september / october 2005:

liev from new york
With a Tony Award and more than 35 film credits already under his belt, Liev Schreiber does what every actor wants: he directs. And in the process of adapting a popular novel about seeking out one’s past, he rediscovers his own. by Victor Wishna


he string of four-letter words spewing from Liev Schreiber’s mouth would make David Mamet proud, and not just because he wrote them. From anywhere in the Bernard Jacobs Theater, it’s easy to see how Schreiber’s animated, profanity-laden portrayal of a shyster real-estate salesman in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross won him the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The Associated Press described the production as “obscenely exhilarating.” New York Times critic Ben Brantley likened watching a performance to “having espresso pumped directly into your bloodstream.”

As for Schreiber, well he calls it “the most relaxing part of my day.”

Emerging from his dressing room in a white undershirt, gray flannel slacks, Adidas flip-flops, and the amulet of “Lucy, patron saint of salesmen” that keeps the admittedly superstitious actor connected to his onstage persona, Schreiber seems perfectly unperturbed. Soft-spoken and polite — quick to flip on the air-conditioner when a visitor makes a tactless comment about the backstage ventilation — he sinks peacefully into a chair, as though he hasn’t a care in the world. Either that, or he’s just completely exhausted.

“The biggest challenge of all this has been the hours,” he says. “Try to imagine a year and a half of 14- to 16-hour days without a day off. That was surprising to me, and awful.”

The “all this” Schreiber refers to is the project that has consumed his offstage life for almost two years: the film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which Schreiber is directing, using a screenplay he wrote, and which opens in theaters this month. Before every show — he performs on Broadway eight times a week — Schreiber can be found at his laptop, reviewing digital scans of the film, editing sound, inserting music cues. After each performance, he scurries off to meet his director of photography or work on color correction until three in the morning. Even intermission offers precious moments of opportunity. “They’ll call five minutes [to places for Act Two], and I’m still on the computer making notes,” he says, shaking his head.

Filmed last summer in and around Prague, Everything Is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood as Foer’s semi-fictionalized self, a young Jewish American who travels to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. For first-time director Schreiber, who has built his acting reputation with a diverse range of screen and stage roles and whose own Jewish grandfather emigrated from the Ukraine in 1918, the project represents not just a professional debut, but a very personal journey.

“This has been so intense because this whole process has been about trying to understand my own history through that of my grandfather’s, an exploration of that part of me that I don’t know enough about, of wanting to know more about being Jewish,” he says. “It has to be this way — films are so phenomenally difficult to make that unless you’re personally motivated, there’s just no way to survive it.”

Isaac Liev Schreiber was born in San Francisco in 1967. After divorcing his father, actor Tell Schreiber, his artist mother, Heather, brought three-year-old Liev to live with her in New York, where, he says, he was practically raised by his maternal grandfather. Unfortunately, though, he recalls very little from those early years.

“I have always had what I consider a pathological memory problem,” he says. “It didn’t really worry me until I was in my 20s — and I became aware that I really didn’t remember much from before the age of 16.” When his grandfather passed away, his first time losing anyone so close, Schreiber was struck with anxiety at the thought that he might eventually have no memories of him at all.

So he started writing things down. As an actor, Schreiber had learned that he was able to remember things by reciting them back to himself. He began writing more and more about his grandfather — at first, just the facts he remembered. “But in writing about him, I became interested in his past, and what it meant to me to be of Ukrainian and Jewish descent.” That began a fascination with Eastern Europe and his own connection to that part of the world. His journaling eventually turned into his first original screenplay, a semi-tragic tale of a young man who travels to Kiev to discover what it means to be Ukrainian. But as Schreiber’s acting career soared ever higher, the screenplay sat, awaiting revisions.

Then, in 2001, while participating in a reading series sponsored by The New Yorker magazine, an editor gave him a copy of a story entitled “The Very Rigid Search,” about a young American traveling to the Ukraine in search of his grandfather’s past. At the time, Schreiber had no idea the story was part of an unpublished novel by a previously unknown author named Jonathan Safran Foer.

