Creator Marjane Satrapi Cooks Up A Tasty "Chicken With Plums"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 17 August 2012 14:48

Written by Brad Balfour

Iranian-born director and artist Marjane Satrapi lives in Paris, France, and has never lived in post-revolutionary Persia throughout her adult life. Yet her home country has shaped and influenced her creative work whether it be her written and drawn graphic novels or her feature films.

In 2000, an independent book of band dessinee (as comics are called in French) was released called Persepolis.

Written and drawn by Satrapi, it was an eye-opening autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran, her family's escape (and some cases death), her move abroad and the demons faced in herself and the world around her. 

Simultaneously tragic, funny, and enlightening, Persepolis garnered acclaim and Satrapi got to direct an animated adaptation in 2007 with artist and co-director Vincent Paronnaud.

Because she gained attention for its unique style and story -- it won awards at festivals (including Cannes 2007) and was nominated for an animation Oscar, Satrapi has gone on to write more graphic novels, including Chicken With Plums, a tragic tale based on the life and death of a relative of Satrapi's.

Now the graphic novel has been transformed into a live action adaptation starring Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros and Golshifteh Farahani with Satrapi and Paronnaud in the director chairs again.

The following Q&A is drawn from a small roundtable with Satrapi and Paronnaud held at the the Gramercy Park Hotel just before the release of the film in NYC.

Q: With this shift in technologies, how have you’ve grown since the previous film?

MS: Growing up is realizing that the more experiences you achieve, the more you understand that you don’t know so much. This wheel of being -- trying to make things before I die -- it’s not like I have 3000 years ahead of me and I can just go on, it's a very simple calculation. I’ve calculated that I have about 30 years to live and work, so each project takes me three years, so ten percent of my time.

So 10 projects and I’m gone. In the 10th project I have to make the maximum of what I feel like doing.

I am more aware of my death, like everybody I guess. But I feel happy. It’s very sad that we have to die, of course, but there isn’t anything we can do. It’s better to laugh.

Q: What is it like dealing with an actor compared to telling a story with illustrations?

MS: Well there are different moments you film, but Mathieu Amalric is a very talented and gifted actor who expresses lots of things even when he’s not doing anything, like in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He’s very expressive and he has this thing in his eyes, this fever. He’s a very gentle person who is really at the service of the film. It was good for him to be on the set, it was like a playground.

He’s somebody who’s actually not scared of playing different roles. He doesn’t say “I’ll look ridiculous, I won’t do that.” When an actor believes in a film, and is committed, and is a great actor like we had the chance to have, then it’s not such a difficult thing to do.

The difference with animation is that in animation you decide what you want, you make the movements in front of the animators and they copy you. You are in control of the project. But when you have actors, they take the story, and when they’re great, they take it much further than what you imagined.

For instance, when you see Maria de Medeiros, who plays his wife, Faringuisse, for us she had a range of sentiment and played a nasty woman, but then we feel compassion for her. She became a bitch at the beginning, but she becomes beautiful, you love her and you want to protect her. You want to shake him and say “Look at this beautiful, incredible wife! Why don’t you want to love her?”

Sometimes as a director, you don’t direct and you just become the viewer of your own film if it goes this way.

Q: Matthieu’s eyes are amazing in this film.

MS: The eyes are his eyes, but nobody was as close to the book as Mattheieu himself. Every morning I would visit him when he was doing the makeup and he would say “Marjane, but the book!” And I would say, “Yes, Matthieu, I know, I wrote the book myself. Forget about it, it’s a work of adaptation, concentrate on your character!”

He doesn’t need anyone to make eyes like that, he’s an extremely talented actor and good person.

Q: Is it a challenge going from drawing a graphic novel to storyboarding a film?

MS: We must not forget that the book is a book, and it happens that the book is my book, but even if it was someone else’s book, we’d do it the same way. Meaning, it would be an adaptation.

The storyboards and the comics are not the same; the language is not the same. With Persepolis we forgot about the book very quickly.

Q: Was there a sense of myth present in the drawing process?

MS: Of course, but the only movie maker that knew how to draw…I think Fellini drew well. It’s visual art, so it’s a plus if you know how to draw a very simple thing. Like if you want to show something to your set designer, instead of using 2000 words, you make one sketch and he understands what you’re talking about. It’s a plus.

