Jeffrey Nachmanoff: The Hollywood Interview

Director/writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff


JEFFREY NACHMANOFF TAKES THE HELM OF TRAITOR
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the September issue of Venice Magazine.

Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff makes his feature debut behind the camera with the political thriller Traitor, released August 27 by Overture Films. Born and raised in Arlington, VA., with stint in London during his teens, Nachmanoff did undergraduate work at Harvard, followed by graduate studies in film at USC. Nachmanoff cut his teeth in “the biz” by editing documentaries, and writing on the side, soon finding himself a working writer after one of his screenplays was optioned. Nachmanoff’s first produced screenplay was the 2004 disaster epic The Day After Tomorrow, and he is also the wordsmith behind Jerry Bruckheimer’s upcoming production Prince of Persia, based on the popular video game.

Jeffrey Nachmanoff spoke with us recently at his Hollywood home about realizing his life-long ambition of shouting “Action!” for a living. Here’s what transpired:

One thing that struck me while watching the film was how reminiscent it was of the work of John Frankenheimer. Are you a fan and/or student of his films?
Jeffrey Nachmanoff: Wow, that’s a huge compliment. Certainly some of my influences for this film were things like French Connection I & II, All the President’s Men, films that were really smart, political thrillers. A lot of those films were made in the ‘70s. A lot of those films were about the political realities the country was facing, but were also popular entertainment. Somewhere along the way, it feels like those became compartmentalized. It got hard to make popcorn films that were about something. So you had to choose between popcorn entertainment, where if you had anything even moderately daring, the studio would want you to take it out, or really serious, independent films with no budget that barely get a release.

Hopefully films like this and The Dark Knight will change that, because they combine both, like the films of the ‘70s.
Yeah, absolutely. I just saw Dark Knight two nights ago, and was blown away by it. Chris Nolan actually lives down the street, so I can’t even have bragging rights about being the best filmmaker on the block! (laughs) They’re entertaining, take you for a ride, but at the same time you don’t have to run away from the real world while you’re doing so. If fact, the real world elements add to it, and make it that much richer.

Yeah, and the last theatrical release before this summer that I can remember which was like that was Frankenheimer’s film Ronin, which was a decade ago.
For me, what makes a story compelling is something that I would want to know about, even if I didn’t have a way to see it in a movie. The subject of how far we’ll go for what we’ll believe in, the subject of what is acceptable when fighting our enemies, which The Dark Knight deals with, as well. What level of collateral damage is acceptable, and not acceptable to us as men and women of principle. Those are all interesting things, but you also have to put those in the back seat and say “It’s a story about this man, or woman, and his journey. And we’re going to take you along with him, and follow him through a lot of twists and turns where his beliefs in the system he trusted, and his belief in himself is tested at almost every turn.” In the case of this film, we have different belief systems which collide, and each case provides the chance for drama and the chance to see what different people do in difficult situations.

Nachmanoff and Don Cheadle on the set of Traitor.

Yeah, it was very reminiscent of Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday, which clearly showed both the Palestinian and Israeli points-of-view.
That was really important to me when I first came on board to make this project. I said that I wasn’t interested in making a jingoistic film that takes one absolute side of it. I grew up in London in the 1980s, and there were terrorist alerts constantly from the IRA. Many people were killed, but there wasn’t the kind of one-sided vilification of the IRA and its cause in the popular entertainment of the period like there is with what we’re facing now, with terrorists in this country. In those movies and TV shows from the 80s in the UK, there were IRA and there were British spies, and it was back and forth, and gritty, and felt very real. It wasn’t jingoistic at all. That may be because the troubles had existed there for decades longer, so the perspective was different. So I thought, why hasn’t anyone done that here and now, with what we’re facing in the U.S.? And I should add that in no way does our film take a two-way viewpoint in the killing of innocent people. Everyone can agree that setting off a bomb that kills innocent people is a horrible thing, but that didn’t stop us from watching films like In the Name of the Father or The Long Good Friday. The characters were very compelling, yet they were IRA terrorists, sympathizers, or fellow travelers. So there was this scale of people, and it wasn’t so easy to say who was “good” or who was “bad.” You grow up on a certain block or a certain street, you are on “this team,” whether you like it or not. The fact that one day they might ask you to set off a bomb, that’s when you find out what you’re really made of.

And you do that with Don Cheadle’s character in Traitor.
Yeah, Samir is a man of faith, someone who believed in Islam and believed in justice, and perhaps was sucked into something bigger than himself. If he’d grown up in a different place on the planet, this person might have been a Red Cross volunteer. Also I believe that the only way to fight religious extremists is to make an effort to understand them. You have no chance of defeating your enemy if you don’t at least try to put yourself in their shoes.

This story has an interesting genesis: apparently it was Steve Martin (who gets co-story credit) that came up with the original concept?
It wasn’t too long after 9/11 that Steve Martin was working on a film called Bringing Down the House with my producers David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman. And Steve said “I have an idea for a thriller in the world of terrorism.” David and Todd laugh, and they meet with Steve the next day who tells them the idea, which he’d written up as a five page treatment. They bought it on the spot, got it set up at Disney, and said “Now we need a writer who can turn this into a screenplay.” That’s when I was brought into meet them. One of the reasons I wanted the meeting, was I wanted a chance to meet Steve Martin! (laughs) Like many young writers, I’d grown up idolizing Steve Martin. So I brought in a rough idea, and pitched it to Steve, and he said “That sounds great.” And that was the beginning of it all.

How was it making the transition from screenwriter to director?
I’d directed student films before, but never a feature. As a writer, you’re really there to serve the director, because someone has to control the process of actually making the film, fortunately or unfortunately. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to be given a shot to direct a film that you’ve written. So I guess you could say that I’m an old rookie as a director, and all that preparation I went through before I stepped behind the camera was great, really invaluable. So even though I’ve been working in Hollywood for some time, this is really the first film that I can say is mine.

Nachmanoff and Guy Pearce on the set of Traitor.

Tell us about that what that experience was like, since you don’t hear it much anymore. It’s very much a ‘70s story.
(laughs) It’s totally a ‘70s story! It’s like the line from the Bible: “It’s harder for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” Similarly, it’s about as difficult for a writer-for-hire to get to direct his own screenplay. What happened was, I wrote the script, the producers were really happy with it, the studio was happy with it, but said “Even though we think this is a great script, Disney is not in the business of making an edgy terrorist thriller,” which was a little alarming considering they’d hired me to write one! (laughs) But these are the vagaries of Hollywood. So it sat around for a while, got put into turnaround, and Don Cheadle read it, and said “I’d like to play this part.” Then my producers said “You know, the only way to really get this movie made is to not make it as a big studio movie, and there’s only one person who can deliver that on this film, and that’s Jeffrey.” And they were right: they were never going to have someone who was more passionate and knew more about this story than me. I’d lived it, I’d breathed it, and I’d directed it in my head already. So when I went to pitch myself as the director, I put together a visual book of images from films, from various photo libraries and other sources, which actually put my undergraduate background to use, where I got my degree in art and photography. I also did some storyboards, and I put together a visual representation of how I’d shoot the movie. I think that helped convince them, and make them comfortable that I was ready to be the director. Then I sat down with Don, and we very quickly hit it off. When he gave me his vote of confidence, that’s what put everyone else over the edge. Once you have one of the premiere actors in Hollywood giving you his stamp of approval, it’s that much harder for people to say “no.” I got very lucky.

Theatrical trailer for Traitor.