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Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with Between the Temples‘s Nathan Silver
Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane in Between the Temples Our Summer issue cover story, Between the Temples filmmaker Nathan Silver interviewed by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is being brought out from our paywall today as the film arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. — Editor
In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, looking suddenly on the verge of middle age, and with a disconcerting new depth to his eyes, plays a cantor unable to find his singing voice. “The cantor who can’t” might be the hook for any number of lively (or annoying) comedies set in a synagogue, but Nathan Silver has delivered not only the version I’d actually want, but one I could never have believed possible—one of the best films of his busy early career, one of the best romantic comedies in decades. Schwartzman’s romantic partner-in-crime—his counterpart, his frenemy, his fateful nemesis, in the Katharine Hepburn sense familiar from classical screwball—is played by Carol Kane, that warmly neurotic presence who may seem to have been with us forever and yet here seems to “arrive” to our attention in a new way—specifically, the way that Ruth Gordon asserted herself and became unforgettable in Harold and Maude and Rosemary’s Baby. Kane plays a secularized Jewish woman who suddenly demands training for her bat mitzvah—and wakes up Schwartzman’s sleepwalker’s heart in the process. Surrounding them is a brilliantly realized and truly human supporting cast: the cantor’s two moms (Dolly De Leon and Caroline Aaron), the rabbi (Robert Smigel) and his seductive chameleon of a daughter (Madeline Weinstein) and Kane’s hostile, priggish son (Matthew Shear). Silver and his collaborators deny no one their full humanity in this stew, which puts the “cringe comedy” at a thrilling high.
Nathan Silver and I sat together in an office in Manhattan and got wired on coffee and my exuberant curiosity about his movie. Between the Temples enters theatrical release from Sony Pictures Classics on August 23.
Lethem: One achievement that’s so thrilling to me here, as someone who admires your earliest work, is the way you have integrated Oscar-nominated, recognizable name performers into your style. There’s still this quality of vérité. Of course, “vérité” is a word that conceals all sorts of lies, but it feels as though you employ improvisation. Yours is a very organic, offhand-seeming—and I emphasize the word “seeming”—style. The early films feel almost like home movies or “credit-card movies.” Carol Kane and Jason Schwartzman are at the center of the new film. They’re performers who present the problem for a director—or so I imagine—of having personas. They do their brilliant bits. So, you have to kind of break that down, as opposed to building up an unknown or a non-performer into someone who can be charming on-screen. But it feels as though your unknown performers are in the same film as the established actors, and that it’s a “Nathan Silver film” aesthetically, texturally. So, I’m delighted to see these performers integrated into your mix and to see other evidence of a little more budget and a longer shooting schedule, yet it’s so consonant with the earlier work. How did you do that?
Silver: I think it comes down to the process. The actors were not given a full script from the outset. They were given a 40-page scriptment, which is written like a novella. It reads like it’s a script, but the dialogue is in the action paragraphs. It’s broken up by location. No one comes to it with expectations that they have to fulfill this certain thing because they have this idea of what the movie is in all their respective heads. They bring themselves to it, and what I ask of all my collaborators is to bring themselves to the project. Carol Kane has been in countless movies, working for years and years with all sorts of major directors. She still approached it with some trepidation because she knew it wasn’t a standard script. I think some of that energy actually fed into her character. It created this environment where some people were nervous with this way of working.
We ended up scripting the dialogue during the shoot, so there were scripted pages by the time we were shooting. Chris [Wells], my co-writer, was there every day reworking everything. We were trying new things out or deleting whole passages, seeing what actually made sense on set. It’s a sense of constantly keeping the film in this malleable form that almost negates any level of mastery you have because you’re all meeting at the same place, where you don’t actually know how the scene is going to unfold. It could unfold per script or could unfold in a way where we go totally off-script and into this other version of the scene, which then leads to some small story tweaks because something is revealed that we didn’t expect that excites us that was going to be covered in a scene down the line, and it should go here. As the actors witness that, they all come into it and embrace it. I don’t want to impose something on them. I want to meet them in the middle, where we can all work together. That also goes for my cinematographer, Sean [Price Williams], and all of the people working on the crew—we’re all collaborating in this capacity. Sean is as much of an actor as the actors, reacting to what’s happening the day of. We wanted it to have that freewheeling quality, even if it was more scripted than a lot of my other work, because the sensibility behind this was to make something that had screwball impulses in it.