Or maybe since you’re more visual, you can imagine how everything will look. But there are plenty of good movie makers that don’t know how to draw. For us, because when we had to re-create a whole world, it was probably a plus.

But it had an effect on how we do things, I don’t know. Maybe on this movie it helped because the framing was very classic [in style]. In other genres of cinema I don’t think, because you have to know the techniques of cinema.

Q: Music also plays a mythic role in this film. What made you feel a passion for music?

MS: Well you have to have some kind of passion, and why not music? You break your instrument and your heart can be broken, or because your heart is broken your music is not good. If you paint and you break your brush, you break your brush every week. You don’t break a Stradivarius every week, you just go out and buy a new brush and it’s no big deal.

Of course the music plays a big role, and we were lucky to work with a great musician that’s an old friend of Vincent’s [Paronnaud, co-director], Olivier Bernet. They had a rock band for a long time and this boy is extremely talented. They work together and I was listening, the things you like or don’t like.

Since we prepared the movie, we had an animatic before we finished the film so Olivier started composing the music to the animatic. So the music was not completely finished because you finish it on the real images. But we had the maquetes, so we played the music on the stage to put the actors in the mood.

Q: What kind of music did your band play?

Vincent Paronnaud: We come from the south of France. Very underground.

Q: Did you use different musical influences from the North?

MS: Pure rock.  But they also used in the music some violin and stuff you don’t normally use in rock music.

Q: Smoking has never been so passionately depicted. Are you both smokers?

MS: Yes.

Q: There's a different perception of smoking here in the States.

MS: It’s the fashion now to hate smoking. Like all the problems in the world are solved, no pollution, no shit in water, so now the only problems people have are smoke and smokers. It’s like if you don’t smoke, then you’re not going to die.

The particles that stay in your lungs, carbon monoxide, that comes from cars. Before forbidding smoking we should forbid cars, and then we’ll talk. But both of us are smokers and are proud of it. I don’t want to quit smoking; I’ve been one all my life.

Could you imagine Humphrey Bogart without his cigarette or Lauren Bacall without hers? I could go on all day. Rita Hayworth without her cigarette? Jennifer Aniston and Zac Efron… Bacall and Anniston, there is no comparison [between them]. Sexually, from an attraction point of view, everything is not on the same level.

Smoke is extremely cinematic. It’s extremely nice to film. It’s also a symbol of life. One second it’s there, the next it’s not. It disappears, it gives you some pleasure, it’s a beautiful thing.

But today, if someone smokes, especially here in the film they have to turn down the light on the cigarette and in the next few minutes he’ll kill a woman, or a child, or blow up a building. The bad guy is coming, he lighting up his cigarette.

I had two grandmothers, both of them smokers, they lived a long time and I had two uncles that were health freaks and they both died in their early 60’s from cancer.

Even in the '80s everyone was smoking. Bruce Willis could smoke. Today, everyone is like *gasp*! I don’t quite understand.

I think smokers are very sexy the smoke as an object is very beautiful to film and photogenic. It gives you some style. And if you don’t have any style...

Q: The film is very stylized -- like the comic. How did you conceptualize it?

MS: In the film you have many layers. You have one underneath layer with the story in the 1950’s with the coup d’état that happened in Iran and the end of democracy, and the name of the lover is Irane, which is equivalent to naming a character America in an American film. Then you have a very realistic story about the people that are there with no hocus pocus fable things.

Everyone has their good moments, their bad moments, you don’t have a hero, you have a guy that doesn’t like his children at the beginning but then he does at the end. Everybody, each character has ambivalence, like it is in life. You don’t have great or bad people.

Then you have another layer of realism, which is the way you remember your memories. Obviously when you remember, not only does it come in pieces, not chronological, some pieces are very detailed and colorful, and some are just an action, plus, this whole reality is how you remember them, not the reality. Now in all this remembrance, how to make out of this boring story about a man who wants to die, an attractive story?

You have all this work of memory, plus the cinema is a domain where there is no limit to your imagination, plus the fact that none of us come from film school, we just go freestyle. All of these were things we loved and wanted to show in a certain way and it was the result of lots of work.

