Tovah Feldshuh Interview

Tovah Feldshuh

My interview with Tovah Feldshuh was what every really lazy interviewer hopes to have. I literally said, “Go,” and she started talking. Every so often I’d repeat the last thing she’d have said just so she’d know I was listening, […]

by Chris Neumer

Extra Information

My interview with Tovah Feldshuh was what every really lazy interviewer hopes to have. I literally said, “Go,” and she started talking. Every so often I’d repeat the last thing she’d have said just so she’d know I was listening, but for the most part Feldshuh took this interview and ran with it. This is the exact opposite of my interview with Luis Guzman. This is more notable than you might realize, so I mention it.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: What I can contribute to you is backstory. Which is what happened before the film got made.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, I understand that your part was written especially for you.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Should I yak now?

CHRIS NEUMER: Go. Yak.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I was an understudy at the Guthrie Theater as a McKnight fellow in acting the early ‘70’s. It was my first job in theater and I was the youngest in the company. I understudied all the leading ladies that were size 7 because I’m little. When a leading lady was wonderful to me, it made all the world of difference. And when they were frightened or weird or jealous, it made all the world of difference. It made my job so very very difficult. I didn’t do anything but be quiet, hang back and memorize their parts in case, God forbid, they got sick. When I became a leading lady soon after that, fortunately for me, I was also very kind to my understudies because I had understudied for two years myself. I went to the George Street Playhouse 25 years later to play the title in a piece called Sarah and Abraham by Marcia Norman. I had an understudy named Amy Wilson, she was an apprentice in the company, an intern, something similar to me being a fellow at the Guthrie Theater many years before. She was twenty years my junior and she looked just like me. She was my understudy and I was very kind to her. As a matter of fact I paid her to test me on lines, so she was testing me on the part that she had to learn anyway.

CHRIS NEUMER: So you were very kind to her.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I was. I loved her. She was a wonderful. I said to her–George Street is in New Jersey, it’s in Brunswick–”When you come to New York, if you need a job, if you’re not acting, you call me.” And she did. And for so much an hour she worked as my assistant at the Tovah Corp., which does custom, made concerts and one-woman shows , basically runs my professional life. It’s the best thing I ever did for myself, because I run my family and I run the soccer team when I coached soccer, so there comes a time in an actor’s life when it’s not appropriate to be at the bottom of the power pyramid. You want to seize your authority as a human being as an artist as a creator, as an actor manager of your own destiny. I bring this up because this is precisely what Jennifer Westfeldt did much, much earlier in her life than I did. Amy Wilson went to Yale. She worked for me for four years. After two years, I said to her, “You went to Yale, how’d you do in school?” She said, “Oh, I did okay.” I said, “With honors?” She said, “yeah.” I said, “Cum Laude?” “No.” “Magna?” “No.” “Summa Cum Laude?” She said, “yes”. So this Amy Wilson had been with me for 24 months before I pulled out of her her academic record. I almost died. So I had this brilliantly overqualified assistant and they were wonderful heyday years, as they still are, of Tovah Out of Her Mind, which is about to open in the West End, and she had a friend at Yale, a young girl, who was waiting at tables at Sarah Beth’s Kitchen named Jennifer Westfeldt. She said, “My girlfriend could use some work too, if you have any space.”

CHRIS NEUMER: When was that?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Oh my God! They were young. Not that they’re old now. We made Kissing Jessica Stein, what, eighteen months ago, I believe. Twenty-four months ago, because last September, God helps us, was September 11. And I know darn well that we weren’t–so I was starring in a play I wrote called Tallulah Hallelujah, I was playing Tallulah Bankhead and filming Kissing Jessica Stein and this is all because of Jennifer Westfeldt. I owe everything to her. And I love Heather Juergensen, I love Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, obviously, they had to come to an agreement that I come on board the project, and to them I’m very grateful, but the seed of this began in my personal relationship with this wonderful, remarkable, magical human being.