Lethem: And what does that look like as a process? You and I are both enormously interested in and influenced by Cassavetes. In Opening Night, there’s an older actress from another era of Hollywood, Joan Blondell. I’m remembering production anecdotes about how nervous she was among the Cassavetes performers because it was otherwise very full of his regulars, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands and so forth. She had to be made comfortable and integrated to some extent, but also Joan Blondell’s incomprehension of what was going on on set became a facet of her character. Her sense of resistance to what she saw as the indulgences of the Cassavetes troupe became a form of relation of the character to the other characters. So, you incorporated this energy with Carol.
Silver: Chris and I worked on this story for quite a long time, so we wanted to find new entry points so that it remained exciting for us as well as the actors. Also, as soon as you start shooting the movie and have all the elements in one place rather than scattered phone calls happening over the course of a week, you start to see holes in the characters, all sorts of things you need to contend with and figure out. You have to find solutions on set. That kind of invention really excites me because everyone is putting themselves out on the line. It sounds cheesy, but there’s a trust that forms among the cast and crew, which is quite lovely because we’re all making this thing that could totally topple over and not work. I love that kind of tension.
Lethem: It seems to me you’re now in an interesting evolutionary position. What once would have been seat-of-the-pants chaos, a kind of barely staying on this tightrope situation innate to your budgetary constraints, now is moving toward the place where there’s some external structural support. There’s more means.
Silver: Every shoot is a tightrope walk no matter what the budget is or how long the schedule is. How to set the slider between the sense of chaos versus the sense of adherence to a storyboarded template? So much of that this time around on a larger set came down to my closest collaborators who were by my side all the time—Chris; Laura Klein, the first AD; the script supervisor, Gordon Bell; Sean and the actors—figuring out how to contend with anything where it felt like we were teetering on the edge of chaos or things were going out of whack, because we had a tight schedule, 18 days, and had to figure out how to accomplish the emotional beats of the story in that time.
Lethem: Let’s talk about “screwball.” One of my favorite filmmakers, full stop, is Preston Sturges. The Howard Hawks films that conform to that label are especially meaningful to me, as is Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth. The sense of two characters entirely at odds but who represent the missing piece in one another—this is a quintessence of the classical screwball mode. At what point did you enter consciously into that tradition? Was it with your screenwriter? Was it in some revelation you had watching some movie?
Silver: We were watching Bringing Up Baby a bunch as we were working on the script. We were thinking of the idea of loosening up an uptight character, right? That’s Bringing Up Baby, that’s Harold and Maude, that’s Minnie and Moskowitz, too. We knew we wanted that element in there. [It provides] such an immediate structure because you have someone who is resistant and someone trying to push their way in. So, you have that kind of tension and can build on that. And Chris and I are huge fans of Maren Ade, who made Toni Erdmann. Toni Erdmann is basically just this father-daughter screwball, but it’s so grounded in the characters, and the pacing of it is so different from your standard screwball comedy, which moves so quickly. That one’s three hours long. It’s this humanistic take on screwball, and we were thinking about how to take a screwball comedy and turn it on its head.
Lethem: Well, let me suggest another point of reference, a non-romantic screwball comedy, Love Streams. The sister is the screwball heroine, yet she can’t affect her own husband. She can, it turns out, affect her brother.
Silver: Exactly. I hadn’t seen that movie in years, wasn’t thinking about it at all. Right after we wrapped shooting, I slept for like two weeks, and it was screening on 35mm at the theater near us. My wife had never seen it and wanted to go, so she dragged me out of bed. I was depressed. I was like, “I don’t know if we have a movie here. I don’t know if there’s a story. I don’t know if anything will hold together.” You know, when you come off a shoot, you’re quite uncertain. We went to see that, and there was some spirit that, after coming out, I felt electrified by, as I always do watching that movie, but it kind of clicked into place: As long as there’s that emotional core between the two primary characters, where they’re kicking each other along throughout the course of the movie, then we have something. We have these two great characters in Ben and Carla, and I feel like it’s enough for the movie.