The big challenge was to be able to make it in the way that it would not look patchwork, the film should be an entity in and of itself.

We had a great set designer, we watched movies, did documentation, photos, but it’s a synthesis of all of that. The research you do at the beginning, the result is not always exactly related to that.

Q: What was in casting Golshifteh Farahani who played Irane?

MS: She’s well known in Iran, but she cannot live there anymore, she lives in France. The reason she was taken isn’t because her name was Irane, it was that when you’re young and you fall in love, you don’t fall in love wondering if she’s intellectual and if you’re going to have good discussions. When you’re young and fall in love you look at someone and *gasp* you’re in love. This is the love of youth.

We needed a girl that when you see her, you’d be like  “wow.” And it was this one. She has something of wild beauty that is difficult to describe, but she has this innocence in her face and you see her and everyone’s in awe of her.

 We needed somebody with this face that you don’t know where it comes from. She has made nearly 25 films when she was in Iran, but she played in one American film with Leonardo Dicaprio…

Q: Is that why she was banned?

MS: She played in that film, Body of Lies, and they asked her, “why do you play in an American movie?” She could not work there anymore, and that was it. If you make a problem, then you go.

I’m not making Iranian cinema or am part of the Iranian cinematic movement because, simply, I do not work in Iran. I left Iran when I was very young, I studied outside. All of my career, my life was outside Iran. I’m Iranian but I’m French.

If someone makes a film about Spartacus like Ridley Scott, it does not make him a Roman.  This is a French film. If you want to talk about the film makers in Iran, I don’t know any of them personally.

Q: You might be helping them…

MS: I don’t think I can help anything. The government of my country does not like me. If I say to the government “please free these people," they will say, “you are a woman who is a hooker in our eyes, why would we listen to you?” I am considered an enemy

Any approach I make to an Iranian film maker will only make their situation worse. This is why I choose to be far away from them.

Q: What is the symbolism of the chicken with plums?

MS: But I can tell you exactly. It is a food that comes from the region I was born in, near the Caspian Sea. When men in my family went to eat the plums, they would say they were eating Sofia Loren because they were round and juicy and sweat. Everyone called the plums the Sofia Loren.

The title is very important because a film that is a melodrama. If you call it The Life of Nasser-Ali Khan, The Musician it becomes too obvious. It’s more fun. But it’s more than that. There’s a moment in this film, the only relationship he has with the real world, which is his wife, is through the food.

Then there’s a moment in the film when he has a dilemma, he can sit down and eat and not die, but he decides not to eat. But this is a man that loses his pleasures one by one. And what is the last pleasure we can lose? Eating.

You can live without making love. You’re miserable, but you survive. But without eating it’s impossible to survive. Also, this is a moment where you dive into his past. It’s an important moment that looks like nothing, but it’s the turning point.

Q: Do you make chicken with plums?

MS: Yes, but I swear to god, I don’t lie, I love that food but I didn’t use to make it very often. But after making this film, everybody says “make me chicken with plums so we can see if it’s really tasty.” So I have to make chicken with plums for everyone.

Q: You have mentioned your love for the late great Japaense director Akira Kurosawa and Rashomon -- his seminal film of a crime described by several from very different perspectives. This film uses a similar narrative strategy. Were you influenced by other filmmakers?

MS: A point of view is only interesting if we all have different point of views, otherwise we have to make Superman and he’s very nice and it’s not the same kind of movie. To come back to Kurosawa, I’m obsessive. With Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, that is the film I have seen the most in my life. 360 times, at least.

At the age of 10, I became obsessed with this film, and every day I came back from school I watched it. Every day, without exaggeration. Kurosawa is a master.  I don’t need to tell you that.

Q: You won’t do a remake.

MS: There are things you can’t remake. You can’t remake Citizen Kane, you don’t remake 8 ½ or other Fellini, it’s not possible. They’re already very nice.

Q: Do you like other comics -- ones that influence you?

MS: I love American cartoonists. Vincent is much better than me at talking about comics. What is your favorite?

VP: My comics. Well, and [Robert] Crumb.

MS:[I love] Charles Burns. My next project will probably be, if everything goes well, an American film.

