Gut instinct: Dan Gordon[Missing Credit]
He and Irene, as she was later known, became very close, right up until the final days of her life (she died in 2003, aged 85). “She was like a second mother to me,” he says. “Her main concern towards the end of her life was who would continue to tell her story, which she used to relay at high schools. ‘Who will tell the children when I’m gone?’ she said. ‘You will,’ I told her. And that was a promise that I was bound and determined to keep.”
While Gut never got to see the film about her life, she did read the script that Gordon wrote years ago. When that didn’t get funded, Gordon turned her story into an off-Broadway play. “I was workshopping it at a small college in New England and she was in the final stage of her life. She was in the hospital and she was dying. As the audience was applauding, I called her daughter, who was at her bedside, and I said, ‘Hold the phone up to your mother’s ear.’ And I said, ‘Irene, do you hear that? That applause is for you.’ And she passed away, I think, three or four days later.”
It was the success of the play that would eventually lead to Irena’s Vow getting made as a film, directed by Louise Archambault and starring the elegant Sophie Nélisse (The Kid Detective) as Irena. In addition, last year Gordon published a novelisation of Irena’s wartime story, a series of events that almost defies belief. Appointed housekeeper at the age of 19 for the highest-ranking German officer (played in the film by Dougray Scott) in Tarnopol, Poland (now Ukraine), Irena determines to save lives where she can, hiding 12 Jews in her employer’s basement for eight months without his knowledge – while having an affair with him.
Affair: Sophie Nélisse and Dougray Scott (centre) as the Nazi Eduard Rügemer in the film[Missing Credit]
“There are four things about Irene that drew me to her story,” Gordon says. “Number one, her faith. She had as pure a faith as anyone I have ever met in my life. She just believed that God was going to see her through on this. Number two, her courage. She was a lioness. Number three, her innate goodness – she is just flat-out good. And finally, her sense of humour. Irene, just as a friend, as a person, was an absolute hoot, a delight to be around. She had this lovely dry Polish sense of humour.”
As the film shows, Irena’s courage stemmed from a horrifying moment, when she saw a Gestapo officer kill a baby and shoot its mother. “She had witnessed that, and there was nothing she could do. If she had stepped in to try and interfere, she would have been killed. And that moment changed her life, and she literally made a vow to God, which is where the title comes from. If it ever came into her hand to save a life, she would do it. And for a person who was raised Catholic, she had a very Jewish viewpoint, I think, which was: God doesn’t ask you to do what you can’t do. God asks you to do what you can do.”
Like Irene, the 77-year-old Gordon seems a man of conviction. Born in southern California to a Jewish family, he went to Israel when he was 16, where he attended high school at Kibbutz Ginegar. He later joined the Israeli army in the early 1970s, serving in the Yom Kippur War, before embarking on a screenwriting career in Hollywood. He cut his TV teeth as head writer on the show Highway to Heaven, which ran on NBC in America from 1984 for five seasons, before he segued into scripting movies.
Gordon broke into Hollywood at a time when the studios were still making movies for adults, and he found success scripting true-story dramas including the western Wyatt Earp (1994), starring Kevin Costner and the late Gene Hackman, the harrowing prison drama Murder in the First (1995), with Gary Oldman, Kevin Bacon and Christian Slater and – perhaps his finest hour – The Hurricane, in 1999. The story of Rubin “the Hurricane” Carter, a former middleweight boxer who was wrongly convicted of a triple murder, earned its star Denzel Washington an Oscar nomination.
In his eyes, these were no different to Irena Gut’s story. “If you look at The Hurricane or Murder in the First, they’re stories about people who take a stand at personal risk, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but they’re usually stories about people who take moral stands. Even Wyatt Earp was a story about a guy who takes what he believes is a moral stand, even though he gets into a quagmire.”
A quarter of a century on, and it’s a whole different ball game. “It’s never been harder to get an independent movie made than it is today, and it’s never been harder to get a studio movie made,” he sighs. “It was a combination of the streamers and Covid that have pretty much killed the theatrical business. So studios are only making event movies, by and large, Marvel Comic book movies or animated movies. They work, but there’s no studio today that would green-light The Hurricane. Even with Denzel you couldn’t get it made today. A streamer might do it… but they’d do it at a lower budget, and it wouldn’t be as good a movie.”
Who will tell the children when I am gone? she said. ‘You will,’ I told her. And that was a promise that I was bound and determined to keep
While Gordon notes that “certain studios right now are simply paralysed in terms of decision-making”, refusing to name names “because I have to make a living in this business”, this is not the only issue. There’s the dispiriting antisemitism that Gordon feels is rife in the industry in the wake of October 7 and Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, exemplified, he says, by the fact that No Other Land, which chronicles Israel’s demolitions in the Palestinian West Bank village of Masafer Yatta, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.
Gordon tackled the conflict himself with the recent four-part mini-series for television October 7, 2023 – but he sensed the project wouldn’t fly in awards season.
“We could have arranged a theatrical screening, but I told the network to ‘not even bother because we will not be getting nominated. It’ll be a waste of your money.’”
Yet he seems more appalled that films such as Screams Before Silence, documenting the sexual violence of Hamas on October 7, and We Will Dance Again, the documentary about the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival, were ignored. “We are in a very unfortunate state in Europe and the United States, and certainly within the Hollywood community, where large numbers of people have allied themselves with, I’m sorry to say, Islamofascists. They mistake who the victim is and who the aggressor is.”
Heroine: Sophie Nélisse playing Catholic nurse Irena Gut[Missing Credit]
Does he now anticipate a string of films about the Israel-Palestine conflict? “I think there’ll be a rash of films in which Israel is the villain,” he says, pointing to the BBC’s recent documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was pulled when it emerged the film’s 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. Still, Gordon remains hopeful. He has several projects brewing, including an action film called Dedication, featuring Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley as a decorated Marine Corps commander who gets caught up in a hostage situation. Martin Campbell, the director behind James Bond movies GoldenEye and Casino Royale, is also attached, and Gordon is delighted by the “collegial” working relationship they’ve struck up. “There’s no ego involved.” As we wrap up, he can’t resist steering the conversation back to his baby, telling me “the story will leave people uplifted and inspired”. Even now, after three decades, he can’t let it go.
Irena’s Vow is in cinemas from March 28
