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Film and the Arts
Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Monday, 14 May 2012 09:53
- Written by Laura Blum
Around midnight on July 4, 1976, in Uganda's Entebbe Airport, a 30-year-old Israeli named Jonathan "Yoni" Netanyahu was heading a mission to rescue more than 100 hostages and kill their guerrilla captors. He didn't survive to tell the tale, but his friends, significant others and writings did, and they speak for him in Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story.
The documentary by Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot ouijas his charismatic, driven spirit in a portrait that both haunts and uplifts. Yoni's own poetry, prose and letters are used to narrate the film, which also weaves home movies and news coverage of the Entebbe raid anchored by CBS legend Walter Cronkite.
Rounding out the testimony are interviews with Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and other prominent figures in the young hero's life.
Perhaps you've heard of his younger brother, Benjamin. Israel's current prime minister movingly recounts what it was like to break news of Yoni's death to their parents. Their father, scholar Benzion Netanyahu, had brought the family to the U.S. for an academic position when Yoni was in high school. Later Yoni too would answer the siren's call of academe when Harvard dangled a scholarship, and soon after when he transferred to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The combination of lyrical gift, intellectual curiosity and hyperresponsibility yielded a poet-warrior who toggled between studies and soldiering, the United States and Israel, romantic yearnings and martyric crusades. He served as commander of the special forces unit Sayeret Matkal and fought in Israel's 1967 and 1973 wars.
As the title suggests, Follow Me's hard-burning subject had leadership in his DNA. From what unfurls onscreen, it's hard not to conclude that this immensely talented young man would have risen to a postion of prominence in whatever field he chose. Yet it's equally suggestive that his demons would have followed him there.
In an especially stirring excerpt from one of his letters, the much mythologized combattant ponders the
inglories of war: ''To kill at such very close range ... to the point of pressing the muzzle against the flesh and pulling the trigger for a single bullet to be released and kill accurately ... adds a whole dimension of
sadness to a man's being. Not a momentary, transient sadness, but something that sinks in and is forgotten, yet is there and endures.''
When asked about Yoni's ambivalence, the filmmakers stressed his complex character.
"He was constantly thinking about different political positions, point-counterpoint, and then debating them and constantly struggling with all of these different points," said Pinchot. "He hates war, but he becomes an assassin. This makes him not just a fascinating character but a real human being -- someone who makes choices and wrestles with them at the same time."
Pinchot and Gruber shared their own experiences in wrestling with how to tell Yoni's story, a creative process that Pinchot began 16 years prior to the film's completion.
Q: The film is called Follow Me, yet Yoni's love of Israel, sense of duty and standards of performance were probitively high for most people to join with him. Talk about your choice of title and whether Yoni was aware of that paradox.
JG: Yoni had really high standards and he did expect people to work as hard as they possibly could. You see from his first days in the army there was a story about him carrying a stretcher that was for two people and he was yelling at his troop -- and one of them says, "We admire him, but he wasn't very popular." But he was commander of the most elite unit of the Israel Defence Forces, so if you're not going to demand exceptionalism from the people under you, then why would you be commander?
With other Sayeret Matkal commanders as well there was extreme rigor in what they asked for. Yoni was actually unlike some other commanders who were very much on top of the people they commanded. He put a lot of faith in his soldiers. He said, "I know you can do it." As Omer Bar-Lev said at the end of film, "He had more faith in us than we had in ourselves." That speaks to someone who can let go and step off when needed.
ADP: We didn't think that people would be able to follow every bit of his life since he really was an exceptional person. The idea wasn't, Can I follow him in terms of being this remarkable scholar or great athlete, or can I be as good looking as Yoni Netanyahu? He had all of these great characteristics, yet he still maintained a devotion to great sacrifice to a higher calling, something bigger than himself. If you see that as an example, then the "Follow Me" is pretty clear.
Q: Yoni was constantly challenging himself and others, but according to an intimate friend of his, he also had a tendency to panic. Were you aware of this, and if so, what prompted you to omit it from the film?
ADP: We never heard that. The fact that he was given command of the riskiest mission says something. I don't think they would have given it to someone who had a tendancy to panic. From our research and conversations, we got the opposite. He actually had a tendency in great stress and danger to be quite calm and soothing to his men and to himself.
Q: To what extent did Yoni's status as a sacred martyr discourage you from digging into his shadows?
