An Illuminating experience for Liev Schreiber

Liev Schreiber learned a lot about himself while filming Everything is Illuminated.

Actor Liev Schreiber is a changed man thanks to a search for his roots. The Tony award winner, whose film-directing debut Everything is Illuminated opened in the United States this week, says his desire to play characters on film or the stage was fuelled by "the root of an identity crisis" in his youth.

With Everything is Illuminated, Schreiber, 37, set out to discover his grandfather's history in Ukraine and learned a lot about himself.

"I know I have the potential to care in the way that he did because of this film," Schreiber said.

Schreiber calls his grandfather, Alex Milgram, who died in 1993, a "typical mensch, just a really, really decent human being" and "a very, very strong male figure".

"I didn't know that I possessed any of those qualities and was suspicious I didn't," he said. Now, he thinks he does.

Everything is Illuminated is based on Jonathan Foer's widely praised novel of the same name about a young American searching for his Ukrainian Jewish roots. In that way, it parallels Schreiber's life.

Schreiber not only directed the film, he adapted the book for the screen. They both paint a portrait of Ukraine's countryside and its people, set against the backdrop of the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

It is a people and history Schreiber never knew growing up on New York City's Lower East Side with a single mother in a flat with no electricity.

As a kid, Schreiber was a troublemaker who stole for thrills, and it wasn't until he studied drama as a teenager that he began turning his life around.

He wrote and performed his own monologues about "junkies, Puerto Rican hookers, fry cooks and orthodox Jews who sold socks". .

He was later accepted at Yale University's School of Drama for acting, not playwriting, because one of his teachers told him he had a better shot at winning admission as an actor.

Armed with a Yale degree and experience from England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Schreiber began acting.

His big break in Hollywood came with the series of Scream horror movies that began in 1996. But several flops and many low-budget movie roles and stage plays failed to win Schreiber attention from mainstream audiences.

That changed last year when he earned praise for playing a brainwashed politician in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. This year he won Broadway's Tony award for best featured actor in a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Now, it's on to film directing. "Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed with films, and I always wanted to make them," Schreiber said. He had been offered screenplays to direct but passed because "none of them were at all indicative of who I was as a person".

Schreiber even wrote his own movie about a young man travelling through Ukraine who gets involved with a prostitute and becomes a target for the mob. It sounded too Hollywood.

Foer's novel was praised for defying literary convention, and Schreiber tries to remain loyal to the book's eccentricity. He introduces sections of the film by showing a fountain pen writing chapter-like titles.

Shifting light blurs or sharpens images to make the transition between segments. The story moves at a slow, contemplative pace, often with little dialogue, and the musical score includes traditional Ukrainian folk music.

Elijah Wood, who stars as the young American Jonathan, said he took the role because he was excited about Schreiber's ideas for making the film.

* Everything is Illuminated is at the Academy from today

- REUTERS