Samuel Maoz: ​‘Maybe I’m just try­ing to con­vince myself that I’m not guilty’

Samuel Maoz’s debut fea­ture, Lebanon, was set almost entire­ly inside the claus­tro­pho­bic con­fines of an Israeli tank dur­ing Israel’s 1982 inva­sion of Lebanon. Based on his expe­ri­ences as a 20-year-old tankman – a trau­ma which delayed his direc­to­r­i­al career for a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry – the film won the Gold­en Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

Maoz’s fol­low-up, Fox­trot, was inspired by a more recent near-trau­ma: the hour when he wrong­ly believed his daugh­ter had caught a bomb-hit Tel Aviv bus. It fol­lows a father who believes his sol­dier son has been killed, and the son’s strange days man­ning a bizarre desert check­point. It also gives an expand­ed taste of Maoz’s vis­cer­al, high-impact style, and often over­looked sense of humour. Speak­ing to LWLies after its first UK screen­ing, his low voice ris­es with reg­u­lar, dry irony.

LWLies: You’ve said that the hour when you thought your daugh­ter had caught the bus was the worst of your life. What were you think­ing dur­ing it?

Maoz: It was a night­mare. I tried to go out, and then I came back, I tried to call the hos­pi­tals. It seemed like an eter­ni­ty. I start­ed to cry when she came back, in front of her, for the first time.

Like Lebanon, Fox­trot is set in enclosed envi­ron­ments, but the tech­niques you use this time feel very liberated.

I’m hap­py that you can see it on the screen. Yes, because I believe that when you are cre­at­ing out of pas­sion and hon­esty, the cam­era catch­es it. You can’t point at it, but it’s there.

To real­ly take cinema’s lan­guage as far as you like, hav­ing wait­ed so long time to do so, must be a pleasure.

Yeah, but I’m angry with myself because I wast­ed time. And life is short. But yes, I can say that the spark of an idea in my mind is almost always visu­al. Because I don’t make nat­u­ral­is­tic cin­e­ma. My cin­e­ma is more expe­ri­en­tial and pen­e­trates or reflects the souls of my char­ac­ters. And this is the kind of cin­e­ma where the visu­al dimen­sion is an inte­gral part of the sto­ry. One look at Michael’s apart­ment should give us a lot of infor­ma­tion about him. I real­ly treat the text as an ene­my. If I can man­age with­out it, I pre­fer to.

From the moment a camel walks past the check­point, this is clear­ly an absur­dist film. It remind­ed me of Samuel Beckett.

‘Wait­ing for Godot’, exact­ly. I like the­atre very much, and that was my reference.

Why did that seem appropriate?

Two main rea­sons. The first is that basi­cal­ly noth­ing hap­pened at the check­point, until some­thing did. So you need to find an inter­est not in the plot, but in the small actions, in the style of the cin­e­ma. The sec­ond rea­son is that it was impor­tant to me that peo­ple would receive the wider pic­ture. It’s quite under­stand­able that this is one big alle­go­ry, I hope.

In one scene, there are maybe five sec­onds between a sol­dier fan­cy­ing a girl and shoot­ing her. What does it do to an indi­vid­ual, and a soci­ety, to be on that hair-trigger?

The shoot­ing is some­thing instinc­tive. They train you and train you and train you, and sud­den­ly some­thing hap­pens, and you react. And the nature of trau­ma­tised Israeli men and maybe Pales­tin­ian men shapes the col­lec­tive. So there was a moment there when he almost fell in love. Sud­den­ly there are no Pales­tini­ans and no Israelis, no sol­diers. But then the Pales­tin­ian guy sit­ting near her saw that between them. And now he needs to be a man. So this chain of events is com­ing always from stereo­types of manhood.

My gen­er­a­tion couldn’t com­plain, because our par­ents had been through the Holo­caust. We had to repress and over­come and be men. And the Pales­tini­ans under occu­pa­tion expe­ri­ence humil­i­a­tion, so they also must prove their man­hood. This is a twist­ed, dis­tort­ed real­i­ty that caus­es those kinds of fates that can­not be changed. The end­less trau­mat­ic cir­cle: the foxtrot.

In Fox­trot, the father, Michael, expe­ri­ences cathar­sis after reveal­ing his acci­den­tal part in civil­ian deaths dur­ing wartime. You’ve talked in the same way about your expe­ri­ence in Lebanon. How much do you think that cathar­sis will help Michael?

Maybe it’s too late for him. I’m not sure. If he got treat­ment imme­di­ate­ly after his ser­vice, it would help. But after years or repres­sion and denial, you start to be this guy. The cathar­sis will help him in a way. It won’t cure him. That’s what hap­pened to me with Lebanon. I feel that I’m much bet­ter now, but it’s beyond one fea­ture film, or talk­ing with your shrinks. It’s some­thing more heavy.

Would it feel almost crim­i­nal to lift that weight of guilt for what hap­pened from yourself?

At the end of the day it was my deci­sion to do this, and not to do that. And maybe in court they won’t find me guilty. But it doesn’t mat­ter, because inside myself I know that I took deci­sions. No mat­ter what was the pres­sure. And I learnt to under­stand that I prob­a­bly didn’t have a choice. But from time to time I ask myself if I’m only doing every­thing to con­vince myself that I’m not guilty.

When you made Lebanon, it seemed that shell around you cracked a bit. Has any­thing changed since?

I felt that it helped me. It’s not just the film itself. It’s my self-image. Sud­den­ly I have the option to cre­ate, to do things, to earn more money…

To do the things you would have done if you hadn’t gone in the army?

Exact­ly. And on the oth­er hand you ask your­self, why I didn’t I do it 20 years ago? And you feel those lost years more strong­ly. Because the war didn’t make me a film direc­tor, or a good writer. It was there before.

In the Q&A part of the screen­ing I attend­ed, a Pales­tin­ian man from the West Bank asked a hos­tile ques­tion. Do you feel that when you walk onstage as an Israeli film­mak­er, there’s a tar­get on your back?

Yes, but I believe no one sus­pects me of rep­re­sent­ing the right-wing of Israeli soci­ety. But for peo­ple from Israel and Pales­tine main­ly, it’s hard for them to accept an unre­al­is­tic feel­ing about those sub­jects. It’s like you can’t make art from them. They for­get I’m not mak­ing documentaries.

Fox­trot is released 1 March. Read the LWLies review.