Q: To be shot here?

MS: I’m not going to shoot it here, but the script is American. it’s not my script. It’s a story of a psychopath, The Voices. We have to see if people are going to do it.

Q: It must be fun working for someone else for the first time.

MS: Yes, but I told you, I only have 10 projects. I have to try whatever I can try in this short time.  

Rashida Jones, Will McCormack, and Lee Toland Krieger talk Celeste and Jesse Forever

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 19:49

Written by Renzo Adler

Made for a scant budget of less than million dollars, but featuring a great collection of comedy actors, Celeste and Jesse Forver, directed by Lee Toland Krieger and starring Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation) and SNL alum Andy Samberg, features the usual cinematic cavalcade of twenty and thirty-somethings wandering their way into adulthood and dealing with failing relationships that seem to permeate films these days.

Though Celeste recieved a warm reception from critics, the film's lead actress and writer, Rashida, has recently come under much more attention for her gaffe and backtracking for urging actor John Travolta to come out of the closet. This interview at the SoHo Apple Store with Rashida, co-writer and co-star Will McCormack, and director Krieger offers a glimpse at Rashida before her recent maelstrom of regretful words and hasty Twitter apologies.

Q: You wrote such a fantastic script. Did you write from experience? How much of your life is in this film?

RJ: A lot of it. You have to be a genius to write total fiction that you don’t have a connection with or isn’t from personal experience. But we stole a lot from our own lives and our friend’s lives, with their permission, I think. We just wanted to tell a story about a broken heart and what it really feels like to break up with someone and how long that takes, and to love someone and feel like you have to let them go but you don’t want to let them go.

Q: There are some scenes in the film that are painfully funny, especially when you start dating again. Did those things really happen?

RJ: There are some gnarly, gnarly dates. You haven’t seen it yet, but just remember when I tell you those things really happened to me. You’re going to feel sad for me.

Q: That is pretty sad. Though for one particular guy it’s pretty embarrassing.

RJ: Yeah, it is. You should know who you are.

Q: Rashida, is it important or relevant that as a woman you have to write your own projects?

RJ: Something relevant is happening right now with women in film and TV. It’s great and people talk about it. It’s a trend where 

messy and dynamic. But women have always been messy and dynamic and interesting and they’ll continue to be so.

I’m happy people are taking notice, but I hope it’s not a trend, I hope it’s a reality that will open up. It really came from a place of just wanting to write something with Will, who is my best friend, and we talked about it for a long time. Even though we knew we were writing the part for me, the most important thing was telling the story and telling it in a fresh and hopefully honest way with some laughs.

It’s a very honest film. When you see it you’ll see it comes from a place of honesty and maturity. It has some raunchy dirty stuff, but it’s very different from the raunchy dirty films you see today. It has maturity to it. And obviously the people working on this film have been through relationships before and know what they’re talking about.

Will McCormack: So many relationships. So much pain.

Q: Will, Andy’s character is this man-child type character seen in a lot of films today, typified by actors like Seth Rogan and Adam Sandler. Why do you think we’re seeing this type of character? Where does he come from.

WM: That guy exists. It came from a lot of men and women we knew. I knew a lot of very dynamic successful, ambitious women that dated under-achieving men and I don’t know what that is. Rashida, you have some good perspective. I feel like men are lagging behind.

RJ: The way it’s evolved is that women have been told they can do all these things and that’s great, and the reaction to that is that there’s this new kind of guy that’s feeling somewhat empowered by chilling at home, playing videogames, dating younger women, not committing, dressing in ironic t-shirts like a teenager. I feel like it is a means of empowerment, but I’m not sure it’s that helpful to all the women in the world. But it’s a women’s responsibility to find some sort of balance.

It’s cool to be sensitive; it’s cool to be a guy into dreaming all day. Underachieving sounds like a dirty word. It’s okay. Women were housewives for years and there was no judgment about just raising a child.

That’s a really tough job. I’m giving men permission to do whatever they want to do, but just step it up in the relationship sector a little bit. Commit.

Q: In the movie Rashida’s character is very successful, but Andy is this failed artist. It’s like he’s reliant too much. Lee, when you came across this script, where you certain this had to be your next film?

