Fresh from Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman is keeping the faith
Music grounds Jason Schwartzman, one of the movie industry’s most prolific stars. Now featuring in Between the Temples, he says he worries about losing his Jewish faith ‘all the time’.
Jason Schwartzman has been busy. The 44-year-old actor and musician, best known for his roles in seven Wes Anderson movies, also works extensively with his family.
The son of Talia Shire, Francis Ford Coppola’s sister, who famously played Connie Corleone in the Godfather trilogy and Adrian Balboa in the Rocky series, Schwartzman has a part as a city resident in his uncle’s Megalopolis, now in cinemas.
Last month at The Venice International Film Festival he was impressive as Daniel Craig’s friend in Queer, where Variety noted that as the “sassy, heartfelt” Joe he “delivers what may be his finest performance yet”, and that he may be up for awards, as will Craig, who played a version of William S. Burroughs, on whose book Luca Guadagnino’s film is based.
While Schwartzman looks weightier than usual in the movie, he was his usual fashionable self on the red carpet and at the film’s premiere.
Schwartzman had two films in Venice, also playing a record label boss in Pavements, a semi-fictionalised look at the rise, fall, and return of ’90s indie rock band Pavement, by director Alex Ross Perry, for whom Schwartzman starred in the 2014 comedy drama, Listen Up Philip.
As for his work in 2023, social network film site Letterboxd honoured him as the most watched male actor of the year, with Margot Robbie the most watched female actor.
Schwartzman not only co-starred with Scarlett Johansson in Anderson’s Asteroid City, he voiced the dastardly Spot in the hit animated feature, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; he sported a massive moustache as the first games show host in prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and was a game show contestant in Quiz Lady, co-starring Awkwafina and Will Ferrell, available on Disney+.
“I can’t believe it, but I am very grateful,” Schwartzman says of his burgeoning career. “All I want to do is to go to work every day and not waste other people’s time. I aim to do the best I can.”
We meet at The Berlin International Film Festival in February to discuss the independent feature, Between the Temples, screening around Australia at the upcoming Jewish Film Festival.
Nathan Silver’s chaotic comedy drama, which was rapturously received at the Sundance Film Festival in January and then did well at the US box office, follows Schwartzman’s depressed cantor (Torah singer), Ben Gottlieb, who works at a synagogue in upstate New York but can no longer sing. Reeling from his wife’s death, he even lies in front of a truck.
He is certainly uninterested in the romantic set-ups his comically overbearing Jewish mothers (he has two, Caroline Aaron and the always hilarious Dolly De Leon, from Triangle of Sadness) try to force on him.
Ben’s life is changed when his former primary school teacher, newly retired Carla, played by Carol Kane, becomes his adult bat mitzvah student and they become close. He is smitten with her.
“I think it’s interesting, because Ben’s in a moment where he’s sort of losing faith,” Schwartzman says. “And she comes to him saying, ‘Give me some faith.’ And he says, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m not the right person to help you with this, because I don’t know if I can.’ So that’s his struggle. But her character is so alive that she really pushes Ben to become alive in a way that he doesn’t think he can.”
The film marks the return of 72-year-old Kane, a comic life force known for Taxi, The Princess Bride, Annie Hall, Scrooged and her Oscar-nominated turn in Hester Street.
“She’s such a big part of my movie-going experience,” Schwartzman notes. “When Nathan was talking about casting Carla and suggested Carol it was the perfect choice. She felt just right. When I first met her, I was like ‘Wow, everything I love about you is true and you’re also more surprising than I would have imagined’.
“When she came in to do the first scene, I didn’t know we were rolling, but she had the whole thing figured out. She’s just a mate and to work with her was amazing. She was very open, also, about how nervous she was in the improvised conditions.”
The film’s humour is sweet and deadbeat, and Schwartzman shows his skill at physical comedy.
“I’m glad people think it’s funny, but it wasn’t like a funny movie to make. There wasn’t a lot of high-fiving on the set. Usually I don’t think about comedy, I just sort of do whatever is happening. But one thing that was weird was that Nathan was very particular about how slowly I spoke, because directors always say to go faster, faster, faster, especially in comedies like that. So that made it feel extra unfunny, because there was so much space. He would say to take 15 seconds before I answered a question.”
In a way you were the straight man, I suggest.
“Well, I think so. I didn’t think it was funny, but when we saw the film in a theatre, there were so many funny things that I’d missed.”
