Henry Bean

Henry Bean is a scriptwriter and has worked on a vari­ety of Hol­ly­wood films over the past 20 years. We talked to him about The Believer, his first film as a direc­tor, is an intel­li­gent and brutal exam­i­na­tion of the gap between one Yeshiva scholar’s Jewish faith and the neo nazi beliefs he adopts when he becomes involved in an extrem­ist right wing organisation.

The Believer is your first film as a direc­tor; did this pose any dif­fi­cul­ties for you, and did it change the way you look not only at film (in gen­eral) but the way you look at your films?

The two chief dif­fi­cul­ties were, first, the shift from the pri­vacy of writ­ing to the pub­lic­ness of direct­ing. I was used to making things up in the soli­tude of my office with no one around to judge the prod­uct until it was care­fully shaped and no one to make me self-​conscious about the inher­ent grandios­ity of the enter­prise. Direct­ing, I was com­pelled to do all of this in front of a crew of 40 or more, and much of the time I simply couldn’t do it. I felt some­what com­fort­able with the actors, much less with the camera, lights, etc. Second, though [cin­e­matog­ra­pher] Jim Denault and I had story-​boarded every shot (not that we nec­es­sar­ily shot them), in ret­ro­spect I hadn’t thought things through enough. I wasn’t clear enough to myself about what I wanted “directorially.” Has this changed the way I look at my films? Well, in one sense, despite feel­ing unqual­i­fied as a direc­tor, a number of the more extreme ideas I had seemed to work, par­tic­u­larly the thought that I could get away with a great deal of dia­logue about fairly abstract mat­ters and that I could over-​pack the film with con­tra­dic­tory emo­tions. In this sense, the fact that “The Believer” works in some way has given me more con­fi­dence in my ideas and trust in the emo­tional spec­trum I’m going for. But I’ve also real­ized how little I actu­ally thought my film as film. I don’t mean even in the pro­found way that some­one like Anto­nioni or Chan­tal Aker­man “thinks” in film, but in the simple, crafts­man sense of how one visu­al­izes a story. I used to think that because I saw s when I wrote that I’d visu­al­ized the thing; now I see that that is almost unre­lated to what making a film entails. And, like most people who do this, I’ve come to see the value, the neces­sity, really, of sim­plic­ity — and, of course, how dif­fi­cult sim­plic­ity is.

What kind of oppo­si­tion did you encounter when the film was being made? Were you sur­prised by the reac­tion of some (in par­tic­u­lar the Simon Weisen­thal Center) who said that The Believer was anti-​semitic?

In making the film I had almost no oppo­si­tion what­so­ever. I put up a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the budget myself, and Peter Hoff­man, who found the rest, and Susan Hoff­man and Chris Roberts, who pro­duced the film, made sug­ges­tions that were invari­ably intel­li­gent. Jim Denault, who shot the film, would rarely com­ment on any script mat­ters, but when he did, that, too, was invalu­able. So people only helped me, no one got in my way. In terms of the reac­tion, when we went to Sun­dance, we had no idea what audi­ences would think. When they seemed to like it, we thought that all our prob­lems were solved, that every­one would see our “good intentions” and that, there­fore, there was no danger in show­ing the film to the Wiesen­thal people — who had some­how heard about it and asked to see it. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t know how polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive they were, that Rabbi Marvin Hier had attended the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion the pre­vi­ous summer and so forth. If I had, I wouldn’t have shown it to them. I would have con­tacted the Anti-​Defamation League of B’nai Brith, as we sub­se­quently did after the Wiesen­thal screen­ing. The ADL approved of the film — they want to show it to a youth lead­er­ship group — but by then the damage had been done. Every time I’ve shown it (only in fes­ti­vals so far) there are people who talk about the pos­si­bil­ity that it will be mis­un­der­stood or mis­used by “certain groups,” but I haven’t met anyone who actu­ally mis­un­der­stood it in that way.

In an inter­view in The Face, Ryan Gosling said that The Believer was “about loving some­thing so much that it makes you weak, and hating that”. Is he right?

