A Master Storyteller’s Changing American Narrative: An Interview with Barry Levinson (Web Exclusive)
by Sam B. Girgus

Over several decades, Barry Levinson has produced an extensive body of work that secures his place among America’s most prolific and successful modern directors. His best films exemplify what he tends to describe as his “humanistic” impulse to make films that concentrate on the psychological, personal, and emotional basis of human relations. He stresses how individual character blends into the construction of social relations so that “themes” of “the concept of neighborhood, the influence of neighborhood, the pluses and minuses of that, that nature of friendship” pervade his films. In developing such themes and concepts, Levinson became a master craftsman of cinema narration. His films open windows onto and create insights into the social and cultural transformations of America from the last decades of the last century to our own time.

Levinson’s first film, Diner (1982), encapsulated a Baltimore neighborhood and milieu within the confines of a local diner, turning the diner into a stage for the articulation of the changing relationships between a tightly knit group of friends. Levinson’s The Natural (1984) starring Robert Redford became a baseball classic. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) starring Robin Williams remains one of the most important and vital films of the Vietnam War era. The film helped awaken the country to the grim realities of the war and became part of the growing antiwar movement. “Working in a collaboration” with Tom Cruise but especially with Dustin Hoffman, Levinson in Rain Man (1988) stresses the importance of “time and commitment,” “comedy,” and “communication” between not only brothers but people in general. The film received eight Academy Award nominations and won five, including those for Best Film and Best Director for Levinson. Wag the Dog (1997) is a satiric film with Hoffman and Robert De Niro that makes a significant contribution to the political film genre, studying the inner machinations of modern political corruption and manipulation, which resonate as strongly in the current political environment.

At the heart of Levinson’s broader narrative of the American experience, he presents his drama of the Jewish-American experience starting at the beginning of his career with Avalon (1990), the autobiographical story of a Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore. This interest in Jewish-American narrative is expressed, most recently, through Levinson’s unique perspective on the holocaust in The Survivor (2021) [see review in Cineaste, Fall 2022] about emaciated Jewish boxers forced to fight each other to the death like gladiators for the entertainment of howling Nazi soldiers and the Gestapo who bet on the outcome of the bouts.

In between Avalon and The Survivor that span Levinson’s overall career stands Bugsy (1991) as a kind of structural pillar upholding the trajectory connecting the two films. Bugsy imbues Levinson’s overarching Jewish-American story with special cultural and ideological significance. The film stars Warren Beatty as the notorious but glamorous Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel, the Jewish gangster from Brooklyn who helped turn Las Vegas into an entertainment and gambling mecca. Annette Bening, Beatty’s wife, also stars as Virginia Hill, Siegel’s girlfriend and second wife.

Working, as I have suggested elsewhere, with an excellent screenplay by James Toback, Levinson developed Bugsy into a kind of Jewish take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), as Newsweek pointed out, saying that Siegel is “depicted as a lethal Gatsbyesque dreamer, equally charming and chilling,” In her New York Times review, Janet Maslin called Siegel “a true gangster Gatsby.” Levinson’s sense of the literary, his love of language, and his concern with narrative structure is manifest also in his novel Sixty-Six (2003), which expands upon the story and characters in Diner. In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani noted Levinson’s “philosophical asides.” Tightly focusing events through the perspective of a young protagonist named Bobby Shine, Levinson indeed expatiates in the novel upon the social and cultural changes that were transforming Bobby’s neighborhood and city of Baltimore during the Sixties. That penchant for such irradiations upon a society in flux also rubs off in Bugsy.

With all his Gatsby like charisma and swagger, Beatty’s Bugsy sought a higher purpose in at least one planned murder when he proposed to assassinate Mussolini for the treatment of Jews by the Nazis and fascists in Europe. In Levinson’s film, Siegel seeks to find transcendence from the profane and mundane. Levinson’s Siegel puts Gatsby’s dream, his myth of renewal and success, into the simple notion of “fresh starts.” He says, “I don’t go by what other people have done. I believe in fresh starts.” He makes this commitment to fresh starts into a Jewish streetwise version of the American myth and ideology of the self-made man. He says, “Hey, without fresh starts, you and I would have been history before we were nineteen.” Thus, Bugsy has roots in the immigrant city history of Avalon while also developing the American idea of inclusion, redemption, and regeneration in the face of the mass murder and genocide in The Survivor.