Schwartzman’s producer father, Jack Schwartzman, who died of cancer when Jason was 14, was Jewish, while Shire has Catholic Italian roots. In the past the actor has said he is proud to be Jewish, though today he is skittish on the subject, even if he has played Jewish characters throughout his career and grew up close with his father’s family.
Does he worry about losing his faith?
“Yes, all the time. I love music and I play music: to me, sometimes the scariest times are when I’m struggling to connect with music. That’s when I know things are bad. The most excited I feel about religion and the universe, and everything, is when I hear a beautiful piece of music or see great beauty.”
Schwartzman developed his love of music through his mother while growing up in Los Angeles. “I am grateful that I grew up next to my mother,” he says.
“I had a very interesting childhood, because this whole side of the family loved cinema and music with great passion. At the same time, I didn’t grow up on movie sets or lead a lavish lifestyle. All the Hollywood glamour was hidden from the family.
“When I came home from school, my mother would watch an old movie on TV or listen to music at full volume, and I saw how much these things affected her and made her happy. I witnessed how powerful such things can be. My mother didn’t particularly encourage me to be a musician or an actor. Although I hated her musical taste, I got a lot from it.”
He shares his love of music with his cousin, Sofia Coppola, married to Thomas Mars, the frontman of French band Phoenix, who played at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics. “When I was 11 Sofia gave me a tape of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and I love her for that.” Schwartzman played King Louis XVI in Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.
Recently he has worked with his other cousins, appearing in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson; he is part of the sequel Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse with Nicolas Cage, and has long collaborated with director-writer-producer Roman Coppola.
Prior to acting Schwartzman was drummer and songwriter for the band Phantom Planet. He has released three albums through his solo musical project, Coconut Records, and hopes to make a new one. Among many past efforts, he contributed to Australian musician Ben Lee’s 2005 album, Awake is the New Sleep, and in 2015 played the drums on Phoenix’s rendition of The Beach Boys’ Alone on Christmas Day, which featured in Sofia Coppola’s Netflix special, A Very Murray Christmas, where he appeared alongside Bill Murray.
Schwartzman has also composed the theme music for television series, including The White Lotus creator Mike White’s Cracking Up and Bored to Death – and he starred in both. Also a talented writer, he co-wrote Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and the story for The French Dispatch, and developed and wrote the series Mozart in the Jungle.
He also appeared in Anderson’s The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel, the director’s biggest box office hit. He provided the voice of Meryl Streep and George Clooney’s son in the animated film Fantastic Mr Fox and co-wrote Isle of Dogs, which actually makes it eight films with Anderson.
He says he owes his career to the director who cast him in his debut film, 1998’s Rushmore, a coming-of age-story where he had pimples, braces and an indomitable spirit, and appeared alongside Murray.
“I’m grateful to be thought of with Wes, because he’s my mentor and he discovered me,” Schwartzman says, and then demurs.
“He entered my life when I was 17 at this key moment and he was my escort into discovering cinema in a different way. He was the first adult to ask me as a teenager, ‘What do you think?’. He actually cared. Adults typically don’t do that and it awakened me; I felt so heard. Our relationship continues to be that way – it’s all about enthusiasm for discovery and sharing.”
So how does Anderson compare with his uncle Francis?
“Wes has an idea of the whole thing, but Francis is very open for you to bring what happens. It’s a whole different feeling. It was like, if it’s not working right, let’s just shoot it. It’s very exciting. What I witnessed on the set was someone not settling for just talking. It was really alive and really fun, and he always wants to try things that are completely new. They’re both different, but fun.”
Schwartzman has been married to art and design director Brady Cunningham since 2009 and they have three children. Even if he is now a family man, he still seems boyish, I tell him.
“You know, my son was asked recently, what’s it like to have such a kooky dad? And I was like, ‘Don’t answer the question.’ Is that crazy? Well, I hope that I’m boyish. I’m excited to be thought of that way, but I’m also excited to be a father and a husband.”
As he then stands up to leave, he holds his back and grimaces.
“Oh my God, my back doesn’t think I’m boyish. My L5 doesn’t.”
Between the Temples screens around the country at the Jewish Film Festival from November 7. Megalopolis is currently in cinemas.
More Coverage
Loneliness reigns in feel-sad film of year
Beautiful to look at and humorous in its reflections on the 1970s, Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail touches on important aspects of being human.
This is the best film I’ve seen this year
This deeply moving, highly intelligent film is about love, loss, grief, regret, repressed emotions, healing and the value of human connection. Its star should receive an Oscar nomination.