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Debra Tammer in the guise of Zara in That’s For Me! |
Fame, I’m gonna chase it forever!
Debra Tammer, whose new comedy film opened this week at the UK Jewish Film Festival, tells Dan Carrier how she found her writing muse in failed auditions
ZARA Zimmerman is a nasty piece of work. She is totally self-obsessed, and is driven by only one ambition – to be famous. She couldn't care less what she is famous for, but this horrible Primrose Hill based wannabe actress / model / TV presenter / singer / dancer knows that simply she must become a household name, and spends her entire life banging on about it to any one unfortunate enough to be in her vicinity.
Backed by her mother and father, who believe she is an acting legend, albeit one who has yet to be discovered, Zara is the bane of agents, producers, directors and family friends, forced to listen to her bleating over how stupid the rest of the world is for not giving her the leading role in a Hollywood blockbuster.
Thankfully this idiotic loser is simply the figment of the imaginations of actor Debra Tammer, whose on screen alter ego Zara is the star of That's For Me, and director Claudia Solti. The pair's film made its UK premiere at the Jewish Film Festival this week at the Everyman in Hampstead.
Tammer, who has toured with the English Shakespeare Company, created Zara, a north London wannabe determined to be an a-lister, because of her own self-confessed lack of screen success.
“It was slightly disheartening to go for an audition for a part in The Bill or Casualty and get turned down,” she says.
Originally from Leeds, she studied English at Oxford but had always wanted to go on stage. A request to her parents to send her to drama school, aged 16 was flatly turned down, but after graduating she still hadn't exercised her acting bug and decided to do a post graduate acting course.
But screen success was still not forthcoming.
“I did get a really good part in an advert for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes though, where I have to run around in a super market,” she says. “It's been showed all the world and is currently running Australia.”
Such minor roles gave birth to Zara.
“I was very disillusioned,” she admits.
“I had all these great ideas about what acting should be about – these dreams of reciting Shakespeare. But most of the time I was going for auditions for commercials and getting rejected. “
This constant disappointment meant she turned her hand to writing – and Zara was born.
“I was getting so pissed off with the acting industry, which was full of deluded actresses,” she says. “ I saw so many who were doing rather well but simply are not talented, and people celebrating mediocrity. I couldn't help but lampoon and satirise it. Zara is part of this ridiculous vanity culture.”
Zara's innate lack of any talent doesn't stop a weekly ritual at the Friday night dinner table. Rather than breaking bread and sharing a prayer, the family, lead by her deluded mother and failed actor father (who does racist impressions at the dinner table) aided by a ever-turning wheel of other relatives and friends scheme over the chollah and chicken soup ways to help her realise her dreams.
As well taking simple pot shots at the narrow minded narcissism of actors, she has also lampoons aspects of contemporary Jewish culture. Zimmerman is a young woman living in a vicious caricature of a north London Jewish family.
“I am Jewish and I know the culture,” she states.
“And I also know people of other cultures will relate to this family.
“If you can create real characters, people will find it funny, and hold a mirror up to themselves and laugh about that. If anyone is offended by this, they have clearly had sense of humour failure.”
Claudia is also an Oxford graduate, and then went on to study drama. Her comic direction led her to an award winning play in Edinburgh, but she has always wanted to make films and showed two of her early, short efforts at the prestigious Venice Film Festival.
With That's For Me, Claudia had to work within strict budget constraints.
“It started as almost a glorified home movie,” she says. “I shot the whole thing either out on the street or in each others houses . We had no crew and we had 2 cameras.”
But despite the shoe string budget, the pair had a clear idea of the films leading characters and how the plot would progress.
“We wrote the film based around characters that many actor friends had already made up, and then wrote a plot that could include them all, plus a couple of new characters based on amalgamations of people from my own life,” she says.
“It is based on an amalgamation of mine and Debra's experiences of acting. It is partly taking the piss out of both ourselves and the insane stuff that used to go on. I remember once going to an audition and being asked to pretend to be a fish in a fish tank, and often thought it would be a funny subject for a documentary.
“We are taking the piss out of ourselves to a certain extent, or making light of things that happened to us – although they were things that were pretty painful to go through at the time, the endless meetings, terrible agents, ludicrous castings, endless rejection.
“I remember driving every day to drama school to work with this very difficult director who loved to tell me how bad I was at acting - only to have to drive past huge billboards of this girl who was at Oxford with me. Everytime I didn't get a job, there she'd be, staring out at me from the cover of a magazine - it was funny, so we used that, too.”
She says being an actress can be 'humiliating', but also the film comments on how society;'s values are skewed when it comes to fame.
“Our fame obsessed culture celebrates all the wrong things,” she says. “Everyone thinks they can be a celebrity nowadays, irrespective of talent . I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of what is achievable thanks to shows like X Factor- and it creates a lot of unhappiness.”
Using improvisation techniques, Claudia got realistic performances from her cast to ensure the documentary feel of the film was not compromised.
“The script was semi-improvised,” she reveals. “We wrote a full scene by scene breakdown , including many of the lines the characters were meant to say - but not all.
“I shot the film in sequence, so none of the actors in it knew the plot line. We were filming their real reactions to events as they happened.”
The set piece Friday night dinner scenes, where the family's foibles are laid bare, saw Claudia hiding under the dinner table and giving actors cues and directions by tapping them on the feet.
Now, again with Debra, Claudia is working on their next project: a romantic comedy set in Primrose Hill.
“It is a modern day adaptation of midsummer nights dream - some of which is in blank verse,” she says. “Trying to be funny and rhyme and come up with the right amount of syllables is pretty tough.”
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The UK Jewish Film Festival highlights
THIS is the UK Jewish Film Festival’s Barmitzvah – it celebrates its 13th year this November.
And it’s diverse programme shows that the definition of what can make it into a “Jewish” film festival covers a vast range of topics.
Highlights include the UK premiere of Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man and a series of films highlighting the work of Israeli actress Ronit Ekabetz. Elkabertz’s movie Jaffa, a Romeo and Juliet-style tale of a couple in love who are faced with hostility due to the fact one is Jewish while the other Arab, makes it’s UK debut at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn on Sunday evening.
Director Judy Ironside said the fact this the festival’s 13th year meant they had chosen some with barmitzvah themes, including Jack Rosenthal’s iconic film The Barmitzvah Boy.
Other films include Oy Britannia, a British Film Institute collaboration that has culled a century’s worth of archive footage to discuss the representation of Judaism and Jewish people on screen. |
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