CHRIS NEUMER: Who was waiting on tables.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: You bet. You know Jennifer, I think she was managing, she started to be the head person, to manage the restaurant. She’s not a take-over person, she just has extraordinary managerial skills and these kids got this whole movie done on a shoestring and a dream. All those clothes–I wore all my own clothing for God’s sakes. This must have been when Jennifer was 22 or 23, she was fresh out of Yale. I can tell you right now ’96. I met her in ’96. That is precisely right. She was at the computer helping me. Another friend, Melissa Wolf, she was a little younger, she was putting together furniture for me–we’d gone to IKEA and she was putting together a bookshelf for my son–so all these brilliant kids were running around the house for so much an hour helping me orchestrate my life and live my life as my own work of art and properly run the house with my kids and husband. It’s a great job here, you can have your lunch here, just go right in the kitchen and you can bring your laundry up, so anyway, Jennifer was at the computer and she lasted there a few weeks, she was, of course a very good typist. Her secretarial skills were impeccable, she’s a brilliant kid, having gone to Yale and graduated Magna Cum Laude herself. Then I was doing my one-woman show and I said, “Come in the living room take a look at this and take a legal pad and I will shout out things that I need to work out.” So I would shout out these things and she would write them down. Sometimes she’d give me feedback and I thought her feedback was awfully good. And I made her a creative consultant on this one-woman show and that was in ’96.

CHRIS NEUMER: When you say that she’d offer you insightful feedback, do you have any specifics or examples–

TOVAH FELDSHUH: She’s brutally honest. She has really wonderful qualities of tough love, which I enjoy. When she doesn’t enjoy something, at least with me because she’s close to me, she’ll say, “This doesn’t work.” Or “you have to cut this.” Or “I don’t believe this.” So what she was really able to do was tell me what she thought stunk. And she has a very high standard. Some of the stuff she said was no good I still do in my one woman show with success. Not all of it, but a few things. I believe in it. But that’s okay. I respect her opinion enormously. And from this relationship with the one-woman show, we became friends for a long time. She kept saying, “We’ve got to do Gypsy together, we’ve got to do Gypsy together.” Which we never did. She was this little pitzalah. She was struggling.

CHRIS NEUMER: Pitzalah, huh?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Pitzalah. A little kid. She was struggling to get going here, she had mounds and mounds of enormous talent and was trying to distinguish herself, which she pretty much did. Eventually she was writing, she was writing stuff, and she met Heather Juergensen and they were going to write this play called Lipschtick and we all went to she Lipschtick. I think it was in the bottom of a church, it was called the Skylight Theater on west 71st street and it was a very successful night. It was after that play she said, “I want you to play my mother.” And I said, “I can’t play the part that you wrote for your mother in this, it’s a wonderful play but there’s not enough there. I love you very much, but I wouldn’t, I’m going to do this.” She said, “It’s going to be a screenplay.” And I said, “Whatever you say, dear.” If it came down to me doing, what I thought was some student film, up on 135th Street near the East River, she’s a dear, dear friend, if I could possibly do it for her, I would do it for her. That’s how it ended up. It ended up as this extraordinary film. The metaphor I’m giving you now is: it’s every American dream of the underdog making it through or the Horatio Alger of rugged individualism of this young woman with a burning dream and desire to make it in our business and this was how she found a way to do that. She now has fancy managers and UTA representatives, heavy batting agents.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, I know, I have had to get in touch with her too.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: She’s all set. I’m not saying she won’t struggle ahead because, just like the porch scene, that was really autobiographical, talking to her about saying, “She doesn’t join a project when it stinks.” She won’t even join it if the part is great. If I feel the part is great… hold on one second. If a part is great, I take it. I take it less enthusiastically now than when I was in my twenties, but if I love the part I take it. Even if the play isn’t great. I don’t care. In the sense that I’m an actor and I act. That’s what I do. A basketball player plays basketball. Sometimes the court isn’t as beautiful as we’d like it, but Jennifer is not of that mind. If she feels that the piece is flawed, she doesn’t want to be part of it. It’s denotes two things: one, she can see the whole piece, which is an ability itself. A lot of people can only see their part. As a matter of fact, I think that was one of my big blessings, because what can happen is you’re in a project that isn’t so spectacular, but you can be fantastic in it. And if you keep showing up fantastic, fantastic, fantastic guess what happens? People get wind of it. But then the levels of your projects changes anyway. So it’s a question of you deciding whether you want to being up to bat suits you. For me, it’s good. For Jennifer, it really hasn’t to be perfect.

