AVC: Your grandfather and father figure was Ukrainian, and Everything Is Illuminated deals closely with family connections and history in the Ukraine. Was that the primary reason you were interested in the book?
LS: That was the primary reason. I started to read about the Ukraine more—the book came out after my grandfather's death, and I started to really wonder about what that immigrant experience was like, especially since the majority of people in this country come from immigrant backgrounds. It was something I thought was interesting to write about, and something I was curious about personally and also artistically—it seemed like an interesting theme. I think that after Sept. 11, there were all these questions for me about compassion and patriotism. I became really curious about that stuff. Why doesn't that exist in this country any more as it maybe existed after World War II? There was a kind of ideology and morality that was perhaps ignorant and innocent, but certainly inspirational to me, and I wonder what happened to that during the Sept. 11 attacks, when I just felt a lot of confusion and sadness. And all of that made sense to me, but there was this hit of patriotism and idealism that came out of that. It was so wonderful and it was so brief. It also ended up manifesting in anger and a declaration of war. So I started to become curious about what it meant to be American, because as I had gone over to Europe—I'd acted over in Europe, I did a couple of films in Prague—I started to wonder about people's impressions of Americans, and what that meant, and who we were. There was this real misconception that we were these gun-toting cowboy clichés, when in fact we were much closer to them than they knew. And that was there in Jonathan's book for me. The clash between the American kid and the Ukrainian kid embodied that, that we are not as far away from each other as we think we are. Our pasts are deeply interconnected. And I think there's great compassion and humor in this.
AVC: You've written screenplays before this, but this is the first one to be produced. How did the adaptation process go?
LS: It was really quick and easy. It was wonderful. I knew very quickly what I wanted to do with Jonathan's book, because I had read it first as an excerpt, a short story [in The New Yorker] and that was primarily what I based the original idea for the movie on. After I read the whole book, as gorgeous as it was, I didn't think I had the resources to make that kind of movie, and I was primarily concerned with a low-budget independent road movie. So it was just the story of Jonathan running into Alex, and Alex's grandfather, and the dog Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. I had already started work on a script of my own about a guy who goes to Ukraine to find out where his grandfather's from and what it means to be Ukrainian, and that was sort of a road movie as well, so it was really about fusing the two screenplays. I finished the script in about a month and a half.
AVC: Do you think this production will draw interest to your other unproduced screenplays?
LS: Films are so hard to make that unless it's really, really special, it's hard to justify the life-shortening experience of getting a film made. I don't think I'm interested right now in making either of those scripts. They're wonderful and I treasure them. Maybe I'll come back to them, I couldn't tell you.
AVC: Would you let someone else make them if there was interest?
LS: That's hard. I get kind of control-freaky that way, like, "How could anyone else make this? I'm the only one who knows why this needs to be made." But I felt like that about Everything Is Illuminated, and other people wanted to make that, so I don't know. You never can tell.
AVC: You bought the film rights to the book before it was even published. Did the studios try to buy the rights from you?
LS: No, no one ever tried to get me to let someone else direct it or anything. It was all very serendipitous. Before we knew it, the book was a hit, and before anything bad could happen, I'd written the script. We put it together very quickly, so we were sort of protected. Having written the script, I think people felt fairly confident that I could direct it.
AVC: A New York Times article a few years back said you were only making a few hundred dollars a week in stage roles, so you've had to finance your theatre career by working in film. Is that how you personally think of it?
LS: It is true. I like to do plays, and I want to do plays, but the problem is, I can't afford to do plays. So I did film jobs to pay for the plays. But I can't help but like doing films as well. It's fun. Acting is like an addiction—once you start, you can't stop. It's not like I do them for money and just pull them out of my ass or anything. It's all acting, but it's just not as fun doing it in front of a camera as it is for 500 or 600 people.
AVC: You've said you prefer the rehearsal process to performing the play. Why is that?
LS: All the things that people enjoy because they're seeing them for the first time—we see them for the first time in the rehearsal process. By the time you see them, I've seen them a couple hundred times. [Laughs.] The audience's reaction to them is still a treat every time. But for me, it's the joy of experiencing that connection or idea or bit for the first time. That happens in rehearsal.
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