UK producer James Wilson has staunchly defended the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of NAZA after they were accused of committing “treason against the state” by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several senior military and far-right political figures.
“The first thing I’d say is that the majority reaction to the film has been, from my point of view, extremely positive,” said Wilson during a talk on his career as part of the BFI London Film Festival industry forum last week.
He noted the backlash has come “largely from people who haven’t seen the film”. A petition has been signed by over 1,500 Israeli filmmakers supporting Abraham and Szor.
“In terms of the hysterical, vituperative, aggressive backlash from members of the Israeli government, Israeli politicians, threats to the directors, legal threats, threats to revoke their citizenship, two young filmmakers who are Israeli Jewish filmmakers made a film in which, in researching the film along with the Guardian journalistic team, spoke to many, many Israeli officers and soldiers, about 100 sources,” he said.
“In the film there are 24 Israeli officers, Israeli Jewish officers and soldiers. So to have made a documentary film, a little documentary, and been threatened by the political elites of your home country with charges of treason and defamation, it has been very difficult and stressful and horrible and scary for them. Then the kind of rabble-rousing that incites in other people individually, so threats of all sorts. But they are okay. They are safe… I think the reaction is part of the film.”
The film is produced by Wilson alongside The Guardian and executive produced by Wilson’s long-time collaborator, The Zone Of Interest filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. It was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and explores Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Dogwoof is releasing the film theatrically in UK-Ireland this week, and it will be self-distributed by the filmmakers in the US.
In Italy, I Wonder opened it at number one in the local box office at the end of September, beating Avengers: Endgame: Encore. I Wonder previously distributed The Zone Of Interest and The Voice Of Hind Rajab.
”The personal is political”
Wilson fiercely believes politics and art do not exist in separate spheres.
Accusations of antisemitism were levelled at Wilson for a speech advocating for peace in Gaza and Israel when he collected his Oscar for Holocaust-set The Zone Of Interest in 2024. Glazer and Wilson are both Jewish.
“I get so bored by debates about politics and ‘is art part of it?’. I can’t believe that 50 years after feminism taught us that the personal is political, we can even bother to have debates about that,” said Wilson.
“Class is the elephant on the kitchen table”
Wilson began his career in the 1990s, working as an executive in the US at Fox Searchlight — as Searchlight Pictures was then known — and then in the UK at Film4, He forged strong creative partnerships with UK directors Glazer and Lynne Ramsay along the way.
His producer credits span Glazer’s Under The Skin as well as the Oscar and Bafta-winning The Zone Of Interest, Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza docu-drama The Voice Of Hind Rajab and Aneil Karia’s modern-day take on Hamlet starring Riz Ahmed.
He reflected on the slow process of 2013’s Under The Skin coming to be, which took 13 years from first optioning the book. “It’s really not a good amount of years.”
In a 27-year career, Glazer has made four films. “It’s a lot of turning the soil,” said Wilson.
How does the economics of such a slow-burn process work for an independent producer? “If it doesn’t sound too cheesy in a post-woke world, [it’s] privilege and advantage that I have, being from a classic British film business, middle-class, upper-middle-class background,” Wilson explained. “That’s not to say I’m minted or anything like that, but I have a level of economic low-level security that has allowed me [to maintain a producing career] for long periods in my life.”
He added, “Class is the elephant on the kitchen table for a lot of people” who have made long careers in the film business.
Wilson is also an advocate for keeping a very low overhead within his company JW Films. “I’m a one-man band. It’s that bag and my iPhone. There’s no office… Sometimes I look very enviously at other producers who have assistants and offices and development people. I just don’t understand how they do it. I don’t. My brain doesn’t work that way.
”I don’t understand how you take your producer fee that you get from an independent film and squirrel enough of it away to pay for all that stuff, and be able to pay your gas bill.”
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