Vanity Fair: I understand you had a script for Yes and were already in preproduction before the Oct. 7 attacks.
Nadav Lapid: We had the main cast and were halfway to the financing, which was easy to find before and impossible to find after.
Yet the film opens with logos from many production entities, including the Israel Film Fund and the Ministry of Culture and Sports. That department has not been your biggest supporter in the past. How did this alignment happen?
The question is good, and the answer is boring. People imagine the Israel Film Fund, and they imagine Netanyahu’s secretary reading scripts. It’s an office in Tel Aviv. The head is a cinephile; she has a small committee, and they liked my work. [The Fund] is no one from the Israel that we have in mind—the fascistic, authoritarian, militarist Israel. No one who works for the state was aware of the film before its premiere at Cannes. And since then, they have attacked it several times.
Now there has been a shift. The Minister of Culture has already forced reforms that would make films like mine impossible. He said something like I offended our pure and sanctified soldiers, and he gave a solemn oath that so long as he is there, I won’t get one penny more.
There is an irony to this, which plays into the binary nature of the film’s title: Many who support Palestinians will boycott your film because it got money from the Fund. And even if you did work exclusively with French money, they may still boycott you, as an Israeli.
I think people who wouldn’t watch the film because of the logo of the Israel Film Fund wouldn’t have watched the film without that logo. They wouldn’t watch because it is Israeli, because I am Israeli, and they’re unable to deal with complexity. And they should be sincere enough to admit it to themselves. I think that they’re incapable of accepting the fact that maybe the most radical movie about this topic is done by an Israeli.
Art should always be free and strange and surprising. Art should always put us in a conflict with ourselves. In their head, since I’m Israeli and since the film takes place in Tel Aviv, it’s done from inside the Israeli universe, and there’s already something that isn’t legitimate. And if they would have watched the movie, they would have had to deal with the fact that despite all of this, the movie goes very far in content and form. They prefer to make the easy choice, which is ignoring anything that might harm their sterile and hermetic concept of the world. Especially those who live in Western society.
When they march in Geneva, London, Paris or New York shouting Free Palestine—which is very good—they don’t consider the fact that they talk from a certain place. An American student in Boston is in a very safe place to talk about this. People who come from such safe places should think not twice, but twenty times before they give moral lessons to people who take risks.
