Everything Is Illuminated

Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated is the directorial debut of actor Liev Schreiber. Schreiber also wrote the screenplay for the film. In the movie, Jonathan (played by Elijah Wood) obsessively collects items from his family, from toothbrushes to retainers to scraps of paper which he then seals in ziploc bags and pins to a wall in his house to record his family history. But the space for his grandfather is conspicuously bare. All Jonathan really has of him is a piece of jewelry with a grasshopper in amber, and an old photo of him with a woman who hid him from the Nazis during the Second World War. Jonathan decides to undertake a quest to Ukraine to find the woman, thank her, and learn more about his grandfather.

His quest is aided there by a couple of characters who run a tourist company for Jewish people, including a young man obsessed with western culture (Eugene Hutz), his grandfather (Boris Leskin), who thinks he is blind and who may have memories and demons of his own from the war, and his grandfather's temperamental seeing eye dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.

The screenplay effectively combines both humour and drama as the three characters travel through the countryside looking for Jonathan's grandfather's town, driving deeper and deeper into the memories of the past. The best performance probably comes from Eugene Hutz, playing Alex Jr., who starts the movie as a tracksuit-wearing, breakdancing slacker just out to have fun but evolves into something more as not only Jonathan, but all the characters gain their own illumination.

Liev Schreiber, Elijah Wood, and Eugene Hutz attended the screening and did a very humourous Q&A after the film:

• On why he decided to make this movie his directorial debut: Schreiber was very close to his grandfather, who was a Ukranian immigrant, and who died in 1993. This caused Schreiber to start to write to get his memories down on paper. Meanwhile, he was asked to do a reading of Jonathan Safran Foer's short story, The Very Rigid Search, which was an excerpt from the novel that was still unpublished at the time. Schreiber was blown away by the quality of the writing, saying that Foer had done in 15 pages what Schreiber tried to do in 107. Schreiber approached Foer and they talked about their grandfathers, culture, the movies they liked, and the nature of short-term memory in America; in the end, Foer agreed to let Schreiber adapt the book.
  
• On how he decided to do the adaptation: Schreiber's own project was intended to be a road movie, but the book has parallel narrative that is an imagined chronological history of the town of Trochenbrod that spans 500 years; given his budget and limitations as a filmmaker, he said he'd leave that to Milos Forman and take the road trip instead. This imagined chronology was what moved him to make the movie in the first place, the idea that "a past lovingly imagined was as valuable as a past accurately recalled".
  
• On casting the character of Alex Jr.: Schreiber said the movie was a series of happy accidents. After searching unsuccessfully in Ukraine for an actor, he was walking through the Lower East Side in New York, when he saw a poster of a woman centaur, topless from the waist up, with an insane cossack sitting astride her in a border patrol outfit and a kilt, giving the sign of the devil while smiling wildly. Under the poster said the name Gogol Bordello Ukranian Punk Gypsy Band; a couple of tracks in movie are from them,
  Eugene Hutz then took over the story. Friends had tried to push him in the past towards acting, but he never pursued it as music was his first passion. One day, a friend gave him the book Everything is Illuminated, and he thought it was written in a manner similar to how he writes music; screw sentences/syntax, language is my own.
  
  Later, they got a call from a film production company, looking for eastern European music that was medieval but at the same time modern. Hutz met with Schreiber, and he soon found the movie was based on the book he just happened to be reading. Not long after that came up, Schreiber asked Hutz what he thought about Alex and whether he could do the character by any chance. Hutz' reply was "consider it to be done... if he asked me to play grandfather, I would've said yes too."
  
• On casting the character of Jonathan: Foer and Schreiber talked about the film in the fall of 2001, shortly after the events of September 11. Both were in Europe, Foer writing his second novel, and Schreiber doing a film in the Czech Republic. They talked about the derogatory comments they were hearing about Americans, which led Schreiber to want to try to find an articulate American who would defy the stereotype that Europeans have of Americans. Someone who was awkward, vulnerable, flawed, innocent, and looking for history beyond the borders of his own country. Schreiber started thinking about who that was, and Elijah came up.
  
  One of Schreiber's inspirations as a filmmaker is Emir Kusturica (I think that's who he said, who also directed a segment in another festival movie, All the Invisible Children) who said "you don't look for the actors, you look for the people." Schreiber said there is something about who Elijah is that he has a generosity of spirit and a sincere goodness as a human being, that came across on film. Schreiber said that the eyes are important when trying to articulate a character who is an observer, and that if "eyes are the doors to the soul, Elijah's are garage doors."
  
• Elijah Wood had fun with a question about the similarities between his character Kevin in Sin City and Jonathan in this movie as both are sort of a blank slate on which emotions are projected. Wood replied that Jonathan may seem still and seemingly emotionless, but it is all about his observations, about his experiences with other characters and the environment he was in.
  
• On the differences between directing and writing: Schreiber said he likes writing a lot more and jokingly described directing as "hell". He said that he has spent 15 years as an actor, and he gets into patterns where his life changes every 3 months. After his grandfather died, Schreiber started to think about how to preserve some sense of history and himself; is he content driven or not, or just good at interpreting other people's work? He said he loved the exercise of figuring out what is emotional to you, important to you.

Side note: apparently Roger Ebert was in the balcony for the screening.

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