Lena Dunham knows she’s normally a chatty person. That wasn’t always the case on the set of his new tragicomic film, Treasure.
“I usually have a lot of words, but I just don’t have any,” she told Yahoo Entertainment of filming at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. “Being there… you have a temporary experience of what the people there had, which is a complete removal of your voice.
“There is a city out there. Life goes on because life goes on for people everywhere, but it’s scary,” she added.
In Treasure, Dunham stars as Ruth, a recently divorced journalist who travels from New York to Poland with her Holocaust survivor father Edek (Stephen Fry). Edek jovially sabotages the planned tour of the village where she was born and was forced by the Nazis to leave, wandering around, flirting with women and singing in bars. He questions why Ruth wants to revisit the loss of her home and her suffering in Auschwitz in the first place.
Dunham is best known for the projects she wrote and starred in, such as the ever-popular HBO series Girls. Although she didn’t write Treasure, her starring role and the recent discovery that one of her relatives survived the Holocaust deepened her connection to the film. Dunham said her character Ruth, determined to confront the trauma suffered by her family members while struggling with distinct personal issues, is “deeply relatable.”
“I hope that in [portraying Ruth] I can shed light on the concept of transgenerational trauma that would welcome not just Jewish people, but anyone who comes from a family that keeps secrets, where darkness is passed from one generation to the next,” she said.
German writer and director Julia von Heinz adapted the script from a novel by Lily Brett with the help of the author herself. Von Heinz told Yahoo Entertainment that it took her 10 years to put the film together.
“I had such a strong motivation to make this film that I never lost energy,” she said. Growing up in Germany, she received extensive education about the Holocaust – through facts, figures and “horrible documentaries.”
“We wouldn’t dare associate this with humor. No teacher would allow themselves to make jokes,” she said. “It made everything so static that we didn’t really feel the horror of the Holocaust… so I wanted to convey the humor and emotion of [Brett’s book] for the film.”
Fry told Yahoo Entertainment that he knows it’s every actor’s dream to be in a “blockbuster or wonderful Hollywood movie,” but bringing von Heinz’s art to life was a “privilege.”
Fry’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. The actor said that, like his character Edek, his grandfather had a “slightly exaggerated zest for life…hugging and befriending strangers and embarrassing me.”
When preparing for the role, Fry thought deeply about what it would mean to survive a death camp — and what it would mean to revisit that trauma so many years after it occurred, as his character does.
“On the surface you think they’re the lucky ones… but to actually survive… I suspect it would be impossible without abandoning some of their humanity. You had to take care of yourself,” he said. “For a while, all you see is the worst that humans are capable of. …You see each day and the next with no hope that the day will ever end…if by some miracle you can get to New York…and smell freedom on every street…why would you Want to go back there, in that nightmare?
Fry said he knows it sounds “pretentious” when actors dive into roles, but for him it’s the most effective way to embody the character — even in this case.
“The only way to do this properly is to imagine what it’s like to actually be that person, and not just say the lines,” he said. “We have to think about where they come from, and in this case, it’s from the darkest place imaginable.”
Even in the abject darkness, for Fry, there is humor. He wanted it to shine in Treasure.
“If I saw a film about a serious subject and there was no humor in it, it would be like seeing a film where the people had no noses,” he said. “Laughter is a magnificently important part of survival.”