“The Believer” exists on its own, so anyone’s opin­ions of what it’s “about” have as much cred­i­bil­ity as mine. That said, I agree with Ryan, though per­haps I’d rephrase it a little: that we always hate the things we love, that we hate them because we love them, because we need them and are vul­ner­a­ble to them, because we lose our­selves in them and have to push them away to assert our iden­ti­ties, and so on…

Judaism comes across as a pretty for­bid­ding reli­gion; at one point, Daniel says some­thing along the lines that it’s a reli­gion of action, or of doing, rather than a reli­gion of belief, and at another point, when he and Carla are talk­ing, Daniel says that there’s the Torah, the word of God, and that’s it; it’s “nothingness with­out end”. To which Carla says God might as well not exist. It seems to be an odd con­cep­tion of reli­gion, to have a nonex­is­tent God (for­give me if I’m talk­ing non­sense; I’m not par­tic­u­lary knowl­edge­able when it comes to Judaism), and one at odds with the stan­dard belief now—espe­cially amongst Chris­tians, though maybe less so in Islam and Judaism—that reli­gion should be a com­fort, rather than some­thing to be feared/respected/held in awe. What’s your take on Daniel’s inter­pre­ta­tion? He seems pretty extreme.

First, Judaism, like any reli­gion, is dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent people. In the film, I try to talk about what it is to me, a vaguely obser­vant, vaguely knowl­edge­able Jew. The idea that Judaism is “a reli­gion of prac­tice, not of belief,” is fairly common among obser­vant Jews. In fact, Jews (in my expe­ri­ence) don’t talk much about God, who He (She? It?) is, what He is, whether He is. I recall hear­ing two con­verts from Chris­tian­ity saying that the great appeal of Judaism was that as Chris­tians, when their faith wavered, they felt lost; as Jews, when it wavered, they lit can­dles, said prayers, observed the mitzvot (com­mand­ments that make up the reli­gious law) and faith returned. My own think­ing about his has been influ­enced a great deal by the con­tem­po­rary Israeli philoso­pher Yeshayahu Lei­bowitz who stresses that Judaism is “submission to the yoke of Torah,” which is to say, keep­ing of the com­mand­ments as laid out in the Torah, regard­less of what one feels or hopes to gain per­son­ally. I find this very pleas­ing and con­vinc­ing and extrap­o­late from it to the notion that Judaism works per­fectly well with­out God; one cel­e­brates the hol­i­days, keeps the Sab­bath, observers the dietary laws and so on. One doesn’t need to believe. Now why would one accept the yoke of Torah if it weren’t handed down by God? Well, per­haps, as Carla says in the film, “because God com­mands it whether he exists or not.” Or one might do it to main­tain an ancient tra­di­tion and one’s own con­nec­tion to that tra­di­tion. Or one might, as the philoso­pher Emanuel Lev­inas has done, simply declare that the law is God. For me, at least, a faith that doesn’t require faith, is both beau­ti­ful and useful.

For most of the film, Daniel is trying to reject Judaism intel­lec­tu­ally, in sharp con­trast to most of the other skin­heads he knows, who just hate with­out really know­ing why; were you aware that putting such stri­dently amti-​semitic argu­ments in the mouth of a char­ac­ter would be controversial?

Well, of course I was aware that saying those ideas at all went against accept­able dis­course. Putting them in the mouth of a Jew made it look like “self-hatred,” but putting them in the mouth of a rabbi-​manque made them, to me, a form of prayer. (It’s also true that vir­tu­ally all of Danny’s anti-​semitic remarks can be read iron­i­cally, as a mock­ery of anti-​semitism, even as they are, also, instances of anti-​semitism.) I took it for granted that no one would seri­ously believe that a pub­licly shown film would, itself, espouse these ideas.

In the after­math of the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, how do you feel about the film? In the arti­cle you wrote for Sight And Sound, you said at one point that you had a “terrible thought: I shouldn’t have made The Believer.” Are you wor­ried that the film will be mar­gin­alised because it’s too close to the bone, in that it deals with reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism (if you can call Daniel’s brand of Judaism fun­da­men­tal­ist), vio­lence in the name of ide­ol­ogy and sui­cide bomb­ing, or do you think it’s now maybe more rel­e­vant than before?

