Actor Liev Schreiber talks to Michael Dwyer about taking roles to finance his own movies and turning Jonathan Safran Foer's successful novel into his directorial debut
When Liev Schreiber was growing up in New York where his mother, an artist, worked as a taxi driver, she only allowed him to watch black-and-white movies.
"When I finally saw a colour film, I was really quite angry," he said, when we met in London recently. "The first one I saw was Star Wars and I couldn't believe what she had been depriving me of seeing. Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky is a great film but not really suitable for a seven-year-old. I think I might have slept through that about three times, and then I saw it when I was in college and could appreciate it."
Despite that early cultural deprivation, Schreiber blossomed into one of the best US film and stage actors of his generation. A tall, charming 38-year-old man with a sonorous voice, he moved between notable independent movies (The Daytrippers, A Walk on the Moon) and the mainstream (Ransom, The Sum of All Fears and the first three Scream pictures) before making an indelible impression last year as the Gulf War veteran running for vice-president of the US with the help of his mother, a ruthless senator (Meryl Streep), in Jonathan Demme's underrated remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
"I think the marketing campaign on the film, of opening it during the Republican convention, may have backfired," Schreiber says. "The film wore its politics on its sleeve, which was one of the things I liked about it, but I think they may have underestimated how negatively that could impact on the release of the film. It drew some very strong reactions. It was much better received in Europe."
On stage in New York, Schreiber has played some of the great Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet and Iago, and in the Harold Pinter plays, Betrayal and Moonlight. So was he was slumming it in the Scream movies for the money? "Actually," he laughs, "the first Scream didn't pay very well at all, but it was very convenient. I had just about 20 minutes of work in that. Then it was wildly successful and they wanted me back for the sequels and the money got better.
"I think people find the balancing of an actor's career hard to understand. If you see it from the perspective that it's a job, a way to make a living, you can over-simplify it by saying an actor is doing one thing for money and another for the love of the craft. I've got to say that I find them equally amusing and exciting to do. They are such vastly different mediums and techniques that I find shuttling back and forth between the two is actually very healthy and really keeps me on my toes."
I cite the instance of John Cassavetes who worked as an actor in mainstream movies to finance the personal projects he wanted to direct. "To be honest," says Schreiber, "that's a big part of what I've been up to the past 15 years, robbing Peter to pay Paul. And that's why I'm acting in another movie now, to refill the coffers."
Doing Broadway doesn't add much to the coffers? "Not at all, but it is such a rewarding experience for an actor in other ways," he says. It recently brought him a Tony award for his portrayal of Richard Roma in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross - the role Al Pacino played in the 1992 film version.
"It's so different as a play," Schreiber says. "The film was wonderful, and very naturalistic, with a terrific rhythm, but the play is just relentlessly comic, fierce and tragic all at once. It takes off like a rocket. It was a real treat to do, like being launched from a slingshot." Winning the Tony "wasn't bad", he smiles, "especially as we were doing post-production on The Manchurian Candidate at the time and doing the play, eight shows a week."
MEANWHILE, SCHREIBER WAS privately harbouring ambitions as a screenwriter and a film director, and he found the material he wanted when he read A Very Rigid Thing, a New Yorker short story by Jonathan Safran Foer which was amplified into the successful novel, Everything is Illuminated.
Schreiber's entertaining film of the book follows the misadventures of an uptight young Jewish New Yorker (Elijah Wood) when he travels to the Ukraine in search of the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Schreiber has dedicated the film to his own grandfather.
"I had developed my own screenplay about an American guy whose grandfather dies and he goes to the Ukraine to investigate his ancestry," he says. "I was bowled over then, when I read Jonathan's short story and the similarities between what he wrote and what I was working on. I was also really envious because he had done in 15 pages what took me 104 pages in my attempt. He had done it with humour and compassion, and he had managed to retain the character of the grandfather, which was really important to me. I knew I had to have that material.
"I went to meet Jonathan in a bar and I was looking out for this much older man because the book is written with such maturity. I was expecting to meet someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer, a reclusive 80-year-old. I was amazed when he turned out to be someone so much younger, this kid with thick glasses, who was sitting in the corner and was waving at me. When he called me over, I thought he was a movie fan who recognised me from the Scream movies!"
Schreiber says that he did his best to respect Foer's work as he adapted it for the screen, sending the author every draft of the screenplay as he wrote it and regularly discussing it with him.
"It's funny with my film because people are divided right down the middle, depending on whether or not they've read the book. It's an impossible task. With a book, the writer is successful if he or she gives the reader ownership of the material and then the readers in their private consciousness develop this very intimate relationship to the material.
"Anything you do that stems from that material is seen as an exploitation of their private history. What they so often forget is that the film-maker, as a reader in his or her own right, had their own private relationship to the same material.
"I think that for a while I was pretty intimidated by the success of the book and by the prospect of having to be responsible for an interpretation of the novel as a film. I was so connected to the material and I loved it so much that I wanted it to reach all the people who didn't know the novel, to go beyond the literary world."
MOST OF WHAT Schreiber learned about directing was gleaned from observing other directors at work. He notes that his first film as an actor, Mixed Nuts, in which he played a transvestite, had Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, working on it.
"I realised I was being afforded an opportunity to watch the best in the business ply their trade. So in a sense I was taking notes. I'd always been a big film fan and acting seemed just so easy. I could go and sit in my trailer, or I could watch these guys do their thing, which I loved doing."
Schreiber's production deal for Everything is Illuminated was in place when he was working with Jonathan Demme on The Manchurian Candidate. "So I watched everything Jonathan was doing. He was invaluable to me, as was his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, and both of them were incredibly generous to me. I think we spent more time talking about my film than the film we were shooting. I owe him one."
Having cast Elijah Wood as Jonathan Safran Foer, Schreiber found the ideal person to play his engaging Ukrainian guide, Alex, when he met Eugene Hutz, a Ukrainian immigrant living in New York and performing with Gogol Bordello, "a Ukrainian gypsy punk rock band". Then there was the task of casting the grandfather's "seeing-eye bitch", known in the film as Sammy Davis Jr Jr.
"I realised early on that shooting a movie in a very small car in the Czech and Ukrainian countryside would be difficult enough without having a dog along for the shoot as well," Schreiber says.
"I got this guy, Boone Narr, who's probably the top animal trainer in Hollywood, and we got two very well-trained dogs, twin sisters called Mickey and Mouse. They're very expressive dogs, border collies. One of them has a slightly crossed eye, so she does most of the physical stunt work and her sister does more of the dramatic stuff. I can tell you that those two dogs needed less takes than any of the actors on the film."
The production designer on the film is Irishman Mark Geraghty. "I met a lot of people for the job," says Schreiber." There are a lot of quite zany ideas in the film and Mark just got every single one of them. He came up with some ingenious ideas. He also has this incredibly infectious laugh."
When we met, Schreiber was on a two-day break from working with another Irishman, director John Moore, on Omen 666, which is shooting in Prague and also features Julia Stiles, Michael Gambon, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite and Mia Farrow. "I play Damien's father. I am the father of Satan," Schreiber says. "John's fantastic. I heard he was tough, a bit of a screamer, but I just love working with him. He has a great visual eye."
Everything is Illuminated is on general release