Nathan Silver is perhaps best known for his prodigious output, releasing nine feature films period of 2012 to 2019. His prolificness is made all the more impressive by the conditions under which his films have typically been made: microbudgets; international productions; structural scriptments with dialogue written the day of, or before, shoots; and little-to-no institutional support. Silver’s persistent DIY attitude was captured succinctly in a 2017 interview for Filmmaker, where he said: “The movie industry doesn’t have any etiquette, just fear. I guess you have to have blinders on. I have failed multiple times. I made a bunch of shorts that went nowhere. It’s [about] not letting that deter you from moving on to the next project.”
Now, Silver’s next project, Between the Temples, has seen him afforded (relatively) ample budget and two star collaborators in Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. Shot through the warm 16mm lens of frequent collaborator Sean Price Williams, Between the Temples follows Schwartzman as Ben, a grieving cantor who has lost his voice, and who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Carla (Kane), his former grade-school music teacher and lifelong non-practicing Jew, after she decides that she would finally like to be Bat Mitzvah’d. The film follows in the screwball tradition of classics like Harold and Maude (1971) while carrying the emotional heft of some of its more dramatic age-gap forebears, such as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Between the Temples is the culmination of Silver’s decades-long independent work, idiosyncratically blending miracle and tragedy, intimacy and remoteness, faith and doubt. On the occasion of the film’s release into theaters nationwide, I had the pleasure of speaking with Silver about the development and direction of the film.
Conor Truax: I’m really curious about how you approached Between the Temples, since it had a substantially larger budget than all of your previous films. How did the increased budget change your approach to the project or your navigation of the production process, seeing as constraint can breed creativity, and in your case, constraint has been the paradigm of creation.
Nathan Silver: It felt the same, to be honest, except I had a larger crew. But it was composed of people who had worked together and who were all friends with each other and who were all friends of my friends. So I knew I could trust them. What was odd was that it was the same basic process that I’ve used in the past, which is: a scriptment, not a full script; pages of dialogue coming in day of, or day before; reworking everything around the actors and exactly what the best way to deal with the reality of the given day is; and finding a way to embrace the chaos of the shoot.
Shooting on film was a necessity on this project; I knew from the beginning it had to be done because it reflects Carla’s [Carol Kane] character. Upstate New York is so cold in the winter, and we knew we needed that analog warmth. In that way, it was actually very helpful to have a script supervisor, which I’ve never worked with before. I was like, “Oh, this is crazy, this takes so much weight off of remembering to get certain shots.” Having people who are really fighting alongside me on set, I was like, “Oh, wow, you can do a larger film and it can still feel like when you’ve just worked with your friends and people you’ve worked with multiple times on smaller, more intimate projects.”
CT: The film has a very communal feeling to it. An intimacy. Funny enough, I actually saw one of the actresses from the first scene on my street right before I viewed it. I read that the only actor you had in mind when writing the scriptment was Jason Schwartzman. Ironically, this is the first contemporary film I’ve seen that captures the warmth and humor of ’70s screwball films since Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip (2014), which also stars Schwartzman. What drew you to him for this role?
NS: I’ve been a huge fan of Jason’s since he broke out with Rushmore (1998), and I’ve just followed his career. I’m like, this guy is a genius. Every time he appears on screen, I just want more of him. He’s so watchable. And has perfect comic timing.
Same goes for Carol — the two of them have insane comic timing. My co-writer Chris and I knew that it had to be Jason. We didn’t know who was going to play Carla, but then we realized it needed to be Carol Kane. I can’t imagine the movie without those two. It just feels essential to what this movie is. And I am so grateful that they were free during this one month of time, and that we were able to get this on Celluloid.
CT: When you say that you realized, was there a particular moment or conversation, or were you re-watching a film of Kane’s where it clicked?
NS: I was on my honeymoon and everyone at the wedding got Covid. I lost my taste and I was in a fever of sleep, and I was like, “Oh, it’s Carol Kane.” I wrote to my producers back home and to Chris, and said: “It’s Carol Kane.” And everyone was like, of course it was her.
