Working on the other side of the camera as a director, Natalie Portman once had the opportunity to direct legendary Lauren Bacall – and admits the Hollywood icon wasn’t a big fan. Within days of the release of “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, she will appear at the Venice Film Festival in support of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie”, a biopic in which she plays Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Planetarium”, as one of a pair of sisters who possibly communicates with ghosts. She put her clout to good use to direct her first full-length film, but as she told me, it wasn’t easy! “This is the moment they fall in love or this is the moment that she realized he’s cheating on her or this this is the moment he sees his mother as a flawed human being for the first time”, Portman said.
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Today Portman joins guest host Gill Deacon to discuss her decade-long interest in the novel, her passion for Isreal’s storytelling tradition, and the double-edged intensity of a mother’s love. The New York Times Style Magazine asked Foer to interview Portman about her directorial debut, “A Tale of Love and Darkness”. “I’m a nerd!” Natalie Portman says, laughing. And I contacted him about getting the rights to make it.
A Tale of Love and Darkness starts in 1945 and follows the precocious and observant eight-year-old Amos Oz through his childhood. Knowing that a move was imminent, it became a now or never moment for Portman. One promising segment, toward the end, finds the boy pursuing his mother in secret as she embarks on some mysterious errand. “The book exists. You don’t need to just film the book'”.
The directors I learned so much from were Mike Nichols, of course, who was both a mentor and a friend and who emphasizes story all the time and to name the key moments in the film and talk about it with the cast so everyone is on the same page. Portman, too, is promising and headed someplace: She’s more interested in psychology – of a nation and a family – than in simple drama, and at her best she manages to illuminate it on the screen.
Natalie also revealed that it took her some time to be comfortable with being the boss on “A Tale of Love and Darkness”. “I immediately saw the film in my head”.
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.
I knew exactly what I wanted, but somehow it was hard for me to express it.
The cinematography by Slawomir Idziak, in line with Portman’s desire, paints the film with a very diverse palette, according to the circumstances, that range from sepia to pastel. Sometimes on movies you see the director kind of bored in between takes. “It went from being a biblical language that was only spoken in a religious context to a modern language that you could say, ‘Let’s put gas in the auto.’ You know, you had to update it”.
She’s become more invested in having a connection with the filmmakers she’s choosing to work with than she was earlier in her career.
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In fact, it seems like she won’t be coming back at all anytime soon.
