Samuel Maoz is used to hard questions. He has asked himself many. DONALD CLARKEtalks to the director about Lebanon, his award-winning film. Shot mainly inside an Israeli tank, it takes a long hard look at Israel's actions in the area in 1982
SAMUEL MAOZ is a serious man. Born in 1962, the Israeli director rarely allows a smile to cross his creased, roughly hewn face. But he does have a sense of humour. When he set out to promote Lebanon, his hugely impressive first feature, Maoz studiously wrote down eight questions he felt he might be asked.
“At the first press conference, I was asked the first question on the list,” he almost laughs. “Then I was asked the other seven. I have not done an interview since where I was not asked most of those questions.”
The film follows the crew of an Israeli tank as, during the 1982 Lebanon conflict, they make their way into enemy territory. It is, indeed, the sort of picture that scares up certain inevitable questions.
“Why is it all inside a tank?” he says. “Why is it a film about the suffering of soldiers and not about the suffering of victims themselves? What about your own personal trauma? And so on.”
Following a screening of Lebanonat the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Maoz is, indeed, asked all these perfectly reasonable questions. His answers carry a slight undercurrent of exasperation. The film takes place from the perspective of the soldiers because, after all, that was a perspective he once shared. When Maoz was just 19, forced to do national service, he found himself squashed into a tank with a huddle of equally terrified comrades. To this day, he can't escape memories of the moment he opened fire on the driver of a rickety, careering truck.
“I remember the pressure was unbearable,” he tells me. “I was being shouted at from all sides: ‘Shoot now, you motherfucker!’ I didn’t put that in the film because it might look like I was trying to escape responsibility. I close my eyes and pull the trigger. When I open them, he is there with only one hand and all his organs showing. He is dragging himself by one hand and shouting.”
Maoz speaks calmly and unemotionally as if (no doubt this is the case) he has told this awful story a thousand times. Every nuance seems to have been analysed, parsed and deconstructed.
“I just remember that I felt something like a big noise in the backside of my head. I knew that I had fucked my own life. At the same time, I was aware of no connection between my actions and this man’s position. Who is he? It seemed impossible to make the connection.”
Despite brooding on the issue for more than a quarter of a century, Maoz is still divided about his own responsibilities. Yes, he was doing compulsory military service. Yes, he was instructed to behave as he did. However, unlike those Nazi officers who were “only obeying orders”, Maoz refuses to shift all guilt towards his superiors.
“There is no connection between the fact that you know you had no choice and the fact that you feel guilty,” he says in his slightly erratic English. “I had no choice, but that does not mean that I don’t think about it every morning first thing and last thing every night.”
Still, it took Maoz – who’d dabbled with cameras as a child – all this time to get around to telling his story. When he came back from the war, he enrolled in a cinematography course, before embarking on a career as a production designer and as a developer of museum exhibitions. As he explains it, if “Michelangelo embarked on painting a ceiling, I’d maybe get to build the scaffolding.”
Every now and then he would consider examining his experiences during the war, but, an ordered professional, he worried that he might still be too close to the events. The screenplay was put back in a drawer and Maoz returned to playing bass in his occasional jazz band.
“Actually, I first wrote a script back in 1988 when I had just finished studying film,” he explains. “But I quickly realised that, whenever I started, I could still smell burning flesh. I backed off. I wanted to be able to analyse it in a cold analytical way, not just as a soldier. I waited for the smell of burning flesh to fade.”
The Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006 finally spurred Maoz into action. As he saw it, his country's rulers were killing opposing soldiers as a way of upholding some bogus sense of martial honour. Appalled at the continuing atrocities, he conceived the idea of Lebanon: a film set entirely within a tank.
“It’s impossible to shoot in a tank, even with a fish-eye lens,” he says. “You have no idea how little space there is. So, we had to build it all. Luckily, we found a tank in a field for exterior shots. That happens in Israel.”
It was an audacious project in many ways. Indeed, Maoz’s producer warned him that the film would be lucky to be seen by 2,000 people. As things worked out, Lebanon managed that number at its premiere alone. Last September, the picture proved a surprise winner of the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
“We had a trick,” he almost laughs. “My producer said to the organisers: ‘Oh we have to leave early.’ And they said: ‘Oh, no. Stay, stay, stay.’ So we knew we had won something, but I thought it would be the best first-film prize.”
Not surprisingly, Lebanonhas spurred furious debate throughout the world. In more liberal parts of Europe, it has been criticised for not fleshing out any Palestinian characters. In conservative Israeli locales, it had been chastised for forwarding an anti-war, pacifist stance. If you annoy both sides, you must be doing something right.
“I don’t know. Maybe so,” he says. “We had a screening in a very conservative part of Israel, and the conversation afterwards was amazing. It stopped being an ordinary QA and the audience began arguing furiously with one another. You know, in certain parts of Israel, they think it is very wrong to show a soldier crying. They don’t like that.”
He pauses and instigates another rare moment of levity.
“It’s odd, because, at the end of the day, it’s just a film. That’s all it is.”
Lebanonopens this week
