‘Richard, I think more than anyone in the world, loves to be an actor,” said Savi Gabizon, the director of Longing, the English-language remake of his own 2017 Israeli movie of the same name, which opened throughout Israel on Thursday. He was speaking about Richard Gere, the leading man in the new version.
“He’s an activist, he’s a businessman, but more than anything in the world, he loves to act. He loves actors, he loves the atmosphere on the set, the ethos of the actors.
He stayed on the set sometimes even when he didn’t have to be there.”
Gere gives one of his best performances in years in Longing, in which he plays a man who discovers that he had a son he didn’t know about – and that this son has recently been killed in an accident.
This might sound like a spoiler, but it’s the opening of the film, which closely follows the plot of the original.
Trying to get to know the son he completely missed out on during his life sends Gere’s character, Daniel, a successful businessman used to being in control, on a journey of self-discovery, in which he reexamines the choices he made that led him to this point.
The film's tone
Even with that plot, the film has an often comic tone.
The original film won awards all over the world, including two important prizes at the Venice Film Festival, and its universal premise made it a natural for a remake.
But while Israeli films have occasionally been remade – The Debt and The Kindergarten Teacher are two that come to mind – I can’t think of another instance where an Israeli director has remade his own film.
Talking to Gabizon and considering the offbeat nature of Longing, which mixes black comedy and drama, it seems important that the director/writer who created the movie was able to reshape the material himself for the English version.
GABIZON MADE a number of successful Israeli movies prior to Longing, most notably Nina’s Tragedies starring Ayelet Zurer as a young widow who struggles to move on with her life. But despite the word “tragedies” in the title, that film had a similar blend of the funny and the sad that characterizes Longing.
After seeing the Longing remake, it seems obvious that Gere was the right actor for the role. Gabizon said that the star’s input was helpful in adapting the film, which was made in Canada, for the English-speaking world.
Gere knows a bit about Israel and Israelis. He has visited several times, including making a trip to Sderot for a film festival at the cinematheque there in 2004, and has starred in three previous movies for Israeli directors: Norman for Joseph Cedar and two for Oren Moverman, The Dinner and Time Out of Mind. Back in 1985, the acclaimed actor played the title role in the movie King David, but that was actually filmed in Italy.
Gere signed onto Longing during the COVID crisis and began having Zoom meetings with Gabizon about the project. “He had ideas about his character.
He helped me a lot about understanding English-speaking culture… The movie [script] was already translated into English, but it still needed a cultural transformation,” its writer/director said.
“There is a kind of straight talk that characterizes Israeli conversation, but in America they try not to be so direct and we made adjustments accordingly,” Gabizon said.
“For example, there’s a scene where he comes to his son’s teacher [a character portrayed by Diane Kruger] and asks her to come to his son’s grave and she tells him that she can’t now. And he pressures her. In the Israeli movie, he pressures her a lot – really a lot. In the American movie, he pressures her, but very gently.”
Gere also helped with the conception of his character. “He loved the story and the character, but felt that he could do it a little differently… The character in the Israeli film lacked confidence. He mumbled a little.
With Shai Avivi [who starred in the original] we went in that direction. Richard said, ‘No, I’m a strong businessman,’ and we went with that. Strong, very busy, with a successful business. I think it helped the story a little. It made it new, the personality that he brought to it. I think that’s why he did it. He saw in it a story that he wanted to tell.”
Themes of 'Longing'
ONE OF Longing’s themes is the difficulty of ever really being able to know somebody else, and as the hero tries to discover what his son was like, he finds himself talking to many people who describe contradictory and often not very sympathetic versions of his late child.
“I kept creating more problems with the son. I thought that when you’re a father to a very successful child, that’s great, but your fatherhood develops more when you’re the father of a problem kid,” Gabizon said.
“Then you have to make more of an effort. And so Richard’s character could develop in ways that are more interesting.”
In addition to his harmonious collaboration with Gere, Gabizon had high praise for the two lead actresses, Suzanne Clement, who plays the mother, and Diane Kruger, who portrays the teacher, both of whom won major awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
Both had busy schedules, and to accommodate Clement, the crew had to film on the weekend, but Gabizon said she was worth it. “Her character is the one whose pain is real – she lost a child in a real and painful way. Without her, I feel the movie would be more lightweight; she brings the movie down to earth.”
In addition to the story of the movie, there is the story behind the movie, of how it got made at all in these days when low-key, character-driven stories are difficult to get off the ground.
Gabizon credits Alexander “Alex” Vinnitski, a Russian-born producer raised in Israel and now based in the US, with doing just that.
Vinnitski said that years ago, he happened to see Nina’s Tragedies at the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles, “And I was so blown away. I loved it. I’m a big fan of Pedro Almodovar and his films and I felt that Savi [Gabizon] had a voice that reminded me of Almodovar, and I just became so obsessed with this movie… I just always wanted to make a movie at some point with Savi.”
Years later, he heard that there was an Israeli movie that would be well suited for an English remake, if only a big-name star would be interested in appearing in it. When he heard that the movie, Longing, was by Gabizon, “My jaw dropped! I thought, ‘I have to do this movie!’”
SO BEGAN an odyssey to find the right actor, which took years. “I saw the movie and I loved it,” Vinnitski said. “We had a long list of actors we wanted to go out to, big names. We had some lukewarm interest but nothing happened.”
Eventually, he got the script to a producer, Josh Deitell, who said it wasn’t right for him, but that he thought his mother might like it.
His mother turned out to be Lisa Wilson, a veteran international sales agent and producer, who loved the movie and got Gere involved. Vinnitski got the good news about Gere around his birthday. “That was the best birthday present I ever got,” he said. “It was like a dream after that.”
For Vinnitski, producing Longing opened up a desire to work creatively in the country that had been his home for many years.
“I’m passionate and interested to not only produce and direct more Jewish- and Israel-focused films and TV but also in creating a studio akin to Participant Media [a company known for making films intended to foster social change] that would specifically curate, develop, finance and create stories,” he said.
Both the writer/director and producer said they were aware of the challenges of releasing Longing during these turbulent times.
“We were supposed to release it earlier but we waited, because of the difficulty after October 7 to release a movie that has comic DNA,” said Gabizon.
“But people who have seen the movie say that it feels right to them now, with the hostages in the news, because the movie is concerned with death and children and that it even sharpens and illuminates the hostage issue.”