A Film by Jasmin Dizdar

CHOSEN

A FILM BY JASMIN DIZDAR

Opens in UK Cinemas 3 March

Written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar

Starring Harvey Keitel, Luke Malby and Anna Ularu

Running time: 105 mins

Press Contact:

Thomas Hewson –

THE ULTIMATE WEAPON IS COURAGE

An epic tale of family, honor, vengeance and salvation.

Based on remarkable true events during World War Two, Sonson is a young Jewish Hungarian lawyer living under German occupation. Devastated when the German authorities allow his ailing wife to die - and after they take away his sister-in-law Judith to a concentration camp, Sonson realises he can no longer sit on the sidelines of conflict.

He joins the Hungarian resistance and sets out to rescue Judith - the start of an inspirational fight back against the increasingly desperate and dangerous Nazis in the dying embers of the war, where Sonson will, in avenging the deaths of his people, save thousands of others.

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer”

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

SYNOPSIS

Maine, USA. Present Day. MAX (10) plays chess with his great-grandfather PAPI (90’s) nagging him to help with an essay on heroes. Reluctant, Papi eventually tells him of Sonson, a Hungarian Jew in WW2.

Debrecen, Hungary. Winter 1943. SONSON is a former barrister who works in Jewish forced labour conscripts. His Wife, Florence, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

By Spring 1944 the Germans have invaded and Florence’s cancer has spread. She dies painfully, barred from medication. On her deathbed, Florence makes Sonson promise that he will look after her rebellious sister JUDITH. Sonson is approached by the local Hungarian resistance, looking for a man of his intellect and language skills, whom he reluctantly joins when he discovers Judith has been captured by the Nazis. Impersonating various SS officers he manages to kill prominent figures of the Nazi regime and inspire the local Hungarian Jews to fight back against their German oppressors.

Following a particularly bloody battle at the gates of a Jewish ghetto Sonson decides to travel to Poland to make good on his promise and trace Judith, who we have seen earlier escape from a train bound for the camps.

Once again, this time in Poland, Sonson joins forces with the local Jewish resistance and through guile, strength and courage he helps inspire the locals and seize control back from the increasingly desperate Nazis who are on full retreat from the Eastern Front and destroying everything in their path. At the end of a violent battle, outnumbered and underarmed, Sonson is almost killed. He is rescued and as life ebbs away he dreams of his darling wife Florence, of a happier, romantic time together. This, and the arrival of Judith instills new strength in Sonson and together with the remaining Polish resistance manage to free their Polish town, forcing the Germans to surrender through incredible acts of bravery.

The liberating Russians arrive, honouring the Jewish fighters and Sonson is praised as a hero, even as an agent of God. Sonson’s future brings the promise of new love with Judith.

As Papi concludes this heroic story he warns the new generation that such atrocities may happen again. A curious Max asks Papi how he knew Sonson, but Papi shrugs off a clear answer, stating that he himself had a very quiet, unassuming war. Max leaves with plenty of impressive material for his essay, and Papi begins his prayers. In the background, photographs betray the fact that Papi is in fact Sonson.

SHOOTING LOCATIONS

Bucharest, Romania and New York, USA

SHOOTING PERIOD August-September 2014

Director JASMIN DIZDAR

What attracted you to Gabriel de Mercur’s script “Chosen”?

What I liked about the script was the fact that it was inspired by a true story about a Jewish man who stole Nazi uniforms and used them to enter Nazi headquarters in Hungary during the Second World War. Although it’s based on true events, the script is written in a kind of loose fairy-tale form; an old man narrating a story that occurred 70 years ago, to his 13- year-old grandson.

Just as you settle into this story about the ordinary couple who are in love, expecting their first child, the wife tragically dies with the unborn baby inside her and the story suddenly swerves off from this sensual intimate tale into war epic action territory and our main character suddenly transforms from a quiet and humble family man into a Hungarian hero. At first, that contradiction confused me. The idea that an ordinary everyday Jewish man would dare to take on the almighty German Army was not familiar to me. I was expecting a modest version of “Schindler’s List”, depicting poor people standing helplessly whilst beaten to death or executed in cold blood by cruel Nazis.

But as I started re-reading the script, I realized that the old man is narrating it to a kid who still has no mature concept of life. How is a 13 year-old living in 21st century New York going to relate to those strange things that took place 70 years ago in some faraway country like Hungary? The only way he can relate to them is if you introduce a kind of fairy-tale element to it - if he tells him the story using time-honored characters of heroes and villains. His old great-grandpa asks the boy: “What do you know about the heroes? These guys in your video games, they’re not real heroes.” By doing this, he sparks the interest of the boy.

