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First printed at www.movingpicturesnetwork.com

By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures Politics issue, fall 2008)

Jeff Goldblum has navigated between the mainland of mainstream entertainment and the islands of independent cinema for more than thirty years. Often labeled quirky, awkward or circus-tall, the actor continues to explore experimental fare, adding to his risky and/or rewarding roles in The Fly, The Big Chill, Deep Cover, Jurassic Park, Independence Day and Broadway’s The Pillowman by bringing to life Adam Stein – a man broken by the Holocaust who is now trying to regain control of his mental acuity and his environment at a treatment facility in Israel. Unlike the majority of films foraging that era for material, this story is adapted from a well-regarded novel by Yoram Kaniuk. But, like all art of currency, the fact that a treatment facility not unlike the one in Kaniuk’s fiction was built not long after his book was popularized is testament to the power of the piece. After premiering at Telluride, Colorado, occasioning jam-packed screenings in Toronto, and earning rave reviews for its almost 6’5″ star, Adam Resurrected is part of the prestigious line-up for this year’s AFI Fest.

At the Moving Pictures Media Studio at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto, Goldblum regaled us with his ability to manipulate each of his ears independently, and with fun facts and pop quiz questions such as, “Which of the following is not a constellation? Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper or… Orion’s Suspenders?” Despite the serio-tragic adventures of Adam Resurrected, Goldblum’s debonair and disestablishment disposition immediately moved him way up on our “People We’d Most Like to Have at a Dinner Party” list.

Moving Pictures magazine: You’re here with Adam Resurrected, a fairly disturbing tale. It’s a fictional account of a man who is each of the following: a womanizer, a vaudevillian, a clairvoyant, an alcoholic and an astute financial adviser. Was it those attributes of the role or the director that provided the motivating factor in becoming a part of this project?
Jeff Goldblum: All of those. When I heard that Paul Schrader was directing this, before I read anything, I was excited. We’ve known each other over the years and almost worked together. I’ve been a big fan of his, so that was a great idea, a very attractive one. I read the script, and it was a beautiful, provocative, unexpected, ambiguous, smart, sophisticated script. Then I read the book from which it originally came, that Yoram Kaniuk did that’s been highly celebrated. And yes, the part was spectacularly complicated and interesting and always contradictory and unexpected and surprising and multi-layered and challenging, really challenging.

I think maybe also what attracted me early on is a kind of theme in it, what it was essentially about underneath the horrific and sometimes disturbing events of the movie. This fellow, Adam Stein, finds himself faced with death and horrible loss in the most traumatic and dramatic ways I guess that anybody could, but, like for all of us who are gonna inevitably face the loss of everything – our abilities, our relationships and people around us that we love, sometimes fleetingly and awfully, and our bodies finally, and our life story and cycle – it could either be horrific and diminishing or be an opportunity for something deeper and enlarging.

In Adam’s case, I think he starts to finally ask himself, “Who am I?” – a question some people say is the most important we can ask, and it’s the reason that we’re here – and comes up with an answer that allows him to finally dis-identify from the things of his life and the forms of his life and his so-called personality and all the things that he thought of himself as before, and come up with an answer that’s mysterious – and is, finally, the only source of peace and forgiveness and present-ness and aliveness and creativity and joy and love and connection with other people.

MPM: And he finds a sense of altruism in there as well when he’s faced with someone else who’s gone through a similar horror.
Jeff Goldblum: Yeah. That’s right. The young boy has been traumatized and can only act like a dog. We don’t wanna give anything away, but my character has had something to do with degrading himself and becoming a dog in order to save his family at one point. So his association with dogs is horrible, and so seeing this boy in this mental institution in Israel in the early ’60s brings everything back and causes him to painfully confront what happened to him. But nobody can help the boy and nobody can really help me. I’m sort of self-destructing slowly, but I reach out to him and we help each other, heal each other.

MPM: You traveled to Poland, to concentration camps; spoke to many people; and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Israel. Did the experience change you?
Jeff Goldblum: I’ve always been interested and somewhat exposed to those events, but I’d never been to Israel, and Yad Vashem was incredible. I talked to survivors in Los Angeles and in Europe. I spent a month in Berlin (my character is supposed to be from there), saw the cabarets where I might have worked and the places I might have lived, and then went to Poland, to Majdanek (which is supposedly the concentration camp most intact) and had a powerful experience there. No tourists or anything. It was just me and a historian who runs it in the dead of winter. It was incredible. It changed me forever in ways that I don’t even know about yet, but it has something to do with the theme of this movie and I think it’s finally inspiring.

MPM: The film is made up of people from so many different backgrounds. The credits list companies from Romania, the UK, the U.S., Israel and Germany. What does that multi-cultural identity bring to the film?
Jeff Goldblum: Something good, I think. At the top, it was produced by a German producer and an Israeli producer, and I think that was unprecedented. And these two particular producers were both soulfully invested in it. The Israeli producer had been passionate about this; it had been the drive of his life to make this for the last 18 years. Then we worked in Romania, and there were Israelis working on it and German actors and British actors. Sir Derek Jacobi is in it.

I think it was good to have had to try to find new ways of communicating – that was not unhelpful, not unrelated to the story, finally. Breaking through ways of communicating has something to do with the story, and the theme of the movie is more universal than just the circumstancefs of the movie. So I think having people from different perspectives and backgrounds and cultures has contributed to that, too.

I’m interested to see if people get what I think is the underlying nourishment in it, and I think they can, but I think a lot of it is ambiguous. I think it’s so rich, and it’s up to the viewer to participate actively and get all sorts of things that are personal.

Photo (top): Goldblum tries a new moustache look, with help from MPM’s Alexis Madden. Photo by Scott McDermott.