In the mix is somewhat, sometime love interest Mira (Rachel Miner), daughter of survivor Mr. Zweig (Jerry Adler), who Lukas finds himself pushing to interview on camera for the Holocaust Foundation. With the two young lovers at odds about the nature of respectful remembrance, The Memory Thief unfolds in layer after detailed layer of dark philosophy and darker humor, its cinematic style shifting the mood from light-hearted character study to existential thriller.

Last November, after a screening at the Cucalorus Film Festival, Kofman shared time to speak about the nature of obsession, the appropriation of tragedy, the positive process of grieving and the importance of a little porn every now and then.

SM: There is a need that people feel, especially within the younger generations, to have these stories of the past told, so that we don’t by neglect lose our history. Conversely, there’s the thought that while we should never forget, perhaps we need to let the horror of these stories go at times. Within the confines of these two different perspectives is Lukas, who then also has this obsessive trait that propels his actions. How did you go about crafting this obsession?

GK: That’s a good question, the obsession because it is like a drug for him. It’s almost like he gets a fix when he watches those tapes and says, “These are all used up. I need some more.” There’s the smoking too. But, he’s desperately trying to find a connection. It’s almost like when one is garrulous, and you find yourself talking with a lot of people; that’s an obsession in and of itself. Here it’s almost as if he’s found his company, and it’s a company that he can control because it’s all on tapes. So once the woman at the hospital asks him to have an intimacy with her by visiting and talking to her—the one who’s not in the coma—he shuts the curtain on her, and he can’t deal.

Basically then the obsession is something that you can control. It’s a correlative, a one-to-one between you and the obsession; it’s mediated. Whereas if you have an obsession that’s diluted, and you can’t have that fantasy be fulfilled, then the obsession is kind of sullied. Here that’s what makes it so unsavory, the way that he’s dealing with these survivors. It’s very hermetic. He’s got a hermetic relationship with these tapes that he’s appropriating for his almost obscene need to feel, which in other people is mitigated or mediated by social contact. With him it’s not. It’s all about “me, me, me,” and hence that narcissistic obsession, as opposed to an obsession that can be more anchored.

SM: He doesn’t have a good point, however, in that the people he’s working with are callous, and in a way rightfully callous because they’ve run these interviews so many times. He’s absolutely right in pointing out that they’re empathy is very low, and so when you do see him run his own interview, there’s something a lot more honest, a lot more powerful about it.

GK: There’s also that quality to Lukas, when the father has a breakdown and is crying, that makes him kind of heartless, that “You must go on.” It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to lose his interview, and so it’s a faux intimacy I think. There’s an honesty about it, but that honesty again is very self-serving.

SM: Then part of that too is that by being an interviewer he’s crafting an identity for himself. He doesn’t really have one on his own, and so then literally this tape that he so desperately needs to shoot is his identity. By the end of the film that’s the only true thing we know of his character, that he cared enough to produce this tape. Without an identity of his own, interestingly, he makes an identity of others. Does that tape then sum up his whole?

GK: Partially, and then he makes his own tape. The idea of when you see him in all of those monitors, that’s his identity. We had a scene that we cut out of the film where he actually goes to the archive, and Mr. Horowitz won’t see him. He says, “Tell him I have this tape I made. This is the real tape. All the others are fake.” So, it’s not necessarily Mr. Zweig’s tape [that defines him]. That’s a step in the process.

SM: Touching on the voice-over, at first I was quite confused about where it was going, and it wasn’t until the very end that I began to understand that the voice-over was a segment of a testimonial.

GK: The voice-over shifts; it starts out as a VO to the mother, and then it shifts at, “My mother wants me to write you, Mr. Horowitz.” Then it becomes letters to Mr. Horowitz, and then when he gets discarded—it’s like Lukas is adopting and discarding; first it’s the mother by Mr. Horowitz, and then when Mr. Horowitz doesn’t respond to him or betrays him, at the end of the movie it does become a testimony tape. It’s almost like he’s sacrificed his body to become a voice.

It’s almost like when he goes up the stairs to the gas chamber, the whole tollbooth transforms into this work camp,—That’s what I mean by making the story contemporary; you’re kind of paving the past with these present symbols—and so, as he’s going up that staircase at the end, it’s almost as if he’s being distilled or siphoned into this one voice, which is a survivor’s voice but it’s also something more rarified because it is totally disembodied. And, it’s true; for the survivors that’s all that’s left from them, are these testimonies, are these voices, and that’s what’s left of him in a way. So, your point on that is actually quite right.

