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And beyond that, if you don’t believe the person is hungry, the movie’s dead. Once you start looking at those things, it felt fundamentally wrong for me, and irresponsible for me, not to do that. If you’re willing to let me go as far as I can go, I’ll go as far as I can and leave everything on the map.” If one is actually reading the news that’s outside of our general news feed, international news provides images of those who are suffering in ways we’re not so accustomed to here in the States anymore. I said, “Well, if we have five months, I can lose the weight. We can make you small, we can make you big, we can make you old, we can make you young.” I barked out and said, “If that’s how we’re going to do it, you have the wrong actor.” That just went against everything that I was beginning to connect with. One of the producers said, “We have this incredible digital technology that can solve this problem. And part of that was saturating myself in the voices and the testimonies of other survivors - hearing their voices, hearing their stories.Ĭan you tell me about the physical transformation you went through for this role? As you come into a film, you don’t know what you’re doing.
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They opened up their libraries and answered as many questions as we had. We spent a great deal of time working with the Shoah Foundation. We surrounded ourselves with people who knew much more than we knew. I think we all felt a real responsibility to be in service of this story, and furthering that, that survivors are going to watch it, that children of survivors are going to watch it, that the generational trauma is not done. How did you and Barry work to protect yourselves in approaching something so unbelievably difficult? Where does that come from? What came before that? Those themes were really exciting to explore with him. It felt that Barry was investigating the shadows behind some of the loose, fun, awkward, snappy male identity in America in the ’50s.
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Liberty Heights was the fourth installment within his Baltimore series, which is all about the Jewish immigrant, first-generation experience. In many ways, it felt like an origin story for Barry as a filmmaker. It’s three seasons of a man’s life, going through very difficult circumstances. had this project: “It’s a special story, and I’d like your eyes on it.” I read it right then, called right back. He doesn’t show his cards a whole heck of a lot.
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It’s exciting to get a call from the collaborator that gave me my first film so many years later. What was your first impression upon receiving this script? THR spoke with Foster about his transformation process, the research and training he did ahead of the shoot, and how carrying this film changes a person’s relationship with the world moving forward. Additionally, there’s the grave emotional heft of working within a full-scale re-creation of Auschwitz and spending months immersed in such horrifying, traumatic subject matter. The Oscar-winning director tapped Foster’s talents again for one of the most physically and emotionally grueling parts imaginable: Over the course of filming, Foster dropped 62 pounds to portray a concentration camp prisoner authentically, gaining the weight back in a matter of weeks to shoot Haft as he appeared later in life. The director and star have a long-standing collaborative relationship - Levinson cast the actor in his first film role, in 1999’s Liberty Heights. In Barry Levinson’s HBO film The Survivor, Ben Foster plays Harry Haft, who survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz by winning life-and-death boxing matches with other prisoners orchestrated by Nazis.