Cineaste spoke with Levinson this past summer primarily about The Survivor (available on HBO Max) but also about his impressive career as a film director and author. The Survivor is based on Alan Scott Haft’s book, Harry Haft, about the author’s father who was forced to fight other Jewish boxers to the death in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In Poland, Haft (Ben Foster) and his girlfriend Leah (Dar Zuzovsky) are taken prisoner by the Nazis and sent to different concentration camps where they each survive in part by hoping to reunite with the other. After his liberation, Haft continues to box in America believing that his bout with Rocky Marciano, the future world champion, might get enough publicity for Leah to learn about him and contact him. After years of looking for Leah, Harry finally marries Miriam (Vicky Krieps) and raises a family with her. Ultimately, Harry and Leah do find each other but only after years of marriage to someone else.—Sam B. Girgus

Cineaste: I didn’t know about these Jewish boxers. Did you?

Levinson: No, I really didn’t know anything about it, to be honest with you. So, when I got the script, I thought it was rather fascinating. You know, sometimes stories come along that stick with you, and you start dealing with it and working on it. 

Cineaste: You changed the name of Leah, Harry’s girlfriend in Poland who also is taken prisoner by the Nazis. Her name is Pablanski and you changed it to your mother’s family name, Krichinsky, that is mentioned repeatedly in Avalon.

Levinson: Yeah, I can remember something came up with that. It wasn’t something I thought we should do, but I can’t remember how it happened. But now that you mention it. [Laughs] You know, it’s funny, we’re talking about a movie that was finished over three years ago and, because of the pandemic and everything else, it’s been sitting on a shelf. So now, some of those details become somewhat vague. I can’t remember what the reasoning was in terms of changing the last name.

Cineaste: I thought it was a sign of how personal the movie was to you.

Levinson: I can’t remember the reasoning behind it, but we needed to do something about changing the name. I’ve told the story that basically, in 1948, a man showed up at my grandmother’s door, and that was her brother that I’d never heard about. [Her brother survived the Holocaust and for a time shared a room with young Levinson.] So, there was a connection of thinking about my family, when suddenly a man came to America with what you would now call posttraumatic stress disorder, and somehow that must have fed into the story of The Survivor. 

Cineaste: You said the movie isn’t about the death camps; it’s really about what’s going on in Harry Haft’s head. You use three timelines for that.

Levinson: You know, what struck me is that we’re not simply dealing with the camp but dealing with the camp in the sense of posttraumatic stress disorder. Much of Haft’s life was affected by things in the past, which he would struggle to get beyond. In a sense, what was intriguing to me, as opposed to doing another camp story—and we’ve seen some incredibly well done pieces—was the fact that he can’t let the past go until, basically, at the conclusion of the film.

Cineaste: Do you consider Harry a hero? That’s what Matti Leshem, [the film’s producer] said.  

Levinson: No, I wouldn’t say he’s a hero. I think he is basically a man who somehow went through the most horrific events and continues to evolve, and ultimately comes out the other side. What you’re saying may be partially true, but I never really think in terms of heroes. I mean, we are people; we are individuals; we do amazing things, and we do horrific things. That is the amazing aspect of civilization, and it’s also the dangers of it as well. That somehow, in various times, we turn on ourselves, and at a great price. Some come out the other end and survive. But I don’t know if I would classify any of us as heroes in this particular story.

Cineaste: I also wonder what you think enabled Harry to survive.

Levinson: Well, I think the shorthand of it is that he’s not political; it’s not like he has these theories of the world or any of that. It’s a young man caught in circumstances beyond what is imaginable. So, the question is how do you survive? Some people give up, and that’s that, and it’s understandable. Others don’t give up. In this case, one of the story’s premises is that the brief time that he’s spent with Leah is so embedded in his mind that he wants to survive to be with her again. That becomes his motivation: “I want to survive; I want to see her again; I want to walk down a street with her again; that’s what I want.” Period.