SM: To counter Lukas’ obsessions, there’s (Mira) who illuminates this idea of the destructive nature of the stories of humanity. Again, it’s not the idea that we’re to forget, only that we’re not to dwell on them.

As a filmmaker, in making a film, you have to dwell in the life of the film, and so there’s an interesting corollary between writing a character who warns against this dwelling and then being the person who has to dwell.

GK: I don’t think I was trying to say that dwelling on it is necessarily bad. It’s how you dwell on it. There’s a way to make grief productive; it doesn’t always have to be paralyzing. Initial stages of it are paralyzing, and you don’t know what to do with it, but there is a positive way of dwelling on grief, which the film doesn’t really explore. Mira’s saying, “Look, you’re way of doing it is not right.” But, there is a way of doing it that’s not wrong. The question is, “How? How do you do that?” I don’t have an answer for that, but I do think there’s a way to live with grief that informs you as opposed to suffocates and buries you.

SM: One of the other major themes of the film touches on gender identity, and that’s most obvious with Lukas’ co-worker…

GK: Definitely there is with the co-worker, and the idea is that it’s easier for him to become a women than it is for Lukas to become a Jew. That’s the joke. You can do all he’s doing symbolically, but somehow his fabric, his nature inside is not going to change per se, whereas the co-worker meanwhile can buy all the accouterments and outwardly transform; he can affect that. People accept you as a transvestite, and although you’re still an other, and although they don’t see you as a full woman, they see you as capable of both. Whereas Lukas wants to become a pure Jew in a way, and that gets to the question, “What does it mean?”

People ask that of him throughout the movie, which is very funny, “Are you Jewish?,” and then he asks people that as well in his aggressive way. The nature of asking that question, how it defines Judaism, even asking that question, is kind of interesting.

SM: Talking about this recurring religious theme of suffering in the film— I’m originally of a Catholic background, and so the idea of suffering is as prevalent—what I noticed here was the similarity throughout the Judeo-Christian branches of this suffering as sexualized. In the film it’s seen in the scene in which Lukas is rubbing his mother’s back. So, not only was it interesting to get these notes on confused gender identities, it was likewise interesting to see this theme of a sexualized suffering. Was that theme consciously developed?

GK: There was a whole subplot between Lukas and Mira that when they start having sex, he turns on one of the testimonies, and she freaks out. Then she takes a shower the next morning, and she tells him to come in, and he says, “No, no shower.” It’s that idea of being in the gas chamber, the shower…We had all those elements that we cut out when I realized that all of the sexuality between Lukas and Mira just didn’t play.

SM: In talking about these themes, I’ve not asked about the technical aspects and the other specifics…What Mark Webber brings to that character is mesmerizing in the sense that we, as an audience, are led to believe initially that Lukas is both upright and stable, a bit awkward maybe but by all indications he’s a nice guy; then suddenly there’s the shift in which he literally replaces the porn with the Holocaust testimony, and at that point, we see how much deeper, darker and full of complexity he is.

GK: It’s funny you mention that because initially in the script I had him watching porno, and everybody said, “Cut that out. It’s not good.” So, I listened to people, and I cut it out. Then we did the movie without even shooting the porno, and my editor [Curtiss Clayton], whose great and has done Drugstore Cowbody and To Die For, he said, “We need something to show that Lukas is a bit dark, so we should have him watching porno in bed.” I said, “That’s exactly what I had in the script, but I never shot it!” So what I did was to find a porn company who gave us some clips—they were very generous—and I composited them into the TV. I had shots of him watching testimony in bed, and so we just replaced that. So, it’s funny that you notice because that’s exactly the reason we did it.

SM: Another importance of the porn sequence is that directly after that the next door neighbor’s little girl barges in, and the moment of one image to the other is a bit shocking.

Because, as you said, Lukas is so selfish, he’s essentially living an extended childhood, and that’s even more pointed because the only other character that he interacts honestly with is this little girl. She’s the only one he lets in enough to say, “My milk is on the top shelf of the refrigerator, and my meat is on the bottom.”

GK: Did that get a laugh tonight? Not really?

SM: I understood it, but—

GK: That always gets a laugh in a Jewish audience.

I finally started showing the film to people who are in it, the survivors. I was terrified to do that for a year. Nothing scared me as much as the thought, “What if they see it and think I was irreverent?” It does walk a line, but as long as you understand it’s Lukas doing it, and that’s something I’m advocating against, this appropriation, then it’s okay.

The film opens Friday, May 9 in New York and San Franciso and then on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles. For more information on the film, visit www.memorythiefmovie.com.

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