For actor Jeremy Piven and his sister, filmmaker Shira Piven, their film The Performance wasn’t only a long-fought labor of love 15 years in the making, it was the fulfillment of a family legacy.
Appearing together on a panel for The Performance at Deadline’s Contenders Los Angeles event on Saturday, the siblings revealed that the project originated as a notion of their mother, Joyce Hiller Piven, after she read legendary playwright Arthur Miller’s short story about a Jewish American tap dancer tapped to perform in Germany on the eve of World War II.
“My mother is a theater artist, director, actress, and loves reading, and she has stacks of The New Yorker in her apartment,” Shira explained. “She read this story in The New Yorker years ago … and she sent it to Jeremy first, and she said, ‘This is a role for you.’”
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“I was blown away by it,” Jeremy recalled. “And my mom’s not very frivolous. She runs lines with me to this day and is my acting teacher – gives me notes to this day.
“Actors are very delusional – that’s our superpower – and I read this role and immediately thought it would be incredible to play this,” Jeremy continued. “Arthur Miller is so incredible, and it also just reveals so perfectly the absurdity of antisemitism in this beautiful way, in this story that’s so beautiful.
“And I didn’t for a moment think, ‘Well, I don’t tap dance – I can’t play this role,’” said the actor. “I’ve been trying to get the money to produce it ever since, and it took me 15 years to make this film. And each year that we couldn’t find the money, I got better at tap until I was ready to perform it, so divine timing.”
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Jeremy approached Miller’s estate to get permission to pursue the film project. “I went to Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller’s daughter, who’s a very brilliant playwright and screenwriter and director in her own right,” he remembered. “And I went to her to pitch us and myself to obtain the rights. And her husband, who’s this viciously mediocre actor named Daniel Day-Lewis, he was in the background, queuing her on what questions.
“It was the most intimidating phone call I have ever had in my life, and I don’t even know how it happened, but somehow I got the rights,” Jeremy admitted. He had to re-obtain the rights annually when it looked like he and his sister might never find the financing for a film. “After a decade, it feels like, ‘What are you doing?’ [But] I’m compelled to tell people, ‘If you’ve got that project that you’ve always wanted to do, don’t give up. Please don’t give up.”
When the financing finally came together after 15 years, in which Piven had time to learn how to tap dance, he was ready to go all-in on his own performance, including a risky sequence that tested his commitment.
“I told my stuntman — who looked just like me if I was younger and better looking and stronger — to stand down, and then I did the stunt myself,” he explained. “And I only know one way to do it, which is to throw myself in completely. And I broke eight ribs while I was doing this stunt. And yeah, and it’s in the film. We got one take, and we did it. We did it.”
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Check back Monday for the panel video.
The presenting sponsor for this year’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles isUnited for Business. Sponsors are Eyeptizer Eyewear,Final Draft + ScreenCraft, and partners areFour Seasons Maui,11 Ravens andRobina Benson Design House.
