Speaking at a Q&A for her new movie, “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, Us Weekly reports that Natalie said: “I must be honest: She did not like me, but I loved her and admired her so much”.
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Still, we hadn’t heard directly from Portman herself, but that was rectified in an interview the actress had with The Wall Street Journal. “I can understand that it would seem amusing if those were our normal “hey Jonathan, what’s going on” emails, which is not the case at all”.
“It feels like the last thing you want to do”, Portman told Business Insider with a laugh.
“A Tale of Love and Darkness” isn’t always subtle; the one, brief time she addresses Israeli-Palestinian strife is basically the art house version of “The Fox and the Hound”. I think it’s something that all immigrants experience to some extent, that the expectations and the reality don’t measure up – and then when you have this sort of Slavic melancholy that Oz describes – that dissonance is tragic. She is what Hollywood likes to call “bankable”, meaning her name can be used to raise money for a movie. This is one of those moments, too, when she suddenly has a handful of projects being released, even though many were shot years ago, like “Knight of Cups” and “Jane Got a Gun”. Wobbly though “Tale of Love and Darkness” sometimes is, there are worse ways for someone to kick off a new career than by making something that’s both close to home and a genuine artistic challenge. Oz’s words perpetuate forward-thinking ideals about living life with passion, they’re just suffocated by a thick, tar-like depression that makes Portman’s first behind-the-lens effort one dry Matzah ball to swallow. “It certainly affected the way I wrote, I tried to include more aspects of her personality, of her struggles”.
Q. What was it about the book that compelled you to make it your first film?
It’s been five years since Portman, 35, won an Oscar for her portrayal of an emotionally troubled ballerina in “Black Swan”, the film where she met her husband and the father of her son, 5-year-old Aleph, dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millipied.
Gilad Kahana, Natalie Portman and Amir Tessler, as young Amos, as the family shares a happy moment. The actress, whose family moved from Israel to the USA when she was 3, describes her Hebrew as “pretty good, but not fluent”, and she worked with a dialogue coach daily for the two months of pre-production.
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“Knowing that I was playing Fania meant that I started to see the story through her eyes”, she says. He would say, “This is the moment when they fall in love”, or, “This is the moment that he realizes she’s cheating”. She adds that promoting female directors is a largely cultural issue, and government support plays a big role in opportunities. A lot of the reactions of the boy [Amir Tessler, who plays the Oz character] were things he did between takes while the camera was still rolling. “[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.
