Israeli director draws on army traumas for Hollywood sci-fi
Avi Nesher was a young soldier in an Israeli special-forces unit operating in Gaza during the early 1970s when he first encountered what he calls "the beast." Though highly trained and superbly motivated, his fellow commandos were too slow on the trigger. "We were well-educated lads from good homes," explains Nesher, now a youthful 37. "If we saw a woman bearing down on us with a weapon, or perhaps a young teenager," he recalls, "we would hesitate." They lost men as a result. And this worried their superiors, who assigned them a psychiatrist. The shrink's job was to help them overcome their reticence to shoot first to unlock their baser instincts and unleash the beast within. "I saw some amazing 'beasts' in those days," he continues, "and I heard some horrendous stories about similar efforts undertaken by the CIA. Those stories have stayed with me for a long time." In February, they will find expression in the release of Nesher's first Hollywood feature, "Nameless," a $ 7-million science-fiction thriller produced by Rafaella De Laurentis for MGM/UA. The film, written by Nesher, stars Michael Biehn, whom fans of the genre know from "The Terminator," and "Aliens." The plot of "Nameless" revolves around a mild-mannered watchmaker who slowly discovers that he is, in fact, a CIA-bred-and-trained killing machine. Rather like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Total Recall," Biehn's character learns that his real memories have been replaced by those of an ersatz persona.
And as in "Total Recall," he strives to regain his identity while a team of operatives tries to snuff him out. "Nameless" is not the film Nesher's fans in Israel would have anticipated. His first full-length feature, released in 1978 as "Halahahah" (The Troupe), was a whimsical look at an army entertainment troupe during the 1967-70 War of Attrition with Egypt. Israel's answer, more or less, to "The Sound of Music," it was produced for $ 200,000, and was a box-office success. "Halahahah" was followed by "Dizengoff 99" and "The Cowards," neither of which made a splash. In 1985, however, Nesher directed "Rage and Glory," a film about the pre-state Irgun, the underground military organization associated with the right-wing Revisionist movement. Though attacked by Israeli critics, the film was well-received at festivals in Chicago and Montreal, and brought Nesher to the attention of Hollywood. "I could no more have made 'Nameless' in Israel," says Nesher, "than I could have made 'Halahahah' in the U.S." To this day, he does not know how he made "Halahahah" with the money available to him. Although Nesher thrives on Hollywood's resources, his Israeli sensibilities continue to surface. His experience not only infuses the actual story line of "Nameless," but the performances of its stars as well. Nesher recalls being approached by a short, stocky man in an elevator who asked if he was indeed Avi Nesher. Uzi Gal, then working in Los Angeles as a bodyguard, had served in the same special-forces branch as the director, and knew his movies. Nesher hired him to train actor Michael Biehn. "I told Gal, 'I don't want you to train an actor,'" says Nesher. "I said, 'Let's pretend that you and I had to go to Beirut, and we had to take Michael Biehn along. In 10 weeks, I want you to put him through what you and I had to do for four years.'" Biehn endured a somewhat scaled- down Israel Defense Forces version of the U.S. Army SEALs' dreaded "Hell Week." Nesher describes the regimen: "Every day, 5 o'clock in the morning, on the beach, for 10 hours, Uzi put Michael through it. Just sheer pain. But it made a tremendous difference to the movie. Michael didn't learn a series of techniques he learned an attitude. And you can't fake it." In addition, Nesher also hired Israeli-born psychiatrist Nili Shalev to train Biehn to express different sorts of anxiety, ranging from mild discomfort to terror under attack. Nesher believes that he never could have made a science-fiction movie in his home country. "In Israel," says Nesher, "reality is already so grim it borders on the dystopian. The country leads such a weird and violent existence, it's almost surrealistic. I mean, there is this man, Saddam Hussein, threatening us with biochemical warfare. You turn on your TV set and someone is talking seriously about putting an end to your entire world, you can't handle any more strangeness." Nesher says he could not have contended successfully with the deep-seated Israeli distrust for levity. Science fiction requires imagination and a well-developed sense of play. These are seen as dangerous commodities in the contemporary Middle East, argues Nesher; especially in a people scarred by the Holocaust and decades of war. "You'll never have an Israeli 'E.T.' Instead, you get this great obsession with the misery of everyday life with the pain and hardship and struggle of making it through another day." In Israel, joy is feared because it would lead to levity. If we are all too happy, who will guard the borders? A sense of wonder becomes a very dangerous thing."