Jeff Goldblum Interview Adam Resurrected

MoviesOnline sat down with actor Jeff Goldblum to talk about his new movie, “Adam Resurrected,” directed by Paul Schrader from a screenplay by Noah Stollman based on the novel by Yoram Kaniuk. The film also stars Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi and Ayelet Zurer.

Goldblum delivers a highly theatrical performance in “Adam Resurrected” which follows former Berlin magician and circus impresario Adam Stein, an enthralling, enigmatic patient at the Seizling Institute, a remote Israeli rehabilitation outpost for Holocaust survivors.

Entertainer, clairvoyant, sophisticate and lothario, Stein veers from brilliance to eroticism, horror and madness, with flashbacks to the physical and psychological demoralization he endured under Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) in the Stellring death camp. Stein appears to have everyone stymied and overawed, but an unusual new patient seems to have the magnetic power to break him free of the grip of his relentless torment.
 
Jeff Goldblum is an amazing actor and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about “Adam Resurrected”:

MoviesOnline:   Can you talk about preparing for this role and learning the performance aspect of this for all of the shows your character does?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Well, I'll tell you, this is different than any movie I've ever done, although I'm nothing if not conscientious. Whenever I get a part, I figure that's the time I should start working on it and preparing it. I like to prepare. I’ve taught for the last twenty years and I like craft, and new investigations, new experiments with how I can best prepare so good things come out.  I had this a year before I did the part.  So early on, some people do it differently and sometimes I've done it differently, but I figured I wanted to learn it. I kind of learned the nuts and bolts of it early on.

I had students in my backyard. I have a guest house that is like an acting space, and my students are often times eager to, and it's good for me, to apprentice me on these things that I'm doing. So, they would come and do the other parts – sometimes different ones every day -- and I would learn the whole thing like a play and I'd have a kind of run through every day.  So I started to do that, and then in that year, I went to Germany and I went to Israel for the first time. I'd never been to Israel before, to suss out where my character might actually be living, what that life might be like, because we don't know.

It's the tip of the iceberg these last few weeks or whatever that I've been out. I've been there in Israel for ten years or so. The war is '45, that’s the period where I'm in, that mansion is another four, five years, '50, and this is the ‘60s. So I've been there ten years and I had to sort of put together what exactly happened to me after you see me lose my mind in that graveyard and eat dirt. I somehow got to the place and lived in someplace. I meet up with that German woman and live in that place and go back and forth. Anyway, I kind of put that together for myself. 

Early on, we spent a couple of days going through the script.  One of the things we talked about is the dialect. I saw as many holocaust fictional movies and documentaries as I could, read as much as I could in this year, but that can only scratch the surface really.  One of the things we looked at, that I was interested in, in some of these holocaust movies, were the movie conceits where you speak accented English. Really I would have been speaking German, and then for Mel Gibson maybe I would have had a subtitled German or Yiddish or whatever we had, but we were going to do this movie conceived, of course, speaking English.  I'd seen some versions of that where they have American actors talking like this, and saying, let's get out of this concentration camp, yada, yada, yada, (laughs) and that didn't feel right to me.

I knew how tricky the dialect was because we were working alongside wonderful German actors. Joachim Krol was Wolfowitz, a very well known national treasure, along with Juliane Kohler, who played Eva Braun in Downfall [and is a] wonderful actress. They speak with real German accents. And Moritz Bleibtreu, who was the lead in Run Lola Run and very well known and beloved there, does that little part with the husband. So anyway, Paul (Schrader) and I, amongst other things, said oh you should start working on the dialect. So I worked with people and spent a month in Berlin. 

I worked with German people from Berlin that I knew in America too. We went through the whole script. I suggested some German words that sound English, you know, "university," and things like that, that I thought I could pepper in, along with the accented English, and Paul accepted many of those. Paul finally made a determination on those. I suggested many of those Yiddish things, so you'd spot them, that I thought might be right for this kind of show business guy in Europe and yada, yada, yada.

