After a world premiere in May 2015 at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, A Tale of Love and Darkness opened in Israel, and then played at multiple worldwide film festivals (including Beijing, Nashville, and Toronto). Portman’s film, told in subtitled Hebrew, is miles from a conventional biopic.
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“It feels like the last thing you want to do”, Portman told Business Insider with a laugh. Like Oz himself, she wanted to know why Fania killed herself. This tale, with equal parts “love” and “darkness”, is based on a best-selling autobiography by Amos Oz, but the movie version is rooted deeply in the life of the woman who adapted it for the screen.
“I knew that she was smart – I’ve seen her in interviews, I’ve seen her performances”, said Portman’s producer on the film, Ram Bergman.
Portman attended the premiere of her upcoming flick “A Tale Of Love & Darkness” on Monday evening at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City and the 35-year-old actress, who donned a champagne-colored dress, recently made an appearance on “Good Morning America” to talk about directing the film. Which wasn’t a line in the movie, it never became a line in the movie, but it got a reaction out of me. On the one hand Fania knew she was lucky to be alive, but on the other hand, she also knew that just being alive did not, in itself, make her “happy” like she always thought she would be. So the narrative structure has to do more with my own emotional arc, I guess – how I feel the story moves. She has taken on a number of hard roles with the potential to disrupt her upward climb and, in one notable case, “Black Swan”, turned the choice into Oscar gold. “Then when those things start happening – you move to a new country, get married, have a kid and then the reality of that … it’s not what you expect, not necessarily in a negative way, just different”. And the only semi-real discovery she can think of is that, well, she’s a “nerd”.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is now in limited release. “It was nearly something I had to do in order to make the film”. “[It was] something I was passionate about, and curious about, and interested in, in a way that could be sustainable for as long as it takes to make a film – which is years and years”, she says. Amos glimpses his mother’s self-flagellating episode, but not her quick cleanup afterwards or the toll it takes to pull her shattered self back together.
In agreeing to give Natalie the rights to adapt his memoir, Amos asked her not to try to explain Fania’s motives or her depression-prone personality.
“No one would give me the money for a first film in Hebrew with a hard story unless I was in it”, she says.
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Who wouldn’t be impressed by Oscar victor Natalie Portman? “Do you still have dual citizenship?”, I asked. “I knew that that had to be my first film to direct because it was so immediate in my mind”. “I tried to keep that feeling going with Amir”. But she was a total pro, despite the fact that she was so unimpressed by me. Sometimes on movies you see the director kind of bored in between takes.