I am wor­ried that it will be mar­gin­al­ized. In the present war, and with the cur­rent U.S. admin­is­tra­tion, the coun­try seems to have little patience for com­plex­ity, irony, nuance. Per­haps this is, for cer­tain people, one of the ben­e­fits of the war. One could say, of course, that these events have made the film all the more per­ti­nent, that it offers an insight into the men­tal­ity of fanati­cism, of people who follow the inter­nal logic of an idea with­out lift­ing their heads to take account of the worldly con­se­quences. I sus­pect that that’s so, though whether it will pay off at the box office remains to be seen. But, finally, I’m relieved that I made the film and fin­ished it before all this hap­pened. The film has a truth, I believe, that is just as true now as ever. Among other things, it is a plea for tol­er­ance of the for­bid­den, for seeing the love that often lies behind hatred. It’s pos­si­ble, of course, that some people might take the film the “wrong way,” but that seems to me unlikely, and, in any case, I sus­pect that in the end it would do more good than harm.

How did writ­ing the script (and direct­ing the film, for that matter) affect your own view of Judaism, if at all? And if it did affect it, was it in ways you expected or not?

It didn’t, really. Judaism affected the writ­ing and direct­ing far more than the reverse. I sup­pose in the writ­ing I was star­tled to dis­cover the exu­ber­ance of my own anti-​semitic invec­tive; it seemed I could have writ­ten that stuff to the end of time. And yet I never wor­ried that I was an anti-​semite or a self-​hating Jew. (A self-​hating human per­haps.) I always felt that those out­pour­ings were, really, of love, how­ever demented.

Is it dif­fi­cult to be polit­i­cal within the con­fines of the film indus­try? And on a related note, have you had any suc­cess find­ing a US dis­trib­u­tor yet?

IDP (a con­sor­tium of Fire­works—who financed “The Believer”—Gold­wyn and Stratos­phere) will dis­trib­ute the film the­atri­cally in the U.S. after it shows on Show­time (now sched­uled for March, the planned Sep­tem­ber pre­mier having been delayed by the attacks). Polit­i­cal in the film indus­try? It’s very dif­fi­cult. Pro­duc­ers, stu­dios and so on are fright­ened of offend­ing any con­stituency what­so­ever, and par­tic­u­larly the more vocif­er­ous ones — often more wor­ried than the groups them­selves are. It’s an inevitable result of trying to market to every­one. I thought “Three Kings” was a very inter­est­ing film polit­i­cally (and in other respects) as was, in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way, “Dazed and Confused.” But, more deeply, Amer­ica tends to be, or tries to be, a res­olutely “apolitical” nation. That is self-​deception, but it means that to address the movie-​going audi­ence polit­i­cally one gen­er­ally comes at it obliquely. I’m presently writ­ing another film that is all about pol­i­tics yet, I hope, won’t look like it.

Why is Carla so drawn to Daniel (apart from the better sex and the “tragic dimension”)?

Well, that’s a lot. But, also, I think she feels that he is seri­ous and very demand­ing of him­self in a way that she respects and is drawn to. I think that there is a direct line from telling him, “Hurt me,” to her wish to “submit to God.” She is a will­ful crea­ture who is search­ing for some­thing larger and more pow­er­ful than her­self. At first she thinks he might be that some­thing, then she finds in him a way to another alternative.

And finally: could you could look on Daniel’s nazi beliefs as being the ulti­mate test of faith? Is this how far he is will­ing to go to test his reli­gious commitment?

I think that’s a good way to put it. There is some­thing in us that wants to speak the unspeak­able, to hold up for inspec­tion and con­sider seri­ously the most hated ideas. We want to get past our reflex­ive, culturally-​learned reac­tions and see what we really think if our minds are open to any­thing and every­thing. I think we also sense that what­ever the cul­ture has cat­e­gor­i­cally and col­lec­tively rejected must have some tremen­dous appeal (or why would they have mar­tialled their forces against it), and we want to see for our­selves what that is. In the end, Danny’s Judaism is stronger, more vital, more living because of his Nazism than it would have been with­out it. Danny wants the impos­si­ble (to be a Jew and a Nazi); it destroys him, but for a period it gives him true life.

Posted at 3pm on 16/01/03 by Leon McDermott to the interviews category.
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