From Hester Street (1975), it perfectly comes full circle. So it was almost getting Jason to commit to the project and then thinking about who is going to play this Carla character, you know? And then I had to deal with my wedding and, you know, my life. And while I was doing that, she floated into my brain and appeared to me the same way she does in the movie when Jason’s character gets knocked out at a bar.
Conor: It’s really interesting how, when you’re falling asleep, you often have a creative impetus, and then you also have more of a decisive impetus when you’re waking up. That clarity. Speaking of, you mentioned wanting to capture Carol’s warmth, and I read that this is the first time you’d worked on 16mm, if not film more generally in 10 or 15 years. What was that process like?
NS: Basically, I knew what I wanted the film to look like, which was like these Soviet movies from the ’70s; in particular, this movie, Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1980) by Kira Muratova, where you have a very desolate landscape, but it feels extremely warm. And so I talked to Sean about this, and he said, “We should try pushing the film stock two stops. I think it’ll approximate this.” And he was right. When I was talking to Jason, the first conversation, I was like, “we’re shooting this on film.” When I talked to Carol, I said: “we’re doing this on film.” They were so excited because whenever you shoot on film, it feels like a movie. You hear the sound of the camera. It’s a privilege to actually shoot the thing rather than have the headache of a computer recording you.
CT: Some of your previous films have dealt with different romantic triangulations, but this film feels more singularly in the vein of a screwball romantic comedy, and transparently invokes Harold and Maude. What made you interested in working in that vein or in that tradition?
NS: I made a documentary about my mother and found out that she was getting a Bat Mitzvah late in life. After I relayed this to my friend, Adam Kirsch, he said, “there’s a movie there.” And I’m like, “what’s the movie?” He said, “it should be like a riff on Harold and Maude, where a late in life Bat Mitzvah student falls for her younger cantor or rabbi that she’s studying with.” And I was like, “Adam, that’s a terrible idea.” Cut to a few years later, Covid’s happening and there’s the lockdown and a lot of companies are looking for scripts while they’re not doing productions. He was able to team up with Ley Line Entertainment and find development money there for a script. And I still had no idea what this movie was going to be, but I was like, well, I need to pay rent. So I enlisted the help of one of my primary collaborators and very good friends, Chris C. Mason Wells, and he is a goy, and he hates Harold and Maude.
We picked apart Harold and Maude: the screwball elements, the tension between the uptight person and the free spirit. Then we started considering how we could make a modern take on it that would be like Toni Urdmann (2016), where it’s basically a screwball comedy, but it’s so grounded that you care about these characters and you’re emotionally there. Maren Ade’s way of making that film was the lighthouse that guided us; that version of a modern screwball comedy.
We also just started looking at a lot of screwball comedies or movies. We broke down The Graduate, The Heartbreak Kid. The Heartbreak Kid was huge for us, too. You bring in May December (2023), you bring in everything, and you kind of put it in a blender and you add pinches of salt to taste and get this new flavor.
CT: Many of your previous films, like Thirst Street (2017), have this circularity or symmetry to them, as does Between the Temples. Are those structural things that you have in mind from the outset that you and your writing partner had predetermined, or were those naturally occurring through that more improvisational process?
NS: Those things are in the scriptment; it’s very much structured in that way. If you were to read the scriptment and put it up against the movie, it’s basically the same movie. The movie is more detailed, I suppose, than the scripts were.
CT: One last question — do you have a favorite age-gap relationship in film?
NS: I think it would have to be Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, because that’s one of the first films that made me want to direct. I found it so heartbreaking. I watched it on VHS, and on the tape there was a picture of an angry man. I thought, this is going to end with a murder. After doing some research, of course I found out that the picture was of Fassbinder, who does appear in the movie as an angry guy; the son-in-law. And of course, there’s no murder in the movie. You go in expecting tragedy, and you are met with this sense that the world is working against these characters, and you want things to work out for them. I was so moved by this, in part because of what I went in expecting , and was knocked out by what it actually was. I was like, “Oh, I want to do this to other people’s minds, other people’s hearts.”
Comments are closed.