ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Treasure stars Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry about the emotional comedy-drama. Bleecker Street’s film focuses on a father and daughter traveling to Poland for the first time since the father survived the Holocaust. The Julia von Heinz-directed film is now playing nationwide.
“A father-daughter road trip set in 1990s Poland, Treasure follows Ruth (Dunham), an American music journalist, and her father, Edek (Fry), a charmingly stubborn Holocaust survivor, on a journey to his homeland,” says the synopsis for Julia von Heinz’s movie. “While Ruth is eager to make sense of her family’s past, Edek embarks on the trip with his own agenda. This emotional, funny culture clash of two New Yorkers exploring post-socialist Poland is a powerful example of how reconnecting with family and the past can be an unexpected treasure.”
Tyler Treese: Stephen, in the beginning, your character is very much trying not to grapple with the trauma of his past and the effects of the Holocaust. It’s a very natural reaction and I feel it’s a very male thing to do as well, to very much push that away. What did you just find most interesting about really exploring that wall that people put up as a defense mechanism?
Stephen Fry: You’ve absolutely put your finger on it, I think. I had the experience of my own grandfather and other members of my mother’s side of the family who were European Jewish and who’d obviously, by definition, survived. The armor, or the wall as you put it, is a mixture of humor. Just flipping things away with a joke or just simply ignoring it.
It is understandable, as you also said, because you imagine going through that experience and then you arrive in America and, you literally, are in the land of freedom, there’s Lady Liberty when you arrive and all the cliches of Ellis Island, but you bring up a, a daughter and there we are in a free country, all that behind us. It’s very understandable. You don’t want to engage with it.
It’s equally understandable that some people could never escape it, that they’d be thinking about it and be sort of closed down. But my grandfather and Edek had had that similar thing of just being out there and embarrassing us as grandchildren by talking to strangers in the street and becoming instant best friends and all those things that Edek does. I just think it’s, and I saw this with the script; the character leaped off with such authenticity and truthfulness and his relationship with his daughter, which is such a profound and important thing. It just seems so true.
Lena, this film deals with a lot of heavy subjects, but there’s also a lot of really funny comedy here, and they really complement the beautiful dramatic scenes that you share with Stephen. I was really impressed by the sensitivity you show in those scenes. As a creative yourself, what did you like most about this balance of comedy and drama and finding this humor out of such trauma?
Lena Dunham: Well, I think what was, so, I mean, besides the irresistible fact of working with people as talented as Julia and Stephen, both of whom are heroes to me in different and essential ways, I was so excited to read a script that was willing to engage in the humor that is a survival mechanism for everybody who deals with trauma. The art of humor has been such an essential part of Jewish survival, and we find [it’s] such an essential part of the survival of anyone who has… We talked about this a lot in the process, is there’s pain, and then there always have to be jokes. Also, where there is family, there is comedy. It’s the essential recipe.
Stephen put it really well, which is, “There are films that are about history with a capital H, and those need to exist.” And I can’t take credit for that quote. That’s all him. “And then there are films about the people that have been affected by history and who come after history.” I think for me, I really did feel my job was to just stand there and sort of be as much as I could as scaffold for this incredibly affecting performance of Stephen’s. Because for a lot of the film, my character is sort of a petulant brat in that she has not yet been able to understand why her father is the way he is. It isn’t by going back to where they’re from. She does get what she wants, which is a glimpse of who her father is, but in a very different way than she expected. She develops an understanding of why she was raised the way she was raised.
I really related to that as a writer and as someone who grew up in a Polish Jewish immigrant family where these topics were not at front of mind. I was always the kid who was pushing and asking and demanding. And I’m sure it was maddening for the people around me. I feel like this film helped me understand deeply why my grandmother, my grandfather, who reminds me a great deal of Edek, and even my mother, there were things that they wanted to move forward, not backward. And they saw not sharing certain things as protection, whereas I saw truth as the antidote to everything. So in addition to an amazing creative experience, it allowed a lot of interpersonal understanding for me within my own family.
The director told me that you lived pretty much in the same place in New York City as the author of the book and your families were from the same part of Poland. It just seemed like meant to be.
Dunham: That was just a crazy coincidence. It was wild to me that her family came from the same place that mine did in Poland and that both of us ended up living in the same four-block radius or so in downtown New York in the 1980s, which was a place where there was a huge amount of… it was an incredibly diverse neighborhood where many kinds of immigrants came to live, but there was a huge preponderance of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The fact that we were able to share all of that, and she was so deeply moved because I think watching Stephen made her feel like she had her father back in a way.
Stephen, you talked about modeling your performance on your grandfather, and I love the little touches that you both put into the father-daughter relationship. I love how he’s always embarrassing her and talking her up. It is a very cute dynamic. How was it developing that back and forth with Lena?
Fry: It was made easy by the fact that I just fell in love with her the moment we met. Of course, she brought with her the amazing history of her career, which is so stellar. Girls knocked my socks off. That’s the right phrase? Blew them off. Oh, knocked me off my socks, something to do with socks [laughs], and a lot to do with sex. Let’s be honest. It was eyeopening for a gay man to want to see what was going on in this other species that I had only really heard about and hadn’t properly researched.
But no, we laughed all the time, and it was so sweet because Julia, the director, when she was quite nervous when we had our table read, and the moment Lena and I were together, she just looked at us and saw that we were family somehow straight away. Of course, in filming, especially when it gets to those more emotional moments, you need the confidence to try and fail in front of the camera to overdo it, underdo it, but not to be embarrassed, not in any way to be self-conscious, which is the absolute bane of a film actor’s life. Because the camera sees it. So the fact that I was so completely at ease with Lena made it really just a joy every day to share camera space with her and, indeed, share off-camera space.
Dunham: I just, I was saying I feel like from the minute that we arrived in Poland at the beginning. I mean, really, from the table. From the moment we arrived in Poland together in February to the moment that we wrapped at the beginning of May, I felt like we started a conversation that just never ended like it existed between takes; it existed during takes, and that’s not something that you can necessarily create. It’s there.
You can try to create bonds with people, but it’s a bit like a blind date where you show up, and you go hoping this all works as planned. From the minute, he was such a hero of mine that, of course, there’s that nervousness. But he made me so comfortable, his sense of humor, his way of being. He really did feel related to me and has continued to. And I think that long, cold winter would’ve been a very different thing had I not been laughing and smiling and feeling so safe and realizing I was developing a familial relationship off-camera as well.
Fry: So don’t forget the moment I arrived in Poland. I tested positive for Covid. They had to film the only scenes in which you were on your own.
Dunham: Correct. They said, “We have some good news. Stephen made it. We have some less good news. He has Covid.” And I went and I stuck a note under his door. I was on the verge of asking if he wanted to play cards under the door, but I don’t wanna overdo it. But the minute that he got out there, he brought the spirit.
I always brag about the moment that he delivered his big scene where he speaks Polish throughout the entire scene to the family that has taken over the home that he lived in when he was younger. I have never seen this before. The entire crew gave him a standing ovation, and that was like one of those moments where you go, “I will never forget this. This is why we do what we do.”