After 10 years of effort, the director of such epics as Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond finally brings his new World War II saga to the screen.

Interviewed by Sean Cunningham

 

It may seem as if every aspect of World War II has been covered, but Edward Zwick is offering up a forgotten chapter as fascinating as Schindler’s List and as action-packed as The Dirty Dozen. Defiance tackles the true story of Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski, Jewish brothers who hid in the forests of Belarus and provided haven for more than 1,000 Jews resisting the Nazis. But it turns out Defiance wouldn’t have been made if not for Zwick’s chance plane ride with then soon-to-be-007 Daniel Craig. 

 

You’ve done movies like Legends of the Fall that tackle themes of brotherhood, and TV shows like thirtysomething, which are about suburbia. How do you balance the two?

I played team sports as a kid, and I’m interested in the gray area between competition and intimacy. With brotherhood the issues of rivalry are there from the beginning and find their expression a thousand different ways as they grow together. Movies have been a way to think about that. Television is wedded to the word, and the relationships I explore are verbal. Television, which tends to be concerned with what people talk about, has afforded me the remarkable opportunity to examine contemporary relationships in a way movies never could. 

 

Much of Defiance deals with the conflict between survival and keeping principles.

Can one retain one’s humanity in inhuman situations? Do you have to become a monster when confronting monsters? None of us who have not been in that situation can speak with any real authority on how one would react. People discover things about themselves, and this movie aspires to talk about that: people who are unprepared and yet rose to that moment, and those who didn’t. In extreme circumstances people are revealed in an elemental way. What is essential to their nature comes out because the niceties of socialization are stripped away. Heroism is a complex thing, and it often includes aspects that one would rather not look at.

 

For much of the film, Craig’s character, Tuvia, is sick, not doing the macho thing you’d expect.

It was very important to Daniel that at first he seem ill-suited to the role he was about to take on, so that Liev Schreiber seems more ascendant. The film’s characters, like a lot of people I knew from their generation, never sought recognition. They didn’t want to talk about it. Daniel has that natural modesty, and it’s in the movie.

 

Why is landscape so important in your work?

I’ve always been interested in a sense of place, whether it’s the plains of Montana in Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall, the pastoral beauty of Japan, or the red earth of Africa. Each has a deep, abiding emotion. In Defiance it’s the forest. These boys were woodsmen. I’ve had a cabin in Colorado for 35 years, and I know what forest feels like: Getting lost, being cold, and wondering if I could find my way home all found their way into this movie.

 

With a true story, do you feel a burden to balance details and the limits of time? 

Narrative film is necessarily reductionist. You are not the final arbiter of history; you are an invitation to it. Jim Harrison once quoted a Zuni proverb to me: “There are no truths; there are only stories.” You can’t be true to the letter of something because it’s fiction. You have to accept that limitation yet believe you can penetrate to a deeper truth that historians and sociologists can’t get to.

 

Did you meet the surviving Bielskis? 

Yes. Most of them live in New York. Tuvia’s sons, Zus’s sons, and Asael’s daughter came to Lithuania while we were shooting there. Asael’s daughter was conceived in the forest, and her father was killed, so she never got a chance to meet him. There she was, watching the scene where her father and mother get married, and it was as if she were seeing her father for the first time.

 

Watch trailer #1 for Defiance:

Watch trailer #2: