Set around the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the mass extermination of Jews during World War II, Jake Paltrow’s latest film, “June Zero,” follows three characters on the periphery of history. The film follows a teenage Libyan immigrant named David, a Moroccan prison guard named Hiyam, and a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who became the chief interrogator at Eichmann’s trial, Micha. As each character finds their lives intertwined in the same strand of history in the making, Paltrow examines the very nature of history itself.
Following the world premiere of “June Zero” at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, The Playlist spoke to writer-director Jake Paltrow and co-writer Tom Shoval.
Given that the story of Adolf Eichmann is so huge and has been told several times, what drew you to tell it from this specific perspective?
Jake Paltrow: I think it’s such a huge story; there’s no way, I think, to really wrap your arms around it and like the biopic sense. I don’t think we would have any interest in doing it that way. So this small detail of the way they’re going to dispose of his body. If you approach the idea of the Lincoln assassination from the point of view of the costumers and a cab driver outside the Ford Theater, it’s a very clear view into something like that. So you’re not with the cabinet, you’re not with him, you don’t have to try to dramatize who those people are. But you bring in the personal dilemmas of these peripheral characters. That’s a whole world unto itself. In a way, something that, I think, is actually more interesting to get into these larger stories through. So that was the point of view through which we knew we could do it. This way just felt like a very human way of getting into a story like this.
You follow three distinct people with three distinct connections to this event. Were they based on real stories you’d uncovered in your research?
Jake Paltrow: The idea of also entering into this through a contested history, that there’s this man who says that when he was 13 years old, he worked at the factory where they built the oven for Eichmann’s corpse, was intriguing. Then we talked to some other people who worked at the factory and they say, no, at any time was there any kid working at this place. So we thought that was a very interesting way of getting into histories that are very much also based on testimony. When you think about the trial itself, it is testimony from the Israeli perspective that is what makes people finally understand what happened in Europe. First, you have these Europeans coming post-war, and you have an Israeli population that’s looking and saying, you let this happen to you? It’s a subject that’s not really discussed. The trial, because it was so public, was the thing that finally lets all the Jews in Israel really understand what happened in Europe. The putting of that history in order, which the character of Mischa says, is really the only kind of justice that would be meaningful in any way, because there’s no punishment for crimes like this. Killing him is kind of immaterial. There was a group within Israel at that time who were lobbying to not execute. The death penalty didn’t exist. It had been abolished, and then they kept it for this possible eventuality.
There is a mention in the film that it was the British version of the death penalty.
Jake Paltrow: In the radio broadcast, if you speak Hebrew, it continues under the dialogue. But the idea is that the continuation was based on British military law pre-state, and then in 1954, inside the Knesset, the parliament there, they voted to get rid of it, and then they got rid of it. But then they decided let’s just keep it just in case for these crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people. We’ll keep it for that. There are people saying, well, you can’t abolish it and keep it. They’ve only used it once since this.
What was the co-writing process like? Everyone always has a different answer to this question.
Tom Shoval: I guess it’s always different because it’s different types of people working together. For me, it was sheer joy. Me and I mean, Jake, we are kindred spirits also in the way that we look at cinema and what we like and what we feel about it, and how we want to create it. So it was very easy, even though we hadn’t met before the writing process. We were strangers in a way, but the moment we met, it felt like we knew each other a long time ago. And I think because we have such a connected passion, it was, I don’t want to say it was very easy, but it was full of imagination and inspiration. And
Jake Paltrow: Precisely. Fun makes it again seem easy, and of course, it’s not easy to find the point of view of how you’re going to do something. But it’s like doing the heavy lifting with somebody who’s so like-minded. It was a very enjoyable experience. Every adjective makes it feel like it’s a lark, and of course, it’s not. It’s a tremendous amount of work, but we were able to do it with a real spirit of openness. Tom would edit the instincts I don’t like about myself as a writer. It’s great to have somebody to say, no we shouldn’t do it that way, and, yes, we should do it that way. When you have that back, and forth, it’s very healthy, I think, and very rewarding.
The tone shifts quite a bit in the film. Was that in the script, or did you find it in the edit?
Tom Shoval: It was in the script. We felt that more than anything, we wanted to make a film about this moment in history. We wanted to make a film about Israel at that point of time. We wanted to show all the complexities and stuff that you don’t usually see when you see these types of films, or history films, or Holocaust films. We wanted to make the film rich in that sense. Also, because we had so many testimonies, there were a lot of compelling stories. We felt that the more the film has a change of tones, we will get a bigger picture of what happened at that time, and maybe it will help us to convey more about what it is to do a film about this period and about the Holocaust.
Yeah, it was maybe the first time I think I’ve ever seen the diaspora within Israel really shown. I think there were Libyan, Moroccan, Turkish, and Polish all shown.
