Back in 2019 writer-director Nathan Silver released Cutting My Mother, a documentary about the disappointment that his mum felt when he cut her from one of his movies. Amid this, he discovered something utterly unique: she was going to b’nei mitzvah classes so she could become bat mitzvah. Raised in a communist, atheist household, his mother was culturally Jewish, but that was it. “I was kind of in shock,” he says, when we meet in the Hyatt hotel during this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Nevertheless, Silver was urged to take this idea and turn it into a script, which is exactly what he did with co-writer C. Mason Wells, who previously collaborated on Silver’s 2017 film Thirst Street. “We wanted to combine that idea and take on a Harold and Maude or The Graduate-type storyline and see what we could do there,” explains Silver, referring to two classic films from New Hollywood that explore so-called May-December relationships, those with big age gaps between younger men and older women.
In the case of Silver’s pleasing new comedy Between the Temples, the story focuses on Ben Gottlieb, a cantor at a synagogue in upstate New York who is struggling with his faith, as well as his faltering voice. Then, a chance encounter sees him reunite with Carol, his high-school music teacher who helps restore his vocal confidence. Next, rather like Silver’s mother, she asks him to help her prepare for her own late-life bat mitzvah, something that allows him to re-explore his own connections to Judaism.
Carol Kane as Carla and Jason Schwartzman as Ben[Missing Credit]
“We were thinking about making a movie that has actual warmth to it, and has a nostalgia, not unlike Carla herself,” continues Silver. “And how to make the movie feel like Carla, like the warmth that she gives.” The director and his co-writer had been watching films made by Soviet underground director Kira Muratov, famed for her 1989 film The Asthenic Syndrome, and wanted something similar. “[They] are very bleak landscapes, but they feel very warm… it feels so inviting, and you want to be a part of these characters’ lives.”
When it came to casting Ben, Silver knew who to turn to: Jason Schwartzman, the 44-year-old American actor and nephew of legendary film-maker Francis Ford Coppola known for his roles in Wes Anderson films such as Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited. Fortunately, Silver had worked with actor Damien Bonnard on Thirst Street, who also featured alongside Schwartzman in the recent Anderson film Asteroid City. “He is actually the one who wrote Jason a letter and said, ‘You need to work with Nathan,’” reports Silver.
Every day's a shul day: a scene from Between the Temples[Missing Credit]
For Carla, Silver went to Carol Kane, who gained attention for her Oscar-nominated role in 1975’s Hester Street, the story of Jewish immigrants arriving in New York in the late 1800s. “Hester Street, Carol Kane’s first leading role, is a very meaningful movie for me. And to give her another meaningful role in a Jewish movie seemed to square nicely much later in her career,” says Silver, who adds that casting Kane and Schwartzman “was a way to get to actors who don’t necessarily do leading roles that often [and] put them in the spotlight.”
Schwartzman was immediately taken with the script, relating as he did to the spiritual crisis that Ben was enduring. “I don’t know about you, but just losing your faith in general… I mean, that’s a constant problem,” he says. “Sometimes on a bigger level and sometimes on a smaller level in my life, but when I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, [I loved] the idea that this person is so psychologically stilted right now.’ He’s so stuck that he doesn’t even know he’s stuck.” Even his inability to suddenly sing, “the thing that’s supposed to make him happy”, struck a chord. “I think this is what was so powerful about the movie.”
As morose as Ben can be, that was not the case on set, according to Silver, who found Schwartzman’s company an absolute delight. “There are a lot of tragic qualities to Ben’s character but sometimes I wouldn’t be able to breathe because I was laughing so hard. Jason was really able to just make humour come into every situation. I knew that he had that ability, to bring that out in the character as well. Because you don’t want him to just play a sad sack; he finds lightness as he gets closer to Carla. And I wanted that to come out.”
Nathan Silver at the Berlinale International Film Festival, in BerlinGetty Images
Schwartzman nods in agreement, believing Ben and Carla “awaken something in each other”, as he puts it. “It just was so real. I mean, it just felt real to me.” Certainly, the connection between Ben and Carla is very different to, say, Mrs Robinson and the younger Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. “To actually portray a spiritual connection between two people, what does that mean?” asks Silver. “What does that look like? If it’s not going to be sexual and two people actually click in a way… how do you actually show that? Genuinely, not like in a cheesy, cheap way. It’s either sexual or it’s not. What is it when it’s not quite one thing or the other? What if it’s just these two people who need something from the other?”
Silver’s leading man expands on the idea. “I feel like these people come into each other’s life and walk each other down the hallway to the next phase of their life, whatever that might be – together or not together. But they’re necessary to each other in this moment… that’s very real to me, and that connection is real, and they need each other right now, and that real love and appreciation of the other person also grows over the course of the movie, which I think is so wonderful. I just know that there’s a real love there.”
Though raised Jewish, Silver never experienced his own bar mitzvah. “My dad went to temple, and he had a bar mitzvah, but he didn’t want to force me to go. My mother was against it. So we would celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, but nothing outside of that.” Likewise, Schwartzman didn’t have a bar mitzvah. “My father died when I was younger, and the timing was off,” he says. But does he feel heavily connected to the Jewish faith? “I’m learning. I’m learning. I mean, that’s the wonderful thing about this movie… the questioning and the searching and the music of it, if that makes any sense.”
Silver believes the “questioning” aspect of the film is the very heart of it. “If you think about Talmudic scholarship, it’s just arguing over what things mean, getting to the heart of the matter through questioning, questioning, questioning.” The film even made use of a Jewish consultant, who proved invaluable. “Questions about rituals and whatnot…we would go and ask him, like, ‘Is this right?’ He’s like, ‘Well, in some places you do it like this and others it’s with this rabbi...’ So there’s no strict way of [doing things] because there’s so much questioning.”
Of course, inevitably, the subject of Jewish humour is raised, something Silver is fascinated by. Is he ready for the Woody Allen comparisons? “Yeah!” he exclaims. “Him and Albert Brooks. And [Jerry] Seinfeld.” But it’s Brooks, the writer-director-actor, that he feels most affinity for. “What I love about Brooks is he’s a dangerous Woody Allen. If you took all the neuroses and made it into something that had violence underneath, the possibility of violence is always there with him, which is so fascinating to me. That’s why he’s in Taxi Driver. That’s why he’s in Drive.”
Schwartzman is next to be seen in his uncle’s long-gestating passion project, Megalopolis, due out in the UK in September. Did he keep in touch to find out the film was going? He shakes his head. “I stay away. With anybody when they’re working on something, I don’t want to bug then. If someone reaches out, I’m very happy to talk. Just in life in general, I typically… I should be better about it. I should bug people more!” Silver, meanwhile, wants to continue making comedies – and has a project about an opera singer that he hopes will go next. But as someone who is very much a stalwart of the American independent scene, he’s worried.
Jason Schwartzman at the Between The Temples premiere at the Tribeca Festival at Village East Cinema, in New York Photo: GettyGetty Images for Tribeca Festiva
“It’s odd. I used to make a movie a year and I feel like pre-Covid people were so much more eager to just work on friends’ shoots for nothing. A group of people making movies with each other. And now it seems everyone’s exhausted and need a reason to get to be on set, whether it’s pay or whatnot. So it’s harder to get people excited. Something’s happened in the world.” What does he think it is? “There’s no focus anymore,” he replies. “There’s a lack of clarity, I think. And it’s reflective of the fact that people just don’t get together and happily make things. And maybe it speaks to a world depression. If you look at all these big-budget bullshit movies, there’s so little spirit to them. That spirit comes from a sense of… you have to have that vigour.”
Between the Temples is in cinemas from August 23.
