Exclusive: 1-1 With Jeffrey Nachmanoff On Traitor

By Kellvin Chavez on August 25, 2008

Jeffrey Nachmanoff is no stranger to disaster films. A writer on The Day After Tomorrow. Since then, he has worked steadily as a screenwriter, writing everything from science fiction to action comedy for various studios, including an adaptation of the bestselling video game “Prince of Persia" for producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

It seems almost fitting that Nachmanoff would be associated to another film involving the potential destruction of the U.S.

I sat down with Nachmanoff and talked to the writer director about his upcoming film, Traitor and spoke at length about Terrorism and his thoughts on possibly giving terrorist new ideas, and doing research for the film and possibly even making the FBI’s watch list!

Latinoreview: Is this your first film?

Nachmanoff: First movie as a writer/director, yeah.

Latinoreview: What inspired you to direct it?

Nachmanoff: I went to film school and I had always aspired to direct my own screenplays and this one just felt like the perfect one to do. I'm a fan of espionage movies. I'm a fan of political thrillers. This was just a script and material that I felt really close to.

Latinoreview: Legend has it that Steve Martin came up with the idea. Can you talk about that?

Nachmanoff: Sure, yeah. He was making 'Bringing Down The House' and it wasn't that long after 9/11 happened and I think he was thinking about terrorism and thinking about the stories in the world around us and he came up with the basic idea for this and wrote it as a short story and sold it to the producers and they were looking for a writer to turn it into a full movie. I got that call and I said, 'I'll go meet. I want to meet Steve Martin.' I'm a big fan of his. I went in and ended up meeting him and pitching him on my idea and he really liked it. So I went off and wrote the script.

Latinoreview: What challenges did you face as the director of this film in regard to being the writer as well?


Nachmanoff: You have to be willing to let go of your own script a little bit sometimes. If you get too married to anything it's hard to work around it. I didn't have too much trouble doing that. I think because I've worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a little while now I'm fairly used to the notion that the script is going to change. You're going to do revisions. You're going to keep moving and refining it as you go along. I think that's probably a challenge in directing your own script, but I was pretty well prepared for it in that I wasn't too attached to anything.

Latinoreview: What kind of research did you do for this?

Nachmanoff: I did a lot of research. I read a lot of books. I probably got myself on all sorts of FBI watch-lists from doing all the research because I was looking up terrorism and how to blow things up and all that sort of thing. I spoke to people too. I talk to various people from different walks of life. I obviously spoke to people of the Muslim faith in order to get a better understanding of what the beliefs are and what they're not and how the people who are using Islam for the purposes of terrorism are twisting it to their own purposes so that there could be an informed discussion of that in the movie.

Latinoreview: Do you think that America is ready for this film?

Nachmanoff: I think there are enough people out there who are ready for it that they can go see it. I think there are some people who might want to see something else, but that's true every weekend. The same people who want to see a comedy with the talking parakeet are not the same people that want to see a political thriller with Don Cheadle. This is a grownup film and it attempts to take on the issues of the day in a way that's mature, but at the same time there's enough action and suspense in it that I hope there will be an audience for it that's a little broader than that.

Latinoreview: Was Don Cheadle always on your mind when you wrote the screenplay?

Nachmanoff: He was not necessarily on my mind when I wrote the part. I didn't have a specific actor in my head when I wrote it. Maybe that's why Don Cheadle was such a perfect fit for it. I wanted someone that could really be a strong character as well as a star and Don Cheadle is one of the best actors working, period. When he said that he was interested I was just excited to hear that.

Latinoreview: And working with Guy Pearce?

Nachmanoff: Guy Pearce is fantastic. I actually chose him in the sense that Don chose the project and then I chose Guy. Guy is a fantastic actor and he was someone that was able to compliment Don Cheadle. He's an actor's actor and is able to play a smart detective part like this and make it fresh. I was just really lucky to get him.


Latinoreview: Are you going to stay in this same vein, thriller/espionage type films after this?

Nachmanoff: I would certainly do another one. I don't feel that with one film I've exhausted my interest in the subject. Maybe if you ask me when I've done five of them. You could say, 'Jeffrey, aren't you tired of doing espionage thrillers?' But I'm interested in other kinds of films too, obviously. I've written other sorts of films and I like sci-fi. I like other genres. I don't think I'll be moving to broad comedy really, but I like films that have a little bit of a kick to them.

Latinoreview: What about the idea that this film could give terrorists ideas?

Nachmanoff: You mean giving ideas to the potential terrorists? Well, that's an excellent question because I was very conscious of that and I think to be responsible you have to be careful not to give them too many ideas. So I actually deliberately took only things that they've already thought of. Some of them might be new to you or the viewers, but everything in there has been done already by terrorists. I was sort of taking from books and from articles and even down to some of their methods of communications, using the emails and those kinds of things. They've already done those things. I'm not inventing anything because I think if you invent too much, you're right, you might give them some ideas. Unfortunately they know already how to set off bombs better than we know how to in the movies.