ADP: In the past he really has been a myth and an icon and less a human being. It's understandable. But we were trying to push the envelope beyond the one or two dimensions that people have known about Yoni before. Yoni didn't have a perfect relationship with everybody. He was a tough commander. He was a husband who had a very complicated relationship with his wife. If you can still make tough choices knowing that there are downsides and ramifications, that makes it even more heroic -- real heroism, not Hollywood's version.
Q: What impact did Yoni's father have on his decisions and worldview? How did Yoni feel about Professor Netanyahu's Revisionist Zionist politics, which were a big factor in his leaving then Labor-dominated Israel in search of an academic career in the US?
JG: We didn't want it to be a political film, too closely associated to the politics of the country. Benzion was 101 when we interviewed him, so we didn't get as much as we would've liked in terms of the relationship between the two of them. But to share a few observations, the father's patriotism on a deep emotional level was passed along to the son. Another fascinating characteristic that translated to Yoni was the father's ability of concentration and hard work. His father's book on the Marrano Jews was a humongous undertaking, and he was able with three rambunctious boys to focus on his work at an incredible level and for a long time.
Q: Professor Netanyahu clearly had divided academic, ideological and familial commitments. Did Yoni, as the eldest brother, assume the brunt of this?
JG: He was constantly trying to find his own road, which really was one of the reasons we were so drawn to him. Clearly there was a tremendous amount of respect to his parents and their intellectual prowess and the values they gave. Yet Yoni left his family to go back to Israel. He constantly battled with balancing everything in his life.
Q: He was at war within and without. Now for a filmic question: what informed the story's nonlinear structure?
JG: Ari's vision for the film -- he was working on it for close to 16 years -- were these two parallel stories of Yoni's life and the Entebbe operation building towards each other. It gives a sense of destiny, that his life has always been going towards this. When I came on board (I agreed that) it was very powerful for the viewer to be in the Entebbe story and leave it at the right moment so you sense that the tension is building on each day of the week. And with Yoni there are real chapters of his life, which felt like good places to leave off, especially with the poetry of his own words, when he's struggling at high school or after his marriage ends.
Q: How did you use audio and visual elements to underscore the timeshifting?
JG: Visually we tried to different the Entebbe story. It's a little more letter box than the Yoni story. It begins in black and white. The music is very different. When we come back to Yoni's story, it's full-screen; it's color. You hear the voice of Yoni and you know you're back in his story.
Q: How did you get the audio recording of the Entebbe operation?
JP: The Entebbe operation audio had been released just a couple of years prior. It adds an authenticity that hasn't existed before. Likewise we got recently released documents for the week of planning. In the film there's a black and white schematic of the airport and an airplane that flies in, that's the actual planning document.
Q: How would the film have been different had it come out as you originally intended, 16 years ago?
ADP: One of the great things that happened in waiting these 16 years is that the people we did interview were much more comfortable talking about Yoni as a human being than they would have been had I talked to them 16 years before. For instance, the unit's comfort in talking about the conflicts they had with Yoni was something that they probably would not have talked about earlier. We know that [his wife] Tuti would not have talked about her story. It was the first time she ever spoke on film. Even now she was very hesitant. We felt like we should talk about the miscarraiges and the divorce. We found Yoni to be much more relatable that way.
Q: Why did it take 16 years to make the film?
ADP: We were kind of threading a very small needle. We wanted the film to be funded; we wanted it to be a nonprofit and we wanted it to be funded by people who were not associated with the family or Israel. Finding that person wasn't easy. We wanted it to be a story about a person, not a cause.
Q: Who took the plunge?
A: The funder who ended up funding it was a New York Wall Street person, Mark Manson, whom I was financing feature films with. We were at a restaurant and he asked me what projects I was thinking about. I told him about this one, never thinking he would have any interest in it. He fell in love with it and ended up greenlighting it at the lunch. He saw it as a love story -- a love triangle among a man and the people in his life that he loved and his country.
Director Joss Whedon Hails "The Avengers"
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Tuesday, 08 May 2012 05:00
- Written by Frank Lovece
When Marvel Comics announced at Comic-Con International 2010 that Joss Whedon would script and direct The Avengers -- the superhero all-star movie uniting the team of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" first assembled by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1964 -- comic fandom knew something special was on the way.
Known for his works' wry humor and for his own love of sci-fi and fantasy, Whedon had the right qualities to earn the respect and trust of True Believers. He grew up loving the same pop culture as they, and in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and even Dollhouse, of which he's amibvalent, he combined captivating plot twists with a deep sense of lore, great action and soap-opera drama, qualities he brought to his ucessful run penning Marvel's Astonishing X-Men comic.
