Hollywood director Vadim Perelman: My native country, where the best people in the world live, is being bombed by lying and cynical ghouls and thieves

There are quite a few people from Ukraine in Hollywood, but usually we are talking about actors, while directors can be counted on one hand, and even then they are all in the past. Vadim Perelman is a unique person in this sense: being a citizen of the world (he lives wherever he works, moving from America to Europe and back again), he does not forget about the country in which he was born.

In the 2000s, the director could often be found at Molodist, Kyiv, and Odesa International Film Festivals, where he was a jury member. As soon as Russia's war against Ukraine began, Perelman immediately spoke out in support of his homeland. On his Facebook page, he wrote that he was speechless: "Violent hatred is a lump in my throat. My native country, home to the best people in the world, is being bombed by lying and cynical ghouls and thieves. And their slaves are grumbling about mortgages and how scared they are to go to resorts now. Shame on them!"

Early years in Kyiv

Vadim Perelman was born in Kyiv, in the very center of the city, at the Zhovtneva-now Oleksandrivska-hospital. His father, Valerii Perelman, was the chief engineer of the Kaniv hydroelectric power plant. The house in which the family lived was located on the corner of Saksahanskoho and Chervonoarmiyska (now Velyka Vasylkivska) streets, and the windows of their apartment on the second floor overlooked the National (now Olympic) Stadium. Later the family moved to a communal apartment on Horkoho Street, nowadays Antonovycha Street. As a child, the boy was fond of painting and wanted to become an artist-he never thought about a career in filmmaking.

From gray and red to the colorful world

But fate decreed otherwise, and their lives were turned upside down. In 1972, when Vadym was 9 years old, his father died in a car accident, and his mother left without any help or support, and seriously thought about emigrating. His mother applied for departure, and five years later they finally managed to leave. However, before that, they had experienced many humiliations because of their choice: their mother was fired from her job as a "traitor" to the homeland, and Vadim himself was expelled from school, so they had nothing to regret in their hometown. And in Europe, as Perelman himself admits, they moved from the gray-red Soviet Union to a colorful world.

From Italy to Canada

The first country on their way was Italy, and they settled near Rome, in a neighborhood that Vadim calls "gangster": he was afraid to walk there after dark, so he sometimes slept on a park bench. Vadim didn't speak Italian, so he worked wherever he could get by without the language: filling up cars at a gas station, washing dishes in cafes, selling flowers, picking up balls on a golf course, and bartending. He exchanged the small fees he received for small bills to keep his pockets full of money. In his free time, Vadim studied a lot, which allowed him to enter the prestigious University of Alberta to study Film History after moving to Canada, which took him and his mother two (!) years to reach, as this specialization seemed to him the easiest of all.

The beginning of his directorial career

Perelman became interested in directing by chance after seeing a documentary "film about a film" about the filming of Fiddler on the Roof by Norman Johnson, based on the work of Sholem Aleichem. Vadim found the filming process extremely interesting. Before that, he didn't know what cinema was – he read books: cinema "swept" him like a wave, and he decided to try himself as a director. Perelman received his specialized education at Ryerson University's film school and began his directorial career with commercials and music videos.

An impressive debut

Perelman's first film, House of Sand and Fog, based on the novel by American writer Andre Dubuis, about an Iranian family that emigrated to the United States, allowed him to be recognized as a serious filmmaker. The film was nominated for three Oscars at once – for Best Actor (British actor Ben Kingsley), Best Supporting Actor, and Best Score – and this is a rare debutant who can boast of such a "harvest". Despite the fact that critics called the film "anti-Hollywood," he earned the respect of his colleagues. According to Perelman, there are only two ways to become famous in Hollywood: make a movie that critics will love, or make good money yourself, and Perelman managed to do both. The director received a good assessment of his work from Steven Spielberg himself, who said that only a real director could make such a movie.

Two years of life for a movie with Uma Thurman

Four years later, Perelman made his next film, All My Life Before My Eyes (in Ukrainian distribution it was called Moments of Life), starring Uma Thurman. According to the director, this film cost him two years of his life. The uniqueness of the film lies in the fact that two cameramen worked on location in Connecticut at once. The second one was tasked by Perelman to shoot vivid video sequences: flowers, bees, birds, worms. The director was very sorry that most of these shots were not included in the final version of the film, and 95 percent of the colors in the film are artificial.

Odesa is a festival city

Journalists often ask Perelman what he thinks about Ukrainian cinema, and especially about how to revive it. The director has repeatedly expressed his opinion about Ukrainian film festivals – he liked the Odesa International Film Festival the most, which he compared to Cannes. In his opinion, this is largely due to the location of Odesa: the city by the sea with its resorts, beaches, restaurants, and nightclubs is the best fit for an international film forum. The main thing is not to reduce its program to one genre and not to mix the festival with the film market. Perhaps, after the victory, the festival in Odesa will be revived and turned into the kind of forum Perelman envisions.

In Hollywood, movies are made by "accountants"

As for Hollywood, Perelman, who knows it from the inside, believes that today movies are made by "accountants": no one works "at the behest of the soul," and the possibility of success or failure of a film is calculated by "committees" similar to Soviet-era artistic councils and focus groups. It is these people who decide what needs to be done to make a good profit from the film's distribution. Perelman names Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Robert Enders, and Michael Bay as the "last of the Mohicans," directors who still resist the current situation.