Overall, he impregnates this familiar game of being and becoming with the humor and complicity of his films. Desistfilm talked with this exceptional New York filmmaker who promises to keep surprising us with an unexplored face of irony.
Did you plan to have that ending? Nathan Silver: After three days of shooting, we threw the outline out, because of what the actors were doing. I think it was Nathan and Sheila, and Nathan had hit Sheila over the head in the original script laughter.
So it shifted completely, we moved away from that. The first one would be, of course, how the Jewish identity in a place like New York works, and the other is about your women, these lead characters place in this kind of crushing surroundings. How did you decide to center your films in feminine characters that resist hysteria and describe their being in a place like New York?
NS: Well, in Exit Elena that was the intention from the get-go, to put this character in the middle of this chaotic family. That was very telling in Exit Elena, I realized that if you worked with certain people you had to give them a lot of dialogue, with other people you just have to give them a few actions and they were able to navigate their way through the scene, and my mother was able to do that very easily. MD: How do you deal with this subject, the Jewish identity, in your films?
NS: You know, I never went to temple when I was a kid, but I identify with this particular humor, of making light of tragedy, making all tragedy into comedy, this was something that was always happening in my family.
