An Interview with Eytan Fox, director of The Bubble

A New York native who moved to Israel as a child, Eytan Fox grew up in Jerusalem, and after serving in the army studied at Tel Aviv University's School of Film and Television. Together with his partner, Gal Uchovsky, he wrote, directed and produced Yossi & Jagger, which played at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival. Fox brought his most recent film, The Bubble, to Tribeca this past May. He has returned to New York for the film's US theatrical release on Sept. 7, and we took the opportunity to chat with him.

Tribeca : Congratulations on the theatrical release of The Bubble. What’s been happening with the film since its American premiere here at Tribeca last spring?

Eytan Fox : I am thrilled. It has been an intense year since the film came out in Israel a year ago, and we’ve had a lot of good publicity. Our world premier was at Toronto, and our European premiere was at Berlin. But it was a very big deal for me to come back to Tribeca after being there with Yossi & Jagger in 2003.  It is always the most thrilling and tense moment when the film actually goes out there and has to meet audiences and communicate with people. It’s an exciting moment in the life of the film.

How was The Bubble received in Israel?

It was horrible timing because the film premiered there in July of 2006, and a week later the second war in Lebanon broke out. It was a bad atmosphere, and there was a lot of bad energy. Movie houses started shutting down because people were not going to see films. Furthermore, the gap between Israel and Tel Aviv was very big. There were all these articles in newspapers about “the bubble” of Tel Aviv where people are dancing and celebrating while the country was going up in flames. And our film really represents life in Tel Aviv. Many people perceived the film as unpatriotic or un-loyal. It was really very extreme, and the film suffered terribly from this kind of sentiment.

And then months later, when the film came out on DVD, the country was back to its own self, and people were back to their selves, and their connection to the film was new and better and healthier in many ways.

Do you have any expectations about how the film will be received in the US?

I’ve been told by the distributors that the audience who went to see Walk On Water [the 2005 film written by Fox and Uchovsky about an Israeli intelligence agent assigned to befriend the grandchildren of a Nazi war criminal following the suicide of his wife] which was the biggest, most commercially successful Israeli film ever released in America, were older, mainly Jewish people.  Now I am hearing that, because The Bubble is a more extreme film, a lot of the people will not be able to deal with it or handle it the way they did with Walk On Water. But I hope a lot of people decide to see the film.

Do you think The Bubble will draw a different audience than Walk On Water?

It might. I think it will be interesting for the people who saw Walk On Water to have to deal with The Bubble. It is much more extreme, both politically and sexually. It will be interesting for them – and for me – to have them deal with the film.

I like to do as many Q&As and meet as many audience members as possible. I had a few screenings in the US this week before the actual opening, and it’s like a relationship between two people. I came back and met people who I’ve already met before, and who have already seen two of my previous films. Now it is a different kind of dialogue. I’m not coming out of Israel with a new film that no one knows about. By now, people know about the characters and the issues and themes I will be presenting, and so a deeper relationship with the audience has formed.

Because you don’t feel like you need to prove yourself and your voice in relation to such politically charged material?

Yes. It’s also like meeting someone on a first date, and you tell stories and try to get to know each other. And the second and third dates can be based on some kind of information you already have about each other. So, I’ll come to this meeting place – this theatre – with a new film and a deeper relationship with my audiences. It’s a pleasure to see that happening.

Did the arc of the love story evolve as you wrote the film, or was that the beginning of the movie for you?

I really had the arc from a very early stage. An early working title was Romeo and Julio, and I was really creating it scene by scene from Shakespeare’s play. But at some point I decided not to adapt it so strictly. It was clear to me that I couldn’t let the two lovers walk, hand-in-hand, into the sunset and live happily ever after. That would not be true to life and it would miss the point we were trying to make about how difficult living and loving and being young in Israel and the Middle East is. Or for that matter in the world! So many conflicts that we are dealing with in the Middle East have become so relevant in the rest of the world.

As tensions rise and political complications escalate in the Middle East, it is certainly challenging to trust the “story-line”, so to speak, that is being told in the mainstream media. Do you feel compelled to put a human face on the situation and daily lives of people in the Middle East?

Film is really about communication between people. I feel so gratified when film brings you to a place where you want to talk about and process issues, or you want to talk with the filmmaker about more technical issues about filmmaking or even the politics behind a certain film. When a film makes me want to talk with people and even argue with them, it’s a wonderful thing.

Do you think that film can change the way people see the tragedies in our world? That it can lead us into feeling more hopeful?

A lot of people are saying that The Bubble is a pessimistic and hopeless film. I don’t feel that way, and I hope that not everyone does. The fact that the film focuses on two people in Israel and Palestine who would have the potential and the longing to love each other and care about each other is the hopeful side of the film. I really think that the young people of Palestine and Israel can and want to live peacefully. The sad thing is that we’ve created a world that doesn’t enable them to live and love the way they want to. What we are trying to do in this film is show that, on the one hand, there is the wonderful thing about their love and their ability to show it. On the other hand, there is the terrible thing, which is that the world of the Middle East doesn’t really let them do that.

Are you working on anything now?

I’m working on two big international projects, actually. One based on the memoir of a Holocaust survivor: a young, gay, Jewish man who survived in Berlin after the war. The way he lived and continued living in Berlin throughout the war is an amazing story.

We’re also adapting Shosha, the Nobel Prize-winning book written by Isaac Bashevis Singer into a film with the producer Alain Goldman, who just produced La Vie en Rose, about the life story of singer Edith Piaf. He is a French producer who I think the world of.

So those are two projects that will hopefully take me into my future. I am here to escort the film (The Bubble ) as it comes out, and then I am going back to Israel to work.