Jake Paltrow: You got. I think that’s a big thing that outside of Israel, I don’t know that people understand, like the vast spectrum of diversity within Jewishness that runs from sort of ultra religious to beyond secular and then, of course, just nationalities and ethnicities. In Israel, a very small country, these people are living amongst one another in a small place, and in the rest of the world, it’s something that I don’t think people understand. So it was great to be able to use that dramatically because it’s actually a part of the story. I mean, having only guards of North African and Middle Eastern origin because they were so afraid of European guards at the prison, becoming emotional and assassinating Eichmann, is cinematically an amazing detail. So you’re able to sort of expose some of these things, through just the procedural nature of the movie itself. That’s a nice way to be able to write it without having to say, well, we should try to bring this into the movie somehow. It’s there, we’re not reaching for it. It’s right there.
I loved the way you used I believe it was super 16mm to shoot the film. It almost felt like early 60s Kodachrome color. How did you achieve this look?
Jake Paltrow: We had an amazing cinematographer, Yaron Scharf, who is a great artist and obviously a master at doing this. I shot the film pretty straight, so there’s no filtration. There are not layers of things between the lens and what we’re photographing. There’s not much manipulation in the processing part either. So as we talked through kind of how we’re going to do it, and how locations and even the fabrics of clothing react to the sun, a movie like this is made in such a short schedule and with such limited resources, you’re making so much of it in the preparation. If you can have just enough time to ensure that these ideas you have, can acquit themselves on film. That’s, I think, how you can make a look like this. So it’s not like we’re taking the film, putting it into a digital finishing process and saying, let’s dial up these colors here, let’s give it a Kodachrome cast or whatever, however you do it now in digital photography, which I don’t know that much about. Like the inherent nature of celluloid is still bringing its own emotion. And that is what makes it such a great tool for a movie like this, especially because, you know, we don’t have tremendous resources to do big sets. I can’t tell you how many elements we were getting from where you’re shooting. It’s not really a prison, but you have bars, and on video, you have to spend so much time integrating elements that feel very contemporary or outside, but the nature of film just kind of hugs all these things, and integrates them in a way that’s really, really magic,
Tom Shoval: There is now this trend to take black and white film into color to make it more vivid or close to how we perceive or watch films now. And I feel this film is doing the opposite, kind of echoing the past by kind of like taking the tools that were used at that time. So you kind of get the feeling or the tapestry of the time and place that stories actually happen.
There are three very strong performances in the film; what were you looking for in the process of casting them?
Jake Paltrow: We knew if we couldn’t find the right person for David, the little boy, we wouldn’t have a movie. And it was challenging. It’s kind of scary to commit to going off to a foreign country to make a movie before you have that. So Hila Yuval, who’s the casting director, found this boy who was not an actor or wasn’t an actor yet. He had a natural quality. We talked about what we wanted and kept saying, oh, we want “The Wild Child,” you know from the Truffaut film. We want somebody with this nature, with this built-in sort of emotions, who isn’t self-edited and doesn’t have any of those precocious qualities some children have. It was very, very clear from even his first sort of self-tape thing that he could access certain emotions that you need for the character. So we developed a process with an acting teacher who is also in the movie; Rotem Keinan, who plays the teacher, is also a very well-known acting teacher in Israel. So there was Noam Ovadia and one other child that we liked, and we started an acting school with them. They would go off and I would talk to him about things. Then he would work with Noam and Noam would come back. Through this process, we found our kids for the movie. But it was very clear that with Noam if we could harness all of these natural abilities, he would really be great. It worked out really well.
The actor who played Micha has such expressive eyes.
Jake Paltrow: Micha is Tom Hagi. Tom [Shoval] suggested him. He knew that he could be really, really good. When he came in, he was absolutely right. The way we did those scenes and his understanding of the stillness. We talked about how if you could never blink in this thing, that would really work. Then he barely blinked. I think it’s funny that the casting of these movies happens a lot in the script stage when you’re trying to make a movie, and you don’t know if this person is likable or if the character is like that. Something always comes about, but you remember that you haven’t cast yet. The humanity that these people are going to bring to the movie will eclipse everything else we’re talking about, it will eclipse our screenplay, it will eclipse my ideas for shots, what the music will be. The humanity that actors bring to these things, in general, is everything. So when you find somebody and your intuitive senses tell you this is going to be so much better than you imagined, to me, that’s the casting process. We always talked about scripts like blueprints, meaning the movie is the house and the casting is, well, who’s going to live in it? What’s it going to feel like? How warm is it going to be in there?
Tom Shoval: For me, Micha was the most complicated character to cast because you needed to see that he had a horrible past. You needed to see it on him physically. I think Tom has this fragility that when you look at him, you say to yourself, this guy has been through something. He’s now this fossil that he is talking about. He has this physical aura, and he’s a great actor, so he could tell the story of this man.
