Filmmaker Joshua Weinstein used non-professional actors for his film set inside an insular Jewish community; TV journalists gather to get the lowdown on shows premiering in the coming months; a new opera digs into the life story of the Apple icon.
'Menashe' director wants to 'make the world smaller through films'
Filmmaker Joshua Weinstein wanted to make a movie set in Brooklyn’s Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, starring non-professional actors from that community. His biggest obstacle was convincing people who don’t attend movies to be in one.
"Most of the people in the movie had never seen a movie before," said Weinstein, "let alone [been] in a movie theater."
Weinstein's movie is called “Menashe” and is based largely on the real life of Menashe Lustig, who plays the title character. When they met, Weinstein learned that Lustig was a widower and that he'd lost custody of his son. In the film, the main character cannot regain custody of his son, according to the rabbi, until he remarries.
Lustig had made YouTube videos but had never seen a movie. That is, until he attended the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of "Menashe." According to Weinstein:
To know that I honestly depicted a world and society that has not been captured, and that both Menashe could love it and a Mormon person in Utah could love it too, [that's] my mission as a filmmaker — to make the world smaller through films.
Weinstein, who is not Hasidic and doesn’t speak Yiddish, spoke with The Frame's host John Horn about how he gained entrée into this insular community.
Interview highlights:
On casting people from the Hasidic community in New York:
There are hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking, Hasidic Jews in the Brooklyn area. Only about 60 showed up for auditions, so you couldn't imagine anything. I couldn't imagine a woman juggler because I couldn't find a Yiddish-speaking woman juggler — it didn't exist. After I found Menashe, we created an outline around his life. He told me two details about his life: one, he's a widower; and two, is that he lost custody of his son. I wanted to create a story that was so insular to that world and didn't make sense to the rules that apply to our world. This is a very fictionalized account of his life, very few actual details are the same, but it connects to his emotional reality.
On the Hasidic community's view of technology:
This is about the most extreme form of Judaism. For these people, when they came here post-war or around WWII, telephones were even against the rules to their community. Then cassette tapes, then CDs — every new invention was against the rules, so they are permanently fighting modernity at every place. Some of these are typical people, like the rabbi works as a cab driver in the community, the brother-in-law actor works as a paralegal in the community, the shopkeeper works as a shopkeeper, so these are people who just have a passion to tell stories and they didn't have an opportunity before. No one in this film wants to bring down the house, they just want a chance to express themselves in ways that usually aren't possible.
On how the rules of the community affect Menashe's predicament:
As a storyteller, I was interested in what happens when somebody never has the idea of leaving. How does that affect the character? It's so easy for us today, when we have problems in our lives we can always walk away from it, we can always change. But what happens if we have to work it out? And I just loved writing a character who never thinks about leaving.
On how he approached shooting the film:
I make films not about plot, but about moments. I spent months with a pad and paper just observing, watching people. Literally, I made the whole film to have one scene where 10,000 people dance around a fire and sing. I wanted to include that moment. When I heard there's a rabbi's portrait that you put up and it prevents mice from coming in your house, I just knew I had to create a plot line that included this rabbi's portrait. I wanted to show the inside of religious bathing houses because I've never seen that in a movie before. So literally this is just a string of moments that I think will teach us about humanity in ways we never expected.
Silicon Valley composer transforms Steve Jobs’ life story into opera
Composer and electronica DJ Mason Bates is listening intently to the sound of a clicking computer key through speakers rigged up to a laptop in his Bay Area music studio.
Bates admits the key clicks don’t sound like much on their own. But the opening music in his new opera, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” morphs out of those simple sounds.
“When you take them together and then turn them into a rhythmic device, they create a bit of a tapestry,” he says.
Bates often uses digital technology in his orchestral works. He’s written major pieces for the likes of the San Francisco Symphony and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., among other top-tier arts institutions.
But this is his first full-length opera. And it matters to the 40-year-old composer that the pops, beeps and whizzes in his score come from genuine Apple gear. The key clicks are those of the Mac Plus computer, released in 1986.
“While you might not be able to pick out exactly that’s a spinning hard drive of an Apple I, a Power Mac or Mac Plus key click, I think the accumulation of those sounds does lend an authenticity to the sound world,” Bates says.
But it takes more than an authentic sound world to make sense of Steve Jobs’ epic life story on stage; it’s not for nothing that Walter Isaacson’s well-known 2011 biography of Jobs — which Bates cites as a major source of inspiration for his opera — runs to more than 650 pages.
After all, the man ran three major companies — Apple, NeXT and Pixar — where he oversaw the release of many wildly successful products and movies like the iPhone and "Toy Story."
He also had a complicated personal life. Jobs was adopted as an infant; he refused to publicly acknowledge his first child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, for years; and he died young, in 2011, of cancer at the age of 56.
“He was such a complex individual, I cannot even imagine how you’d capture Steve’s life in an opera,” says Andy Cunningham, who worked closely with Jobs as a publicist and witnessed the ups and down of his career — and erratic temperament — firsthand.
Cunningham says Jobs hired and fired her several times, and once demanded calla lilies for his hotel room at midnight. “Steve was a very emotional person, and he was driven largely by his emotions,” she says.
Other individuals and organizations have also questioned the idea of transforming Jobs’ story into opera.
For instance, the San Francisco Opera turned down the opportunity to host the world premiere when Bates and his early-stage collaborator on the project, UC Berkeley arts presenter Cal Performances, approached SF Opera’s leadership in 2013. (Since the project was workshopped at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2015 and 2016, SF Opera has come around, and will be producing the work in its 2019-2020 season.)
But Bates revels in the complexity and emotionality of his subject. “His actual life is the stuff of opera,” he says.
The opera careens backward and forward between episodes in Jobs’ life. In one scene he’s launching the iPhone at MacWorld 2007. Then it’s 1974 and he’s dropping acid in an orchard with his girlfriend.
The work also weaves together intricate theme tunes for each individual character. There’s jazzy saxophone music for Steve Wozniak, Jobs’ partner in the early years of Apple. Gongs and prayer bowls illustrate Jobs’ spiritual adviser, Kobun Chino Otogawa.
Appropriately, Bates has created a sound world for the opera’s protagonist that features quicksilver electronic sounds and acoustic guitar — an instrument that Jobs adored, especially as played by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
And while operatic heroes are usually played by tenors, this one’s a baritone — a darker, more nuanced voice. Edward Parks plays the character of Jobs in the world premiere production at Santa Fe Opera. Like a true baritone, Parks isn’t afraid to embrace Jobs’ dark side.
“I’m mostly drawn to his flaws,” Parks says. “The arc of his life is grand. There’s a lot of betrayal, there’s a lot of anger towards people, and there’s a lot of love as well.”
All ingredients ripe for opera.
“The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” is part of the summer season at Santa Fe Opera.