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Interview: Natalie Portman talks ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness,’ Israel and gender inequality in Hollywood

On set filming “The Other Boleyn Girl,” Natalie Portman was cold. Co-star Scarlett Johansson noticed Portman’s chills and asked why she hadn’t said something.

“And I was like, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t want to be a problem,’ and she was like, ‘Say you’re cold!’ And it was good to have someone point it out to me that I even had a hard time making a very reasonable complaint about my own discomfort,” Portman said. “And I do connect that with my gender even though of course not all women are like that. I’m sure there are men who are like that too, but it did feel connected somehow to being a woman, that I wasn’t always comfortable just saying exactly what I needed and wanted.”

Portman’s reticence persisted when she stepped into the role of director for the film “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” out Friday. She found it difficult to express what she was envisioning or tell people what she wanted. She got over it quickly, but it’s an experience from her directorial debut that stands out in her mind. Portman attributes the scarcity of female directors in Hollywood to society’s lack of comfort with women expressing their desires, but she hopes that’s starting to change.

“Girls of today are growing up in a different environment. They have Lena Dunham on TV, writing, directing, producing, starring,” the 35-year-old said. “So many wonderful other role models, too, that it’s part of their environment, but it’s still not 100 percent there. We’re still seeing such a difference in how many women go to graduate school versus how many women are actually practicing in some professional careers.”

“A Tale of Love and Darkness” has been an enduring labor of love for Portman. She adapted Amos Oz’s 2002 autobiography and spent years trying to get it made. Set in the years bridging Mandatory Palestine and the establishment of independent Israel, it’s a story both of a nation and of a family—a young boy’s relationship with his very unhappy mother, Fania (played by Portman).

“It is Oz’s words and ideas,” Portman said. “I think it’s one of his great abilities as a political figure also, is to see nations as individuals and that individual psychology. That psychology of an entire group of people can be compared to the psychology of an individual.”

In the movie, the people of Israel have to grapple with the reality that their new country isn’t the paradise they imagined it would be, while Fania sinks into depression upon realizing that her life isn’t what she had dreamed it would be. Oz turned the story of his mother into a parable representing what an entire nation experienced.

Portman sees this as a key difference between psychologically healthy and unhealthy people—some can process that reality and dreams are different, and some despair over the dissonance. “A fulfilled dream is a disappointing dream” is a line toward the end of the film that Portman said she doesn’t fully agree with. Directing “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is a dream that she’s had since she originally read the book over a decade ago.

“I would modify Oz’s words for myself—I don’t find fulfilled dreams disappointing, I just find them different from your expectations, for better or worse. Sometimes it’s not even a qualitative difference, it’s just different, like something you couldn’t expect if you haven’t experienced it yet,” Portman said. “So [directing] was definitely a different experience than I expected. Some things were easier than I expected, some things were harder than I expected, some things were more fun than I expected, some things were not as fun as I expected. It was a much harder path than I thought it would be. But it was fulfilling in unexpected ways too. I’d say that a fulfilled dream is just different than anything you could ever dream.”

A conflict-free promised land for the people of Israel and Palestine is still a dream, tempered by a complex reality. In recent years, left-leaning Americans—including many in Hollywood—have moved away from supporting Israel to sympathizing with Palestine. But choosing sides doesn’t seem particularly productive for Portman, whose ties to the situation run deep because she was born in Israel and has become something of beacon of Jewish identity among celebrities.

“I think it’s a really complicated situation, and it’s made me consider a lot of questions ethically and just on a human empathetic level that I wouldn’t have considered if I wasn’t from [Israel],” she said. “Ultimately, I think we need to get out of a sides situation and move toward what stops being a tragedy for everyone because we’ve been stuck in a cycle that basically is hurting individuals all the time. And if we start looking at people as individuals rather than as members of teams then maybe we’ll find a way forward that is better for everybody, hopefully.”

Her heritage is part of what intrigued Portman about Oz’s book. The stories in it felt familiar to her, echoing memories her grandparents had shared with her as a girl. She insisted it be kept in Hebrew, even though that made things more difficult for her.

“All of these refugees coming from different countries came to Israel and then all started speaking Hebrew, which had not been a spoken language in hundreds of years, so they were essentially speaking a biblical language all of a sudden,” Portman said. “It is almost a character in the film and in my mind nearly impossible to do without.”

Portman said she is “exceedingly dorky” about language, something that shows up in the film, which is almost obsessed with etymology (it might be the only thing Fania has in common with her husband). She famously chose to study psychology at Harvard University, remarking, “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”

Portman’s accomplishments include an Academy Award and multiple Golden Globes. Her devotion to acting has led her to dance training for a year to play a ballerina in “Black Swan” and perfect her Hebrew for this film. But as she began to promote “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” the media sometimes chose one title over actor or director—”working mom Natalie Portman.”

It’s the kind of thing that gives you pause, wondering how many times you’ve read “working dad Brad Pitt” in a headline.

“It’s definitely something that I love in my life and am proud of, but I do get upset by the different labeling like you’re talking about,” Portman said. “I will always get the question about what it is to be a mother and what that means to me, and I do not think that men experience that to the same degree at all. And it certainly would not be in their job description headline. But it is important too, being a parent—I keep trying to say ‘being a parent’ because I think it should apply to both men and women—I feel like in my family, being a parent does apply in a similar way to me and my husband.

“It’s a really big topic among everyone I know who both has children and works, both male and female,” she continued. “How you balance it, how do you do your best at both—it’s a big question when you care about being a parent. It just feels really unbalanced, the way that women are asked about it so much more than men. I wish men were asked it more rather than women asked about it less because I do find it a very interesting topic of conversation.”

The discrepancy is something she’s uncomfortable with, but Portman has no problem pointing it out. Not after sitting in the director’s chair.

@lchval | laurenchval@redeyechicago.com