Also, in preparation, I talked to many survivors here in Los Angeles who were very sweet and generous to me. There's a group called Cafe Europa and I took part in that year in a Purim party just for survivors -- it was a little bit like the scene in the movie -- and from that group, one door would open another door. And somebody, a lovely woman, told me if I wanted to go there, there were many concentration camps, and I'd never been to any. She said if you want to visit one that's the most intact, and will give you the most powerful experience of what it must have been like, that's what you need to act out and experience, there's this one called Maidanek in Poland, near Lublin. I went there, made a special trip there, and it was very powerful and incredible. 

Along with all of that, I knew I had to attack the problem of the violin, which you see me play before the war in the shows a little bit, and then of course in the concentration camp. I'm a pianist. I know music and I play piano. I have a jazz group in Los Angeles, but I've never played violin.  I got a violin teacher early on, and I took lessons. I got a violin and played it everyday. By the time I got to Israel, which is now way before the fact, I took my violin to Israel, showed Paul who had books of cabaret what I was doing and acted out the whole thing for him. 

Then, when I went to Germany, I saw all the places that I might have lived before, where I grew up, where my parents were, and there still are vestiges of the circuit of those kinds of cabarets and places.  It’s amazing.  And so, you know, I went around like that and saw films of people who did things like that, and I also played the violin.

What else did I do?  You know, I did things that don't appear in the movie. Like one of the folks says, “He was the funniest man in all of Germany, he did animal impersonations, he could do any animal.” Well, I had to sort of make up what I thought might have been. It was different animals, but certainly this dog act that I did for laughs obviously and entertainment, so that you see a little piece of me in my furloined state. [It’s been] years in between the last time you've seen me. When I arrived at this extermination camp, I do this thing in order to leverage the immediate safety of my family and it's humiliating, but I do a little bit of a dog and then I worked with other dog people.

I went to London and met Jane Gibson who was highly recommended as an acting teacher who works specifically with animal interpretations of scripts.  I'd never done that. I'd studied with a bunch of people, but I'd never done that, you know. She was supposed to be the expert on that, so we did dog stuff and I liked that. And Cesar Millan, who's The Dog Whisperer, I saw all his shows and read his books and met with him and told him the story and we went through the script.

I had to do this other thing where I ostensibly control this real dog that we got, and early on Paul Schrader said that’s one of the big things that's going to make this part work for you. He says it early on in the story, if we see not a cute shot of you and the dog, but when you and this dog are at the concentration camp.  If we can see you in a two shot, and if you're actually mad and you can, through the power of your impersonation and by channeling the power of your personality, inner powers and unusual resources, can calm him down, communicate with him.

So I worked a lot with that actual German dog with a German trainer, which was very helpful. We discovered this thing that I could do if I spent a lot of time with him, where I could go, (does German dialect) cross your arms like this, you know?  (unidentified words) is German for cross your arms, and he would go [try?] with his pea brain (laughs). If I rewarded him in the right place, he was finally able to go, I think you're asking me to do this.  I'd go “Good, good, now uncross them” and he'd kind of uncross them, and I'd go “Lie down, lie down.” We spent a lot of time on that, but we got it and that's what Paul said would have impact. 

I remember we spent a lot of time with a very talented Romanian crew where we shot most of it, coming up with these different looks. Paul had books and the fascinating thing was (unidentified words) because you see me from a few years separate sometimes my ascendancy in the entertainment field in Berlin.

MoviesOnline:   What about the magic? 

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Well, I'll tell you, you know something in the script like this eye thing, people are going to ask me, is that real? No, it's trick photography, you know, they lock it down and I go like that (gestures). Because I read it, I said, do I have to learn to do this (laughs), because I think some people can do something like that I've seen. But he said, no, no, I know how to do that and I thought it would be good.  I said, you know, I can wiggle one ear at a time, left, right, left, right (demonstrates) and I've never known anyone else who could do that.  And this is my character, if I can do things like that, and make myself bleed, I'm like an Indian Fakir. He looked at it and said, no, I don't think so.  I don't want you to do that. 

But, I did say early on, when I finally showed up for the rehearsal period, after my preliminary showing him what I could do, and then worked with him some more, showed up with some of the other actors and I showed him just him and me again the old script and what I was thinking of doing. I said, look at this rope trick, I've got this rope trick.  There's no place in the script that it says this, but I don't know where I'll put this in, but I don't know if it's part of the act that I do in Germany, or maybe with the boy if it can interest him, and bring him out of his (unidentified words). He said, yeah, I like that.  And then he finally, after a time, kind of percolated and said, yeah, this scene, that particular scene, and it wound up in the film, but I had that up my sleeve actually.

