Interview: Boaz Yakin, Director of Death in Love

It's hard to make a film when you're depressed -- which is what kept writer-director Boaz Yakin away from filmmaking for the past five or six years.

Now he's back with a movie that reflects the psychological state he was battling -- and the reasons he was battling it.

The director of Fresh and Remember the Titans, Yakin put his own money into Death in Love, which opens Friday in limited release. That was the only way, he says, that he would ever get it made.

"This movie came out of a meeting with a studio," says Yakin, 43, in a telephone interview. "What they wanted to do and what I wanted to do were so far apart, I didn't feel I could continue. So I wrote this for a low-budget production. I ended up financing it with my life savings. No one else chipped in a cent. It's not the kind of thing I can afford to do often. But for this one time, I got to express what I wanted to in a way I found interesting. I feel I got to explore and try some things."

Death in Love, which stars Jacqueline Bisset, Josh Lucas and Adam Brody, ostensibly is about the family of a Holocaust survivor (Bisset), who used sex to save her own life in the concentration camp. Her withholding personality has damaged her sons, particularly Lucas, a con man who is disgusted with his scam of luring customers to a fake modeling agency.

The story, Yakin says, is fiction -- but the feelings it portrays are real. And that's about as far as he'll go.

"It sounds glib but it's truthful: This movie comes from the last 43 years of my life," he says. "One hesitates to answer specific questions on the grounds of incrimination. It's a fantasy based on emotional truth. Pardon me if that sounds evasive.

"For me, the Holocaust part and what it represents is specific. I saw it as a symbol for a certain kind of pain and violence that people keep inside and end up passing on from generation to generation. I saw it as more about love and its destructive power. The Holocaust is a metaphor for this recurring cycle of pain."

The film also deals with issues that Yakin takes seriously: art vs. commerce, when one's soul is on the line. The central figure is a grifter who could actually teach acting, if he weren't doing it to scam people. The character, Yakin admits, could just as easily have been written as a filmmaker.

"But I didn't want to make this a film about a filmmaker. That's self-indulgent. This is about the whole idea of somebody who has a talent and uses it in a completely cynical, unproductive way. It's a metaphor for how I feel about working in the film business. You feel like a con man, selling phony emotions and ideas. It's sort of corrupt, like advertising."

The film features Lucas in situations as sexually explicit as an R rating will allow. But Yakin says Lucas was game for anything -- more daring, in fact, than the director.

For the rest of this interview, click here to reach my website: www.hollywoodandfine.com.

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Comments

[cweinbl]

Sometimes authors use a novel or screenplay to support political or social beliefs; or to cry out for morality and ethical priniciples. This is no more clearly evident than with Holocaust books and films. Whenever we stand up to those who deny or minimize the Holocaust, or to those who support genocide we send a critical message to the world.

We live in an age of vulnerability. Holocaust deniers ply their mendacious poison everywhere, especially with young people on the Internet. We know from captured German war records that millions of innocent Jews (and others) were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany - most in gas chambers. Holocaust books and films help to tell the true story of the Shoah, combating anti-Semitic historical revision. And, they protect future generations from making the same mistakes.

I wrote "Jacob's Courage" to promote Holocaust education. This coming of age love story presents accurate scenes and situations of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps, with particular attention to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It examines a constellation of emotions during a time of incomprehensible brutality. A world that continues to allow genocide requires such ethical reminders and remediation.

Holocaust books and movies carry a moral message globally, in an age when the world needs to learn that genocide is unacceptable. Such authors attempt to show the world that religious, racial, ethnic and gender persecution is wrong; and that tolerance is our progeny's only hope.

Charles Weinblatt
Author, "Jacob's Courage"
http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com/

[pons1595]

It's a metaphor for how I feel about working in the film business. You feel like a con man, selling phony emotions and ideas. It's sort of corrupt, like advertising.

THE HARM DONE BY ADVERTISING: There is nothing intrinsically good or intrinsically evil about advertising. It is a tool, an instrument: it can be used well, and it can be used badly. If it can have, and sometimes does have, beneficial results...it also can, and often does, have a negative, harmful impact on individuals and society.

"If harmful or utterly useless goods are touted to the public, if false assertions are made about goods for sale, if less than admirable human tendencies are exploited, those responsible for such advertising harm society and forfeit their good name and credibility. More than this, unremitting pressure to buy articles of luxury can arouse false wants that hurt both individuals and families by making them ignore what they really need. And those forms of advertising which, without shame, exploit the sexual instincts simply to make money or which seek to penetrate into the subconscious recesses of the mind in a way that threatens the freedom of the individual ... must be shunned."

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_22021997_ethics-in-ad_en.html