Where Is My Mind?

This will sound tiresome, I know, but some of the ladies I brunch with were full of fluttering ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ when I mentioned I was off to meet Liev Schreiber.

As for the air-stewards I brunch with – well, they were terrifically impressed as well but certain obscenity laws prevent me from committing most of their remarks to print. Funny, I don’t remember them being nearly so excited when I skipped around our various haunts announcing my interviews with Chan Wook Park or Wong Kar Wai. Planet Tara can be a very lonely place. However, that’s okay in the circumstances as I suspect Planet Liev is also a fairly idiosyncratic destination.
Though he’s best known for roles in Very Big Movies like Scream, Sphere, The Sum Of All Fears, The Hurricane and, er, Kate And Leopold, plus lavish box office television presentations such as The Battle For Citizen Kane (where he simply rocked as Orson Welles), predominantly, Mr. Schreiber has resisted the blandishments of Hollywood in order to be a Proper Actor. In this capacity, you can catch his quirky turns in The Daytrippers and Walking And Talking. Mostly though, he prefers the more serious business of treading the boards and doing the Bard.
In the 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate, Liev takes on the role of Shaw, a character once made immortal by Laurence Harvey. His contemporary take is slightly less chilling and horrid than his predecessor’s. One might even say his rendition is more complex. Did he, I wonder, purposely avoid re-watching the 1962 film in order to invest the role with originality and avoid the pitfalls of mimicry?
“Well, I’m always up for mimicry,” explains Liev. “I consider myself a thief more than anything else. If somebody somewhere has done something interesting then all bets are off. I’m a huge fan of the original film. I’ve seen it probably four or five times. But I wasn’t worried about duplicating Laurence Harvey’s performance, because I don’t think it’s humanly possible. He was fantastic. Also – and I think this is a great testament to the writing of Richard Condon - it was a very different character because there’s a wonderful campness to the original that I don’t think you could replicate either. So that made it easier for me.”
During the course of the movie Liev has to, er, bond in various Oedipal ways with his onscreen mother, one Meryl Streep. It must have been terrible kissing Meryl?
“Oh yes. Just awful,” he says. “See, I liked that in the script. There is a strange closeness between mothers and sons that never gets talked about. But it’s there and it’s not like anything else.”
Resurrecting The Manchurian Candidate is nothing if not timely. Once in a while, Hollywood gets around to producing a flurry of (at least nominally) political films. The height of Cold War fever gave us the original Candidate plus movies like Dr. Strangelove. The aftermath of Watergate produced such subversive classics as The Conversation and The Parallax View. Certainly, one could argue that although neither movie could be seen as a latter day Battle Of Algiers, the ambiguous heroes of Collateral and The Bourne Supremacy do seem to suggest that American politics are back in studio vogue.
“That’s true,” nods Liev. “Well, I think this year’s election was the most important ever. It’s absolutely apocalyptic. I’m not going to talk about how I voted, because I don’t like when actors do that, but after 9/11 there was a fantastic feeling of solidarity and somehow that’s been transformed into fear and paranoia. So I think we really needed a change.”
For the benefit of my fellow brunchers, I ought to point out that Mr. Schreiber really is an impressive sort of fellow. I’m sure they’d like me to relate this Princess Diana thing he does of bowing his head slightly and peering upwards with his steely blue eyes. Or tell you about the scar on his left cheek which I was hoping came about from some duel or other (fencing is one of his many hobbies), but in fact resulted from the removal of a cyst. However, I was far more impressed by his degree in semantics, which bizarrely is misrepresented on his main website as a degree in symbiology. (“You know why that is?” he laughs. “Nobody knows what a semantics degree is”). Even better is his former association with The New Yorker as a short story reader. Would this be a contender for the Coolest Job Ever? Can you think of a better one?
While slaving over manuscripts of varying quality he came across a tale from one Jonathan Safran Foer. Wildly impressed by what he read, particularly as someone of Ukrainian Jewish origin, Liev snapped up the rights for what would eventually become the sublime Everything Is Illuminated. He’s just adapted and directed the book for the screen, a process that required research into his own Ukrainian roots.
“I went back there for the first time and it was incredible,” he gushes. “I mean obviously there are none of my family left. The town they came from was decimated during the war for obvious reasons. But I loved the country and the people and Kiev is a real party town.”
His name wouldn’t happen to be some kind of Ukrainian rhyming slang would it?
“No actually, my mom is a big Tolstoy fan and she insisted that Liev is Ukrainian for Leo. Now as I found out the people of the Ukraine don’t agree with her. But mother knows best.”
Why, I wonder, has he adopted his second name, rather than his given name, Isaac?
“Listen. When I was growing up Isaac was the bartender on The Love Boat. Nobody wanted to be that guy. Besides, Isaac means Lamb of God and Liev means lion. I don’t need to tell you that it’s much better to be a lion than a sacrificial lamb.”

The Manchurian Candidate opens November 19th