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| Finding a fresh perspective on the Holy City |
The Paz brothers, Doron and Yoav, are being celebrated as a bold new force in horror, and it’s not hard to see why. Although its premise is simple enough and much of it involves a familiar flight from the undead, JeruZalem is a little film that punches well above its weight. I asked Doron how he came to make it.
“For years, my brother and I, we loved genre films and horror. For years we thought that Jerusalem could be the perfect setting for a horror movie and we wondered why nobody was using it, and then we thought, okay, it’s time to pick up the glove and just do it. We wanted to show the real roughness and mystery of the city, not like the Jerusalem you see mostly in movies or tourist guides of National Geographic, that sort of thing.
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| Yael Grobglas in Jeruzalem |
“The second stage of the idea was that we wanted to go beyond the pure Jerusalem you see for tourists and show the underground life, the nightclubs, the youth hostels and places like that. We’d thought about a point of view kind of movie and the idea didn’t really develop but then we read that Google had started Google Glass and that other people were starting this kind of wearable tech and we thought that would be a great way to tell a different kind of story. It meant there was another layer of technology we could use with social media and apps and stuff like that. It was like a first person shooter game but there was lots of other stuff we could do.”
We’re joined by Yael Grobglas, who plays one of the two young American women visiting Jerusalem in the film (the other, played by Danielle Jadelyn, is the wearer of the Glass device), who says it was the combination of modern technology and ancient mythology that really made the film attractive to her as it reflected something which is important to understanding Israel itself.
“I had an audition but we sat down and connected instantly,” she said of her meeting with the Paz brothers. “We talked about the film and different ideas we had for it. All of us love our country and agreed that we’d love to show it from a different point of view. It was incredibly magical.”
They were already familiar with Yael’s work, says Doron. “Israel is a small industry.” They had fun going on a journey together to show their country from a different angle.
“We’re very well known for movies about politics and the army,” Yael adds, saying that making a horror film felt like something fresh.
Something which stood out to me as an outsider, I say, is the way that the film deals with characters from across the city’s different communities and shows how they interact in day to day life.
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| The hostel owners realise something is amiss |
“We wanted to show the real deal,” says Doron. “Jerusalem is a very intense city. You can feel all the different religions there in a very small area so it’s very intense and as a filmmaker you need to deal with that. We were very delicately dealing with religion but not making a movie about a specific religion. We wanted to show the place that combines it all together, the three biggest religions in the world on the same ground dealing with the same problems and the same issues.
“Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in world – it’s about 3,000 years old – and it’s said that wherever you dig you will find skeletons or dead bodies. There have been thousands of years conflict and wars.”
“And civilisations!” Yael points out.
“Yeah, so we think it’s a very good base for this kind of religious horror story. In a lot of scriptures, in the Bible and other places, it’s said that the resurrection will start in Jerusalem. There are a lot of theories about it.”
The other thing that makes the film strong, I venture, if the way those characters are developed so that, even though there a quite a few of them, we really feel we know them. “From our point of view we wanted to start with laughter,” Doron explains. “We felt that if you can laugh with the characters at the beginning of the movie then you can be scared with them at the end. We didn’t want to take all of our tricks out in the first minute. It deteriorates as we go along and we think it’s very important not to overload the audience. It would be hard to exaggerate the need to build characters and build relationships. I really loved the group we formed there. They were actually like tourists in a way.”
“For me it was an amazing, crazy adventure in guerrilla style filmmaking,” says Yael. “Things like, the youth hostel room that you see in the film is the room we actually slept in that night. A lot of what you saw is what we actually went through. It was also funny because the first thing you learn as a actor is not to look into the camera, and for this I had to look directly at it and treat as if it was my best friend. I had to look in her eyes and react to what she feels.”
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| Meeting something sinister in the street |
Doron laughs. “Yeah. For the actors it was so strange – we had to tell them to look inside the lens.”
This approach to filming let them shoot in some of the city’s holiest locations, he notes – places where they would probably never have been allowed to shoot documentary style footage. But some places remained off-limits.
“One of the funniest moments for me was when we went to the Wailing Wall,” says Yael. “The men could not go into the female half so the directors couldn’t shoot there. So Danielle and I went over to that part. The directors had built her a helmet with camera on it, so that was how we shot that part.”
“We were standing just at the other side,” Doron adds.
And what about the famous Jerusalem syndrome, mentioned in the film. Isn’t it a bit controversial?
“It’s a fact,” says Doron firmly. “I don’t know numbers but a lot of tourists coming into Jerusalem, especially Catholics, are really affected by the sacredness of the city. You see these places and it really affects tourists. In fact there’s a mental asylum near the outskirts of Jerusalem where some of them have to go for a few days to recover. It’s a very powerful travelling experience to go to Jerusalem. We live in Israel so we know.”
The film has had a powerful effect on festival audiences, garnering lots of praise. I ask Doron how he feels about that.
“It’s a very exciting time,” he says. “We have been working for a long time on this movie, me and my brother Yoav. It’s a project we did for so long and the crew and the cast all gave their souls to it so we’re very proud of it.”
“I’m just extremely excited to see the result of it all,” adds Yael. “It’s mind-boggling, it’s been such an adventure and now we can finally see it all come together and audiences enjoy it.”
