Tom Nesher doesn’t know if she had much of a choice in becoming a filmmaker as the daughter of Avi Nesher, seeing the impact that his films such as “The Secrets” and “Past Life” had on other people.
“We used to watch a lot of movies together,” Nesher says of her father, who is still very much active after a five-decade career. “Every weekend we used to do marathons of four musicals in a row, four westerns in a row. And that really made me appreciate cinema the way I do and feel like making a movie that means something to someone is the most meaningful thing I can do.”
And although Nesher has been well on her way to making her feature debut for some time, she also wouldn’t have much of a choice in what it would be about following the untimely death of her brother Ari in 2018 in a hit-and-run car accident. However, as much as grief is a part of “Come Closer,” which received the top prize for filmmaking in her native Israel and go on to represent the country at the Oscars this past year, she also knew that it had to bring joy when to honor her brother’s memory, she had to make something he would actually want to watch. The result is a film that’s enjoyably hard to pin down in any respect, nearly as restless as its lead Eden (Lia Elalouf), a young woman who can be seen enjoying herself immensely in surprising her brother Nati (Ido Tako) with a beachside bash for his 17th birthday, but wakes up with a hangover the next morning that won’t seem to end when compounded with the news that he was fatally struck in the streets.
Upon learning that Nati had snuck off in the middle of the night to meet a girlfriend he had been keeping secret, Eden at least regains a sense of purpose as she sets out to meet Maya (Darya Rosenn) herself based on what she can find on Nati’s phone and from his friends and Nesher finds a fascinating thread to tug at when as much as Eden is drawn to Maya to fill the void her brother left, Maya finds that getting close to Eden offers more than just a connection to a lost love. Both young and still figuring out who they are, they have trouble deciding what their relationship is, but Nesher sees it with clearer eyes, even when she adopts the frenetic visual parlance of the time as Maya and Eden document their adventures to Galilee and back on their cell phones and the camera picks up the passion between them in long, fluid takes. As smoothly as the drama unfolds, Nesher embraces the role of a disruptor, injecting an irreverent sense of humor into the proceedings and always shifting the narrative any time it approaches predictability.
With “Come Closer” now rolling out to U.S. theaters, Nesher took the time to talk about how she was able to turn personal tragedy into a film that could touch so many, working with the cast and crew to make something that felt like it belonged to everyone and the particularly wild day of filming where she quite literally insisted on letting it all hang out.
How did the story for this take shape?
I always had this dream of making a coming-of-age film while I’m still coming of age. I wanted to write about a 17-year-old girl, like the movies that I love but most of the movies that I loved were made by 40-year-old men. So when I was 20, I already started developing this story and when I was 21, my brother died in a car accident. I couldn’t really write about anything else — I kept going back to this subject, but at the same time, I really wanted to make a movie that my brother would love, a movie that is funny and sexy and just a fun film. That’s the way “Come Closer” came to life. I really wanted to write a movie that was true to the emotions I was going through and deals with grief in a complicated and interesting way, but I also wanted to make a movie that really celebrates life and really has a sense of what it feels like to be that young going through something like this.
Purple, or more specifically violet, seems to be a key color in both the lighting and for the character of Eden. Was that foundational?
Yeah, there’s something witchy about purple that I love, and adds this sense of mystique to the movie, even in the way it ends [which] I don’t want to spoil. But there’s something that feels a bit larger than life and if you really let your guard down, then something magical might happen and I really loved that color for that feeling. I loved that Eden has this red purple hair and she feels like she’s a character [separate from herself]. She feels like she’s special. She feels like she deserves the world. And then when bad things happen to her and by the end of the movie, she loses that quality as she becomes an adult, but she finds it in a different way. I loved that as a color for this feeling.
What was it like to find your lead in Lia?
First of all, she’s amazing and this is her first role but since then she’s been acting and she’s so good in everything. When I had a meeting with her before the audition, I asked her all these personal questions like “Who are you jealous of?” and “When you fight with your mother, what does that sound like?” and her answers were so original and crazy I felt like I have to hear more. Then when she came in to audition, she had something very fresh and very exciting, but she still wasn’t an actress, but I really had a feeling that if I put the time to work with her, she will be able to give a performance that will be amazing. Eventually, she’s winning every award at every festival we go to and she has this ability to really just be in front of a camera. She’s not posing in any way. She’s just feeling feelings.
What was it like working with the actors in rehearsals?