I had those rope tricks up my sleeve since, you know, the movie Nashville.  Well Robert Altman in that movie said there's nothing in the script like this, a few weeks before.  He said I think your character does sleight of hand in several of the scenes.  Let's get you with magic. I was living in New York at the time with a magic guy and I learned some things. Bring it down here, show me.  I got together with this guy named Cohen Norton. He showed me a lot of things, including the salt thing. If you remember, I made some salt disappear, and I had several other things that I showed. He said, oh, very good, just bring that to the set everyday. I don't know what I'll use but, you know, including the rope tricks!  The rope tricks, I put them in. We filmed them in Nashville in a scene, they were cut out.

And then my bag of tricks, I let everything go. It was a bunch of cheesy stuff. I kind of let it go, but the rope trick, all it is is a little lengthy rope, I kind of kept up with that routine, because I enjoyed doing that routine. And then I tried to (laughs) put it in a couple other things, you know, because I thought it was neat and there were other parts that I thought would be right for it.  In Buckaroo Banzai, I actually did some of that, but that got cut out, and then recently I was on Broadway doing The Pillow Man.  It's a Martin McDonagh play, brilliant. Billy Crudup was in it, Zeljko Ivanek and Michael Stuhlbarg.

Zeljko Ivanek, by the way, recommended that woman Jane Gibson to me.  He's a wonderful director, and I showed them the rope trick, because I thought I was kind of a cop/ringleader, dazzling entertainer. He said, no Jeff, that's not correct for this, put that away, and then when I showed it to Paul, he said, oh I knew about those rope tricks. I said why, he said because Martin McDonagh, who was there said Jeff is going to try to put some rope tricks in this.  (laughs)  I said Jesus Christ, I'm busted.  But he said, you know, I think they may film it.  So now I've finally done it.  That was up my sleeve for twenty years, twenty, thirty years or something.  (laughs)  Since 1974.  Now I guess I can't do it again.

MoviesOnline:   Have you kept it going?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Well, I just did an episode of Law And Order, believe it or not, and there was one scene, it just came up very quickly, because you know, I don't have a year to prepare there. The script is coming out today and we have to shoot for this next episode, so it's a different way of working, a little bit more instinctive. There was a scene with a boy who had just gone through a horrible trauma, in a hostage scene, and I was successful negotiating him away from this madman, and he's waiting for his mother to appear at this police station, and I'm going “Take it easy, take it easy, here, look at this rope open,” and I do one thing and I go “Oh look who it is, your mom.”  So I did that, and I saw the cut they used in it, so (laughs)… 

Steven Spielberg has always been mad at me, I think, because in our movie (Jurassic Park), we made this up on the set. When the dinosaurs are chasing us, I say, “must go faster, must go faster,” which we kind of made up, and it's in the movie.  And then I did Independence Day, a year or two later, and it wasn't that we didn't put it in the movie, but in looping, Will Smith and I are in the spaceship trying to get out of the big exploding mothership, and Roland Emmerich said, oh do that thing that you did, say, must go faster, must go faster.  (laughs)  I did it.  (laughs)  And I think Spielberg saw me later, and he said, I heard that thing, you know, (laughs) you did it again, huh?  I think he thought it kind of took away the originality of our thing. 

So I prepared fully for it and then after I worked my ass off for this film, I must say, because it was worthy of it, you know, the material, the book, the subject matter, the people we were really depicting, but after the movie, I knew I was going to have to loop most of the movie again, do the whole thing again for one reason or another.  So I got a cut of the movie early on and watched it every day, kind of went and did another run through every day, did a lot of technical things, prepared a lot of technical things that I knew I had to do, looping and figured out other things I could say and re-did that voice over and stuff like that, so worked a lot on it.

