Last Sunday, Showtime's award-winning terrorist drama Homeland had its third season premiere. For the pop culture-deprived, the show is about Carrie (Claire Danes), an emotionally unstable, undeniably brilliant CIA agent, and her obsessive relationship with Brody (Damian Lewis), a rescued U.S. Marine POW turned against his country during his captivity in Afghanistan by a terrorist mastermind. What some fans may not know is that Homeland is based on Hatufim (Prisoners of War), a hit 2010 Israeli television series created, written and directed by Gideon Raff. Former 24 producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa bought the rights to adapt the series for American television on the basis of Raff's POWs pilot script.
In contrast to the original, Homeland 's love story is in the forefront. Near the end of last season's final episode, as Carrie and Brody bid farewell, he's a shattered, wanted man coming through on so many frequencies one doesn't know whether his declarations of love are sincere or he's an inveterate survivor pressing his advantage over a vulnerable, broken woman. "Asking whether you can really love someone whom you suspect wants to kill you is very clever," observes the 40-year-old Raff, whose career prospects are bright indeed. He's a writer and executive producer on Homeland; he's at work on the third season of POWs in Morocco and Israel; and his recent Hollywood project Tyrant, a TV series about an American family entangled in Middle Eastern politics, was the object of a cable-network bidding war. He got his first big break as an assistant to Doug Liman on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and with two feature-film directing credits under his belt, hopes similar opportunities will be coming his way.
Raff, who's gay, married his partner Udi in California, and splits his time between his native Tel Aviv and L.A. We spoke last July at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Sura Wood: What are the differences between Homeland and POWs?
Gideon Raff: A simplistic answer is that Homeland is a fast-paced thriller with drama, and POWs is a drama with thriller elements. Some scenes are lifted word-for-word from the Israeli scripts (which were translated into English), while other scenes contain the DNA of the original but were changed substantially. In POWs, we wanted to deeply explore PTSD. Unlike Homeland, which is from Carrie's point of view, it's told through the soldiers' memories, flashbacks and nightmares. That's also why the torture scenes are more graphic. The American version has some features all its own: it has a bi-polar lead character in Carrie, whose judgment is questionable. When she says Brody is a terrorist, you have to ask: is she right, or is she just off her meds?
Do gay themes come into your work?
I'm gay, so of course, that's part of my sensibility. In POWs, the material isn't overtly gay, but if you look at the relationships, the real couple is the two soldiers, who become home to each other. The women are on the outside. Because of my gay sensibility, I was able to film scenes that maybe, if I was straight or macho or chauvinistic, I wouldn't have been able to.
Israel strikes me as a macho culture. What's it like to be gay there?
It is a very macho culture, yet it's more open than the States in some ways. There was never a problem for me being gay in the military, for instance. I could be open about it.
What's the status of same-sex marriage?
That's never going to happen there because of the rabbinical ultra-orthodox Jews. Still, if you go to Tel Aviv, you'll see it's so gay. The joke is that it's straight-friendly. People live the lives they want. We still have to fight for our rights, but you don't see hate crimes like you see here. I've never felt that kind of danger in Israel.
Do have more creative freedom in Israel?
Yes, without a doubt. I wrote and directed all 24 episodes of POWs – that's control. I feel like it was my child, whereas with Homeland and now Tyrant, there are so many executives and writers and directors involved. Good comes from that collective thinking, but there's a lack of one vision. We have an amazing industry in Israel. With so little money – an average Israeli TV episode costs around $50,000, compared to the millions one can run in the U.S. – we have to emphasize the writing. Homeland 's pilot cost more than two seasons of POWs combined.
Writers tend be introverted, needing exile, cunning and silence, as James Joyce once said, yet there's so much cacophony and meddling in the film and television industries.
I think the writing process should be very intimate, silent, lonely, and usually it is. In the best circumstances you get your episodes by locking yourself in a room and writing the whole thing, the cacophony can start once it's already on the page and you know what it is. If you allow those voices in beforehand, you're in a big mess.
HBO's In Treatment opened the door to Hollywood, following by Homeland, and more adaptations of Israeli series are in the pipeline. Do you see a downside?
There's a danger. I hear more and more executives and creators in Israel saying, "This would make a good American show." The main reason POWs is a success is that it's very local and specific. I wasn't looking for a way into Hollywood, and there's a danger of losing our identity and making mediocre products when we try.
You lived in U.S. from 2001-09 before returning to Israel. You've said that during that period you felt like you were living in exile.
I think my first emotional connection to POWs was that I also felt like a man without a country, especially later when we were shooting both shows together, flying back and forth between sets in Israel and L.A.
TV is so much about the zeitgeist, and you've hit the mother lode in two countries. What are the chances of that happening? We need to bring in an anthropologist to explain it.
Zeitgeist is the word that needs to be used here. What happened is a miracle.