and heading in the direction of what we were trying to accomplish. And then I started thumbing through the book and immediately I could tell that the structure of the book was so different to the story that Liev had adapted and the direction that he was going. And I just sort of felt like that as much as the book may have been helpful to gain further insight, I knew that Liev's vision was different and strayed slightly from the book. So that was my reason to not want to read it, to not get confused between the two different viewpoints"

Wood also said he was free to make the character of Jonathan his own and not directly copy the real author, whom he did not meet beforehand. "I met Jonathan once we'd been filming for about a month. He came out to visit the set, to see the film in progress." In the film, Jonathan has some very odd traits, including his obsessive collecting of various objects and items he comes into contact with, which he puts into zip locked bags that he neatly attaches to his wall. Asked if the real Jonathan is quite that bizarre, Wood said, "No, no, no. I don't know that Jonathan was ever as weird as that. The book is obviously a fictional tale with truth included. So I think that he even slightly embellished his own character and who he was to a certain degree. He may have embodied the character more when he was younger, because I think he was 21 when he wrote the book. So he may have embodied it more at the time, but he certainly doesn't now. But he is in his head. He's quiet." Asked if he could relate to the role, Wood noted, "I'm a bit of a collector. I keep all sorts of things, be it photographs pieces of paper that have some significance." Smiling, he added, "But unlike Jonathan, I'm poorly organized."

The big discovery in the film is Eugene Hutz. A real life immigrant from the Ukraine, Hutz has been performing for several years now in New York as the lead singer of a self proclaimed "gypsy punk" band that has acquired a cult following, but this is his first time acting in a film. Fearlessly funny and quirky, Hutz manages to steal many scenes, and Schreiber was quick to sing his praises. "He's a natural. Eugene is one of the most charismatic people I've ever met in my life. You must go see him perform on stage if you can. It's as close to rock opera as anything I've seen since David Bowie. He is a performer."

Asked if there were any difficulties in honing Hutz's performance, given his lack of experience, Schreiber joked, "Eugene's a big Charles Bronsan fan, and I had to work him down from that." Getting serious, he continued, "He just didn't understand size. He's used to playing arenas. And he's used to screaming and singing. So he just had to learn that he didn't have to project anything. And that's very difficult to learn and he learned it remarkably quickly." Hutz was quick to agree that reigning in his tendency to go big was one of his biggest challenges, "I think that was the main adjustment for me. It's really true that when you're used to playing places that have hundreds of people in them or thousands, at least the way my performance is built, it's very extroverted. It's reaching as far out of your own skin as possible, to the farthest person in the crowd. Not even letting them take a piss! It's like, 'Where are you going? There's a spiritual event here! You can't leave!' And bringing that in front of the camera, those gestures that are gigantic, they won't fit the camera. So that was probably the main thing that I had to adjust. To minimize my gestures."

Hutz explained that his director and costars all taught him a tremendous amount as they made the film. "I learned from Liev with his great thea