Liev Schreiber Eastern Quotations

I had wanted so much to make this a European film. Jonathan and I compared stories of our grandfathers. I wanted to show their survivors' sense of humor: If you believe your life is excrement then you either drown in it or transcend it with irony. That's a distinct Eastern European trait.

My model of casting comes from Eastern Europe and part of the ideology there is that culture and place are essential,

It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense of humor. Because of the difficulty of life for many Eastern Europeans - the pogroms, the Revolution, the Holocaust - their humor is broad and aggressively and ridiculously comic. It also triggers an emotional response. It's that kind of chaos and absurdity that results in an opening-up to a discovery of deeper emotion.