Defiant

Director Ed Zwick takes a page (and an actor) from James Bond to blast the common view of Jews as passive WWII victims

Director Ed Zwick (right) says the actors in ''Defiance'' endured some of their characters' hardships - especially Daniel Craig (center, with Mark Feuerstein). (Karen Ballard/Paramount Vantage)

Popular history tells us the Jews of Europe rarely resisted Hitler's Final Solution. Director Ed Zwick says that's just not true.

"The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto has seemed to stand in as if it were the only incidence of resistance, and it has been popularized again and again in novels and in movie form," Zwick said. "But as I began to do research, what was remarkable to me was how prevalent resistance was."

Zwick's new movie, "Defiance," opening in Boston on Friday, tells the true story of a group of Eastern European Jews who fled to the woods when the Nazis invaded and formed a thriving guerrilla movement. Zwick ("Blood Diamond," "Glory") directed and co-wrote with friend Clay Frohman, who'd given him a book about the saga. Zwick cast Daniel Craig - the new James Bond! - as the leader of these gunslinging Jewish heroes. They represent many others whose stories have not been told.

"There were all of these moments. Small groups went into the woods, and other groups joined the Russians. There were street battles in the ghettos; and even in the concentration camps, at Tre blinka and Sobibor, there were these attempts," Zwick said in an interview at a Boston hotel. "If you read the Book of Judges, it's the 'Iliad' of a warrior culture. That's who they had been."

Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell star as brothers Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski, rough-edged sons of a farmer in a rural corner of what is now Belarus. In 1941, after their parents and Tuvia's wife and child were killed, they escaped to the forest and led a partisan cadre. Zus, hungry to fight the Germans, eventually joined up with the Russian Army. But Tuvia became the reluctant leader of an ever-growing woodland camp where hundreds of Jews survived the war. Tuvia and Asael even take "forest wives," Lilka (Alexa Davalos) and Chaya (Mia Wasikowska).

The movie sinks the viewer into the hardships of that forest camp, the cold, hunger, and deprivation. On location in Lithuania in late 2007, Zwick and cinematographer Eduardo Serra ("Blood Diamond") worked to make that happen.

"First of all, when it's really cold anyway and the breath is real, you don't have to work that hard," Zwick said. "And the snow on the ground is real and people are really shivering, that's real. But there was a great attempt to keep them dirty, and make it about two potatoes and one pot . . .

"We chose very carefully, though it's subtle, never to see the sky," he said. "We basically kept all direct sunlight out of the movie. The idea that you're in some penumbral world gives a real feeling, kind of an oppressive feeling. . . And remember, we're very far north around the Baltic, just below Finland. You're approaching winter, the light is low, the sun is never overhead . . . it's like the Bergman movies."

Zwick had won the confidence of the Bielski descendants, who gave him access to videotapes of the late Tuvia Bielski recorded by his children.

"There was one remarkable moment during filming," Zwick said. "At the end of the movie it says that Asael and Chaya had this child, and he never lived to see this child that he fathered. And that child came to Lithuania. She's now a grown woman, and she watched us, coincidentally on the day that we were filming the marriage of her parents in the forest. That was very moving."

At the same time, the movie harks back to the bang-bang World War II movies and TV shows beloved by many Baby Boomer boys like Zwick.

"I was raised with those movies - 'Guns of Navarone,' you know?" Zwick said with a laugh. "These are people wearing these Eastern European clothes, which is something I hadn't seen, but you had seen the Schmeissers and the Lugers and the potato mashers [grenades]. So I was trying to reinvent something that maybe in my childhood had been iconic, trying to find some new evocation of it."

Speaking of icons, the casting of Craig as a reluctant hero was interesting, as the actor seems ambivalent about the stardom that two 007 hits have brought his way.

"He was dealing a little bit with that new mantle. He's a modest man actually . . . and I think he was reckoning with it," Zwick said. "He's very unpretentious, the opposite of demanding. He was the guy who never went to his trailer, who sat there [in the cold] and led by example. He comes from a tradition of that British actor who has been trained and been part of ensembles, and he knew what that meant."

This was more than another Hollywood adventure for Zwick, whose "Glory" told the story of the African-American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. That tale offers some insight into why the myth of a complacent European Jewry is so well-established, he said.

"When I was a student here, I would walk past the Saint-Gaudens memorial [honoring the 54th] on the Common," said Zwick, a Harvard grad. "It was sort of dulled over and not preserved, just as the story was in disrepair. But in 1863, that story had been the most important story in the North and especially in Boston. Why was that story forgotten? Industrialization and racism had come to the North, and Boston had become a place where race was a very complicated and divisive issue. So it was not surprising that story had fallen out of the popular imagination.

"With Jews and resistance, the understanding of the culture being monolithic is convenient for any number of agendas from 1945 to the present day, both to Jews and to people who are trying to look at Jews in a certain way," he said.

"We did a screening last week in New York," Zwick said, "and unbeknown to us there were two people in the audience who stood up at the end and said, 'I was in the forest, you've told my story, and I thought I would die without that being done.' Everyone now left from that experience is in their 80s . . . and they said, 'Now my children can understand.' It was very, very strong stuff."