You know," says James Schamus, leaning in, "in Hollywood, there are a few of us Jews around!" He breaks into an infectious laugh. "You know, there are a couple! But Hollywood doesn't make Jewish movies! Think about it! It's bizarre! I mean there's a deep, critical interest in the history of Jewish-Americans, and the entertainment industry, but one of the facts of it is… we shy away from Jewish subjects."
It's an intriguing point made by the bespectacled Schamus, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and producer whose best work has come working for Ang Lee, penning his scripts for such classics as The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Indeed, the Jewish-raised Schamus was CEO of Focus Features, the classy indie company involved in releasing the Coen Brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man - "one of the few films in the American industry that's truly Jewish".
Now Schamus, at 56, is making his directorial debut with a pristine adaptation of Philip Roth's 2008 coming-of-age novel Indignation, which somewhat fictionalised the acclaimed author's college experiences. Receiving its UK premiere this week at the Sundance London Film Festival, it tells the story of a Jewish teenager named Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) from Newark, New Jersey, the son of a kosher butcher living in the mid 1950s.
A straight-A student, Marcus wins a scholarship to (the fictional) Winesburg College in Ohio. But, as an atheist, he finds himself on the fringes, at odds with the Jewish fraternity and his combative Dean (Tracy Letts). So how did he come across the book? "I picked it up at the airport a few years ago, mainly because it was short," Schamus confides. "I'm a very slow reader. I fell in love with the characters, and thought, 'This might be a Philip Roth novel you can make a movie out of.'"
While Marcus soon tires of his Jewish room-mates, his request for a single room brings him in direct conflict with the Dean, already apoplectic at the student's refusal to attend chapel. It's a clash that leads to the film's central scene, a stunning fifteen-minute debate, with the Dean demonstrating more than a hint of antisemitism. "The antisemitism… was very real," says Schamus. "I mean at the time this movie is set, there were quotas about Jews getting into the Ivy League Colleges. They just would say 'No'."
Lerman, the 24 year-old star who broke into Hollywood in 2010's Percy Jackson & The Olympians and was last seen opposite Brad Pitt in the Second World War movie Fury, calls Marcus "an incredible character" to play. "He's an atheist Jew, who has been categorised, and been forced into this community that he doesn't even relate to, or agree with, so that's fascinating."
Raised Jewish in Beverly Hills, California, he immediately understood Marcus's background. "If I have to play a Christian kid, which I've had to do before, it's very foreign to me. I really don't know what it's like growing up in a Christian household. Therefore I really have to learn about that. A lot of the research was already done for me, because I grew up in a Jewish household, so I could definitely relate to the family, and the values, even the slang."
Yet is this a film relevant to today? "We get asked this question a lot," says Schamus. "I'm like 'Are you kidding?'" Certainly a number of themes will resonate: from the "American jingoism", as the director puts it, concerning the half-forgotten Korean War to the "slut-shaming culture" -seen via the character of Olivia (Sarah Gadon), a fellow student deemed a "slut" for her sexual antics with Marcus. "It's bizarre," exclaims Schamus. "It's exactly now!"
Like Lerman, Schamus, who is married to the novelist Nancy Kricorian and has two children, grew up in Southern California in a strongly Jewish household. Was he very attached to his faith? "I don't know if it's faith," he says. "It's culture, it's identity. But it's wrapped up in the usual, crazy, Jewish-American discourse around religion, and Zionism, and all those things… but still I'm very much identified as such."
The son of two lawyers, his early years were blighted by psoriasis and he skipped grades in school, before he went to University of California, and then moved to New York, where he fell into the movie business as "the oldest production assistant on earth". After meeting Ted Hope, the two formed indie outfit Good Machine - while Schamus also forged a working relationship with Ang Lee, co-writing his 1992 debut Pushing Hands.
While he went on to score Oscar nods for co-writing Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Good Machine become Focus and Schamus stayed with the company for over a decade until he was unceremoniously fired in 2013. "I found myself happily unemployed," he says, seemingly unconcerned. "I was always planning, at some point, on transitioning away from the studio world. But I was planning on doing it a little later, after my youngest daughter had finished high school."
Despite continuing with his academic role at Columbia University School of the Arts, where he's Professor of Professional Practice, Schamus became determined to direct, despite the possibility that it could be "potentially, incredibly humiliating", as he puts it. "Let's be honest, I've been moving sausages through the sausage factory for 30 years, and having a great time, but it is true, it is quite a different thing when at the end of the day, it's your movie."
Now, with Indignation under his belt, he's back to the day job, co-scripting the upcoming The King's Daughter, starring Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV.
He's also been researching early Judaism for an adaptation of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by the Iranian-American scholar Reza Aslan. "I've been doing massive research on first century Palestinian Judaism, and kind of the birth of Christianity," he explains, "which, as it turns out, is more a creation of Paul than it is of Jesus." He stops, fully aware he's getting into a whole other subject. "That'd take us forever." Perhaps his wish to see more Jewish subjects in Hollywood may yet come true.
'Indignation' screens at the Sundance London Film Festival on Saturday June 4 at 6pm at Sunday June 5 at 1.15pm, at Picturehouse Central.