Lethem: That has what a younger person today would call “cringe.” Minnie and Moskowitz has it as well, but Love Streams is a cringe movie. One of the things Cassavetes is chasing is how painful it is to see Rowlands’s life force wasted on Seymour Cassel’s husband character in that scene where she tries to entertain. The jokes—it’s torture, and this energy seemed to me to be locatable in your film. But I also was going to swear that you’d essentially lifted a moment wholesale, a very oblique moment. It’s one of the most intuitive and strange things Cassavetes does in his whole career, when his character glances at the dog that his sister has added to his household, and for one uncanny shot the dog has been transformed into a human, sitting on the couch—a naked, hairy man, but a man. It seemed to me when Jason Schwartzman sees his younger self sitting on the couch that you’d borrowed the cut rhythm precisely.
Silver: That came from John Magary, the editor. His way into the scene is to find the rhythms most emotionally consistent with the character rather than trying to make the pacing make sense. So, the way that’s cut, you’re absolutely right. But I think Cassavetes’s editing, too, is very much emotionally based.
Lethem: In that same regard, Love Streams—and this may be why it echoes your film for me—has the weird stutter editing. Cassavetes uses cuts that contradict or repeat. And your use of sped-up rhythms and the chase scene—I think there’s one other place where films speeds up.
Silver: We do all sorts of weird things. John is a huge fan of Arnaud Desplechin. It’s that idea of bringing play into the edit so it doesn’t feel like you know what to expect at any given moment.
Lethem: When I look at certain ’70s movies and see the way, for instance, Altman uses Shelley Duvall or Bud Cort, or the way Bud Cort is used in Harold and Maude, or the way Geraldine Chaplin is used in Remember My Name—
Silver: I love that movie. Alan Rudolph is huge for me and Chris.
Lethem: —you realize how those ’70s filmmakers were still in touch with the silent comedians, with Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd. You felt it in the way they’d let characters occupy space.
Silver: Yes.
Lethem: This connection is alive for me in your use of Carol Kane. She’s another performer who, the way she walks into a film in the ’70s as a young woman, is that same category. It’s the same way in which one now looks and says, “Oh, David Bowie was a Charlie Chaplin figure. He wanted to be like the little tramp.” This genealogy seems to me alive not only in your reference to ’70s films, but also in their glance back to the drollery of a silent performer. So, when you speed up film and have Jason Schwartzman being chased by his child self, it’s like a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck moment, right? It’s “duck season/rabbit season.” I think that there’s that anarchic sense of humor in old comedies and screwball comedies, like what Katharine Hepburn is doing in Bringing Up Baby. She’s bringing anarchy to this space—you see it infect another character, like when Cary Grant is caught wearing the dressing gown and has to account for himself. He does that bizarre little leap in the air and says, “I just went gay for a moment.” That’s the quintessence of the acrobatic. It’s not a human motion. It’s a puppet.
So, I want to talk about Jason Schwartzman. What an incredible performance you bring out of him. A boyish performer has been caught as his boyishness collapses into another, older person. It’s startling in some ways at first, and you even seem to make reference to it. It’s like a meta moment when Carol Kane only recognizes him as her former student when she sees the driver’s license where he’s smiling. You obviously told him never to smile in the early parts of the film. When one has grown old watching a performer, it really makes you feel it in your body—your own age coming on. Jason Schwartzman might have previously seemed to be circumscribed by his callowness, but you’ve presented him with an exit door. After your movie, we can see the possibilities of using him in so many more ways. I’m impressed. I’ve always adored him, but there’s also an element where maybe you should be ready to be irritated at any moment. And this is not the irritating Jason Schwartzman. This is something new.
Silver: It was funny because calibrating that performance—I always wanted him because as a person Jason is extremely funny, affable, warm, generous. And then anything that this character was doing that felt quiet or ill at ease, Jason would sometimes push against that. I would bring it back down, but I’m so glad that he kept pushing against it because that creates who the character is, so it’s not just like a one-note character.
Lethem: He still wants to charm, but it’s blocked, and you’re blocking it just as circumstances have blocked it for the character. But then he’s pushing against it.