As a filmmaker I just love that combination of truth, naïveté and imagination, which is characterised in my previous films. Although I admire films like "Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan" and "Downfall", where every single detail is based on the historic fact, I personally find facts too restrictive, obvious and lacking the magic of cinema. You know exactly what is going to happen next. I prefer stories which are inspired by, but not a slave to history, filtered through the filmmakers’ imagination and given a personal touch. Such a film is “Chosen”.

What I liked about the screenplay is that it’s not trying to make the audience feel sick and distressed with familiar Holocaust imagery – skeleton-like starved victims executed by evil Nazis. Instead the writer opens the script with a very sensual and romantically intimate story about love between two ordinary people. I found it fascinating that Gabriel chose to tell us a love story about a Jewish Romeo and Juliet trapped in the wrong time and wrong place.

Another thing that attracted me to it is the fact that Sonson’s wife, Florence, dies along with her unborn baby, from a natural illness because the local doctor, Sonson's former friend, is unable to treat her because she is Jewish. The doctor is concerned for the safety of his own family.

The old man narrates a line over Sonson staring at his wife’s grave: "He did not know where to go and what to do”. This line expresses my own feelings when I was burying my mother. She also died prematurely in Bosnia due to poor medical help. Sonson's wife was more a victim of ethnic and racial tensions in Debrecen than of the Nazis. And nothing more enrages one than a betrayal by one’s own once-trusted relatives or a friend just because you belong to a different ethnic group. The inner rage that Sonson carries inside him throughout the film is very much like my own inner rage.

I also love the fact that at the end of the story he refuses to act as a hero. He is not triumphant, he is not celebrating victory like all the others around him, he his men take the spotlight as he retreats into the forest and back into the anonymity from where he came. And he sits there, alone, tired of killing, tired of hatred and human misery. Sonson simply desires to be left with his beautiful memories - which is, in essence, the only valuable thing we have.

How did you go on about translating the script into your own vision? How did you work with the writer during pre-production?

The writer, an incredibly knowledgeable historian and former international lawyer, was generally resistant to script alterations – understandable, given that the amount of research he’d done and that the story is personal to him too. But he did allow me to contribute to a degree, expanding and deepening certain characters and scenes - as long as I don’t cut anything out. Pre-production started quickly as we did not want to miss summer’s long daylight. I did much of the script brainstorming between casting sessions and during location scouting. In my youth, I made a lot of guerrilla-style shorts, often on the run, camera in one hand, pen and paper in the other. Multitasking is a default setting for me.

The script is made of three stories, unified by the fact that our main character, young Sonson, appears in each of them. Each story has its own genre, milieu and set of different characters. Two of the stories are set in Hungary and one in Poland. On top of all of that there is a fourth story that takes place in present day New York, USA, where an old man (Harvey Keitel) narrates his story to his great-grandson on the eve of his Bar Mitzvah. My main focus was to ensure there was a clear dramatic and logical flow between these stories.

I was already familiar with multi-stories projects from my previous film, “Beautiful People”, but “Chosen”, considering its Second World War period and Hungarian setting, was an interesting new challenge. The first story is an intimate love story between Sonson and his darling wife, Florence. The second story follows Sonson, who just lost his wife and his unborn baby, transformed from a quietly tolerant and humble law-abiding citizen into a leader of the local resistance movement. The third story takes us all the way to Poland where Sonson meets completely new set of characters – Polish Jewish rebels.

We developed an idea to introduce a new character into the story, Florence’s young sister Judith. Whilst older sister Florence is an angel of a woman, a good conservative wife devoted to her husband, her young sister Judith is the complete opposite - a born rebel, reckless trouble-maker and political activist. On her deathbed, Florence asks Sonson to make a solemn promise to protect Judith. Sonson makes his pledge, which he now must keep. By heightening this promise, there is a strong dramatic reason for Sonson to leave Hungary, his homeland, and make his epic journey across Europe to Poland where he hopes to find Judith and fulfil the promise.

“Chosen” has quite a large international cast. How did you cast and direct such vast ensemble of so many different nationalities?

Regardless of where we originally come from, when you work with talented people and honest professionals no language or nationality barriers will ever get in the way. All my professional life I worked as a foreigner with foreigners, directing people in languages which are foreign to me and I learnt that the more diversity, the better the film is. I love a grand and diverse scale, Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel paintings, large ensemble films like “Twelve Angry Men”, “Nashville”, ”Ragtime”, “Pulp Fiction”, stories where the entire cast is the protagonist and every single character, however small, has a very important part to play in a story’s jigsaw puzzle. I love it when all kinds of strange and different characters mingle together, appear and disappear unpredictably and mysteriously. I found all that in “Chosen”.

