Natalie Portman on Jerusalem, Amos Oz, and Self-direction

The Torah? Bible? Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus? All good guesses at Israel’s best-selling tome of all time, but the actual answer might surprise you. It’s Amos Oz’s 2002 memoir chronicling his childhood in 1940s Jerusalem as Israel moves from British mandate toward statehood. The book arrived in an English translation entitled A Tale of Love and Darkness in 2004 and has now been adapted into a feature film by Natalie Portman, who also stars in the movie as Oz’s mother.

“It’s about the birth of a writer,” Portman, back in town from her Parisian home when her film closes Lincoln Center’s New York Jewish Film Festival, says. “He becomes a writer because of a void his mother leaves that he has to fill with words and stories. There’s tension between them. She’s pushing him to create, but she’s giving him the space he needs to fill. It’s devastating, this incredible abandonment, but it is also this opportunity and she gives him the tools along the way.”

Portman read Oz’s book seven years ago, sometime between her return to film after graduating from Harvard with a degree in psychology and winning the best actress Academy Award for her role in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” in 2011. “The book is really moving,” Portman explains, “and beautifully written. So many of the stories sounded familiar. I had heard many stories about my grandparents and their relationship to books, learning, and language. And to Europe and Israel. It felt familiar and something I was interested in exploring.”

An Oscar under the thirty-five-year-old’s belt couldn’t hurt this film – which she along with the rest of her cast acts mostly in Hebrew – from scoring financing on its $4 million budget. The cost is nowhere near the $115 million average of each of her “Stars Wars” prequels, but indeed this niche budget might actually be the harder one to bankroll. Yet two years ago, when Portman was fully on board, French producer Nicolas Chartier, known for “Hurt Locker” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” signed onto to finance the six months of production in Jerusalem without even reading Portman’s script.

Portman describes shopping the idea around to a number of writers until a writer friend of hers encouraged her to just write it herself. “Just do it,” she recalls him saying. “You have such specific ideas.” And the process turned out to be one that agreed with the actress. “I liked being in a room by myself,” she says, “with the words, changing things and coming up with ideas.” It wasn’t until she shifted into the director’s chair that she realized that some of what she conceived as a writer would be challenging to her as a director. “When you have to make things come true,” she says, “it is more challenging. I think when I write again I will know that if you write a burning house with a child running out of it, that’s going to be difficult to shoot.”

And although Portman, who was born Neta-Lee Hershlag in Jerusalem and speaks fluent Hebrew, makes it clear that financing was contingent on her starring in the film; her decision to film in her native tongue with subtitles isn’t one that exactly shook the money tree. “My initial attraction to the project was because of the language,” Portman explains, “and it seemed like a big mistake not to make it in Hebrew. Americans tend to make movies about other places in English and give people a British accent and say that it’s Germany. There are great movies like that, but the way people are watching movies now, with the access to foreign films, they’re used to subtitles. It’s preferable to hear the language where the movie takes place.”

Aside from the language, another hurdle for Portman was casting her central character, the young Amos Oz. And while she relished the casting process and describes it as seeing “characters come to life after living with them for so long,” she admits, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with Amos. Originally I thought I’d have him be quite young in the beginning, like a six-year-old, then twelve and a third one at sixteen. So we started auditioning every Ashkenazi boy we could find. I saw hundreds and hundreds of auditions.”

The first Amos to drop from the script? “Very quickly it became clear that a six-year-old wasn’t right. Amos had a more mature voice, and even with older kids, it was hard to find someone who could handle the voice, which was mature and intellectual and often says things that children wouldn’t necessarily say.” Portman, who began her own film career playing a pre-teen in Luc Besson’s action-thriller “Léon: The Professional,” found an answer to her casting prayers in the form of Amir Tessler, whom Portman calls “this magic, unbelievable child.” During the casting process, she found herself asking, Did he really just say that? “When I watched his tape,” she remembers, “I thought, He looks older. But when I met him, he was so small! I couldn’t believe how young this child was because he projects this wisdom and maturity. He is a one in a billion, that child is really something else.”

Casting in place, the project lurched toward its biggest challenge, Portman’s debut as a feature film director. “I was obviously very nervous making my first film as a director,” Portman explains, “about how it would go. I’ve made about forty movies in my life and I have seen great things happen and I’ve seen terrible things happen.” When asked for an example, Portman launches into a laundry list of on-set phobias: “You have someone difficult on the set, a hard personality, people fighting, problems with weather, if someone gets sick or hurt, I’ve seen all of those things happen and they’re all terrible, especially someone getting hurt, that’s my worst nightmare.”

Certainly, those fears double down when shooting in Jerusalem. Our own State Department warns, “Demonstrations can occur spontaneously and have the potential of becoming violent without warning. Rock throwing, Molotov cocktails, small arms fire, and clashes with police are often dangerous characteristics of such unrest in both Israeli and Palestinian areas.” It’s certainly one Portman captures effectively in the film when statehood is declared in 1948, but the intensity of that violence is refracted through the very real threat to an on-location production.

“As the director you are responsible for that,” Portman replies. “Everyone is here because of me and I want to ensure that everyone has a positive and a safe experience. That’s really important and you have to balance that with getting what you want. Am I going to make this person uncomfortable by making them unsafe for my piece of art? You always have to balance that. It’s definitely not worth hurting anyone physically or psychologically and so that is the top priority: that everyone is mentally and physically safe. But once that is established, that it’s safe, then you have to push for everything. It was a great experience and luckily I had incredible people around willing to push hard.”

Of course, that challenge is amplified when an actor takes the helm herself. In Portman’s case, playing Oz’s mother, Fania, a depressive whose downward spiral casts the young Amos as father to his own mother, only compounded the task. “Fania is always seen reading this Russian literature – Chekhov and Tolstoy – and there’s a very Russian kind of longing to her,” Portman explains, “a very passionate, jump-onto-the-train-tracks-for-lost-love quality. When you grow up in that kind of environment, your understanding of how you are supposed to behave and how life is supposed to be is influenced by that.”

As to the chore of directing oneself, Portman is only too happy to dispel the myth. “It’s easier to direct yourself,” she says. “You don’t have to put it into words. I can watch and understand what I want. When you are directing someone else, you have to figure out how to explain it in a way they understand and that helps them. And that isn’t insulting! You have to figure out the right thing to say and that can take time.”

That’s not to say she wasn’t challenged. “It’s hard to watch yourself,” she admits. “Sometimes I want to cover my eyes and not do another take, or I want to do fifteen takes because I’m just not happy with it. I’m more judgmental of myself than I am of other people. As an actor, you’re always creating a director’s vision. And I got to a point where I wanted it to be my vision and my ideas and my feelings and my way of seeing the world.”

“I feel so grateful to all the actors and all the crew who helped create my vision,” she continues. “I see how much they tried to create what I wanted, even if they didn’t agree with it or had different ideas. They were listening to me, and that’s what I have done for the past twenty years for other people’s visions and will continue to do now, but it’s nice to have the opportunity to express myself fully, through my eyes.”