“I was bowled over by the similarities in terms of the story and the idea,” Schreiber says, “but even more impressed by the quality of the writing, the humor he had done it with, and the compassion. He had been able to retain the source of his searching, which was this dedication, curiosity, and love and loyalty toward family and history.”

He also felt the story contained a message that was contemporarily relevant, perhaps even urgent. Working in Europe in 2001 and early 2002, Schreiber says he had become frustrated by the average European’s opinion of the American character — learned largely from American-created media. “We project these images of ourselves which are kind of destructive,” he says. “What I loved about Jonathan’s book is that he was offering a version of the American character that was open, vulnerable, fraught with anxiety, and, more important than anything, looking for our history beyond the borders of our own country. We have so little sense of history nowadays, people forget how recent everything is. This is a relatively young country, and what is an American? An American is the son of someone’s son who came from somewhere else. That connection and that sense of history is important for people to remember, especially now.”

Schreiber met Foer at a local bar and, over drinks, they discussed their grandfathers, the Ukraine, and what it meant to be Jewish. Schreiber left with the number for Foer’s agent and a pretty good idea the rights to the story would be his.

“Liev’s extremely charismatic and it’s very easy to get caught up in what he cares about and I really trusted him straight away,” admits Foer. “I had no idea what he was going to do with the book, but I knew that he cared about it and whatever he did would be a reflection of that caring rather than any other motive one might have for making a movie.”

Inspired, Schreiber wrote his script in a month and a half, finding the satisfaction his first attempt never delivered. “A week later, I open the New York Times and there’s Jonathan’s book on the cover of the Book Review,” he says, “and I realize, ‘holy sh*t — I might actually be able to get this made.”

In his script, Schreiber has stuck to the novel’s present-day storyline of a young man’s Ukrainian heritage quest with the assistance of a linguistically-challenged guide, Alex, Alex’s grandfather, and their dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Fans of the novel will notice only references to the magical, mythical scenes of the Trachimbrod shtetl that comprise the other half of Foer’s book. And, without giving too much away, Schreiber has added a significant twist that reflects his own curiosity with “what the repercussions of surviving the Holocaust are on someone emotionally and spiritually.”

“They had to survive, and what did they have to do to survive?” Schreiber asks. “That was where I wanted to steer my interpretation of Jonathan’s book. To survive, to live, is heroic to me. But when you break it down ... probably most horrible of all, they had to deny faith. They were not allowed to be spiritual people in order to survive.

“My whole sense of being Jewish for me comes through my grandfather. For me, it had always been a cultural thing, and I was curious about that — at what point was faith taken out of the formula? I’d always been aware of older Jewish people’s reluctance to talk about the Holocaust. It occurred to me that that was somehow connected to the lack of faith in our family, somehow there was this huge transition that occurred in the middle of the 20th century where Jews stopped being religious.”

Nonetheless, Schreiber says his Jewish identity is something that has always given him comfort, allowing him to feel closer to people, to justify his sensibility. His favorite Jewish tradition, one that he has always sustained with his extended family, is the Passover seder. He says he loves the “Old Testament rhetoric” of the Haggadah, in particular the part “where they talk in very mathematical, pragmatic terms, about who’s son was who’s son, was who’s nephew, was who’s daughter, and it goes all the way back to Adam,” he says. “In Jewish culture, we’re constantly reminding ourselves and our children of our history and our connectedness, that we are related to other human beings, that we are bound by time and love to all human beings.”

Everything Is Illuminated is a road movie, a sometimes funny but more often touching one, about those unbreakable connections of family and shared history, and also about the bond that can grow between the least likely of people. Despite the epic theme of the movie across time and space, this is at heart a small, independent film (backed, with a small budget, by Warner Independent Pictures). Most of the “action” takes place inside a 60-year-old broken-down Trabant sedan. The sense of place is inculcated with sweeping views of the Eastern European countryside and an infusion of the Russian music, old and modern, that Schreiber has always loved.