What I love about cinema is that it’s really collaborative. It’s not like a song [where] you can just pick up a guitar and write. You have to have many people involved and what is beautiful about it is if you let them really get creative with it, they add so much. It really creates a world that is much more layered and every [actor] has their own reasoning to why they’re acting the way they are and their own backstory. So in the rehearsal process, I really worked with every actor even in the smallest roles to understand how they as people are like the characters and whatever they could bring in from their own life.
For example, Lia has a very interesting, complicated relationship with her mother, so I rewrote a lot of the relationship of the mother in my script to fit what Lia could bring in and Netta [Garty], who plays the mother, had her own interesting take on that since she is a mother. I was 21 when I started writing this movie, so it was so impactful on the script to have the perspective of those different people who really went through stuff that sometimes I didn’t go through. I could only write to my own experiences. And if you really bring people who are creatively interesting, not only in the actors but the crew, then you can really have a much more layered world.
Is it true those party scenes were inhabited by real groups of friends?
Shooting a party is one of my favorite things and every movie I write, I try to write a party scene just because it’s so fun to shoot. When you cast those events, it’s really important to have people that have good chemistry because otherwise it feels awkward. It could be awkward anyways because sometimes you need to bring the music down to hear dialogue and shooting a party is very complicated. But if you have people who really know how to jump together, then it really feels like a real party. The first party at the beach was so much more than what you see on screen. Creating that environment was something that was very important to me and there are all these still photographs, so I really wanted them to feel like they are having the coolest party andthe photos will really have this feeling of the most epic night of the year.
The idea that there’s a lot of mixed media in the movie is very modern, especially in how it’s presented as one continuous flow. What was it like to figure out the story as a bit of a mosaic?
That was crucial from the very beginning because I wanted to be true to the experience of being young these days. You’re on the phone most of the day and you’re experiencing most of life through the lens of an iPhone, so I really wanted to capture that within the movie — the way they fall in love or the way they remember someone who passed away is so much based on what an iPhone can provide. So I incorporated real iPhone footage in the movie and to have this plot [point] of finding the password to his phone matters because that’s the way it would work in real life or if you see a girl and you think she might have something to do with your brother you’re going to look her up. I wanted to have a creative style that embodies what it’s like to be a teenager and what it feels like [where] every night is amazing and everything is so exciting and beautiful and you remember the colors of the sunset as if they were insane.
From what I understand, you have a true madman behind the camera as far as cinematographer, who was regularly getting on a skateboard to achieve shots. What was it like to get that visual energy?
Shai [Peleg], the cinematographer of the movie is someone you see around in Tel Aviv all the time on a skateboard in the city or at a party, shooting like super up close. He has no boundaries and he’s just melting into scenes in real life all the time and I loved that idea for the movie. I was really inspired by “Y Tu Mama Tambien” that has a camera that really breathes with the characters and even more so because we have all this iPhone footage and still photos, so it was really important to find someone who is very physical and can carry the camera on his shoulder and just go with it all day, but also someone who really understands the emotional rhythm of movement in a scene.
There’s a scene that involves your two lead actresses holding one another from the flatbed of a truck and I wouldn’t want to spoil the context of the scene…
We can just say it involves peeing. [laughs]
It’s one of the big jokes in the film. Was that as crazy a day of filming as it looked?
Yeah, it was crazy. In the beginning, we tried to think, how can we make it look like [the character’s] peeing from a pickup truck? And then we were like, “Okay, she’s just going to sit there with her ass outside the [back of the] truck and it’s just going to be what it is, but then the truck will be driving.” It was a crazy day. It was so hot. We shot it in the desert, but it was so fun. It was hilarious. We couldn’t stop laughing.
Even though you had plenty of experience from shorts, when it’s your first feature, was it what you thought it would be?
I expected it to be great, but it was even better. It was really the best days of my life for shooting this movie. I do believe that making shorts is a great thing and something you should definitely do before making a feature because it teaches you so much about set dynamics and about every other aspect of filmmaking. But there’s something about a feature film and creating a family that really spends so much time together every day on set and really pulls together and puts their lives aside just to be part of this creation. I don’t feel like I experience that any other place.
What’s it like getting the film out into the world?
It’s been a dream. As someone who loves movies, being able to join the row of movies in the world, that’s already a huge compliment and if the movie does well as ours did, it’s a true gift. Something that I didn’t expect would be the most fun part for me would be to meet audiences. You do a lot of press and you choose the dress for the festivals. But the actual greatest thing is just to connect with a person and when I read a Letterboxd review or when I meet a person in the screening that tells me their personal connection to the movie, that’s the most rewarding thing.
“Come Closer” opens on December 5th in New York at the Quad Cinema, December 12th at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles and the The Hitchcock Cinema in Santa Barbara, and January 9th at the North Park Theatre in Buffalo.