The script also has youthful casual recklessness, rebellion, mocking uniformed authority and fractured narrative which is very characteristic of French, Polish and Czech New Wave films like Andrej Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds”, Roman Polanski’s “Knife in the Water”, Jan Nemec’s “Diamonds of the Night” and Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde”. These are the films I was thinking of while preparing, casting and shooting “Chosen” - those 60’s hippy-ish, jagged, edgy characters, fractured narrative and youthful free spirit in the scenes when Sonson practices his Nazi demeanor in front of the mirror or when Judith escapes from the train.

In fact, I paid a little personal homage to "Diamonds of the Night" which opens with two teenage Jews escaping a train bound for the concentration camps. In the second half of "Chosen" Florence’s younger sister Judith, played by the incredible Romanian actress Ana Ularu, escapes from train. I didn't have time or narrative space to make her escape in one ten minute tracking shot as Nemec did. Instead, Judith’s escape had to be done in a dozen dramatic seconds. Nevertheless, the same rebellious spirit is there.

We first started casting Jewish resistance fighters in London. The overall preference was for resistance fighters to be played by English actors so I told my casting director to think of actors who have that Slavic/Eastern European facial aesthetic. I saw Sam Churchill waiting for an audition and looking so presidential - like a statue of Abraham Lincoln with his distinctive black beard - and I knew straightaway he could be our Polish resistance leader. I had no idea what sort of actor he is, I didn’t know him at all just as I did not know most of the actors I cast in “Chosen”.

I gave the part of the Hungarian resistance leader to Tomasz Aleksander, a powerful actor with Hungarian descendants, always appearing thoughtful, like one of those student leaders who always take themselves too seriously and are first to give speeches in front of people. He needed to keep pestering Sonson to help them so he had to have an element of a “weak leader” who loves publicity and position but when the chips are down he lets others take the charge. Casting such characters must not be overlooked, because when you put them next to the main hero they give the hero a greater stature and importance in the film. Each Shakespeare play has such characters, from Mercutio to Falstaff. I asked him to grow a period moustache, which made him look cheap-leader-like, without slipping into a self-parody.

For the lead, I liked Luke Mably straightaway. English, but resident in Los Angeles, Luke sounded honest, keen and mysterious and a kind of his own man. Luke’s natural Robert De Niro-ish presence, virility and yet possessing a charming way of talking was exactly what the part needed. I got to know him better during the run-up to the shoot where I discovered his mercurial character, which was like a dream come true for me as a director. We were very fortunate to stumble on Luke Mably with his “Raging Bull” natural aura and being such a dedicated die-hard actor who takes his job incredibly seriously. During preproduction Luke spent hours each day with his semi-automatic Mauser constantly practicing holding it, pulling it out of its holder, and coming up with new ways of handling the weapon.

He is an absolute perfectionist, every detail had to be perfected and mastered in his performance. He worked tirelessly on the script and his character. Almost every other night he would phone my hotel room in Bucharest and asked me if he could come down for a chat. Then he would tell me how he would develop this or that scene in which he appears and would it be okay if he changes this or that line slightly or wears this hat instead of that hat. I approved almost everything because either his instinct was correct or I just did not want him to lose his amazing enthusiasm for the part.

I had a wonderful time working with the actors on “Chosen”, allowing them a degree of freedom to take direct part in creating their own performances. They felt free to contribute which helped their performances and if they occasionally went off piste, so what, we are all humans, we all want more.

What about the Romanian cast?

I especially recall meeting Diana Cavallioti for the part of Sonson’s wife Florence. I asked Luke to join us. The very moment I saw them together, I could see them gingerly looking at each other, both happy in each other’s company. During the rehearsals I started to worry, I didn’t want them to fall in love too early and than fall out of love during the shoot. During the shoot, for some reason, Diana could not stop laughing at Luke. Each time he would come near her, kiss her or hug her she would burst into this spontaneous explosive laughter, which made us laugh too. We would set the shot, start shooting and suddenly, in the middle of the shot, Diana would break into another loud laughter, which then make Luke laugh too. I would come out from behind my monitor with my arms spread saying: “Guys, come on!” Luke would shrug his shoulder smiling. She would say: “I’m sorry, I can’t help it.” But she could never tell us why he made her smile so much. We made so many shots of them laughing together and looking so happy in each other’s arms, it was very moving during editing. It definitely was not acting. It was real joy. I was very lucky to have these two actors with such contrasting ethnic and cultural backgrounds and yet with such spontaneous and natural chemistry. They looked made for each other and maybe if they were living in the same town they would be a couple. It’s just a shame that she had to die so early in the film and we could not make more scenes between them because such unique chemistry is gold dust for cinema.