Actor David Oyelowo Is Enjoying A Championship Season
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 04 May 2012 14:27
- Written by Brad Balfour
Born in Britain, part of a royal Nigerian family, raised there and in England, 36-year-old actor David Oyelowo is enjoying a remarkable run -- garnering more prominent roles and rising billing in films with bigger and bigger actors. This increasingly favorable career surge doesn’t seem like it's going to abate any time soon.
Within this last month, two of his recent efforts have come out either theatrically or on DVD -- the high-profile Lucas-Film produced WW 2 flying airmen story, Red Tails, and the indie-edgy inner city drama, 96 Minutes.
In this drama about a car-jacking gone wrong, Oyelowo play a small but crucial role. Though his appearance is limited, this skilled and committed actor has to drive the momentum in two pivitol scenes. A film about the good and bad decisions one can make in a split second, his character survives with dignity intact though it takes quite a bruising in this one scene.
Chimpanzee's Filmmakers Tell A True Tale of Loss and Bonding
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Monday, 30 April 2012 18:43
- Written by Brad Balfour
While Marvel's The Avengers is tentpole cinema's paean to superhero glory, DisneyNature salutes a different sort of heroics through the true primate story told in Chimpanzee.
British directors/producers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield have fashioned this rousing drama out of three hard years worth of collected footage of our primate cousins in action.
From hundreds of hours of digitally captured live action they have culled a powerful chronicle of primate society, including the accidental adoption of a young orphaned chimp by the alpha male of his pack. An unheard of situation in the annals of primate research, this remarkable event forms the backbone of a narrative that both reveals much about chimpanzee social life and provides a metaphor humanity.
This material was in capable hands for veteran nature documentarians Fotherfill and Linfield, who previously helmed such films as African Cats, Earth and Frozen Planet -- not to mention the BBC juggernaut Planet Earth.
Q: How did you work out which task each one of you handled in making this film?
AF: It's an organic process, actually. I'd worked with chimpanzees 25 years ago, so I started it off. Mark's a real primate expert as well, and it was very much a 50/50 split. Although I have to say, Mark is quite a lot more technically capable than I, so he took more of the lead with the camera side of things. But we have worked together a lot... including on the TV series Planet Earth.
ML: Alastair's got far better political skills to deal with tricky people.
AF: One of the things about chimpanzees is that in the wild most run from you straight away, so you have to work with what's called habituated chimpanzees. And these are chimpanzees where scientists like Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream in Tanzania, and, in our case, Christophe Boesch in the Ivory Coast have worked with these chimpanzees for literally 30 years. Originally they'd go out in the forest day after day after day and wouldn't see anything.
They'd hear frightened chimpanzees and then gradually the chimpanzees would get used to the people there. Now you can sit as close as we are to each other and they're completely relaxed and ignore you. It’s wonderful and really special.
Q: It seems impossible to script a story like this, yet it’s amazing how it turned out. How did this story come about?
ML: Of course it's not entirely true that we didn't have a script, because you'd be doing really well to get a feature film commissioned by Disney if you don't have any kind of a script. It’s just that the script went in the bin. There was a 60- 70-page traditional Hollywood script, and it was made the way we make most wildlife film scripts.
Through our research and collaboration with scientists, we put together all the cool things that we know chimpanzees do and put them into an order that made sense. And we removed things that we thought ha no chance of being filmed.
Then we fiddled around with it. But in reality, you get there and of course the chimpanzees haven't read the script. Day after day they might not even turn up. And you hope -- and this is always the way it is to some extent -- that they'll do some interesting things that you didn't put in the script.
Probably some of the things that you thought were easy you won't ever see. In this case we were incredibly lucky because the real story that unfolded in front of us was way better than the script [we did].
AF: We deliberately chose to follow a young baby chimp because we knew they're very, very cute. But during the first five years of a chimpanzee's life, 50% of those chimps die. We didn't want Oscar's mother to die; that was a real, real problem for us. She was killed by a leopard about two years into the filming and at that stage we thought the film was over.
We genuinely thought that, because Disney movies need a happy ending, so we were really worried. Then the extraordinary adoption by alpha male Freddy happened. In 30 years the scientists hadn’t seen anything quite like that and it's certainly has never been filmed before.
ML: We were quite lucky -- it was probably just short of three years. Had he been orphaned when he was two years old, he probably would have died because they're very reliant on their mother's milk. Freddy was able to give him normal food that he could collect in the forest, but were he just two that might not be enough. Whereas at about three or just short of three, Freddy was able to give Oscar just enough to keep him going.
