The past three years have seen three feature films adapted from his writings: two directly from his short stories, one from a collaboration with his wife, Shira Geffen. The most recent, $9.99, is a claymation movie that debuts in New York this week. Keret talked to the New York Press about his forays into film, including why he opted for animating his most recent adaptation.
“I think that my stories have fantastical elements in them, but they have some sort of hyper-realistic tone at the same time,” he explained. “In [director] Tatia [Rosenthal’s] work with claymation, she creates a hyper-realistic fairy-tale feel I was aiming for. It is work of this world, but still not something completely of this world.”
Along with his prose writing, Keret is actively involved in film production. He was extensively involved in $9.99 and co-directed the 2007 film Jellyfish. Keret, who has published around 200 stories, says he still finds writing more difficult than filmmaking.
“After you write a screenplay, you can improve it, you can work on it during rehearsal or change the cast. So even if you fuck up with anything, you will still have that movie,” he said. “When you sit in front of a blank page, you know there is no guarantee that you will come up with a written work.” With the premiere of $9.99, we decided to look at how well Keret’s work has been adapted for the big screen. (Click here more from the interview with Keret.)
2006: Wristcutters: A Love Story, directed by Croatian filmmaker Goran Duki, is the story of an alternative dreary world where suicide victims are sent after death.This first major Keret film adaptation falls flat after the first 20 minutes and loses the compact zest of Keret’s short stories, perhaps because of Keret’s minimal involvement in the production.The movie is as feckless as the citizens of its suicidal universe.
2007: Jellyfish,a collaboration between Keret and his wife, won the Camera D’or at Cannes. It recounts the struggles of three Israeli woman: an immigrant health aide with a persnickety patient, a newlywed with a dissatisfied husband and a lonely working girl with a homeless child who came from the sea.Though a far better movie than Wristcutters, Jellyfish doesn’t quite capture the quotidian absurdity that makes his singular stories so readable.
2009: $9.99, from Keret and director Tatia Rosenthal, weaves together six of Keret’s short stories. It is centered on an unemployed son who finds an advertisement for the meaning of life available for the very-low-price of $9.99.This is the best adaptation of a Keret story to a movie so far, the claymation aesthetic meshing well with the fantastic tenor of his fiction.