Latinoreview: Do you have a lot of respect for religion?

Nachmanoff: I do have a lot of respect for religion. I think that Islam like Christianity like Judaism, there are people out there who are extremists and will abuse the religion to kill or to hate or to carry out terrible acts. That doesn't mean that's what the religion teaches you though. Does anyone really think like David Koresh, the guy who killed all the people in Waco – is he the example of Christianity? Is that what a Christian is? No. Of course not, but he claimed to be a Christian. He claimed all sorts of things. I think the same is true with Osama Bin Laden or some of these terrorists. They claim to be speaking for Islam, but Islam is over two billion people in the world and they're not all trying to blow themselves up.

Latinoreview: And the film comes through with that, that it's not all what you think it is.

Nachmanoff: It's not all what you think it is and hopefully the movie, in addition to being entertaining, might just open people's eyes to that, that there a lot of different types of people involved who are practitioners of the faith.

Latinoreview: Is that the message you'd like viewers to take away from the film?

Nachmanoff: I don't like to say that it's one sort of message because then why bother even making it. It's like writing a book, if you can sum it up in two lines why did you bother writing the book? But I think one of the messages of the movie is that we certainly have to reevaluate our assumptions about other people and about other religions if we're going to understand them.

Latinoreview: Are you still involved in 'Prince of Persia'?

Nachmanoff: I don't have anything useful to say about it right now because I wrote it and they're now off and doing it and I believe that they have some other writers now too.

Latinoreview: How do you write something like that for cinema, something from a game?

Nachmanoff: Those are big movies and the challenge there is to create something that's original and entertaining, but movies those big are a director's and producer's medium and at the end of the day if you want to see my version of it you'd read my script. What they make I don't know at the end of the day. I can speak more easily to a movie like 'The Day After Tomorrow' which was a really big movie that I wrote and stayed on throughout the whole movie. That was an example not too dissimilar from this in that we take a popular idea, a popcorn disaster movie and we tried to work in some really fun but provocative topics into the movie. In that case it was global warming and U.S. immigration policy and other things that people might not normally want to think about in a popcorn movie. But while they're sitting there enjoying their entertainment you give them a few other things to think about.

Latinoreview: In your version of 'Prince of Persia' did you talk to gaming legend Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia back in the day and wrote the 1st draft of script?

Nachmanoff: I did speak to him once. He's the one who thought up the whole world there. As I said though Hollywood is an obscure process. You go through and invent a movie, but that movie might not be the movie that gets made.

Latinoreview: What's your thoughts on videogames becoming movies?

Nachmanoff: I think that anything can be the source of a movie. I think that you have to be willing to forget the source material a little bit to make a good movie. I think if you stay too true – things have a natural media that they work in so something that makes a great videogame then maybe that's what it's supposed to be and it's not supposed to be a movie. I'm not a big gamer, but I know that some of the most disappointing games for people have been the ones that came out of really successful movies. So if you make a really great movie – is 'The Matrix' game a good game, for example? I don't know. 'Prince of Persia' was a great game, and no disrespect to the creator of The Matrix game, but using that as an example, if you make a really cool movie like 'Matrix' and then they try to make a game out of it, but the game is just not as good – it just sometimes doesn't work that way. It's really hard for something to cross all platforms. Does 'X-Men' have a great game? I don't hear anyone talking about it and yet it was obviously a fantastic series in comics form and they made some really good and not as good movies out of it, but they were able to get certain things to work and then some of those things don't work. That's how it is with material.

Latinoreveiw: 'Halo' is another example of a great game.

Nachmanoff: But maybe it's not a movie, right. That won't stop them from trying though because there's millions of dollars to be made.


Latinoreview: How ironic is it that you wrote 'Prince of Persia' and 'Day After Tomorrow' and Jake Gyllenhaal is in both of them?

Nachmanoff: I know. That's funny. I was thinking about that and I haven't talked to Jake since he signed on to 'Prince of Persia', but it'd be a more interesting story if I actually was involved in it now. There's not too much to say or write about that because there's another director. If I was directing it I could talk about it.

Latinoreview: What's next for you?

Nachmanoff: I haven't found the next thing. Maybe I'll find a videogame [laughs].

Latinoreview: Is there a videogame or a comic book that you love and would like to see go to the film?

Nachmanoff: I'm not a big gamer so I don't have one that's top of my list. Obviously, some of my interests are connected to that world. A comic book is more likely than a videogame for me, frankly, and when you say comic book there are obviously some graphic novels that are really sophisticated. I get sent a lot of them and I just haven't found one yet that's the perfect one for me, but we'll see.

Latinoreview: Especially now with the success of 'Dark Knight'.

Nachmanoff: Yeah, the bar is set really high.

Source:Latino Review

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