ADAM RESURRECTED

One of the film’s most vivid roles is that of Gina Grey, the iron-fisted but alluring nurse who
indulges her own fantasies with the seductive Adam Stein. To play Gina, Schrader chose the rising
Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, who was seen in Steven Spielberg’s MUNICH and was recently cast to
star opposite Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s ANGELS & DEMONS.
life.”
“She is a wonderful actress,” says Schrader. “She took on a very difficult part and filled it with
Adds Goldblum: “Ayelet is incredibly beautiful and wildly talented. As long as I could keep
up with her, I knew I was doing well.”
Of all the unusual roles in ADAM RESURRECTED, the most unconventional of all is that of
David, the dog-boy whose very presence in the asylum, heard at first only in eerie barks and howls,
drives Adam into a rage. Yet ultimately, it is David’s poignant, unrelenting attempts to regain his
humanity that opens Adam’s eyes to all that he has lost. To play this essentially wordless but
transformative character, Schrader chose a young amateur Romanian named Tudor Rapiteanu.
“Tudor was a very smart boy, I believe he’d actually won Third Place in the Romanian
Academic Olympics, and he really understood what the role was about,” Schrader says.
For Goldblum, working with Tudor was revelatory. “He was thrilled to be a part of this story -
enthusiastic, playful, never the least intimidated and absolutely fearless,” Goldblum said. “I wish I
could approach a part in the completely unaffected way that he did. I learned a lot from him.”
Rounding out the cast are a number of accomplished Israeli and European actors including
the award-winning German actor Joachim Krol as Adam’s fellow survivor Wolfowitz and Israeli
actress Hana Laszlo, who won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Amos Gitai’s
FREE ZONE, in the role of Nurse Schwester.
“This was a truly multi-cultural production,” sums up Ehud Bleiberg, “with Paul Schrader as
the only member with English as his first language, and a cast and crew from Germany, Israel,
Romania and the USA. Different cultures, ideas and attitudes all brought together by a dynamite
subject.”
ADAM IN THE DESERT:
THE FILM’S DESIGN
ADAM RESURRECTED takes place in a realm of the imagination one step removed from
history. Much of the film unfolds in the 1960s inside the fictional Seizling Institute – a starkly
modernist building rising out of the raw, empty floor of the ancient Negev Desert – which the
filmmakers would create partly in Romania and partly in Israel. “I knew that we would have to build
the whole institute and this would be something very ambitious, so that is what brought us to the
Castel Film Studios in Bucharest, Romania,” explains Bleiberg.
Production designer Alexander Manasse, who previously designed Tom Tykwer’s art-house
hit RUN, LOLA, RUN, crafted the institute’s interiors. For the building’s exterior, he forged an
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