CHRIS NEUMER: So there is a lot of real life put into that scene.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I think so. I’m not saying it has to be perfect all the time, she’s not jerky, she’s very brilliant, she’ll compromise, she’s not insane. But she’s able to see things that other people aren’t able to see and it is her burden. She was able to see that the film needed editing when everyone else thought it was finished, from what I understand. She went in for the final, final tweaking, because she could see things and other people had finished. That to me is genius. That’s the vertical climb between the A minus and the A plus. You have to have very strong arms to take you up the side of that mountain.

CHRIS NEUMER: Or to accept the fact that something you’re doing that is so close to you really does need some tweaking. That’s hard to do too.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I think she’s the exact opposite. She’s a ruthless cutter and editor.

CHRIS NEUMER: I think one of the things that stood out for me in Kissing Jessica Stein was how it was made for a hair under a million dollars and this film looked like a $10-$15 million budget. It looked good and people worked to make it look like that. It’s interesting to see that what propelled this was a lot of youthful passion and spit and elbow grease.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I would say that’s not always true. A lot of people put spit and polish and love and care towards something and come out with garbage. That’s really the problem. The thing about this piece is that it had spit and polish and it chose the right staff to also work at the same value level and artistic level… and that’s not easy. If you look at the acting, the acting is uniformly great in this piece. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but that had to do with Jennifer and Heather putting together these readings and insisting that we read this and we read that and it got very clear what they could eliminate and who they could cut and that’s what they did. They got a great art designer and a great cinematographer, but gee whiz, how does this happen? Who sees what? I think they meticulously went through all sorts of work of different directors before they hooked up with Charles Herman-Wurmfeld and I found him very good. The standards with which Jennifer and Heather are able to see things permeated their choices on the whole project. So the whole project was done exactly right but with the help and love of other people. My question to you is this: what other people? A lot of these other people were sterling. They were outstanding.

CHRIS NEUMER: I just realized that for you, being such an integral part of Jennifer’s life when she and Heather were doing Lipschtick, you had the opportunity to see a lot of the transitions that were made between play and feature film almost as an outside observer. Were there a lot of significant changes that were made in that time? I know there were, but were there any particularly significant changes to you?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: My actual part was expanded, so I was very grateful for that. But the piece just got much tighter. There was this constant quest to write the ending. This constant exploration of how to finish this film and the difficulty that they embarked on in trying to tie up the pieces of the film.

CHRIS NEUMER: I know they had gone through several different edits of that one before settling on one. I think they even changed the ending after they submitted it to Sundance–

TOVAH FELDSHUH: That’s right.

CHRIS NEUMER: but the ending is one of the places in the film that make it stand out from the rest of the romantic comedy genre. Most films would end with the Ella Fitzgerald montage, this one went further. It was real.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I loved the ending. It gives us all choices and it deals with sexuality as a continuum and as sexuality as a way to connect with another person so Helen remains with her lover and Jessica has the possibility of hooking up again with Josh. Josh… Scott Cohen. I loved the ending because it embraced a lot of different possibilities. I’m sure a good ending does what everybody wants it to do: it will be enjoyed by many and will offend some as well (laughs). Will it offend the militant lesbians… I don’t know. (sighs) I was up at the film festival up at Boston and they skewered the ending. They thought the ending wasn’t great. I said, “Why? Only one of them goes back to men.. The other stays with a woman.”

CHRIS NEUMER: that was the militant lesbian take on it?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Yeah, the idea that she has to go back and I just took it apart. Immediately I spoke to her and said, “One of them leaves, one of them stays with a man.” I love the scene where Jessica tries the jacket on and is like, “It’s so big, it’s so big.” That seems to be vs. being with a woman where they’re trading clothes rather than borrowing a jacket to stay warm.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s interesting! God knows how many times I’ve seen this film and I’ve never picked up on that.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: It hinged on me. Remember it?

