Facing History with Edward Zwick: on the Making of Defiance
The film Defiance, directed and produced by Edward Zwick, is based on the extraordinary true story of three Jewish brothers living in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. In 1941, the Bielski brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Joshua Bell, flee to the surrounding woods to escape the ensuing massacre. What begins as an act of survival turns into a community as hundreds more Jews join them. Based on the book by Nechama Tec, the film's themes of resistance, choiceless choices, memory, survival and community powerfully resonate with Facing History.
We encourage teachers to see Defiance. This important film opens December 31 in Los Angeles and New York, and January 16 nationwide. In partnership with Paramount Vantage, Facing History has hosted private screenings of the film in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto.
Edward Zwick's films include Blood Diamond, Glory, The Last Samurai, Traffic, and Shakespeake in Love, and TV shows thirtysomething, Once and Again and My So-Called Life. Prior to the Boston screening in November, Facing History staff member Marti Tippens Murphy had an opportunity to discuss the film with director and producer Edward Zwick.
Marti Tippens Murphy (MTM): Defiance resonates on so many levels with Facing History. Not just the historical piece but the way you frame it-themes such as choiceless choices, resistance, judgment-many of the themes which follow the journey we take teachers and students through. For this particular aspect of the history, we don't seem to have as many stories. Did you discover that to be the case?
Edward Zwick (EZ): I did. The Warsaw ghetto is the kind of the poster child. There is some writing on resistance. Not a lot. People have written unpublished or self-published memoir. There is a lot of oral history. But in terms of actual dramatic work-no. So I suppose it does have its value.
MTM: Did Nechama Tec's book (Defiance, on which the film is based) find you or were you looking to tell that story?
EZ: Clayton Frohman (who wrote the screenplay with Zwick) my childhood friend, read the obit in the New York Times for Zus Bielski, (one of the brothers who play a central role in the film). That was the prompt. Clay and I found this book that then opened a whole world of possibilities. Turns out, the sons had a videotape of their father. We found that Tuvia Bielski himself had written a manuscript-unpublished but available. There were other memoirs about Jews who had joined Russian partisan brigades. So it was not unlike what a historian might do in the attempt to write something using source material and other histories.
MTM: Do you have a personal connection to the history?
EZ: My grandfather on my mother's side came here in the 20s. But he left brothers and sisters behind who then never made it. So there was that.
Another connection comes through my father's side where his father had six brothers who were tough guys. They were Chicago bookies and that sort of less-expected side of the Jewish experience of guys who were fighters. Both of those things came together to give me a personal vantage point.
MTM: When you spoke last June at our Community Conversation on "Film as a Catalyst for Social Change" you talked about how you wanted to set the historical record straight with Defiance.
EZ: It is not to belie the victimization of those who died. But it is also to suggest there was a much more complex response than might otherwise be understood. The impulse to resist had to have been there. It seems to have been lost to history, overwhelmed by the results of those who died.
There is a very significant difference between passivity and powerlessness. The historical status of that group-that they were a stateless people. They had no access to weapons. Their neighbors were hostile. The local police were collaborators. There was a systemic and brilliant campaign of extermination that they faced-all this conspired to make their resistance difficult.
We were screening the film at the Jewish Heritage Museum and came upon a map that documented all the acts of resistance throughout Eastern Europe and it was a pincushion of resistance. Usually futile. I think to add an understanding of the complexity makes much more knowable and accessible the history and allows someone now, someone here even, a way in and a greater relevance, a greater personal understanding of it.
MTM: There's that tension between what you're describing-about wanting to help people understand better that there was resistance everywhere-and with our culture right now and so many people not understanding history. That must have been a challenge.
EZ: We tend to look at history and groups of people as monoliths. The refugees in Sudan-as if they are all of a single mind. The Palestinians. The Jews.
That kind of objectification of people is what finally leads to the willingness to nullify their value and to do violence to them. It's that kind of objectification that certainly precedes genocide, but also precedes war of any kind. Anything that anybody can do to make more knowable the individual, the experience of something, I think is doing what history can do best, which is to be relevant, contemporary and illustrative.
MTM: You showed making community as an important part of survival.
EZ: Yes. That also had to do with talking about love, and including humor and sexuality. That was the more radical aspect I think-even then talking about violence. At least to me.
MTM: These are aspects of resistance that we don't always think about.
EZ: And so is bearing witness and so is keeping faith. Those are all parts of resistance.
MTM: Can you talk about the challenge of dealing with the context of moral decision-making and judgment during this time?
EZ: You certainly don't want to be prescriptive. You want to be specific to the circumstances and hope that in its depiction it will then resonate outward; that people will take from it and make that leap themselves into any other circumstance.
Because the minute you're into the world of homily and pageant and that kind of weird moralistic telling-I think it's scary.
On the other hand, it was very important for me to try to not make simple those choices. And indeed, to dramatize people making the wrong choices at times. Even those who are doing good are also doing badly. That was conscious on my part, based on what I read about things that happened. And also what I understood about people I've met over the years who are so-called heroes, who don't look upon what they did as having been heroic. In fact, are confused by it; would rather not talk about it.
I just like the idea that it is impossible to be a leader of any kind without sacrificing a certain piece of your soul at times and without realizing that you are fallible. And things are not necessarily reasoned out well or thoroughly. They often have to be impulsive. Sometimes that impulse expresses itself in a way that is moral or correct and sometimes it is the opposite.
MTM: In one scene the Bielskis go into the ghetto and try to convince people to come out. You showed how there were so many factors that weighed on their decision-making.
EZ: It was entirely untenable. Everything about the circumstance was untenable. It's not as if there was right and wrong. There was only what one did.
MTM: Can you talk about survivors and what it means to hear their perspectives?
EZ: It is one thing for those of us who write movies or books to speculate. But quite another for that authentic voice and the voice of experience to be there. It breaks through that two-dimensionality of a movie or a book. That person is like you and there and its imminence becomes very palpable.
The thing about this particular moment in history is that all of those people are now in the 11th hour. The oldest alive with any memory was probably 10 or 11 and within 5 years, 10 years, that voice will be gone.
It does behoove historians, educators and filmmakers to be the archivists, to be the vessel or repository of this moment-and to find ways to keep it living and to keep it vivid. To not render it as that kind of dull lifeless recitation by which history is ruined for young people.
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