Lee Toland Krieger: It was pretty instant. I got it late one night, planned on reading it because I heard out great it was. It was a script that had been around the black-list, which is this list of great unproduced scripts.

I read the first page and I thought “let’s see if these actors can write.” I fell in love with it from the first page and whipped through the script that night. I called Jennifer Todd, our producer on the film, and said “what do I have to do to be a part of this?”

And she didn’t say “I’m sending you this script to see if you want to direct this.” She just said “I’m sending you the script.” She was pretty cagey. It was just my luck. I had finally fallen in love with something and she’s just going to say “we’re looking for PA’s and you can come down.”

Fortunately, Will, Rashida, and Jenn gave me an opportunity to meet them and explain my take on it and we all just connected right away and hit the same touchstones for movies we saw this as and off we went.

RJ: We had seen The Vicious Kind, Lee’s first movie, and absolutely loved it. It’s very different in tone, it’s a dark drama about family and heartache, but it was so beautiful, and so delicately discovered the emotional side of things. It was not even a question.

Q: How involved were you in the casting of the other roles?

LTK: It was all three of us. Luckily for me, Will and Rashida are sort of the unofficial mayors of Hollywood, they know everyone, which made everything. We had great casting directors, Barbara McCarthy and Angela Demo, who we forgot to thank at Sundance and we’re still paying dearly.

With their guidance, and the few actors I knew [combined with] the few actors they knew, we knew everyone. Fortunately we just had a great piece of material and everybody loves Will, Rashida, and Andy. We were shooting out in LA and people said “sure, we’ll come out and do a few days of work and make no money and eat bad food.”

But we had a great piece of material, so people were eager to come out. It was very cool to see.

Q: You wrote this character for yourself and she’s not entirely unsympathetic, but in some scenes you think no wonder she’s not happy. She’s demanding and a know-it-all.

RJ: I agree with you, there are a lot of things about her that are not for everyone and they’re magnifications of qualities about me that Will very nicely observed and made larger than life for this character. It gave us somewhere to go. It’s more interesting to watch me to learn a lesson if they don’t know something about themselves.

She’s got a blind spot. She knows she’s right, she knows she can judge somebody on the spot and be right about it, but ultimately it might make her unbendable.

Q: She always thinks she’s right. Was that tough writing and having to say you’re wrong?

RJ: Wait, “she” meaning Celeste, not Rashida. Let’s just be clear.

Q: But did it bring up certain things about your personality?

RJ: Right.

WM: No, it’s like being in a relationship. The idea avails itself. You never push too hard because ultimately I’m right and she’s wrong, or she’s wrong and I’m right, the idea will be right. We’re usually both wrong, and the idea is right a week later. It takes time.

RJ: We collaborated pretty well because this was our first screenplay we had finished and our first screenplay we had worked on together. We were very gentle with each other in that process of sharing ideas. It can be a raw process, sharing ideas.

WM: Having acted for so long, it’s in our DNA to collaborate.

Q: Rashida, for I Love You, Man what was your experience like working with Jason Segel and Amy Adams? And what was it like working with Kermit on The Muppets?

RJ: Jason Segel is a wonderful person and a wonderful actor, I love him, he’s hilarious. Amy Adams is a dream, a professional, she’s so nice. Paul Rudd is the greatest. We’ve worked together five times now, and I would work with him 25 more times.

And Kermit is a great dude.

Q: Rashida, what influence did your parents have on your acting and writing career?

RJ: My parents are very supportive, very unconditional, very non-judgmental. They would have supported me regardless of what I decided to do. It’s nice for them that we have this thing that we can talk about, how we all create things.

My dad would just tell me to follow my heart, do what I love, work really hard, and never think that you know anything. He still feels that way about music and he’s been a musician for over 60 years and he still finds new things every day. That’s what makes him great. Humble attitude and curiousity.

Q: Lee, what did you bring to the script? Did you let the actors improvise?

LTK: I’m a real taskmaster, I run a tight ship. No, I was very fortunate to work with not only brilliant actors, but really genuinely funny people. Rashida and Andy being the most obvious ones, but as you can see, Emma [Roberts] is hysterically funny, Elijah [Wood] is funny, Will McCormack is brilliant and funny.

