Liev Schreiber
Liev Schreiber
Isaac Liev Schreiberis an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s, having appeared in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the Scream trilogy of horror films, Phantoms, The Sum of All Fears, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Salt, Taking Woodstock, Goon, and Oscar Best Picture winner Spotlight...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth4 October 1967
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I had wanted so much to make this a European film. Jonathan and I compared stories of our grandfathers. I wanted to show their survivors' sense of humor: If you believe your life is excrement then you either drown in it or transcend it with irony. That's a distinct Eastern European trait.
My model of casting comes from Eastern Europe and part of the ideology there is that culture and place are essential,
It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense of humor. Because of the difficulty of life for many Eastern Europeans - the pogroms, the Revolution, the Holocaust - their humor is broad and aggressively and ridiculously comic. It also triggers an emotional response. It's that kind of chaos and absurdity that results in an opening-up to a discovery of deeper emotion.
I have a pathological memory problem and when he died I was very angry and worried that somehow I wouldn't remember him,
I did everything that my father did in trying to find him because I didn't live with him,
I always wondered about my grandfather's story. What was his life really like as a young man?
I think that for me, I'm in a great place. I work all the time, I hang out in fancy hotels, and I do interviews all day, and I get free coffee.
When you're in a place like New York or D.C. you just can't beat it, and it's so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places.
I was out of my head. I was really frantic, ... I guess I was always under the misconception that a director makes the film, and it's not true. A director directs the people who make the film.
If this wasn't as important to me and my family, I wouldn't have done it, ... I'm done, but today I went to check the mix. You're never really done.
He was very supportive of me, ... He saw every single play I did in New York. I'll never forget looking out into the audience and watching my brother, who was 40 years younger than my grandfather, sleeping in his chair during some of my early plays. My grandfather Alex never fell asleep.
You know, I have a deep, deep affinity for Dr. Seuss.
We talked about our grandfathers and their senses of humor and our sense of culture and history, and we had a lot in common,
There's something insanely sweet about him. And he is a very, very, very good-natured person. He is a truly kind person. I put him in some of the worst circumstances that you could put a human being in and there were homeless guys who I'd hired to be in the movie because I liked the way they looked, and they complained sooner than Elijah did.