Q: How many hours were you there and how many hours did you actually shoot in terms of footage?
AF: We were there for about three and a half years. It was an unbelievably difficult place to work because the rainforest is very, very dark and chimpanzees are obviously very dark animals. There’s 100% humidity and the cameras were heavy. Mark and I reckoned it was the hardest challenge that we ever asked a cameraman to do. Martin said if he got one shot in a day he was pleased. It was really like that.
One thing we've been trying to do with DisneyNature is not make documentaries. We've tried to make movies that really work in the way that movies are supposed to work. We have stories and engaging characters. The fact that they're chimpanzees is wonderful, but they've got to work as characters. And with Chimpanzee, more than even African Cats, we really had to get it to work.
ML: And that's down to the chimpanzees. What's so incredible about the chimpanzees is that so much of their lives are mirrored in our lives. We actually joked when we first arrived at the location, obviously Alastair's been there previously, but when we went there for a reconnaissance trip four years ago we sat down with researchers and they'd just come back from a day in the forest and were all talking about these chimpanzees like they were human characters.
And we'd just thought they'd been in the forest too long, but within a few weeks we were doing the same thing. You can't help yourself. Really the kind of relationships they have with each other, the dramas that go on between them...
Q: How do you explain this miracle between Oscar and Freddy?
AF: Nobody can really explain it. The scientists actually did a genetic test and discovered that, as they suspected, they're not at all related. And I think the only thing you can think is that male chimpanzees do have a feminine side to them.
ML: The best way to answer that surely is, Why do humans adopt? -- and actually even humans who have children. Couples will adopt, so why? If you can answer that question, I think you've answered our question about chimpanzees, because we are so similar.
AF: In the past scientists have seen female chimpanzees that don't have their own young adopt other babies, and sometimes an older brother will adopt a younger brother when the mother is lost. But it's almost never, I think maybe on one other occasion, for a big adult male.
And particularly the alpha, because he has a real big role in chimpanzee society. He has to lead the guys against their rivals, and as you've seen in the movie, chimpanzees don't live on their own; they have other groups nearby. And our particular group, unfortunately, had a particularly powerful group nearby called Scar and his big team of males. They were a real threat to Freddy and Oscar and Isha. We were really worried all the way through the filming.
ML: Another thing worth saying on the adoption is that there's a scientific study going on -- from the genetic analysis of the feces, if you must know -- showing that Freddy and Oscar are not related. Because it could be that Freddy was actually Oscar's father, being the alpha male of the group and all the rest of it. But we know for certain that they're not. So it really is an act of altruism.
Q: Could you tell the difference between each of the chimps?
AF: You can recognize their faces.
ML: Easily.
Q: Scar was obvious.
AF: Scar was obvious. It takes a bit more time. But their faces are as distinctly different as human faces. And their character as well, actually. When we first started we knew we were to follow a mother and a baby, and the first mother we went with was very relaxed, but she turned out to be camera shy.
Every time the cameraman went close, she'd just look away from the camera and we thought this isn't going to work. So luckily we chose Isha, who chose to be a really relaxed girl. She was a lovely girl.
Q: Why didn't you say that a leopard killed the mother instead of implying that it was from the chimp attack?
ML: Why didn't we?
AF: Basically what happened was that – this is the true thing that happened – Isha was separated from the group, and we think she was killed by a leopard. We never filmed it. Basically what happened is there was the battle and then the next day there was Oscar on his own and Isha had disappeared.
And we said to the scientist, "What's happened?" and he said, "Well, she's almost certainly been killed by a leopard," which is why we chose to tell that story in the movie.
Q: You left it ambiguous. With these wonderful stories, they always have one animal being killed and here as well, though you didn't see it being torn to bits. Why does an animal have to die? Kids still talk about their traumatic experience of seeing Bambi's mother being killed.
AF: That's the truth in nature.
ML: Yes, and we set out to tell the story of Oscar's life. Clearly the thing that shaped it was the death of his mother; that wasn't our fault. As much as we wanted a good story, we didn't do her in.
AF: But you make a very good point, and I think the important thing is these movies are for every age group. We want children to come with their parents.
It's not just a kid's movie, but we do want families to come. So why dwell on it? Who wants to see a leopard rip up a chimpanzee? There are some people who really hate it. And of course Bambi is a terribly sad story, but my God, it's a good story.
Q: Is that was a Disney rule; you've got to have one.
AF: We need to make a movie about vegetarians.