Silver: In the edit, it was a combination of different takes where it was sometimes more of him bringing those qualities of himself to it, and sometimes it was tamped down a bit. I thought it needed to be tamped down throughout—theoretically speaking, that was my idea for the character’s arc. That would have been a very boring movie. He was resisting it for a reason, and I’m so glad that he did.
Lethem: There’s a metaphoric parallel with the singing. He’s a singer who can’t find the voice. What’s a Jason Schwartzman performance without the winsome charm? His voice has been taken away, but you can still hear it anyway. That’s magically apt.
So, I want to go back. I’m prone to comparisons and references. But I feel that this is a film that’s very conscious of its relation to other films, and I’m going to enumerate them. You can tell me if something doesn’t really belong on the list: Harold and Maude, Minnie and Moskowitz, The Graduate—those especially for me were alive in this film. The character shares the name Benjamin.
Silver: Yes. It was this joke that his mother is calling him Benjamin, and everyone else calls him Ben. And, of course, Carla would call him Benny. Then, there’s The Heartbreak Kid.
Lethem: I knew I was missing one. The Heartbreak Kid is overwhelmingly present.
Silver: The discomfort that comes from that movie—it’s so funny and so uncomfortable, and I was like, “That is exactly right for this.” There are so many incredibly awkward moments that are so well pitched. And I just was like, “We need that kind of comedy.”
Lethem: It is worthy of comparison to The Heartbreak Kid. That’s a daring film to bring into the viewer’s imagination because it’s so consummate.
Silver: And it’s funny because Neil Simon was breathing down Elaine May’s neck and wanted her to follow every line, but would then be off set and she would have the actors improv. So, it goes between being very scripted and being very improv.
Lethem: There’s a short story that’s the basis of it, by Bruce Jay Friedman. It’s interesting to consider that there’s a third writer hiding behind Simon and May.
So, you’re nodding your head: yes, The Graduate; yes, The Heartbreak Kid; yes, Minnie and Moskowitz. At what layer of awareness or intentionality do these references come into your working method? Was it there at the start with you and the screenwriter? Did you write them in and then hide them from the performers? Or did you show these films to the actors? How do you manifest this intertextuality in your process?
Silver: It all started because I told Adam Kersh, one of my producers, that while I was shooting a documentary about my mother, I found out that she was going to have her bat mitzvah. She was 65. And he was like, “Oh my God, you could do like a Harold and Maude thing, but the older woman meets a cantor.” I had no idea what to do with that, and Chris does not like Harold and Maude. So, there was this tension already: We’re going to look at this movie and see what we do like about it and what we want to keep. Then, we started thinking about other movies that are akin. From there, it went to screwball. We were like, “This is a screwball comedy at its core.” That’s what brought us to Bringing Up Baby and a bunch of others. We both love Heartbreak Kid and started mapping out how those relationships unfold over the course of the movie. The way I work is very much about each character and not feeling like they’re trapped in a story, allowing them to dictate the plot rather than folding the characters into the plot. So, it was many things at once, but it started with this initial impulse Adam had: “You should do a remake of Harold and Maude, but a Jewish version”—even though I guess Maude is Jewish.
Lethem: This leads to the Jewish question—let’s put a pin in that one.
Silver: But it started there, and that’s what got other producers involved. And I didn’t know what that story looked like. I didn’t know how to separate it from the model. Then, you just look at how the model is basically The Graduate. Harold and Maude was made a few years later. It’s in the ethos, and then you think about Mike Nichols—of course, Elaine May was reacting to The Graduate when she made The Heartbreak Kid. So, you move on from there and start to think about what that looks like now. And also the idea of, if you take out the simplicity of it being overtly romantic, what does that look like? What does a spiritual connection or friendship look like when it’s not sexual?
Lethem: Analyzing the characters as if they’re a real person is a kind of inquiry I often resist when I’m asked it about my novels—but do you feel like you know what happens to these two people after the closing beat?
Silver: It’s this odd sensation where they have love for each other. They just don’t know what that love is. So, what does that mean? It’s the confusion of everyday life. You have all sorts of reactions to people that you cannot quite fathom. We want to always put it into some kind of book in the Dewey Decimal System of our brains. Who the hell knows what the book that they’re contained within is saying, if it is a romantic relationship or just a friendship? What matters is they found each other at that point when they needed each other, even though that sounds like it could be cheap. Essentially, we’re all looking to actually be understood by another person. That’s how the film lands. So, why not say it?