Jake Paltrow: He’s also playing the person that we have felt the most responsibility toward getting that right. Miki Goldman, who is about to turn 97 years old. We both spent a lot of time with him and wanted to ensure that, because we were doing something provocative, we did it right. The 81 blows story comes from Haim Gouri, who was a writer who wrote kind of a, what would you call it? A poem?
Tom Shoval: He was a poet, and he wrote for the newspapers. He went to the Eichmann trials, and he wrote about testimonies in a very poetic style. He was very caught up by the testimony of somebody else about Miki Goldman. His writing got a lot of attention.
Jake Paltrow: It’s on YouTube. Miki was an investigator for Bureau Six, which is like a white-collar crime thing. They were part of the people who did the depositions for the Eichmann trial. He’s sitting at Gideon Hausner’s desk, while this man points Golman out in the room. He talks about this moment. So the way it really plays out, is in the courtroom, he tells the story, and they say, is the person that you’re talking about sort of here, and he’s sitting right there. Miki is very dignified. He’s like Fredric March or something. You see him, and he doesn’t move. It’s like breaking the fourth wall or something in the trial. It’s kind of an odd moment.
Tom Shoval: Also, Haim Gouri made a short film about the testimony. It also became something very known. It helped change something about how the Israelis perceived those testimonies and what the power was on the culture and of accepting the Holocaust survivors. It had a united effect.
The scene where Micha tells Ada about how he doesn’t want his story to be treated like a fable; he wants it to be treated like history, so people remember and realize what really happened is very powerful. I felt like that segment really has something to say with where we’re at; I think in the United States right now, with the rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial are both on the rise.
Jake Paltrow: I think it’s a big part of making a movie like this. The movie is dedicated to Claude Lanzmann, who made “Shoah.” The approach he made was to not use archival and not to recreate any of the horrors. In the 80s, when that came out, it’s, I think, the first document that suddenly makes this subject very contemporary to the time and its treatment of it and his choice to ask a question, the interpreter then takes it from French to Polish and the person answers in Polish, and it’s then translated again. He makes you suffer through this thing, this thing that initially might seem boring, and an editor would say, well, let’s just get right to the story, becomes part of like this meditative process of having to go through the testimony in this way.
For our movie, we also made a choice to not do archival and to not do a recreation of horrors, because with memories, you take some of your own relationship with the subject matter. As he’s telling his story in the ghetto, you know, the camera is following nobody, as if he’s there telling the story. I think that was just a method of trying to make the subject matter contemporary in a way and kind of relevant. Because it would be interesting. That’s the thing. How do you keep it interesting? It’s hard to do things the same way again and again, and engage people cinematically. So that is a side effect of doing a movie this way.
I would also say, just in terms of the historical part, in a world where history is now sort of ratified by who controls the Wikipedia page, that speaks to much bigger, contemporary things. What we’re seeing in America, not just with Holocaust denial and antisemitism, but I mean, everything that has to do with some of these histories. So we’re in a very, very dangerous moment.
And I wanted to ask about the Wikipedia part in the film’s coda. Was that part of the real story?
Jake Paltrow: I think we really only chose to do it that way because that is the portal through which everyone receives so much information now. So even if you’re not taking it as doctrine, you’re taking it maybe as confirmation of ideas you already have. So even if you can recognize it, this might not be exactly the truth. Well, maybe it’s close enough? Is that good enough? I don’t know. If it makes it now on to there, if it makes it through, it’s treated as doctrine.
And characters represent different parts of history. Hayim, who rejects it. History can go to Hell. Miki is history. He’s the fossil, you know, he’s the living embodiment of these histories. And David is trying, as an old man, to get into history. To claim this history, which is refuted. That’s how we get into this movie. It’s a contested story.
Tom Shoval: Where is the border between memory and history? Between history and theater? I mean, where do you draw the line? When can you point and say this was history, this actually happened? It’s a tough thing to do. I think the film echoes all of those elements and tries to evoke them.
What do you hope the audience feels while they’re watching or after they’ve watched the film?
Tom Shoval: That’s a hard one because I consider myself also an audience in some ways. I feel the film allows you to feel all sorts of things. I think the world is contemplating the time that we are in and about the past. All the things that we talked about. For example, the conversation between Ada and Micha, I feel it makes you contemplate on what you have seen until that moment in a different way. So for me, this is if people walk out of the theater and still think about the film, and still think about moments of it, I think that we achieved what we wanted to happen.
Jake Paltrow: For people who are interested in the subject matter, I think because a lot of these things in the movie don’t necessarily have a correct answer or resolution, as we dramatize with Ada and Micha. What I think it can do is help articulate certain thoughts and bring a certain clarity of vision about subject matters that are important and hard to articulate. And maybe the conversation helps you put your own ideas in order.