CHRIS NEUMER: On top of the Armory Building.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Right. She says, “It’s cold at the wedding.” Jessica is cold and Josh lends her his jacket.

CHRIS NEUMER: And it’s big. I’ve been interested on the take by both sexualities on this film. Whenever I hear that gay communities have a problem with this film, I raise an eyebrow because the film suggests that it is nature, not nurture that is where homosexuality stems. And that’s a progressive, new argument to where this comes from, and it seems like that would be embraced by the gay community. But no…

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Right.

CHRIS NEUMER: Why is that film works on so many levels? After I saw a lot of the scenes that were cut out of this, a lot of the hard-core sociological statements were cut out. There’s a scene when Helen comes out to Martin, for example. All the hard lined, hard core takes on what homosexuality is were taken out. But strangely, it seemed as though, in the end, this worked to its benefit.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I agree. I agree with this because it’s more inclusive, because it gently beckons you to look at the alternatives rather than slamming it over your head.

CHRIS NEUMER: Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to get hit in the head with a 2×4 every once in a while, especially if they’re telling you what the point of the film is, but if they want me to take anything away from the film, this is the right way to go.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Right. Funny, huh?

CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like there’s a large portion of the American public that just wants to be angry at something, it doesn’t matter what.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: We had a great time filming this. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld ran a nice set. He’s a friendly guy and relates very nicely to people. There were very little–I experienced very little internal tension on this set. That’s interesting to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: So the biggest problems you guys faced were lost locations or things like that.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Yeah… I guess. I didn’t know much about that either. I had only two or three locations, so that was it for me. The leads faced all sort of things and they were actor producers, so that was an enormous burden on them. Jennifer and Heather too I guess, I’m more exposed to Jennifer’s journey on this. Every single detail was a problem. Finding locations, scouting locations, it was all a big deal. I loved filming it though. I’ve done six or seven independent films in the last two years and this was the most commercially successful, but there’s a reason for that. Very often, you’ll get on a set when it’s first go and the script is nice, but it’s also the first go for the cameraman or the sound man and the sound man is an incompetent. And if the sound man is incompetent then the whole set becomes about sound, the whole movie becomes about sound because he’s so weak. That did not happen on Kissing Jessica Stein.

CHRIS NEUMER: And this was a virtual rookie effort for everyone on board. Charlie hadn’t done anything and Eden hadn’t produced anything and the girls hadn’t done much either. They were very experienced first timers then?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Very much.

CHRIS NEUMER: Can you account for that in any way?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: What, them being experienced first timers?

CHRIS NEUMER: yes.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: You know something, I think it’s like school. There are a few ‘A’s, a few ‘B’s a lot of ‘C’s a few D’s and some ‘F’s I think they’re A students, they’ve got the mental chops for it, the intellectual and the intelligence markers to encompass what it means to make a film and do it well. It’s absolutely astonishing what they’ve done. It’s a first film! It’s insane! It not like Jennifer Westfeldt or Heather Juergensen have been making films all their lives either. I think Jennifer did a little television and I don’t even know what films Heather has ever done, but she’s fantastic on film. She doesn’t push ever, really good acting. Authentic and true stuff. I chalk it up to their native intelligence and diligence to master this form. They also knew it was there shot. This is the shot. This is it. Take it and make it great. I’m not saying any of this is easier.

CHRIS NEUMER: But it’s a motivator. And when you have a good product, it would also help some things in the long run.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: That’s right.

CHRIS NEUMER: So approaching this project from the perspective of an accomplished veteran actress, it wasn’t very hard to step onto the set and work with these people.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: No. I thought they were very gifted and they had good taste. They pretty much left me alone. They said, “You’re great, let’s roll it.” A lot of the smart directors do that. Sidney Lumet’s famous for that. He doesn’t direct at all from the set. You audition for him and then you have two weeks of rehearsals where he’ll make suggestions and then you get to the set to shoot and he goes, “I’m the luckiest director in the whole world.”

