Actor Liev Schreiber on Finding the Best of Humanity in the Worst of People

In an early episode of “Cheers,” waitress Diane stages the murder scene from Othello in the bar as a showcase for her protégé Andy to a Boston University drama teacher. Andy turns out to be a jealous lunatic who starts to strangle her for real while enacting the scene. As Diane struggles to free herself in front of an audience who doesn’t realize she’s not acting, the professor rises to his feet and exclaims, “I love it! A Desdemona who fights back!”

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in Defiance

The comparison may seem flippant, but that will be the appeal for a lot of viewers of Defiance, especially viewers who have seen too many movies about Nazi Germany where Jews are slaughtered like so many helpless sheep.

Based on events which, amazingly, escaped popular attention until the 1990s, Defiance is the story of Jews in Belarus who escaped the Nazis into the dense forests of their country. Coalescing and building their numbers with escapees from the cities who chose to join them rather than hope the Nazis would let them live, they built a community of 1,200 who survived to the end of the war.

At the center of the film are three brothers who formed the core of the group. The Bielskis were no one’s idea of heroes, tough farmers and smugglers who didn’t mind resorting to violence or thievery to get their way. Escaping into the forest as the Nazis attacked their village, their initial goal was to become partisans and kill those who murdered their families. When other refugees joined them, they fought about how to continue. Elder brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig) feels that survival is the most important way to battle the Nazis and becomes the leader of the community. Younger brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) wants to fight, and joins Russian partisans who are barely less contemptuous of Jews. Younger brother Asael (Jamie Bell) is torn between the two.

While it may take a leap of faith to accept Craig and Bell in these roles, there’s no problem at all with Schreiber, who has played his share of tough Jews in a 15-year career of nearly 50 films and 70 television appearances. Somewhere in there he’s also found time for theater work, wining a Tony award for the 2005 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross and a nomination for another in the one-man show Talk Radio. I spoke to him in early December at the Los Angeles junket for Defiance.

AV: Were you familiar with this story when you accepted the role?

Schreiber: I’d done a considerable amount of research on the Holocaust for things I’d done in the past, but I didn’t know this story. I was really surprised that I hadn’t heard about 1,200 people living in the woods of Belarus, undetected—well, that’s not true, actually, they went up against three German infantry divisions, I think, and survived, women and children fighting, pretty remarkable. But I had done so many Holocaust things, and directed a movie about it myself [Everything Is Illuminated], that I was kind of hesitant [to take the part].

AV: What convinced you?

Schreiber: Talking to [director] Ed Zwick. And reading the books about the Bielski brothers, when I read some of the horrible things they did, I became interested.

AV: Did you like the fact that it was about kick-ass Jews instead of the usual victimized portrait of Jews in this era?

Schreiber: I never had any doubts that there were kick-ass Jews, because I grew up with my grandfather. He was a very tough cookie, he was a bodyguard for the Communist party. [He laughs.] I’m not supposed to talk about that, but you can imagine in the 1950s that was a bad gig. He delivered meat in a meat truck to diners. He was a little guy, probably about five-six, five-seven. I was seven years old and I was with him one time when the truck got rear-ended. My grandfather very calmly got out of the van, and in the rearview mirror I saw this huge man getting out of the truck that had hit us, and I probably started to cry because I knew that there was gonna be a fight. I looked away, and I just heard the loudest smash, and I looked back and there was this dent in the van where’s this guys body had hit the van. And my grandfather got back in the van and drove on, muttering something like “Fucking prick.”

AV: After the ear the surviving Bielski brothers moved to New York. Did you speak to any of their descendants?

Schreiber: I did, I spoke to Zus’s son. But I avoided spending too much time with them, because I found it very intimidating, and emotionally difficult. It was while we were on set shooting the movie. It’s very difficult playing a historical character, because of the responsibility. On top of that to play a character in front of their own child is a little nerve-wracking. I was afraid initially that my characterization of Zus was something that he wouldn’t be proud of.

Not that I made him too tough, but I was interested in exploring some of the darker elements of who these guys were, because that conflict to me was what was interesting, not the heroic actions. When I heard about some of the things that they did before the Nazis invaded Belarus, that’s when the story got interesting to me. There’s a story about their farm—their neighbor let his goat go under the fence and graze on their property, and the two elder brothers went over and beat the guy within an inch of his life. This is who these guys were.

So when the Nazis invaded and began to speak in the language of violence and terrorism, this was a group who understood and could reply, and I though that was important. Rather than portraying them purely as heroic, I had to believe it was more complicated than that. I wanted the freedom to play it that way, I didn’t want to have anyone looking over my shoulder and going, “Hey, that’s not nice!” When I spoke to them afterward, they were very generous with me, they said that it really meant a lot to them to see their father portrayed that way. Zus’s son told me, “You know, my dad was a great man, but he was a very difficult man.”

AV: As a family man [he and Naomi Watts has their first son in July 2007 and their second a few days after this interview] is it hard to take a part that requires you to spend months in Lithuania, where Defiance was filmed?

Schreiber: They came with me. Naomi had to leave about halfway through because she did a film in Berlin with Tom Twyker, The International.

AV: Have you ever turned down a role because you couldn’t work that out?

Schreiber: It’s already happened to both of us.

AV: Does that make theater a more attractive option?

Schreiber: Sure. Theater is daddy hours. Your day is free to be with the kids, you put them to bed, go to work, and come home two hours later

AV: Do you plan to direct another film?

Schreiber: I am [working on one]. Right now, having a 16-month-old, and a new one on the way, the great thing is that you can stay home more, write more, think about what you’d like to do.

AV: And you’ve already finished X-Men Origins: Wolverine [due in theaters May 1], where you play Wolverine’s nemesis Sabretooth. How was working on that?

Schreiber: It was a good experience, and really difficult for the physical aspects, a lot of training. I think I am officially the Adolph Hitler of the chicken world in terms of my diet. I lost most of that muscle about two or three months ago. Look at Hugh [Jackman, who plays Wolverine], he’s this colossus of a man right now, he works out seven days a week, it’s insane. And I play the guy who has to whup his butt!

I was a fan of the comic books, so I went to the internet to see what the fans were talking about, and there was a real resistance to the idea of me as Sabretooth. But you gotta be able to read through that, to see what’s important to them and not take it personally. And one of the things that was important to them was a certain level of size. Hopefully what I bring to the character is a feral quality that adds something to the mix.

AV: What do you expect viewers to take away from Defiance?

Schreiber: Not many of us are tested in the way that these people were tested. Nowadays life is relatively cushy, as long as you don’t live in the Middle East or Africa. For me when I saw a screening [of the finished film], to see that level of compassion, that level of courage, self-sacrifice, those are all things that are part and parcel of being a human being. To see that we have that potential, that to me was really moving. I don’t think it had to do with the Holocaust or even being Jewish at that point. It had to do with knowing that we were capable. Of course this was also the point when Obama was winning the election and I was feeling a deep sense of optimism. I remember thinking, Wow, we really do have such potential for greatness. Part of what I like about the Bielskis—I don’t mean that they are the worst in anyway, but these were hard, uneducated men, who were criminals. But even the worst of us, even the lowest common denominator has, built into his nature, greatness.