"I felt it’s time to really focus on my people, on the Jews and on Israelis, and to do what I could to make a difference,” said legendary Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender about his reaction to the October 7 massacre. His films, which include Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, have won nine Oscars and received 36 nominations.
Bender gave a Zoom interview from his Los Angeles office ahead of the 42nd Jerusalem Film Festival, which opens on July 17. The Jewish-American producer will attend the festival and will receive a lifetime achievement award, along with his fellow honoree, Gal Gadot.
Bender, who grew up in New Jersey and faced antisemitism as a child, has a straightforward, tough way of talking. His movies tend to be both undeniably entertaining and socially conscious, and they include An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 ground-breaking documentary on climate change written and narrated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore; Hacksaw Ridge, the drama about a heroic medic in World War II; and the recent epic Western, The Harder They Fall, as well as many of Tarantino’s films, including Reservoir Dogs and Inglourious Basterds.
Now, though, he is devoting a significant portion of his time and energy to making Israeli movies and television series. He explained that October 7 was something of a wakeup call for him. “It was clearly an inflection point where basically it became OK for the entire world to become antisemitic all of a sudden, and so it was like opening Pandora’s box,” he said.
While he has proudly supported many social causes, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, he felt that people he considered his allies on the Left were not there for Israel or for Jews after the Hamas attack on Israel that ignited the current war and the wave of worldwide antisemitism that followed.
“The year of George Floyd’s killing [2020], I made three movies all around Black Lives Matter issues and I was very proud of that and I was very happy to do it,” he said. These movies were the Oscar-winning short, Two Distant Strangers, as well as The Harder They Fall and Cops and Robbers, an animated short featuring spoken-word poetry about Floyd’s death, which won a Peabody Award. “So clearly, I was walking the walk… and I felt like, wait a minute, I worked really hard to support all my friends, and then no one was there for us after October 7 – and that was very disheartening.”
Stories of people caught in the massacre
Bender, who has visited Israel many times, didn’t turn away from the horrific news of the attack and made it a point to view the 47-minute atrocity film compilation, showing acts of violence committed by Hamas against Israelis and foreigners, much of which the terrorists recorded and broadcast themselves. He was upset that quite a few of his liberal friends in Hollywood seemed to dismiss the Hamas massacre and embrace the terror group’s narrative that the killings were justified acts of an oppressed people. Many more seemed uninterested, or to have quickly forgotten what took place.
“The typical person I run into will say, ‘Well, tell me what happened, I don’t really know,’ and, yeah to be honest, I have to stop my blood from boiling because it was a savage massacre,” he said. “But you have to kind of take a breath or two and try to explain it.”
His need to explain is part of what led him to produce an upcoming television series, Red Alert, which he created with Keshet. The five-part series, which is currently in post-production, was directed by Lior Chefetz, who made the hard-hitting Yom Kippur War movie and television series The Stronghold.
Red Alert dramatizes the real stories of five people caught up in the massacre, although Bender said it was too early to reveal which stories will be told. “It’s about ordinary people, just different people who you would not necessarily look at as being heroes, who do heroic things… These are underdog stories that will show what ordinary people had to do to survive that day.” Details about when the series will be broadcast are still being worked out, he said.
He was in Israel during much of the filming. While he was here, he met actor Lior Ashkenazi, who hosts the Saturday-night demonstrations for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Tel Aviv. He also met some of the hostage families, many of whom visited the set.
One of them was Batsheva Yahalomi, who was abducted by Hamas with her children, but who managed to save herself and her two daughters. Her son was kidnapped and released, but her husband was murdered in Gaza. “She’s an extraordinary woman, and I got to meet so many survivors who had incredible stories to tell,” he said. He also made time to tour the sites of the massacre in the south of Israel.
At this point in our interview, we took a 10-minute break, during which I hastily went to my building’s bomb shelter as the Houthis fired another ballistic missile on Israel, and he made some business calls. I knew that eventually, a Zoom call of mine would be interrupted by a missile alert, and I told Bender that I was glad it happened with him, since he has spent time here and knows what it’s like.
He nodded, saying, “What a crazy way to live,” and then we switched gears and spoke about how he got into moviemaking.
Bender got a degree in civil engineering but became a dancer and received a scholarship from the prestigious Louis Falco Dance Company in the 1980s. “It was an amazing time,” he recalled. When injuries ended his dance career, he began acting and found that he preferred working on movie sets to waiting tables. Once he understood what a producer’s job involved, it seemed ideal for him.
The world of film production
“What is producing? It’s one foot in the practical world – problem solving, finance, whatever, right? And the other foot is in the world of the creative, the magical, the poetic and so forth. So, it was like, with the engineering on the one hand and the dance and acting on the other, I was exercising both those sides of my brain,” he said.
He managed to produce a low-budget horror film called Intruder in 1989, which he co-wrote with director Scott Spiegel, about the staff of an all-night supermarket being slashed by a maniac. Horror director Sam Raimi had a part, and Bender also played a police officer. Through making Intruder, he met Tarantino, who wanted to get Reservoir Dogs made.
At first, they entertained all kinds of schemes to try to finance the movie about a heist gone wrong, like casting the girlfriend of a would-be investor as Mr. Blonde, a part that was eventually and very memorably played by Michael Madsen, who passed away last week. Another misguided investor said he would finance it if it were like The Sting and it would be revealed that everyone who had been killed turned out to be faking it.
But knowing that Tarantino would be paid $50,000 for his True Romance screenplay along with the money coming in from Intruder “gave us the chutzpah to be able to walk away from somebody making us some crazy offer with some crazy stipulation like that and be able to realize Quentin’s vision.” They stayed true to that vision, and the rest is movie history.
When Bender came to Israel with Tarantino in 2009 to promote Inglourious Basterds, I interviewed him and asked whether he had seen any recent Israeli movies. He responded that due to the grueling Basterds schedule, he hadn’t seen any movies that year, but that he was interested in learning more about the Israeli film scene. Now, he has bridged that gap and is working with Israeli filmmakers as much as possible.
“When I was filming [Red Alert], I regularly met with tons of Israeli directors, writers, and producers and we have projects we’re developing, but I hate to talk about stuff when they’re in such early stages,” he said. “There’s so much great talent in Israel; there are so many great ideas.”
For Bender, making movies in Israel is the perfect way to combine his twin passions for filmmaking and activism: “It’s just a great feeling to be on the set and just feeling like you’re doing something that’s productive and helping to be part of a bigger picture. It’s exciting.”
Tickets to the opening night of the festival and the full program are currently on sale at jff.org.il/en