Cineaste: It’s really kind of Romeo and Juliet. 

Levinson: I thought that Ben [Foster] was extraordinary. I was so disappointed that he didn’t get nominated, it was almost inconceivable to me that he’d end up not getting nominated [for an Emmy], because his performance is so extraordinary that it’s hard to overlook. 

Cineaste: Harry’s future wife Miriam takes him into her neighborhood synagogue where she frequently has found security and peace. But after his time in the camps and his experience with the evil of the Nazis, including the murder of his sister’s newborn baby, he finds it hard to have faith and belief. In the synagogue scene with the Stars of David and the story about Harry’s sister’s baby—“two hours old and two hours of air; two hours of air and thrown into the back of the truck”—Harry says, “I come from a very religious people, and it’s easy to find God in a synagogue.” Would you talk about that scene?

Levinson: You know, when you’re playing in the moment, sometimes you change little things here and there, and you do a little “Let’s not say that” or “Why don’t we mention this?” I find it’s a very powerful scene. You always must be on guard against saying too much. On the other hand, you don’t want to say too little so that you undermine the drama. Sometimes you sort of tweak things here and there until you find what you think is the most credible moment to support earlier parts of the film and other things that will evolve. So, to me, I work a lot in the moment of doing something, and you make adjustments accordingly—especially when you’re dealing with human behavior, which is inarticulate to a degree. You can’t really talk about emotions with this pure sentence structure to it all. It’s messy and when emotion is mixed in with trying to explain things, and the struggle of it, that is when things are most compelling and fascinating. You try to find a way into it so that you deal with the behavior of the character and the struggle to explain, to talk to one another. That’s why, when it finally gets to the locker room, Harry can’t even say anything anymore. As he says, “It’s here, but it’s not here.” He can’t articulate it.

Cineaste: I wondered in that synagogue scene if you weren’t speaking through Miriam about the importance of the religious. You also have the High Holy Days prayer “Avinu Malkeinuh,” and you have the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over his friend.

Levinson: Well, I thought “Avinu Malkeinuh” because they were fighting on a religious holiday, which obviously the Germans are not concerned with, and he has to fight. That’s against the backdrop of those who went back to the barracks, and the cantor who was there, singing because they are trying to deal with a holiday at the same time these atrocities are taking place. So, there’s that kind of duality of “Where is God?” At the same time, there are those who are devout, so two things are going on there. I thought that that would be interesting to try.

We actually got a cantor and brought him to Hungary just to see if that was going to work, because I thought it would be an interesting counterbalance. It’s the brutality of the fighting against the backdrop of the most religious Jewish holiday.

Cineaste: Early in The Survivor, Harry starts but doesn’t finish telling Miriam a joke about a cap that was told in Auschwitz. Later, in his conversation with Emory Anderson [Peter Saarsgaard], a newspaper reporter, the cap motif continues when the significance and symbolism of another cap takes on a dreadful meaning. Harry relates how making the choice of stealing another prisoner’s cap to comply with the Nazi rule to wear one for morning assembly could cost another person’s life. At the end of the film, Harry returns to the untold hat joke with Miriam and finishes it. In the joke, a great ocean wave takes a Jewish woman’s son. The woman cries out and pleads with God to return her son. Another wave then deposits the boy back on the beach. After a few minutes, the woman looks up to heaven and exclaims, “What about the cap?”

Levinson: Well, the cap story came about when we went to Auschwitz. We were with a guide, and asking questions, and he was talking about the importance of a cap—if you didn’t have a cap at the morning roll call, you could be killed. That stuck in my head and, as I was sitting with Ben one afternoon, I said, “You know, that cap story is so amazing.” And he said, “It was.” I said, “You know what? I’ll write it, and we’ll try it out when we do the scene; we’ll just throw it in there.” He said, “Well, let’s give it a try.” He was always open for that stuff.

So, I wrote that out, and put it into the Emory conversation, and we tried it while shooting that scene. When Harry is talking to Emory, he was telling a story about a man not having his cap at the camp. He realizes he needed one, and so went back to the barracks. He was telling a story, not a joke, about the importance of having a cap in the morning for roll call.