On set in Prague for the 42 days of principal photography, Schreiber found himself relying largely on instinct and the skills that he was perfecting each day. “The learning curve has been totally vertical,” he says. As an actor, he has had the benefit of observing skilled directors at work, and he can identify with other actors — “though I kind of shot myself in the foot by hiring non-actors,” he says. Joining Elijah Wood, of Lord of the Rings fame, is Boris Leskin, a Russian-born actor who once worked as a messenger, and Eugene Hutz, lead singer of a New York-based Ukrainian Gypsy punk band who had never before acted in his life — and who steals most scenes with his instinctual eccentric portrayal of Alex, the film’s narrator.

While Schreiber never aspired to be in his own movie (unlike Foer, who asked on a couple occasions to play himself), there were days on set, he admits, that he wished he could’ve been an actor, sitting in a make-up chair, drinking coffee, “watching the director sweat.” He estimates he sometimes had to make 400 to 500 decisions a day, decisions affecting the hundreds of people in his cast and crew. Considering that, it’s easy to understand why he considers performing someone else’s script to be calming (and swearing one’s head off for two hours can be a good way to let off stress from the editing room).

Schreiber had accepted the offer for Glengarry long before filming began — he had expected to be free by the time rehearsals began. Instead, post-production for the film was just reaching full swing.

“That was insane,” he says. “I kept remembering those stories about Orson Welles and how he rented an ambulance so he could get from the radio show to the theater just to make sure he could do it all.” Schreiber, instead, bought a Vespa, which enabled him to scoot from his home in Manhattan’s NoHo section to the editing room in Tribeca to the sound mixing studio in midtown to the theatre on 45th Street, sometimes with only five minutes between appointments. “I actually believe I owe Vespa a huge debt of gratitude for this film,” he says only half-jokingly.

A graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Yale School of Drama, Schreiber has long been an actor praised for his versatility, known both to patrons of New York’s Shakespeare in the Park and fans of all three Scream movies. Before finally flirting with big-screen leading-man status in last year’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Schreiber thrived mostly in meaty supporting roles, particularly in indie films such as Big Night and A Walk on the Moon.

Single, Schreiber has over the years been linked romantically to various well-known women (most recently Australian actress Naomi Watts), at least in the tabloids. Now, he sounds like he might be too busy even for that.

“There is nothing in my life besides this, and I don’t like that very much,” he says. “But I think that’s what my work has always been about. The sense of emptiness is something I’m exploring through work how to address. What is life? It’s doing things, right? So let’s do more things and see if that tells us more about what life is. And that got me to the idea of memory, that history determines personality and character. I identified with this story of a person who is an empty vessel and is going to try and fill himself.”

Glengarry closed at the end of August, and as the date of release — both for his movie and from his exhausting endeavor — approaches, the writer/director allows himself a bit of cautious pride. “I do think its heart is awkwardly set in the right place,” he says of his film. “Like all of us. It’s not a perfect setting, it’s an awkward setting, and therefore worthy of love. I’ll be thrilled if the audience gets one iota of that. I hope it makes them feel as connected in their own relationships as Jonathan’s book did for me.”

He’s also now able to look past the anxiety of being a first-time filmmaker and the glare of judgment sure to shine on an adaptation of a book resurging in popularity. (First Lady Laura Bush just publicly added it to her reading list.) “Like everyone else, I’d always dreamed of making a film,” he admits. “Regardless of whether I succeeded, I knew it was something I had to do. It was important that I went through it.”

Certainly, Schreiber has other projects looming, though nothing he’s ready to announce, and for now, his goals are somewhat modest, including “about a month of sleep” and a chance to process everything he’s absorbed from this experience. The most important concern just now is getting the next sound cue right.

However, he is certain of one lesson, taught by his religious tradition and reinforced by his artistic undertaking. “There’s a reason why we want to know our history, and why we want to share stories with others,” he says. “We all need to feel connected.”


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