When Nathan Silver sat down for an interview with Slant over a decade ago, Mackenzie Lukenbill noted that the director was “predominantly preoccupied with chaos.” The scope of his productions might have grown since then, but Silver’s core sensibility has stayed largely the same. His latest feature, Between the Temples, fulfills all the playfulness with both narrative and form on display in his early-career run of microbudget works.
The stars and scope might make Silver’s biggest production to date feel different than those before it, but the process to achieve his distinctive vision remains deeply collaborative. While Silver shares official screenwriting credit with C. Mason Wells on Between the Temples, the finer shadings of dialogue and character come about through workshopping their “scriptment” with their cast. Cameras roll before the actors have time to memorize their lines, lending scenes the paradoxical sensation of structured improvisation.
That style proves a perfect fit for the story of Between the Temples, a screwball-style comedy for the Shabbat-observant set. As an upstate New York cantor Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) struggles to regain his voice literally and figuratively following the loss of his wife, he begins to find purpose again when reconnecting with his childhood music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane). Ben’s well-meaning but overbearing loved ones push him toward more traditional routes of reconnecting with romantic and professional satisfaction. However, only in preparing Carla for her unconventional late-in-life bat mitzvah does his life begin to make sense again.
The film resists forcing Ben and Carla’s relationship to fit into any familiar dynamics. At any point in Between the Temples, it feels like they could end up as friends or lovers, mentor-mentee or parent-child. That enticing sense of potential lurking within every scene seems directly correlated with the nature of the production itself, as Silver afforded his performers the latitude to explore the possibility within every scene while staying rooted in a strong sense of character.
I spoke with Silver, Cane, and Schwartzman ahead of the film’s theatrical release. Our talk covered how the collaborative writing process fleshed out the screenplay, what cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s reactive camerawork enabled on set, and where the actors saw parallels to some of their formative working experiences. But as we awaited Schwartzman to join the interview, some jocular crosstalk quickly gave way to profound discussion.
Nathan Silver: I was joking, they’re going to wheel Jason in here like Anthony Hopkins [in The Silence of the Lambs].
Back in the news!
Carol Kane: What do you mean?
NS: Trump keeps saying “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
CK: He does? Meaning what?
NS: Nobody knows!
CK: When does he reference that?
NS: At rallies, just like, “the late great Hannibal Lecter.”
CK: He says that apropos of what? In what context?
The most charitable explanation anyone has been able to provide is that they think he’s mixing up the political asylum process of immigrating into the country with mental asylums. Somehow, he makes the jump to Hannibal Lecter.
NS: Ah, yes. A surrealist gesture.
CK: Fuck me, motherfucker. What’s the thing where these people just follow him? My mother was so brilliant and alive during the time of the war with Hitler. As soon as [Trump] started campaigning for the presidency the first time, she saw him one time and said, “He’s Hitler.” She also said the first thing he would do is go after the press. It’s just extraordinary that it’s the same kind of insanity that people just seem to want to follow. I just don’t get that.
NS: It’s so excruciating to live in a time of complete idiocy and short-term memory. The past is close behind. The Holocaust is so close; it’s not even a century ago.
CK: I keep quoting the last line in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which I was privileged to do twice [at the Charles Playhouse in Boston in 1975] with Al Pacino, and John Cazale as the Goebbels character. I may be making one or two mistakes, but I think it’s: “Let’s not yet rejoice in his defeat, you men, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
NS: Oh my god! Yes.
CK: Doesn’t that just give you chills? He’s it again. Be on the alert for these people. [shudders]
I don’t know how we pivot toward anything lighthearted from this, but as someone who watches movies, I’m always attuned to questions posed in movies that doesn’t get answered. When Carla comes into Ben’s class, the one that gets interrupted is about what it means to be a good Jew. Do you all have any thoughts on it now?
NS: It means to question everything at all times. I think the foundation of…
Read More: Nathan Silver, Carol Kane, and Jason Schwartzman on ‘Between the Temples’