CHRIS NEUMER: It’s the directing by not directing principle.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Directing through empowerment. Directing through the belief in the person. I was fortunate enough to have great directors before I coached small girls in soccer–I coach 5-10 year olds in soccer–and I really used a lot of what they taught me on the field.

CHRIS NEUMER: And that was what?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I taught them very diligently and taught them the technique of kicking the ball and strategies of play and practicing and hired a better coach for them. Then when we’d get to the game, I’d warm them up and then I’d always say, “Shut your eyes,” and they’d shut their eyes, these 15 kids and they would say, “I am beautiful, I am unique, I am my coach’s treasures and I will take care of my sisters on the field.” Then we’d go out and have a great time. And we came in first and then second in the league (laughs). It had nothing to do with just the way you kick a ball, it had to do with the empowerment of the individual to connect within a community and take care of one another. To have enough abundance to take care of one another. There was a lot of abundance in my mind on the set of Kissing Jessica Stein. Certainly when I was doing my little bit there was. On the days that I worked there was good food, good people, kindness. A lot of care. A lot of caring.

CHRIS NEUMER: The last thing I have for you now is there any particular way that you went about approaching the character of Judy Stein?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: It was very kind of them to write it for me. Jennifer must have had that in mind. It was set in the town I grew up it and my father had recently died when I met Jennifer, so she put the name of my father as my husband in the show. It was Judy and Sidney Stein. That was incredibly kind. Then she set it in Scarsdale where my mother Lily still lives. I approached it as if I were born to play it. I used a lot of my mom in it and got up there and did what every good mother does which is to infinitely love their children. I love my own children so and I certainly love Jennifer Westfeldt, so it was like getting into a warm tub, this part. And I’m proud of all our work in it and I got the Jewish Image Award, which I’m going to be flown to Beverly Hills to pick up from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture. So that was really nice, for the part of Judy Stein. Tolerant intelligent mother that she is.

CHRIS NEUMER: Congratulations.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: I got that for film and my friends from Max Bixford, Richard Dreyfuss, Eli Wallach and Ian Goldberg got it for Max Bixford. I was very pleased.

CHRIS NEUMER: Was there any trepidation about approaching a role specifically written for you?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: It’s like you’re stuff, I’m sure. You love what you do, I love what I do. So no job is ever a job as usual, nothing, nothing, nothing.

CHRIS NEUMER: There is no typical.

TOVAH FELDSHUH: There is no typical, baby. If you’re typical you might as well slit your wrists. Forget it. Unless you’re so exhausted… I don’t know, maybe the repetition of a certain project on Broadway, but I was on Broadway for 13 months for my last run and I would always say before I went on stage, “This is the only September 6, 2002 I will have the opportunity to do this play, at this time, in this theater with these people.” I would literally say that to myself and then I’d get on as if I were going to die tomorrow and do it. So it was good. It was a good role; I got my third Tony nomination. Carpe Diem. Take it, enjoy it and live it fully while it lasts. It wasn’t business as usual, I was thrilled to be in the piece, I was concerned because I was rehearsing a play while I was filming, but I felt very lucky that the part was written specifically for me so that I could do the part with ease and authority and relax. I didn’t have everything worked out, I just got up there and learned my lines and improvised some, which they welcomed, I was very lucky. I wrote the Nobu line, “we have reservations at Nobu and not at 5:30.” Little things. They let me put in my little things. Eventually after reading my part aloud for them, my little idiosyncrasies were scripted into the piece. It was fun. It was like wearing a nice glove that fits. I was very pleased to do it and felt very comfortable doing it. I hope to be in Jennifer’s NEXT project. I’d be happy to play her mother again. Maybe the head of her company or something. Hector Burlioz said that the only things that mattered in life were work and love. And when he was dying he said that the only thing that mattered is love. It is love of the art that gave birth to this project. It is my relationship with Jennifer Westfeldt that gave birth to my participation. It’s something to learn in life that it’s not just your skill that gets you places. Your skill is only a small piece of the equation. You have to have what the older generation would call charm. You have to be able to function in a community.