Lethem: Madeline Weinstein plays the other love interest, and this is where this film does something only a very small number of very great films do: It risks letting that third party, the one who’s going to lose, become so alive to us that we’re confused in our wishes. Schwartzman’s character sees her as an extension of the rabbi—he’ll never fundamentally see her otherwise. Yet for us, she’s an immensely intricate and compelling character, and your camera commits to her with those close-ups. We stay with her in the party scene when she’s flubbed the Katharine Hepburn impression, and we’re with her in torment. Later comes a prolonged torture sequence when the game of telephone is moving toward her. And you do something very unusual, in that it’s also a ghost story. She’s cast as the dead wife. As I read that scene where she’s on the porch smoking, that’s not reality. That’s the ghost. How did you get there?
Silver: We were thinking about the structure of Two Lovers, a James Gray movie I love deeply. This is structured very differently in terms of what those two options mean for him. But with Gabby, we were thinking about someone who is the opposite of the Carla character, how to define her. We wanted her to be associated with the whole institution of the temple. He doesn’t know if he belongs there anymore. It’s a very interesting set of signifiers because Carol Kane wants in. She wants to be recognized by this institution, even as it’s becoming a kind of a trap or a cage—which I think any institution is, when you look at it, because it’s about keeping the lights on, very literally. Jews in pews. So, her character, that’s where it began when we were structurally thinking about the movie and what that character might be. But Chris and I would spend months banging our heads against the wall as to how to get these characters right, who these characters are. I was discussing it a lot with Maddie throughout the whole process and who this person might be, and when we settled on the fact that she’s a failed actor looking for a new role to play and then she’s like, “I’m going to play your dead wife”—it was like, “Oh, that makes sense. That clicks.”
Lethem: Really an amazing, intuitive leap, and that you worked on it with her makes sense.
Silver: She’s actually my old roommate.
Lethem: Is she in any of your other films?
Silver: We wanted to work together once upon a time, but it didn’t happen.
Lethem: Jewishness is conceived in a couple of your films as a familial trap that one needs to work out of—a thing I imagine a lot of Jewish people can probably relate to. I couldn’t keep from thinking about your choice as an artist who happens to be a Jew. You’ve got a choice to lean in or to lean out. Here, you make reference to matters as specific as the schedule by which one is bat mitzvahed. Unlike, say, Elaine May, you haven’t leaned out. She’s not interested in that specificity. I think that’s mostly the more typical choice. So, it’s a very compelling fact to me that at this moment, you’ve found your way to a place that leans into Jewish identity as an overt topic. Can you tell me about that?
Silver: I grew up in a household where we would celebrate Hanukkah and maybe have a Seder and that was it. Didn’t go to temple at all.
Lethem: You didn’t have a bar mitzvah?
Silver: Nope. My father had been bar mitzvahed and my mother made fun of him, called him “bar mitzvah boy.” He didn’t like Hebrew school. My mother came from a house of socialists. They met at a socialist summer camp.
Lethem: You and I have mothers in common in that sense. The secular red diaper baby.
Silver: Exactly. That led to Carla’s backstory, where the character is a red diaper baby. So, I grew up in this Irish Catholic town in Massachusetts. It was a dry town because it was heavily religious at the time. Now, obviously, it’s different because it borders on Cambridge, where Harvard and all those places are. So, it’s become like Brooklyn. But at the time, I was the only Jew in my school. And my parents came from Queens, so they identified, once they were outside of New York, as Jews, but just culturally. Growing up it was about Jewish humor—you know, the Woody Allen of it all, Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks, recognizing cultural lineages of irony in respect to mainstream culture that were both oblique but, in some ways at the time, privileged. My parents’ best friends from when they were back in college became ultra-Orthodox Jews who were in my film Soft in the Head. And I’ve always been interested by the rituals that I did not ever partake in when I was younger. Then, when I found out that my mother was going to bat mitzvah class, it opened up this curiosity in me to sort out exactly what that is. I didn’t even know that you could do that when you were older. It opened up this whole line of questioning. Every movie is a reason to engage, offers you the ability to do research because you have an in, which is the character you’re learning about it for. Like, I’m doing another movie about an opera. I know nothing about opera, but I’m learning because it’s the character. Of course, it’s the kind of milieu that you become fascinated with and you’re a student.