The reality was that we were making a movie in 23 days, so it wasn’t this Judd Apatow experience; there wasn’t a ton of time. It wasn’t let’s just ride it out and see what happens. It was let’s make sure we get what’s on the page because we love what’s on the page and trust what was on the page and if we had time we could loosen the screws or bring something different.

Often times Andy, Rashida, Emma, and Will would throw ideas and we were able to improve, but not as often as you’d think with a comedy. We had a really great piece of material and we wanted to service that.

RJ: In that particular scene, Emma just added two words to her line and made it a thousand times funnier. It was scripted “you’re pretty” and she added “kind of.” “Wow, you’re *kind of* pretty,” which is so much funnier and so much more descriptive of the character of this pop star that thinks she owns the world.

Q: Rashida, how did you react on the Park and Recreation set when they added the story with you and Tom getting together?

RJ: Aziz [Ansari] is hilarious and I love him, he’s my friend and basically the writers pitched it to us that this is a small town, and in a small town everyone dates each other, and that’s true. LA is kind of a small town and everybody’s dating each other and it makes sense.

We looked at that relationship with a comic value and how different they were and how she’s annoyed but misses it. I’m game, the writing is still good and funny and it works in the scene where he was in shock that I didn’t know who Genuine was. It was hilarious. It was really good acting on my part to act like I don’t know who Genuine is, because believe me, I know.

Q: Will and Rashida, it took 23 days to shoot, but how long did it take to finalize the script and get everything together?

RJ: 35 years.

WM: It felt like a decade, but we wrote the movie pretty quickly. We finished the first draft in four months and sold it in six in 2008 to Fox Atomic, which was a mini-major studio but they went out of business. We got the script back and sold it again, only you don’t get paid again.You don’t get paid much the first time.

We sold it again, meaning Overture bought it and they went out of business. So our script shut down two studios. Then it was set up five or six times in different incarnations and finally we were like let’s just do this with however much money we can get.

We were at this place that is also now out of business and they were going to give us two and a half million to make this movie and it felt shady. We were in the parking lot and we just said “this feels wrong.” I think it was your idea…

LTK: I’ll take credit for it.

WM: You were like “let’s just make it for $50, whatever we can get, but we’ll have total control.” And we did. This great company found us, Envision Media Arts, and we ended up making the film for well under a million. Under $900,000. It took four to six months to write the first and second draft, and then four years to get made.

RJ: We did a few tweeks before we filmed because we had to condense locations and whatever, but we didn’t change it too much from 2009. There were a few references that might be dated.

Q: Rashida, I first saw you in NY-LON, which was more of a serious role, but then you went to Parks and Recreation. Do you feel more suited to serious roles or comedy.

RJ: People say “comedy is really hard.” Look, no. I work with the best comedians in the world and it’s really fun, I’m not going to lie. It’s hard to be sitting in your uncomfortable emotions all the time. Your body doesn’t know you’re acting. Your heart and your brain don’t know you’re acting. You have to shake that off every day.

For me as a human being, I love doing comedy because I get to laugh with funny people all day long. There’s nothing wrong with that. I have a lot of respect for dramatic acting, especially because I’ve never carried a film before. NY-LON was my first lead role [in a TV show] and that was really tough for me.

This was my first lead role in a film. It was a tough experience. I loved it, but I basically cried for 23 days straight. I was cool with it, it was fine, it was contained, it was safe, I was with my friends., but I think I’m going to go with comedy.

Judith Kallman Sparks "A Candle in the Heart"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 10 August 2012 11:31

Written by Laura Blum

On a fall morning in 1942, at the station watching her and her parents, sister and brother being thrown into a cattle car, a 4-year-old girl named Judith did what anyone would do in the circumstances. She screamed. A soldier put a gun to her head and threatened to drag her onboard as well. She shut up.

Listen closely and you'll hear the silent scream in Judith Alter Kallman’s memoir, A Candle in the Heart. The personal testimony gives voice to the despair and hope of surviving the Holocaust as a Jewish orphan.

Depending on your view of human resilience, you'll either be astonished or simply stunned by Judith's story of transcendance. Just making it out of the outhouse where she slipped and dipped meets a lifetime's quotient of fortitude.

