Carol Kane has a chance to make history. Oscar history, anyway. If she earns a nomination for her role as 70-year-old bat mitzvah student Carla Kessler in the odd-couple comedy “Between the Temples,” she will break the record held by Judd Hirsch for the longest gap between acting Oscar noms.
Kane, last Oscar-nominated 49 years ago for Joan Micklin Silver’s immigrant drama “Hester Street,” would top Hirsch’s record by seven years. (Hirsch’s nominations spanned 42 years, from 1981 for “Ordinary People” to 2023 for “The Fabelmans.”)
Kane stars in the film opposite Jason Schwartzman, who plays Ben, a depressed cantor who befriends Carla, his childhood music teacher, as he prepares her for her bat mitzvah. In an interview during a recent visit to Los Angeles, the veteran actor says her performance “is totally dependent on Jason. We were like one in some way.” The warm and generous Kane further enthused about writer-director Nathan Silver and his unusual process.
Congrats on all the love you’ve been receiving for the film. How did it feel when you heard about the New York Film Critics and Spirit Award kudos?
I found it extraordinary. I just can’t sort of fathom how it’s happened, and I’m very grateful. It’s still just sort of unreal.
Were you and Jason the filmmaker’s dream choices to play Carla and Ben?
Yes. Though [at first] there was just what Nathan calls a “scriptment,” a sort of combo of a treatment and a script. It’s very unusual, nothing I had ever seen before.
Did that give you pause about signing on to the project?
Oh, God, yes. The writing is, to me, the most pivotal element. He said we would have a script before we started shooting. But then he had to explain to me, a couple of days before [filming began], that there wasn’t going to be one. He couldn’t do it, that’s not his method.
First of all, I signed on based on Jason. I have always been mesmerized by his work. So when I heard I got to have this major part in a movie opposite Jason, then I thought, “OK, I’m in.”
— Carol Kane
So then you agreed to the film based on the character and the story?
First of all, I signed on based on Jason. I have always been mesmerized by his work. So when I heard I got to have this major part in a movie opposite Jason, then I thought, “OK, I’m in.” But I was nervous about what [Silver] said about how he worked because I had never done anything like it. I had my doubts that I could be effective in that process.
As a result of that process, there’s a kind of loose, improvisational quality to the performances. How did that work for the cast?
We just got the pages sometimes the night before, sometimes two nights before [shooting]. We shot what was on the page, and then Nathan would say, “Oh, no, that’s not it.” And then we would improvise in the structure and around the lines that he had written.
Until then, had you done much improv in your career?
No. But Nathan has a lot of confidence in his process, and I grew to understand that I could depend on him to not accept what we were giving if it wasn’t right.
Carol Kane, from left, Jason Schwartzman, Madeline Weinstein, Diane Lanyi, Dolly de Leon, Robert Smigel in “Between the Temples.”
(Sean Price Williams/Sony Pictures Classics)
Carla is such a memorable, endearing character. Aside from acting with Jason, what else drew you to playing her?
I think it was this idea, which reminded me of my own mother, of a woman of a certain age having the courage and spirit to begin her life again. My mother moved to Paris when she was 55 and started all over again — and that was Carla’s path, as it were.
Also, I just loved the fact that it was a love story between these two people where it was so unlikely. When you get to be a certain age, you’re mostly asked to play a grandmother, not the heart of the story; you’re peripheral in a lot of ways. I’ve had some great parts in my older age, but here was a role that was truly a fully three-dimensional woman.
You’ve said that you were never bat mitzvahed. Was it ever something you’d wanted back then?
No. My family was just not around a temple or anything like that. [Unlike] Carla who always wanted to be bat mitzvahed, but the people in her life stood in her way.
How did you handle all the Hebrew in the film?
It was so hard for me. I’ve spoken Yiddish in a couple of things now — and I don’t [actually] speak Yiddish — but there’s some music to the language that reminds me of French, which I do speak. But I had a wonderful coach, Jesse Miller, who was one of the producers of the movie. His “day job” is to teach kids their Torah portions. So he just hung in there with me day after day. It was always difficult, but we did it enough times that I was semi-ready.
Also, chanting is something I’ve never done. It’s not singing, and it’s hard to learn. But the spiritual aspect of it was freeing to my voice — unbeknownst to me.
(Ethan Benavidez/For The Times)