Ben Foster reunites with Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Levinson (Rain Man) for the biographical drama The Survivor, based on the true story of boxer and Holocaust survivor Harry Haft. Premiering on HBO on April 27, 2022, The Survivor delves into Haft’s life, from being forced to entertain his Nazi captors by fighting his fellow concentration camp prisoners to his decades-long quest to find the woman he loved who was snatched away by the Nazis.
Ben Foster made his acting debut in Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights and was thrilled to collaborate with the award-winning filmmaker on The Survivor.
“He sent me this script and I read it that day, and I was overwhelmed by the tale and overwhelmed with a full heart that Barry wanted to work with me again in this way,” said Foster during the Television Critics Association’s winter press panel.
Levinson believes Foster is one of the few actors of his generation who can completely transform and become another person. “That was a requirement for this particular piece,” explained Levinson during the TCA panel.
Foster lost 60 pounds for the scenes that take place in Auschwitz and then gained that and more as Harry aged. That commitment is what made Foster the right actor to tell Harry Haft’s story.
“[…] He literally becomes another person and I think that’s an essential requirement because you don’t want to feel that somehow we’re kind of playing a role. The piece needs real credibility, and that applies for all of the characters. There needs to be a real credibility to a story we’re trying to tell of basically an individual who was suffering [from] now [what] we determine as post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Levinson.
Foster described the process of getting into the role as a series of small steps. “The closer you get to the story, the more immense it becomes. The way that I combat fear personally is the deep dive, is getting lost in the research. And I was surrounded by people who are very well connected. The Shoah Foundation guided us quite a bit,” said Foster.
Foster added: “I watched thousands of hours – thousands of hours – of Holocaust survivor interviews, spending time with Yiddish experts, learning about this world, the responsibility to honor survivors. And there aren’t many left who are still on the planet…those who have survived the camps. Some of their children are still with us. The immense responsibility to represent the complicated nature of this kind of trauma, I just had to not let the fear take hold and get lost in it.”
Foster shared his reaction to visiting Auschwitz where thousands of men, women, and children were brutally murdered by the Nazis. It’s an experience he’ll never forget.
“It’s an altering experience to be there, to touch the rails that brought the boxcars full of human beings in mass slaughter. It’s inescapable, the feeling. It’s one thing to see a documentary. It’s another thing to see a photograph, and it’s another thing to walk into the place. And it impacted Barry. It impacted all of us who took this trip before we began filming,” said Foster.
“It’s a place I hope someday to bring my children. It feels like a necessity to see that. So, it informs you, whether you want to call it energetically or visually, taking those experiences back, seeing the mountains of baby shoes and toothbrushes that had been disposed of when they stripped the passengers of their belongings…these are things you can’t unsee. And for the job that we have at hand is to fill ourselves with these images and to take that further.
I then plastered my trailer with the images of the camps so that when I close my eyes that’s all I saw. These are the things that he takes with him throughout the rest of his days and finds healing through compassion, and that’s from the compassion of Miriam that Vicky (Krieps) plays so luminously. It’s not a current tale of gender dynamics, but it is an investigation of a time and place of people dealing with trauma, and that trauma is something we can speak to today,” explained Foster.
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The Survivor is based on the book Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano. Barry Levinson directs and Justine Juel Gillmer wrote the screenplay. The cast is led by Ben Foster and includes Vicky Krieps, Billy Magnussen, Peter Sarsgaard, Saro Emirze, Dar Zuzovsky, Danny DeVito, and John Leguizamo.
