ORIGINAL-CIN: Was there a specific personal moment that made you decide to write this film?
AVI NESHER: Well, it wasn’t one thing. Of course I was strongly affected by what happened on October 7, like every other Israeli. So many people lost their sons and daughters and parents and brothers. My immediate reaction was wanting to help, do anything to help the grieving families. I had made a movie called The Monkey House, which opened to great reviews. It came out a week before October 7. When the attack happened, the country stood still and of course all the movie houses went dark.
After about three or four weeks, I felt lost. I know about grief; I lost a son a few years ago in a tragic car accident. You know time can heal up to a point, but naturally it stays with you. Then, I got a call from a guy from one of the kibbutzim down in the south who said to me, ‘We really want to see Monkey House.’ They had put many families in hotels by the Dead Sea, and he continued that I would be doing them a great favour if I could bring the movie to the hotel and then do a Q&A after the showing.
At first I thought, ‘How petty for me to do this but they really wanted to escape and watch the film.’ So, we screened the movie, and they laughed and cried in the right places. These people who lost everything, 400 strong, sitting there was a sight to see. They applauded loudly when the movie ended and when I got up on stage and started apologizing, they said, ‘Please, let’s just talk about acting and cinema.’
O-C: They were grateful for the distraction from their grief; you were doing them a “mitzvah” or good deed.
AN: The next morning, I was having breakfast with some of them, and you expect to hear tales of war, right? No. They point to a guy and this girl sitting nearby. These were two people whose lives collided and met on October 7. He was running for safety, and she had a safe room, and she pulled him in. They started telling me stories of October 7 and it was nothing like what you’d expect. They were stories about what state they were in when they got into October 7, and there were stories that were funny, sad, emotional and romantic. I thought that if I were to ever do a movie about that event, it would be a movie about normal people with ordinary problems. I found a bunch of people who thought October 6 was their very worst day of their life, couldn’t get any worse. Then October 7 happened, and as they were trying to survive, they were rethinking their lives.
O-C: It puts it all into perspective.
AN: It’s really interesting this whole notion of a second chance and having an opportunity to face your mistake. I researched for about four months, and I just wrote these people. I didn’t make anything up. Some characters are a combination of two or three people I met. Some characters I took great care not to disclose who they are. There were only two people who did not mind knowing that I would tell people who they were and when we had our first cast and crew screening, I invited them, and I was so scared, but they loved the movie so that was a huge relief.