Natalie Portman’s no slacker.
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Not many actresses can star in a billion-dollar space epic and earn a degree from Harvard at the same time.
WATCH: Natalie Portman Crashes Sia’s Performance With Jimmy Fallon and The Roots, Everyone Rocks Epic Wigs! . With the story of the founding of Israel through the eyes of a young Oz (Amir Tessler), Portman-acting entirely in Hebrew-profoundly reaches within for something fragile and builds Oz’s onscreen tale with pride.
Natalie Portman recently made her directorial feature debut with her adaptation of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, and spoke to Jason Guerrasio of Business Insider about the challenges of directing, Star Wars, and how she sees the roles for women in Hollywood changing.
The director plays Amos’ mother, Fania, a fabulist storyteller in the first reels and a near-catatonic depressive in the last few.
That said, the film’s intentions are constantly fluctuating between a young Amos Oz and his mother’s mental deterioration. His writing was so vivid. “And I was also starting to get old enough to play the part myself”. He was very nice. I knew the lines backward and forward.
Q. It would have been hard to come up with a more challenging book for a directorial debut.
Sometimes when you have to do things many times, that’s when it becomes harder for a kid, because repeating the same emotion somehow can make it less natural.
“It was really helpful mainly because they are such different filmmakers and they were all very encouraging of me making my own thing”.
I admire the attempt more than the execution, which is often irretrievably dour. It takes place in a moment in history I had already imagined so much because of the family stories I heard growing up about my grandparents coming to Israel as refugees in the 1930s, to what was then British mandate Palestine.
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Portman, who had optioned the book rights over tea with Oz and his wife, had two decades of experience on films sets to draw on for her approximately $4 million film, and she sought advice from several of her past directors, including Mike Nichols, Darren Aronofsky and Malick. Instead, he asked Portman to leave those facets a mystery, much as they were for Oz, himself. The directors Portman found helpful:Anthony Minghella, when I worked with him for only 10 days on “Cold Mountain”, was one of the most influential people. He always talked about painting from life. “There are passages in the film in which we use voice-over narration that is drawn directly from Amos’s text, and for those Assaf just went back to the novel”. You spill a glass of water in a scene and everyone’s reaction to it in character can actually be shockingly handsome. I was so deep in the whole story by the time we started shooting that it was a natural preparation. Rather than try to control every detail. The narrator is an old man (Amos Oz himself as played by actor Alexander Peleg) who has spent a lifetime trying to understand the still incomprehensible fact that his handsome mother killed herself when he was barely twelve years old.
