Jeff Goldblum and Paul Schrader on ‘Adam Resurrected’

Jeff Goldblum is capable of making any character a memorable one. How did he prepare for the role of Adam Stein, an Oscar-worthy performance and Goldblum’s best work?

“I like to prepare,† he says. “I’ve taught for the last twenty years and I like craft and new investigations, new experiments about how you can best prepare so good things can come out. I had this a year before I did the part. I learned the whole thing like a play.†

For Goldblum, creating the character was not limited to reading.

“I went to Germany,† he recalls. “I went to Israel for the first time, I’d never been to Israel before, to suss out where my character might actually be living, what that life might be like.†

Goldblum also had to learn new talents.

“I knew I had to attack the problem of the violin. You see me play before the war, then of course in the concentration camp. I’m a pianist. I know music and I play the piano, I have a jazz group in Los Angeles but I’ve never played the violin. I got a violin teacher early on, took lessons, got a violin and played it every day.†

Adam Resurrected seems easy to obsess over.

“At one point,† director Paul Schrader explains, “Orson Welles wanted to do it with Betty Davis. Charlie Chaplin was actually interested in it at one point. The current life [of the project], this man, Ehud Bleiberg, who read this book while he was on leave from the second Lebanon war, he became obsessed with the book and spent twenty years getting the rights, getting the script and getting it made.†

Schrader has directed a powerful, emotionally frank account of one man’s crippling madness, and Goldblum†¦

Jeff Goldblum’s work in Adam Resurrected is phenomenal, funny, frightening and heartbreaking. He manages to encapsulate the whole of the human experience with the character of Adam Stein, arguably one of the most complex characters to ever grace the screen. It is a tour de force, worth the price of admission on its own.

Adam Resurrected opens in New York on Dec 12 and in Los Angeles on Dec 19.