An illuminating chat

While he still carries the baggage of Frodo, Elijah Wood is breaking out in all sorts of new directions. So too is actor turned director Liev Schreiber; and the pair collaborated on the film Everything is Illuminated, currently showing in Australia. The Blurb's Gaynor Flynn caught up with the pair at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

At 24 years of age, Elijah Wood might have been acting for 16 years, but of the 37 films he’s now appeared in he will, for many people, always be remembered as the little hobbit who had an awfully big adventure.

And that’s okay by Woods. After all, when Lord of the Rings came along he was largely seen as a child actor who was trying to make his mark on adult audiences – and he was doing okay, sort of. While there was a notable turn or two in films such as The Ice Storm (1997) and The Faculty (1998), there was many a forgettable one as well. LOTR however, secured his place in cinematic history once and for all.

"They were massively popular films and I think they will be referenced for the rest of my life," he said
recently at the Toronto International Film Festival. "So being a part of something like that is not something that you can just let go of and nor do I want to. I mean it was an amazing experience."

"So it doesn’t haunt me," he adds. "I‘ve continued to work since LOTR and I’ve continued to work on films that are intentionally very different from each other. In my mind I’m not actively trying to shake Frodo or those films. I’ve always employed the philosophy that every job that I do should be different from the last that I did. And I think that just intensified after LOTR, the interest in wanting to play very different types of roles to both satisfy myself as an actor and challenge myself and I guess to change perception a bit as well."

Which explains why Wood has been popping up in the most unexpected of places. There’s his turn as the slightly pathetic, insecure (and at times even a little creepy) Patrick in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His unrecognisable, and unbelievably evil role in Sin City and the upcoming Green Street Hooligans where he once again gets to investigate his dark side, (more on that later).

His latest film, Everything is Illuminated is another opportunity for Wood to put some distance between himself and Frodo and demonstrate that the young actor is turning into one of the most diverse and accomplished performers of his generation with a dramatic range, few can equal.

"It was a great experience on a lot of levels"

Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, the film revolves around a solemn and quietly neurotic young American Jew, interestingly enough called Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood), who is obsessed with his family history. In particular his grandfather’s history and the woman rumoured to have saved him from the Holocaust.

He heads to the Ukraine for answers and is met by his guide - and the narrator of the film - Alex (newcomer Eugene Hutz). At first glance they seem a most unlikely pair of travelling companions. Where Jonathan is sombre, immaculately dressed and anal-retentive, Alex is a gregarious, Addidas wearing, chunky gold-chain loving guy, in awe with everything from that "ennobled great country America". He’s also Jonathan’s translator with a mangled command of English that results in such colourful phrases as "I dig Negroes" and, "many girls want to be carnal with me because I’m such a premium dancer".

His family does however specialise in organising "tours of dead Jews". The pair are joined by Alex’s bilious grandfather who’s also called Alex (Boris Leskin) and his much loved, "seeing eye bitch Sammy
Davis, junior, junior".

It’s an intriguing story not least because Foer has turned what is a familiar pilgrimage for many Jews
into something surprising. And Schreiber, on the whole has done a fine job, although at times the many quirky moments early in the film threaten to render meaningless the darker, more haunting elements of the journey the quartet is making.

"It was a great experience on a lot of levels," says Wood. "Filming in Prague was amazing, (it doubles for the Ukraine) and figuring out all the weird little nuances of this character and working with the others was fantastic. And Liev might be a first time director but he had such a clear vision of the story that he wanted to tell. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that this is a very personal story for him, there’s a lot of his own connections to his own grandfather in this. And ultimately, that was the impetus for getting this story told."

38-year-old Schreiber (Scream I, II and III, Manchurian Candidate), had in fact been "daydreaming for a long, long time about the movie I would make if I ever got the chance to make a movie," he laughs. "But I didn’t ever think it would really happen and in the end, it only came about through a series of happy accidents."

He was already writing a screenplay about his grandfather, a Ukrainian immigrant (called Alex) who died in 1993, partly because "I have a pathological memory problem," explains the director. "And when my grandfather died, it started to become a problem, because I felt like now I was losing things that mattered to me."

But Schreiber’s script was "going nowhere" when a call from an editor at the New Yorker changed everything.

"He was doing a fiction series and he came across this young writer that he wanted to include, and he asked me if I would read the writers work in a public reading," explains the director. "And I was blown away by the similarities in our stories. And I very envious of the quality and maturity of his writing and how young he was (19 at the time). And it blew my stuff out of the water. And I asked him if I could adapt his story into a film, and so for me it was a simple act of transplanting his characters into my narrative structure."

"my character... was fascinating"

Schreiber recognised himself in Jonathan immediately, he says. The other appeal was that the novel raised a lot of questions Schreiber had also been asking after he lost his grandfather, such as "am I connected to anything", and "what does it mean to be an American?"

"So the act of writing this and the act of making this movie was a commitment to some kind of search for identity and a search to understand my grandfather and myself, and it turned into a very emotional one for me."

And that appealed to Wood:

"Well I’m a huge fan of Liev as an actor," says Wood. "And his passion for this project was contagious. So it was easy for me to want to be a part of this. And I loved the relationship of these three characters in this tiny car driving across the Ukraine and what happens in terms of dynamics between them. And my character Jonathan was fascinating, because he was this very still, quiet observer who's awkward socially and who lives at an arm's distance from the rest of the world, but yet has this world going on in his mind."

"And one of the first references Liev made to me," adds Wood, "was the Peter Sellers character in Being There, and I embarrassingly had never seen the movie. So then I watched the film and that was actually a great inspiration for the character just in terms of his quietness and the fact that he’s an observer and everything kind of washes over him."

Despite the fact that Wood could probably retire right now if he so desired, given the massive popularity of LOTR, he is fact working harder than ever. There’s Green Street Hooligans, due for release next year, where Wood plays an American who gets indoctrinated into a group of football hooligans. There’s also going to be a film on the legendary Iggy Pop, that Wood hopes to secure, despite the fact that he "can’t sing".

"No I don’t sing," he laughs. "And that scares the shit of me. But its something I’ve very passionate about and I’m a huge fan of the Stooges. I’m a huge fan of Iggy Pop and to be able to portray him in a film would be amazing and very, very frightening because of the fact that I have so much respect for him."

In between all that, Wood is also trying to start up his own record label.

"Its called Simian Records, purely out of love for music," he says. "I’ve been a huge music fan for a long time, and I’ve kind of wanted to start a label for a long time just purely out of interest to find bands that I believe in and release them on a small level. So I have very pure intentions," he laughs. "And part of it is that its just nice to focus on something else you know? Focus energy on some of my other passions and work on something from the ground up and kind of develop it. And I’ve been learning a lot of new things which is great and that’s what’s life’s all about."

Everything is Illuminated is now showing in limited release. Check your local guides for session times.

Gaynor Flynn

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Elijah Wood and Liev Schreiber - the interview

Current film: Everything is Illuminated

Release: November 24, 2005
Rated: M