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MoviesOnline:   How was it working with Paul Schrader?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Spectacular.  He was terrific.  He's the reason I'm doing the movie.  I've always been a big fan of his anyway, but he'll tell you, when he got to page 75, he said I have to do this movie, first of all, no matter how it turns out.  If the ending is no good, I'll make it work because this is fascinating, very original, both the dog and the boy, I love that part.  And he said to his wife, Mary Beth Hurt, there's one actor who's born to play this part, Jeff Goldblum.  And he's the one who sort of pushed me to do it.  He's brilliant, you know. I knew we had to very much be on the same page and make this together you know, and I knew about him but not as fully as I was going to come to know him.

I asked him what movies should I have not missed out on by this point?  You know, what movies do you enjoy, what's your sensibility, what are we going to make out of this script. And he said, well here are the twenty movies that you should see, and I got the Criterion version of all of them and saw them twice.  Like Rules of The Game, which I'd never seen, Tokyo Story, and that Antonioni movie called L'Eclisse, Masculine and Feminine, Godard. He watches two movies before he makes every movie, Performance and The Conformist, both of them.  Vertigo.  So anyway, I saw all of those and then I read the books that he's written about movies. You know, he was a critic and he's spectacular, so that was fantastic.  He really knows.

He's a courageous artist who I believe is at the top of his form now. He wants to make things that are unconventional, not easily made, and this material deserved that. The book is brilliant and unexpected, contradictory and dark. It was written in '68, it was published in '71, same time as Tin Drum, Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22, the same kind of backward look at the war in a dark and irreverent way.  So it was brilliant.  He was well suited for this, and even that ending which is not simple and my character after having gone through this, I still say, I don't know, you know it's contradictory and unexpected and just kind of brilliant in my opinion. 

He was good at shaping the movie, shaping my performance, you know, helping me, just terrific.  He was a very interesting guy. I'd never seen this before. He said, you know, this character, you're the only guy really in the movie. We see you a lot, so you have to be many different characters -- the lover, the seducer, the lecturer, the grievings, the father, the worm, you know, all those things.  And he made a graph of all those characters’ titles along with Act One, Act Two, Act Three, and sort of went here, this character sort of emerges more around here and the graph was like this little thing like that.  Isn't that interesting?  And then finally, we came to that scene he wanted I think. It was an important movie for him and I think he wanted to have a peak creative experience. He was ready for it certainly, and personally too. 

You know, this movie is about big things.  Somebody, as we all do, loses in a horrible way, everything, and more deeply asks himself, clarifies who he is really.  Finally in the desert, it's nothing, you know really finally something that is apart from all the trappings of who he thought he was ever. So it's a real spiritual odyssey and identity adventure, and the participants I think can touch something like that in rendering it.  When we were doing that scene at the end where I go to my daughter's grave and finally lose my mind, we'd sort of fashioned finally how we were going to do that and you eat the flower and you're kind of going crazy. 

And then I was doing it, I'm crying, I cried for three months, I was crawling around for the better part of three months and once again I'm kind of crying and he says okay, that's good, keep doing that, he says, but this time I think, we haven't planned for this, but get a handful of dirt and put it in your mouth and eat the dirt.  I said yeah that sounds good, (laughs) that sounds very crazy, that's crazy, I'll be crazy, he says yeah and then you play this violin. He says that's crazy. I said well let's do it, but shouldn’t we have some edible dirt or something. He said, no Jeff, just eat the dirt (laughs). I said Paul, I think that's… you shouldn't do that (laughs). He said Jeff, look, look, and he ate the dirt!  He ate the dirt himself!  I went okay Paul, let's go, let's go.  (laughs)  So we both had a kind of incredible experience.  What else can I tell you? 

MoviesOnline:   Is this the most challenging part that you've ever taken?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Yes, I think so. I've had challenges, but I look for challenges, but yes, I think so, yeah.

MoviesOnline:   When you saw your own performance, how did you feel?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  Since it's finished, I've shown people to see it through their eyes and I see it with audiences, and I'm interested, so I've seen it a lot.  I can be tough on myself but finally I get objective and go wow, that's the story, and that's what it's about instead of how am I doing there, what did I do there, what did they pick there. I loved the movie and I was glad for a chance to work hard on something that’s meaningful. 

MoviesOnline:   Have you had a chance to see The Fly opera here in Los Angeles?

JEFF GOLDBLUM:  No, I want to see that.  I'd love to see it.  Well David Cronenberg directed it, so that's interesting.

“Adam Resurrected” opens in theaters on December 12th.