To describe her earliest years as happy and secure would be accurate and at least partly explanatory. Judith was the youngest of six children living comfortably in the spa town of Pieštany, then part of Czechoslovakia and today under the Slovakian flag. It seems likely that Judith inherited some of her talents from her father, Jona Mannheimer, who owned a successful general store. From her Hungarian-born mother Dora she learned pluck and the importance of doing what you believe in. She recalls how her mother lit Shabbat candles even though it made the family a target of anti-Semitic violence.

With such passons on the rise and the Slovak Republic under the Third Reich, the family fled with the barest essentials and went into hiding with peasants. They were soon betrayed, however, and Judith staggered her way to relatives in Hungary against ineffable odds.

Judith had to rely on her instincts and on the kindness of strangers. She has some of those “strangers” (including London Rabbis MB Wiessmandl and Solomon Schonfeld) to thank for her rescue and ultimate arrival in America where she would write her own chapter of the American dream.

Judith sat down with FilmFestivalTraveler.com to reflect on her book and the personal journey it traces.

Q: Despite the horrors you describe, A Candle in the Heart is ultimately a chronicle of hope and legacy. Tell us about your choice of title.

A: It was always the light of the candle that...gave me the hope and faith to get through everything I went through. I always remembered my mother's eight Shabbat candles, and we were eight in the family. Later on, when we got out of prison, it was on the eighth night of Chanuka. When I walked into [my Hungarian foster] house and saw the eight candles, it right away brought me back to my home. 

Q: What was life like for your family in Pieštany?

JK: We were quite comfortable. It was the only two-storey building and we had a courtyard. We had full-time help; it was a wonderful life. My father traveled a lot, both as a salesman and for the store.

Q: So when the family needed help, whether papers or safe refuge, there was a reservoir of good will.

JK: My father always managed to keep us secure and get the right papers because he was fluent in German. He looked like an aristocrat: reddish-blond hair, green eyes, tall. He had the German look, because originally we were German. He managed somehow to always save us from place to place till we got to Jilina, and there we were caught living as non-Jews.

Q: That was the betrayal you wrote about.

JK: Yes, that was the betrayal for money. They sold us. They saw six children. And it was reported that we were Jewish. But later on somehow the underground managed to help us. Well, two of my siblings were caught.

Q: Where did you think your parents were headed when they boarded the cattle car marked “Z” for Zidov (Jews)? What did you understand?

JK: I didn´t really. Earlier we had been put in a lager, or camp, but my father got papers where we were listed as non-Jews. I was home when the Hlinka guards came and inspected the papers. They were so bad that they paid the Germans to take us and get rid of us. The Slovakian role is so little known.

Q: You describe a harrowing experience in an outhouse when Hlinka soldiers descended on the farm where you and your family were in hiding in 1942. What gave you the stamina, courage and presence of mind to escape from this unthinkable fate?

JK: I´m not religious, but I feel God is within me and guiding me throughout my life. If something bad happens, He will be there to help me. I lost my parents. I had nothing to hold on to...beyond the memory of their nurturing. In the outhouse, it was my faith and hope gave me that strong courage. Automatically I reached for those rusty nails [to pull myself out] as if I was being guided.

Q: The Stern family in Budapest would soon offer you a secure, loving home. Were you a fiction writer you almost could´t create more perfect timing than this “Chanuka miracle” after prison.

JK: That gave me even more strength than my memory of home. When they took me out of Conti Prison and I was brought to their home, my Anyu (mother) opened up her arms and took me to her bosom. The fear disappeared and the love and the nurturing was like, "You're mine and you will never again be lost." They loved me unconditionally and I gave them back that love. They had lost their child. My siblings couldn´t give that connection because they were older. It was a little harder to get to them, but I had a need for [the Sterns]. They put me in their bedroom to sleep.

Q: They also helped you resolve a thorny social problem at school.

JK: In school I was the foreigner and the kids didn´t want me around them. I felt very lost and very alone. Vera Czik was this very fancy girl who was spoiled beyond belief. I wanted to join her and her friends at jump rope. She pushed me and I fell. “You're not allowed to play with us." I went home crying and my father, Apu, went back to school with me and they called her parents to come. When the girl's father heard my name, he said, "My cousin was married to a Mannheimer." It turned out that he was my mother's cousin. Then Vera became my best friend and the Cziks bought me clothes. Whatever she got I got.

