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January 16, 2004/Tevet 22 5764, Vol. 56, No.17
'House of Sand and Fog' director identifies with movie
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
The day before he discovered the novel "The House of Sand and Fog" in 2001, Vadim Perelman asked his chauffeur to drive him to a slum in suburban Rome.
The Jewish emigre hoped to revisit the decrepit flat where they had lived without glass in the windows and dead animals in the street. He wanted to see the room in which he had lain deathly ill, treated by a veterinarian because a doctor was too expensive.
So when his chauffeur refused to drive him deep into the slum that day in 2001, Perelman, now 40, walked the 10 blocks alone to his old building. He found his former landlady and silently sat in her apartment, under a naked light bulb, as she served him a glass of rancid wine. As he got up to leave, he placed $5,000 on the rickety table.
"I felt like I was giving the money to her, but I was also giving it to myself, back then," he says with emotion. And I walked out of that place like I was walking on air. I felt like I had closed one of the circles of my life - and there was a gift at the end."
The "gift" was Andre Dubus III's bestseller, "House of Sand and Fog," which he bought at the Rome airport, and which revolves around another set of desperate people and a rundown home. The story tells of recovering drug addict Kathy Nicolo, who is evicted from her Northern California bungalow as the result of a bureaucratic error. The bungalow is then bought for a pittance by Iranian immigrant Col. Massoud Behrani, a former aristocrat reduced to working menial jobs to support his wife, Nadi, and their son. For Behrani, the house represents a last shot at the American dream.
"I read the novel on the plane and I wept," Perelman says. "I immediately knew I had to turn it into a movie."
Like the book, the film, which stars Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley, "is about loneliness and being cast out," he added. "(It's) about being an immigrant in a new country and, with regard to Kathy, about feeling like an immigrant in your own country."
As the intense director told his life story over steak salad at a cafe near his Hancock Park home, it sounded like the stuff of melodrama. Until he was 14, he lived with eight relatives in a one-room Kiev apartment, sharing a bathroom with 60 neighbors.
Seeking a new life, Vadim and his mother took advantage of the Soviet Union's then-permissive Jewish immigration policy and applied for exit visas. "It felt very Holocaust-like," he recalled of the train journey West.
When his mother married a man he despised after they settled in Edmonton, Canada, he moved out, left school and joined a gang of teenagers who "broke into houses and robbed places," he says.
A night in jail convinced Perelman to go straight four years later; he promptly earned his GED and enrolled at the University of Alberta, where a film appreciation class changed his life his sophomore year. The epiphany came as he viewed a documentary on the making of Norman Jewison's "Fiddler on the Roof:" "I saw the director creating his own little world and I realized I wanted to do that," he says.
He didn't attempt his first feature film, however, until he discovered "Fog" in 1999; securing the rights wasn't easy. The author had already turned down more than 130 directors, Dubus told the Journal. "I didn't feel that a story with this kind of darkness would get out of Hollywood alive," he says.
Undaunted, Perelman phoned Dubus and, over the course of 90 minutes, recounted his life story. Dubus felt Perelman wasn't going to "reduce the story into a digestible, Big Mac version of the book," he said.
Perelman said, "I've seen death and I've seen catastrophe, so I know how such stories can help people. It's something the audience can experience vicariously so they may live through their own tragedies gracefully."
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