I think that’s the initial impulse, but there’s obviously this greater impulse: My family is Jewish whether they practice or not. So, it has some impact on my neurotic everyday personality. I’ve always seen that the humor and the religion go hand in hand for me. What fascinates me most about it at this point is that when you get down to it, there are no hard and fast rules within Judaism because there’s so much questioning and it’s done so differently depending on, you know, if you’re Reform, if you’re this, if you’re that. So, everything is about questioning. That’s incredible. Why is that not at the forefront, that Judaism is about questioning everything in front of you and not taking what you’re being fed? That’s essentially Talmudic scholarship. It’s just people arguing over what something means endlessly. That kind of circular thinking and questioning fascinates me, and that’s what this movie is, with these characters who are questioning their lives, and that makes sense. It grounds this otherwise abstract notion of going about life and questioning. It fits thematically. I don’t know what it means to be a Jew. I do know that I just made a movie about Judaism.
Lethem: Well, you and I share this. We’re both sketchy Jews who’ve made artworks where the characters are more Jewish than we have ever been.
Silver: Exactly. It’s almost like this thrust into what another version of us could be. I don’t have it articulated quite yet as to how I want to navigate this world. I don’t think I would ever go to temple regularly, but maybe I would want to have a Seder. So, there’s something about tradition that interests me, that I would like to integrate into my life after making this movie, perhaps more so, because I understand a bit more of it.
Lethem: I want to ask you about a moment that reminded me especially of your earlier work. I didn’t check to see if this feeling was because the actor you used was in fact a connector to your earlier work. I’m thinking of the anomalous visit Schwartzman makes to the Christian church to talk with that daft priest character. The rhythms of that performance, the sly and completely bemused quality of the priest trying to contend with a Jewish man’s questions, really stands out.
Silver: That’s Jason Grisell, and he was in Stinking Heaven.
Lethem: Who is he in Stinking Heaven?
Silver: He has bleached blonde hair. He plays the guitar.
Lethem: Oh, gosh. He’s just enough older, and something about the priest’s outfit really fooled me because he seems younger, but of course time has passed, and people start to look older. Of course he’s the singer. That’s great.
Silver: That was a scene that, when we were trying to figure out the schedule, we almost cut it out, and I’m so glad that we stuck to it and found this. There were a few beats they had to hit, but they just went off, and Jason [Grisell] knows a lot about Catholicism—he works at a church—so it ended up becoming just a conversation between the two, which we shot with one camera and for which my editor wanted to kill me because of the coverage. But the fact that he’s going and basically checking out this other religion in hopes that he could reunite with his dead wife in heaven because he’s saying that Judaism is about what’s in front of us, which is like upstate New York, which is quite depressing for him—I found that we did need it. It’s personally one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Lethem: I love scenes in movies where you meet a character who stands entirely outside of the story. It reminded me of the opening of Minnie and Moskowitz, the New York sequence, which is in some ways anomalous because it has this character, played by Timothy Carey, you’ll never meet again. They’re having hot dogs, and it gives you an angle on the Seymour Cassel character that will stay with you through the whole film. Similarly, this priest scene is outside the system of relations that define Schwartzman’s character—his two mothers who expect such particular things from him, or the rabbi who expects very similar things. This priest can’t possibly be disappointed in the cantor for not singing because he doesn’t know he’s a singer. So, you see Schwartzman briefly escaping the system of surveillance and expectations which define his world in the film. It opens something up in him that he doesn’t follow. Or perhaps it closes a doorway that briefly opens. Like, “Maybe I can go in here, but no, there’s no escape.” So, instead, he has to turn back toward the existing system of characters. Where is his escape going to come from? It’s going to come from another human. It’s not going to come from another institution, the rival institution of Christianity. I think this is important. Our salvation doesn’t come from another institution. We need people, unfortunately or fortunately.