Q: But the care-free life was short-lived. How did it feel when in March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary? Did you feel the bad old days are here again?

JK: It was a big shakeup. Suddenly I was scared again. But in a way I felt very secure with Apu and Anyu because they said, "We are going to make sure that we are safe and you feel protected."

Q: Did you feel they had the power to do that?

JK: Yeah, because the Regent of Hungary used to come to their restaurant and they were friends.

Q: The Regent came for cholent?

JK: He came for cholent, yes! But the Regent suddenly was in trouble, himself. Apu had connections with the underground and -- these were Raul Wallenberg times -- he got papers under Swiss Red Cross and Karl Lutz's protection. We went into hiding in a glass house that had been a factory.

Q: When you read about the reemergence of anti-semitism in Hungary today, what goes through your mind?

JK: In Budapest they´re putting out posters of a soldier who's holding a Jewish puppet with a Star of David on his head and money falling out of his pocket. I recognize what's going on, and that´s why I feel so strongly that the young have to be educated: Never again!

Q: What would you most want young readers to take away from your story of survival?

JK: Strength. Belief. Faith. But I can´t even see a young person today going through an ordeal. A 4-year-old cries if he doesn´t get a toy. If you remember my story with my shoes...

Q: I wondered if your later interest in fashion may have harked back to that time in your life when you were not allowed to dress nicely and suffered so much shame and yearning.

JK: You´re being now a psychiatrist! (Laughs.) I'm not sure. Deep down it could have been my interest. But I was always dreaming of going to America to study fashion. I went to F.I.T.

Q: During the Bosnian War, [publisher, editor] Helen Gurley Brown launched a local edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. For once Cosmo had my enthusiastic support. We don't have anything else in those moments but hope and beauty. What do you think the link is between beauty and dignity? Beauty and survival?

JK: A very strong connection, I think. It's the beauty of life that makes you want to live. The sun shines. It's what you look for.

Q: What did 9/11 bring up for you, and how were you able to overcome your resurgent fears?

JK: We were in Geneva during that time. We were in a restaurant and somebody was signaling that she would like to talk to me. It turns out that she was looking for Americans. She was telling us that she was seeking asylum in the United States, and could we help her? She claimed she was married to the cousin of [the former Libyan leader] Gaddafi because she had a child with him. She was living at the Richmont Hotel in Geneva. She was saying that she had a lot to tell the United States. If you saw her, her look and everything, she was not real. She went to the American Embassy; she went to the FBI; she went to the CIA, and they didn't believe her story. She gave me newspaper clippings and she gave me her card. She said something would happen in the United States. And I started to get very scared.

Q: You started to believe her?

JK: I started to believe her.

Q: Because she was so specific?

JK: Because things can happen. And she was so definite about it.

Q: Did your husband start to believe her?

JK: He let it go. Americans can be so naive. It's beautiful but it's...

Q: Luxurious.

JK: Yet it´s not the reality. I told my husband, "I think I will tell her that we're going to London instead of New York, because she may have connections and put a bomb." Three hours into our flight I see that something is very wrong on the screen. I try to get an attendant but they are running around. Suddenly the stewardess comes to First Class and says, "I have terrible news."

Already my whole body is shaking. From the bottom of my gut, I´m feeling that the bomb is on the plane. My thoughts always go beyond. The stewardess says 50,000 people were killed. She's putting us in a terrible panic. The plane had already turned around headed back to Switzerland. Suddenly everything came to the surface -- the fear of the whole German experience got hold of me and I got so hysterical. It took 10 minutes to calm me down and put me in control of myself. I think, God forbid...that's why we have to be on our toes.

Q: Do you ever fear that America could succumb to institutionalized persecution?

JK: I hope and pray that it doesn't. But it all depends on our leadership. Whenever there are hard times, Jews are always blamed. And the Americans are not quite picking it up.

Q: What would most surprise your American friends to learn about you?

JK: The background and experiences I describe in my book are a shocking revelation.