Etgar Keret
”Goda intentioner” ("Good Intentions"), a collection of short stories by Etgar Keret translated to Swedish was recently published.
Here's an interview with Etgar Keret by Dn.se (Swedish language)
Time Out New York interviews Keret about $9.99... Why are people always looking for easy answers to unanswerable questions?
I think the film isn't about people looking for easy answers as much as it is the fact that people gave up on looking. Because I think that sometimes the yearning and the search is some sort of a meaning. And the difference between the character who wants to order the meaning of life and the other people around him is that you can say he's naive and unrealistic, but he didn't give up. He's obsessed with this question. The other people are already executing their plan Bs and Cs - they've already given up on whatever they once believed in ...
Time Out London's "Tel Aviv Heroes" interview with Keret
"Why is he a hero? You would be hard pressed to find an Israeli who grew up in the 1990s and can't remember the first time he or she read 'Missing Kissinger'"
The "Tel Aviv Heroes" project also includes interviews with Dana International, Ohad Naharin and Tzipi Livni.
Audio interview with Keret at Christofer Lydon's "Open Source Radio" (Brown university).
San Francisco Bay Times interviews Keret
I really think that when you write or make films, you try to show how you experience reality. I don’t experience it as realism, which is objective, and something people agree on. The moment you accept subjectiveness, it transcends realism - falling in love is like flying in the air. These experiences happen, and you check them against reality, and they are actually much more relevant than reality. It is a way to describe the world I live in.
Here are 2 interviews with Keret
LA Times
"My prime motivation to write stories," Keret said, "is that I want to read them. I would be very happy if somebody else had done it, but they're all lazy . . . , so I have to write it all by myself." As he tells it, his decision to direct "Jellyfish" was a similar story of picking up the slack from the goldbrickers out there.LA Weekly
"My wife wrote this wonderful script, and I said, 'I really want to see this film.' She showed it to one director who said it was never going to work. She showed it to another who said, 'This is boring.' The third one said, 'This is completely confused.' . . . The moment I suggested directing the film I looked at my wife's eye and knew if we didn't do it, this film will never be done."
“I write about the violence that I grew up with,” Keret says matter-of-factly. “In a country where, for three years out of their lives, everybody who is 18 lives in a reality where he may kill people or see people get killed next to him, he may do things Americans would never do. I didn’t serve in the occupied territories, but people who do know that if you knock on a door and it doesn’t open, you kick it open. You can play the guitar, read Nietzsche, become a very good dentist, but you’ll still do it. And once you cross that line, it’s very difficult to uncross it. When your girlfriend won’t talk to you and locks the door, you will still know how to kick it open.”
Hebrew speakers can listen to a Hebrew interview with Keret at Radio Bracha Goleshet.
Nextbook podcast with Etgar Keret.
Useful lies on the way to becoming a writer:
- Telling people you’re a computer genius
- Faking an asthma attack
- Complimenting old, fat ladies