How Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane team up to improvise ‘Between the Temples’

Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane make an unlikely couple but a natural pairing for Nathan Silver’s heavily improvised screwball dramedy, “Between the Temples.” 

Schwartzman’s Ben Gottlieb is depressed and struggling in the aftermath of his wife’s death — he’s a cantor but can no longer sing and has moved back home with his two mothers, who are eager to help him move on and find a nice girl. Kane is Carla O’Connor, who long ago taught little Benny music and now wants him to be her bat mitzvah instructor. (The film was inspired by Silver’s mother, who has appeared in several of his movies and who also had a late-in-life bat mitzvah).

Their relationship gradually jolts Ben back to life but with unintended consequences. Things come to a head at an intimate and increasingly uncomfortable dinner with Ben’s moms (Dolly de Leon and Caroline Aaron), the temple’s rabbi (Robert Smigel) and his amorous daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein). 

Schwartzman and Kane recently spoke by video about the movie, their admiration for each other and the game of telephone at the climax of that fraught dinner scene. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: You had a story, an outline and ideas about the relationships to start, but no script.  What made you say yes?

Kane: Nathan Silver says that it was written for Jason. So then I had the real easy job of being told that I had the opportunity to make a movie with Jason Schwartzman. To which I said, “Lemme at it.” 

Schwartzman: If Carol couldn’t have done the movie, I don’t think there’s a movie. It’s like trying to picture what was it like before the universe, before the Big Bang. 

Kane: I pay him to say things like that

Schwartzman: I had just worked with Damien Bonnard and we really hit it off and I think so highly of him and he wrote me an email saying, “I worked with a director named Nathan Silver, and they’re going to send you something that he’s working on and it’s not going to look like a script but I have a feeling you and he will click. And I just would feel like I wasn’t doing my due diligence if I didn’t tell you.” But he didn’t say “due diligence”— he said it in a much more French way.

Then I watched “Thirst Street,” which Damien had done with him and loved it. And then I reached out to Richard Brody of The New Yorker – I’ve been interviewed by him a few times and I love his insights about other movies – and said, “Here’s this director and this premise and I’d love to know what you think.” And he wrote back saying, “You have to work with him.”

And that was all before I’d gotten the thing.

Kane: The “thing,” sometimes known as a script, but not here. 

Q: Carol, beyond working with Jason, did you feel any personal connection to your character’s story?

After the fact, I realized that I had a strong connection with Carla through my mother, Joy. She was born in Cleveland and was married in the ’50s when you had to stay married. But she didn’t want to be married, so she got divorced and moved to New York. She was a musician and life was very rough for her. She was working in what her agent used to call “toilets” – nightclubs with no dressing room. It was very depressing. But she decided at 55 to move to Paris and live in a tiny little hotel room with no toilet, no bathtub, no nothing in there. You had to make a reservation, “I would like to take a bath down the hall at two o’clock.” “So-and-so has a reservation at that time. You can go at three.” But she completely rebirthed herself. And she said she always thought of her hotel room as sort of a crib. And Carla is attempting to rebirth herself like my mother did. 

Q: Jason, you often play characters, like Ben, uncomfortable in their own skin, while Carol, you often play characters like Carla, who are comfortable with their place in the world, even if everyone else thinks they’re weird. Is that who you are or is that a type of role you’re good at?

Kane: I personally am so phenomenally uncomfortable in my own skin. Just about every situation that you drop me into is like, “Oh God, I can’t do it.” So the fact that you feel that I seem comfortable is interesting to me. That must be acting.

Schwartzman: As a fan of your work, I’ve always wished I could just go watch your character for the rest of any movie. For me, I’m also not the most comfortable person. Did you say I was comfortable playing uncomfortable people?

Q: Yes, you capture that well so is that you or acting?

Schwartzman: That’s acting of the highest sort. I could write a book about it. 

Q: There are lots of close-ups, especially when you’re eating. Did Nathan talk to you about those shots and did it affect the way you play those scenes?

Kane: Nathan never said to us, “We’re going to zero in on your mouth.” I think I would’ve had to quit. But this is a perfect segue to the genius of Sean Price Williams, our cinematographer. A lot of the film was improvised around the essence of the scene, so when we went to shoot, Sean did not have much of a map about where we would be, so he was improvising along with us.

Schwartzman: We could be doing a scene and the camera’s on you, and then for take two, the camera’s on an ashtray. So you always have to be ready and be trusting. 

Kane: He was going all over the place. You have no idea what he’s going to see with his camera. 

Schwartzman: When I lay down to go to bed, and Carol says “I’m going to go downstairs” but then she just goes down on the floor right there, that was not rehearsed but Sean captured it because his attitude is “I’ll go where you go.”

Q: Nathan’s approach creates this real kind of immediacy and intimacy. How difficult was it to improvise that dinner scene at the end?

Kane:  It was such a hard scene. We were wrestling with which direction it should go in. 

Schwartzman: It’s a scene where Nathan wanted everyone talking at once like a real meal; there were specific things we had to accomplish and Sean filmed those but what’s neat is I didn’t know what they were talking about at the other end of the table so it felt realistic. 

Kane: And because Jason’s so modest I’ll point out it was Jason’s idea to do the telephone game in that scene.

Schwartzman: I was just playing that game with my kids but the phrase never changed. 

Q: That’s disappointing.

Schwartzman: It took away the joy of it. I said, “Shohei’s the best” and it went all the way around and ended up as “Shohei’s the best.”

Q: Well, you shouldn’t have picked something so undeniably true.

Schwartzmann: That’s fair.