Early in the film, when he’s walking on the boardwalk at Coney Island, he starts to tell the cap joke, but he gets distracted. He starts to but then he says, “I can’t, it’s hard to believe there were jokes,” and then he kind of got off that. But I used that part of it. Then, when we were doing the last shot in the movie, which is on the beach with the two of them, I said to the actors, “Ben, why don’t you tell the cap joke, the one you started on the boardwalk at Coney Island?” What he tells at the end to Miriam was the joke about the Jewish mother that they told in Auschwitz, not a joke about Auschwitz. I had mentioned it three or four times during the shooting. It always made me laugh because it is so embedded in Jewish behavior. It was such an ironically strange joke, and I thought if they were to laugh together, that would show there’s suddenly a breath of fresh air, and he’s finally coming out of the darkness that’s been over him all along.

Cineaste: The cap joke releases all that tension. If they don’t find God, they do find a kind of love that maybe the real Harry never did find, although I hope his son did.  

Levinson: While shooting a movie, especially a piece that is humanistic, there are things, as you go along, when you think, “Well, what if we try this? What if we try that?” We are not chasing a plot in the way you would in a Marvel movie. You are talking about human behavior—how do we react, what do we say, how do we respond? Having been a writer long enough, something like that is not out of left field. In fact, it does have a lot to do with things, if you think about it, but it’s just not in your face. Therefore, if you feel like you are really connecting with the actors, sometimes you say, “Why don’t we try this?” And then you just try it. 

Cineaste: In the last scene, Rushka [Svetlanda Kundish], sings “God bless America” in Yiddish. Where did that come from?

Levinson: I think we were coming back from Auschwitz, and I said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if he had a character that could sing “God Bless America” in Yiddish?” I just didn’t know where or how I could use that. And that led to the connection to the wedding scene.

Cineaste: That was your idea?

Levinson: Yeah, but it just popped into my head when we were coming back from Auschwitz, and I thought, “Well, that might be interesting.” Then the question was, how do I construct it, which is how we got to the wedding, and then, of course, who’s going to sing the song? That led to the idea that it would be the wife of his brother [Peretz played by Salo Emirz].

Cineaste: I wonder if sometimes, when you’re in the middle of the night and you can’t sleep, and you look back and say to yourself, “God, I did this, this was great.” What are a few such scenes, not just in The Survivor, that you look back on, and say, “Well, if God asks me what I did, take a look at this scene.”

Levinson: [Laughs] I don’t necessarily go back and review what I’ve done because it’s done. I almost never go back and watch a film that I made. Sometimes, while watching television, I’ll change the channel and, all of a sudden, I’m looking for a minute, and realize, “Oh, wait, I did that movie.”

Cineaste: I wondered how much Raging Bull [1980] or Body and Soul [1947] were in your mind when you made The Survivor? In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Soul—sorry, it would be called Raging Soul if it were Jewish—in Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta [Robert De Niro] talks about “entertainment,” and in a scene at the end of the movie, he says, “I am not an animal.” Both of those themes occur in The Survivor when Schneider [Billy Magnussen as the Nazi officer who sets Harry up for boxing other Jews to the death] says, “You’re here for entertainment,” and the Nazis call out “Jewish animal.” I wondered if any of that was in your mind when you made it?

Levinson: No, to be honest with you, it wasn’t. I seldom refer to other films, particularly as we get closer to what we’re doing. Then it becomes “Now I have to focus on what we’re doing,” as opposed to, “You know, there was a great little thing in so-and-so movie, why don’t we do that with the camera.” I can’t deal with that. I have to be inside what we’re doing in that moment. For me, that’s the only way I can focus, as opposed to “Let me apply something that happened in this or that film.”

Cineaste: You’ve talked about the importance of having a “clear design” from the very beginning of a film. It’s also about having that design and assuring that intense moment is going to be lasting. I’ll be thinking about that in the middle of the night.

Levinson: Thank you very much.

Sam B. Girgus is the author of several books, most recently Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul: Wyler, Lumet, and Spielberg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1