Cigar Exclusive: Ed Zwick talks about new movie, 'Defiance'

01/22/09 - Movies about the Holocaust are apt to be heavy sagas, and director Ed Zwick's ("Blood Diamond," "Traffic") latest sprawling triumph, "Defiance," is no exception. All the grim terror of World War II is there in spades. But heroes are often born from the bleakest of circumstances, and "Defiance" unravels the true story of the Bielski brothers' unlikely heroism in the face of unfathomable tragedy.

A hard-nosed Daniel Craig kicks ass and takes names as Jewish outlaw, Tuvia Bielski and his brother Zus, played by Liev Schreiber, makes an equally valiant sidekick.

The hard-drinking, gun-toting Bielskis lead a sort of rustic thug life in the Polish countryside, and as the twisted tyranny of the Nazis looms ever larger over Europe, it's do or die.

The title says it all: this is a movie about victims fighting back.

"Defiance," which hit theaters Jan. 16, tells the story of the Bielski brothers, who survived in the forests of Belarus as the Nazis closed in, bringing thousands of Jews with them and building a settlement of survivors who struggle to weather the horrific thrall of the Holocaust.

The themes of the film aren't subtle - and occasionally, it bites off more than it can comfortably chew. But the story is wrought with elegance, and Craig and Schreiber bring bold grit to this true tale.

Director Ed Zwick, who took time out to talk to the Cigar about "Defiance," put it this way: "The title of the movie is "Defiance," and obviously that refers to revenge and survival, but I think there's another kind of defiance, which is the willingness to live life - and that includes romance and sexuality, and definitely humor."

The unlikely unity that forms among the members of the so-called "Bielski Otriad" - a ragtag group of resourceful refugees - doesn't come easily though. Bickering, jealousy and insurgence all seethe as more and more exiled Jews join the band of forest-bound rebels.

"They're Jews," Zwick said of the (occasionally bloody) spats within the Bielskis' settlement. "And when you have two Jews in a room you have six opinions - it's just inevitable, and that was important to me: to not present a monolith. No culture is a monolith. There are any number of divisions within a group and I thought it was very important to portray them."

But bringing the story to the big screen proved to be a deeply reflective and meticulous process. In a movie about heroes, choosing the right actors for the roles is paramount, and casting played out as an intensely personal affair for Zwick.

"It's a lot like talking about love, or falling in love," he explained. "You know, when you go looking for it in a bar, you're not liable to find it but it tends to stumble over you in the street."

"It's about really feeling a connection," he went on, "It is about attraction, of a kind - not necessarily sexual attraction, but real interest, deep interest, and I think some intuition of that person's inner life that you can see what's going on inside- and that they have something going on inside."

Zwick paused and then elaborated; "In my experience, the most interesting actors have a lot going on inside. They're not faking it. They may not be schooled, they may not even be articulate but they are deeply complex and they have very vivid inner-lives.

"In Daniel [Craig]'s case," Zwick continued, "there was a combination of a roughness, physicality and a soulfulness. I think in Liev [Schreiber], who's done the most intellectual parts, I saw something strong and brute, which maybe he hadn't necessarily expressed.

"I think it'll be very interesting for people who have now gotten to know him as James Bond to then see this," Zwick said of Craig's unlikely turn as a Polish Jew, "because, for me at least, within three minutes he just disappears into this part and that's a real statement of his breadth and depth of range and ambitions artistically - and I hope it really lets people sit up and take notice that he's not going to be defined only by his stardom."

Once the roles were cast, however, the real work began, and for Zwick, the most pressing challenge was figuring out how to tell an incredibly big story, while working within the typical studio limits.

"You never feel like you have enough time," Zwick remarked. "You always feel like you're rushing. You finish every day frustrated. You only think at night what you could have done better, and how could you have been such an idiot as to not accomplish that thing, or forgotten that bit or whatever."

"So, sometimes it's better to be very sort of gonzo and to just get out there and see what happens and start shooting it because things fall into place and in this very interesting organic way," he said. "But you can't be that way when you have explosions going off, and bullet hits, and things falling down and blood spurting. So, sometimes you have to be very lapidary."

And given the wealth of battle scenes, blood and choreographed explosions in the film, going gonzo in the forests of Lithuania (where "Defiance" was shot) wasn't really an option.

"You are whoever you need to be so as to have the shot in the can, on the day and in focus, and move on," Zwick noted of his directorial style. "If that involves occasionally having to be brutal or autocratic, you'll be it. If it involves being collegial and supportive and nurturing, obviously that's preferable, but you are who you need to be, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying."

Zwick shot the action scenes with a deft and careful hand, saying, "I think we've all seen action done as some weird, incomprehensible collage, which is born of just shooting the shit out of something and not having any understanding of what you're doing. And being put together in a kind of hallucinogenic way, which will fill the screen, but at the end of the day it's kind of tiresome."