Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson has a trenchant childhood memory from the late 1940s of an uncle popping up at his Baltimore row house out of nowhere and staying with him in his bedroom for a couple of weeks.
“At night, he’d wake up throwing himself around the bed and talking in a language I didn’t understand,” said Levinson, who has directed classics such as “Diner,” “The Natural,” “Rain Man” and “Good Morning, Vietnam.” “He was having some sort of nightmares. This went on night after night. Then he left and they didn’t talk about him. I was five and I didn’t understand what was going on.”
He found out many years later his uncle had been in a concentration camp during World War II.
That memory came back to him as he read the screenplay for the film “The Survivor,” which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and will premiere on HBO and HBO Max April 27.
“The Survivor” revolves around the real life story of Harry Haft, who boxed professionally in the late 1940s. Haft, played by Ben Foster, was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was forced to box fellow inmates just to stay alive. Near the end of the war, Haft escaped a death march, killing a Nazi soldier and donning his uniform.
“The Survivor” cuts between Haft’s time in the camps, shot in stark black and white, and his life after the camps in which he came to the United States and tried his best to block out the trauma while searching for the woman he loved while in his native Poland.
What Levinson wanted to explore more deeply is what Haft clearly suffered from and wasn’t considered an operational diagnosis until 1980: post-traumatic stress disorder. “He’s struggling even after he comes to America,” Levinson notes, including nightmares like his uncle, angry outbursts and depression. “It’s not like the war is over, you’re out of the concentration camp and everything is fine. For a lot of people, it’s not that simple.”
This wasn’t an easy role to cast, as it required a De Niro-like “Raging Bull” transformation. Foster, the actor known for roles in films such as “3:10 to Yuma” and “Hell or High Water,” shed 60 pounds for the concentration camp scenes. Production took a break for a few months for him to regain the weight. The result, a jarring, gaunt look in flashbacks that contrasts sharply to the fleshed out body he carried as a post-war fighter. “He has to play three different times of his life,” Levinson notes, including an even older version of himself.
Haft’s brief professional boxing career ended after losing a match against future world heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano in 1949.
“Harry was never a great fighter,” Levinson noted. “But in the later years, he at least picked up some skills to defend himself against other professionals.”
Levinson brought in award-winning character actor Danny DeVito as Marciano’s trainer Charley Goldman, who surreptitiously helps Haft out of respect before that big fight.
He said he saw a photo of Goldman and immediately thought of DeVito for the role and offered it to him. (DeVito was part of the cast of Levinson’s 1987 film “Tin Men.”)
“He’s such a committed actor,” Levinson said. “We were editing and I see him in Marciano’s corner. The camera pans by him while Harry Haft is being beaten to a pulp by Marciano. You see how totally focused Danny is, how totally into the moment he is as an actor.”
Billy Magnussen (“Game Night,” “Made For Love”) plays Haft’s sadistic Nazi overlord Dietrich Schneider. Schneider kept Haft alive for his own financial gain, betting on Haft as Haft fought other inmates for sport, as if they were dogs in a dogfighting ring.
Magnussen, whose career has been on a steady upward trajectory, “embodied what we wanted in the character. Schneider was not just a thug or whatever,” Levinson said. “He’s obviously well educated. He understands the irony of mankind in a certain way. At the same time, he’s a soldier and bound by duty.”
Most of the seven or eight finalist actors who auditioned for the Schneider role were German. Levinson, when he initially saw Magnussen’s audition, had no idea he was American. “When I cast, I usually don’t want to know anything about them,” he said. “I just responded to him.”
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'THE SURVIVOR'
Available for HBO and HBO Max subscribers April 27
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