The Big Picture

Liev Schreiber discusses bringing to life Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Richard Cantewell in
Across the River and Into the Trees
.
Despite not being a Hemingway expert, Schreiber appreciates the themes of mortality and love in the story, hoping for more modern adaptations.
He also spoke briefly about a project still in-production and those rumors about
Deadpool & Wolverine
.

One of the best movies of the summer was quietly released at the end of August, nearly two years after Europeans got to experience it. Across the River and Into the Trees is a poignant adaptation of one of Ernest Hemingway’s most oft-forgotten novels. The film, smartly directed by Paula Ortiz, sees Liev Schreiber star as Colonel Richard Cantewell, a fifty-one-year-old career soldier whose terminal heart failure will catch up with him in three days. Like the novel, the film covers the Colonel’s final days as he returns to the city he loves, Venice, for one final duck hunt. There, he meets a bright-eyed young woman, Renata (Matilda De Angelis) who changes his outlook on life, far too late.

Just before the film arrived in theaters in North America, I had the opportunity to speak with the ever-talented Liev Schreiber about the film. He spoke about crafting the romance between the Colonel and Renata, how the ghost of Hemingway was meant to haunt the film due to its semi-biographical quality, which other Hemingway novels he was familiar with, and how he captured the physicality of the role. He also briefly spoke about a previously announced project (The Guns of Christmas Past) which hasn’t moved into production yet, and he spoke briefly about the fans who wanted to see him come back as Sabretooth for Deadpool & Wolverine. You can read the full transcript below or watch the interview in the player above.

COLLIDER: First and foremost, congratulations on this film and it finally being released here in the States. I absolutely loved it. My background is in history, anthropology, and literature, so this is the perfect intersection of my interests.

LIEV SCHREIBER: Oh, awesome. Thank you.

I know that there has been a bit of a distance between when you filmed this and the release now, but I felt a very heavy emotional impact from watching it, and I’m curious, is there anything about playing the colonel that has lingered with you the way that it may linger with audiences?

SCHREIBER: This was a love story, but it was also very much about mortality. When we shot this back in 2020, my father was very ill, and I’m no spring chicken either, and this was something that I thought would be compelling material. There’s a wonderful novel by an Italian writer named Andrea di Robilant called Autumn in Venice, which tells the story of Hemingway and his relationship with an Italian Aristocrat, Adriana Ivancich. A lot of people say that’s at least who Across the River was written for, and certainly, the story is about her. And so I thought that was rich material for me, given everything that I was going through.

How Liev Schreiber Brought to Life the Battle-Bruised Colonel in ‘Across the River and Into the Trees’

I love that this is a romance, and I’m very thankful that this adaptation didn’t take any of that away because the book has a lot of that built into it. Maybe modern audiences wouldn’t be as okay with their relationship because of their age difference, but it’s such a very pure connection. What were the conversations like about how to play out that dynamic between Richard and Renata [Matilda De Angelis]?

SCHREIBER: The book is about so many things. It’s a cautionary tale about war — an aging officer who’s going back to find the place where his son might be buried — but I do think primarily it is a love story, and it’s a love story between an older man and a younger woman, which is not unusual given our industry. But what I like about Hemingway’s take on it is his kind of self-consciousness that verges on self-loathing about him, which is that he knows how inappropriate it is, and I think he tries to walk that line. Obviously, he was a fairly complicated guy, but what he felt for Adriana was… Of course, they had a years-long relationship, and she traveled to Cuba with him and knew his wife, and they all lived together. It was awful and crazy, but also somehow wonderful and idyllic in his mind. But I think that our version may be the version of the story that he would like to leave her, or leave us, how he maybe would have liked to have handled it as opposed to how he did.

I love that. That’s such a great answer. I really love the physicality of how you play Richard. I think there’s a real richness to the subtle movements and those little choices that are made. What was your preparation like for this role and building in the little ways that he might move his hand or the way his gait is because of the injuries he sustained in the war?

SCHREIBER: [Laughs] I thought that, ironically, our bodies were very dissimilar. He had been a soldier, and he’d spent a lot of time training young men to fight and fighting himself, and now, in the twilight of his life, he was suffering the results of that, which are a knee injury, a back injury, and obviously his hand. But I think he’s someone who, like Hemingway, has a very forceful physicality, and Paula [Ortiz], the director, wanted very much for Hemingway’s ghost to be present in the film, so we were crossing over there and looking, and developing the character and thinking about Hemingway, as well. So, I kind of saw it as this sort of race, or this battle this guy was having with his own body to keep moving, to keep going forward. He knows that he’s got a heart condition that’s going to stop him at some point, but he wants to achieve what he wants to achieve.

Another idea that strikes me as very Hemingway is that life is short and life is rich, and to not spend one’s currency while one can is a terrible mistake. So for him, he doesn’t want to die in a hospital. He’d rather die in his favorite place in the world, which is Venice.

You can definitely feel Hemingway’s ghost throughout this because it made me think about Hemingway a lot and the fact that there aren’t really that many adaptations of his work. So many of them are in the 20th century. Are there any other Hemingway books that you may have been more exposed to while researching for this and prepping for this that you would like to see adapted for a modern audience?

SCHREIBER: The big ones that I read in high school did get adapted. I can’t think of any that I haven’t read that should be adapted. The ones that I’ve read are A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I think those have all been adapted. Before this, I was by no means a Hemingway expert. I kind of went back another 300 years — Shakespeare was my sweet spot.

Liev Schreiber Is “Okay on the Sidelines” When it Comes to ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’

I love that. I wanted to ask you about a project that was announced last year, but I haven’t seen any of the updates for it yet. I was curious about the status of The Guns of Christmas Past because I love Charles Dickens, and the logline for that film has stuck with me for a year.

SCHREIBER: [Laughs] I love it, too. The last time we talked was last year; I don’t know what’s happened with it, or where it is in production. It’s a terrific script in the tradition of wacky action films like Die Hard, and I really loved it. So, hopefully whoever has it at this point will resuscitate it, and we can make it before Christmas.

Maybe they’ll read this interview and be like, “Oh yeah, we need to start moving on that. Let’s get that going!” As we close out, you’ve probably been asked a lot recently about how last year there were a lot of rumors around the Deadpool & Wolverine stuff that Sabretooth was coming back, and a lot of people were hoping it would be you. I wanted to flip the script on that question a little bit and ask what it means to you as an actor to see that 15 years after you played a character, there are still people actively campaigning to see you come back as that role somehow?

SCHREIBER: It’s amazing. It’s amazing. I can’t begin to tell you what it feels like when people are thinking about something you did and are so appreciative of it that they want you to do it again. When we finished work on Ray Donovan — and it wasn’t a question of us finishing work, Showtime pulled the plug on the series — I was just so overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from fans who watched. When you’re making a television show, or you’re making a film, I’m not in there with the audience, I don’t know that anybody sees it. Of course, if you follow that sort of thing, you can see the numbers, that millions of people have seen it, but I generally don’t follow. So, I was so surprised that we had that many fans, and I was so surprised that people were campaigning for me to be in the new Deadpool movie. [Laughs] To be honest, it’s a lot of work getting your body up to that point. I know I watched Hugh [Jackman] get himself ready again, and I thought, “I’m okay to sit by the sidelines.”

Across the River and Into the Trees is in theaters now.

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