David Mamet mesmerizes at the TLV Int’l Student Film Festival

David Mamet likes to tell jokes – and he told quite a few at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival, which is taking place at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque until August 20 – but he is dead serious when he talks about his love for Israel. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright/ director/ screenwriter, whose work includes Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, Homicide, House of Games, and Heist, began our interview by saying, “I’m so happy to be here.” 

While many American Jews talk the talk, Mamet never fails to walk the walk, always visiting Israel when the chips are down. A threatened Iranian missile attack is not going to keep him away from this country that he loves, just as a different war with Gaza and the Second Intifada did not deter him from taking part in the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2014 and 2002. 

He sat down to talk to me with his wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon, who starred in many of his movies and gave her own master class at the festival. 

I couldn’t help reminding him of one of his best Jewish jokes, which he told on his last visit and which he remembered well: “Abie says to Sadie, ‘When we were little kids in the shtetl and the Cossacks came, you were there. When Hitler, may his name be erased, invaded, you were there. When I had my heart attack, you were there. Sadie, you’re a f***ing jinx!’” Mamet laughed and said he hopes he’s not our Sadie.

All kidding aside, he said, “I was looking out the hotel window at this magnificent city on the Mediterranean, and my first thought is: This could be Gaza. Gaza could be like Singapore.”  Israel is in a fight for its life, he said, and there was no ambiguity about where he stands. “The question is, how do you win a zero-sum conflict?”

Mamet has been a vocal supporter of Israel and an iconoclastic conservative thinker for years – and if people don’t like it, he doesn’t care. He recently published a very funny memoir about his 40 years working in Hollywood – Everywhere an Oink Oink – and said he has a new book coming out soon from Simon & Schuster about politics. 

I ASKED him about a line he wrote in a recently published article on the website UnHerd – that for American Jews, “Our problem is not public opinion, but denial.” He said he has spent his entire career dealing with denial: “Drama focuses on denial because it’s about something which cannot be said…  

“The assimilationist urge [in Jews] has been ingrained for 2,000 years, because what choice did we have?” he asked rhetorically. Jews in America are “free to be Jews, but they have to stand up. They keep sending their children to these elite universities that have forever been antisemitic and have been teaching antisemitism, and American Jews have not demanded that Jewish students be treated exactly like gay students or Black students or Arab students – that is to say, treated like human beings. 

“And the Jewish students say, ‘It’s OK, I don’t want to make waves.’ Well, of course they don’t want to make waves,” Mamet said. “My grandparents came [to America] ‘cause where they lived, if they made waves, they were killed. What was the difference between them and the poor people in Gaza? If they make waves, they’re killed.”

He said it was “absolutely absurd” that the majority of American Jews are liberal. He calls all politicians “lying whores” but feels that Donald Trump is the lying whore who would be best for Israel if elected. “You meet an American Jew, they’ll say, ‘I’m Jewish, but I’m not that Jewish, or I’m Jewish but I’m not religious.’…They’re completely in denial,” he said – to which Pidgeon added, “And all the information they’re getting about Israel is false.” 

American Jews feel and have always felt “that if I work harder, if I keep my head down, if I’m better than everyone else, more generous than everyone else, it will be alright,” he said. Jews, he noted, “Are all crazy.” Mamet is known for giving interviewers pop quizzes; he asked me: “Look at the Chumash [first five book of the Bible]: Who did Moshe have the most problems with?” Fortunately, I knew the answer: “The Jews.”

During our wide-ranging interview, in which he answered virtually every question I have ever had about how the world works, I mentioned Russian Poland, an unproduced screenplay he read aloud at an event at the Jerusalem Film Festival 22 years ago. It is a tale of Jewish mysticism in Eastern Europe, framed by a 1940s story about the beginning of the Israeli air force (more on that later). The screenwriter said that he was meeting with Israeli producers on this trip and hoped to get the movie made someday. 

He added that he had an idea for an “untold story” about Anne Frank, which he said would dispense with the saccharine Hollywood movie and Broadway stage version, which he dismissed as “Everybody Loves Raymond with Nazis,” and that his would dispel the notion that she felt people were all good. As he described it at length, Pidgeon suggested he write it as a story, and he said he might, which is something to look forward to.

His master class on Saturday – which sold out 20 minutes after it was announced – was a conversation with Ido Aharoni, an Israeli diplomat and writer who graduated from the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, which sponsors the student film festival. Mamet was friendly and attentive to the students who came to hear a writer/director whose work means so much to them, and even signed DVD boxes from his movies that several of them brought. 

Mamet teases new film

A trailer for his upcoming movie, Henry Johnson, was shown during the class, which he said was filmed in five days and which stars Shia Labeouf. Based on the trailer, it looks like a tense prison drama about a convict hoping for redemption. It is filled with his trademark tough, clipped Mamet-speak, with lines like, “Everything is as it seems. All the cards are in the deck, it just depends on how you cut ‘em.”

The Q&A with the students following the conversation with Aharoni gave Mamet a great chance to be Mamet, as he joked – the more earnest the question, the funnier and more irreverent the answer – but also gave them his best advice about writing and directing. 

Asked whether he would ever work in Israel, he revealed that he had been offered the opportunity by Keshet to make a 12-part series based on the life of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

“I said I’d like to, but first I have to drop bowling balls on my feet.” He told them he would make it, though, if they would also agree to produce The Handle and the Hold, a novella he wrote based on the true story of how Israel Aerospace Industries’ American-born pilot Al Schwimmer illicitly brought a plane from the US to Palestine to be used by the Jews to fight the War of Independence. 

“They thought about it for… moments,” before turning him down, he said, which led him to muse, “I was glad to see that although we’re Jews, we’re also human beings. So just the fact that we’re Jews and living in Israel doesn’t prevent us from being stupid f***ing producers.”

AMONG HIS advice to the students were the following nuggets of wisdom: 

“Cut the first 10 minutes of every movie” and “There are no rules. There is one law – don’t be boring.”

Asked by an aspiring actress how to “differentiate content” when making a movie on an iPhone, he said, “You can differentiate your content – or tell a great story you’d rather die than not tell.”

When a screenwriter questioned him about backstory, he said, “There is no backstory. There is just: ‘Give me the money or I’ll blow your head off.’” 

In response to a question about how he learned to “communicate with images” when he moved from stage to screen, he said, “I never wanted to communicate with images. I wanted to make a movie.”

But perhaps the most valuable advice he gave was to a young man at the end of the class who asked when the right time was to begin writing – clearly concerned, as so many Israeli creators are, about how to keep on working during this war. Said Mamet: “The right time to begin writing is when you feel like it. Yes, there’s the terror of the empty page. But so what? You can write when you’re frightened.”

He admitted that when he writes, “One day I think I’m a genius and the next day I come home and I want to blow my f***in’ brains out. You know, so I’m married to the Eshet Chayil [Woman of Valor] and she says, ‘OK, good, so things are just progressing nicely.”

Mamet, an expert on knowing when to end a scene, let these be his last words, and left the stage to thunderous applause.