His work illuminated

Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer came to this post-revolution, fairy tale city in the 1990s, joining the crush of literary pretenders in search of a modern-day Hemingway’s Paris and Czech Americans in search of their roots.

Foer stayed for a few months in 1997, a period that included a badly planned, hapless three-day trip to Ukraine for clues to his Jewish ancestry. But what had been a failure of experience became a gold mine for his imagination.

His 2002 novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” became an acclaimed bestseller and perhaps the one great American novel to emerge from the Paris of the ‘90s.

The story traces a young American’s Ukrainian journey in search of the woman who might have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Its introverted hero (who happens to be named after the author) is accompanied by his wildly extroverted interpreter-tour guide Alex, Alex’s grumpy grandfather and a scrappy Seeing Eye dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

Alex’s convoluted, thesaurus-and-American-pop-culture-driven English is the comic backbone of the book, and Foer has inserted elaborate imaginary historical passages to entertaining effect. As Foer points out, “it’s really not an obvious choice” for a film adaptation.

Unless, of course, you interpret it as a road movie.

“The only way I knew how to adapt it was as a road trip,” said actor and first-time director Liev Schreiber (“The Manchurian Candidate”) on the Prague set in July. Schreiber, 37, grabbed the film rights based on a pre-publication excerpt in the New Yorker and wrote the screen adaptation himself. “I felt this could be like a really fun ride,” he said. Set to open in August, the $7-million film is being distributed by Warner Independent Pictures.

A Jewish American who also has ancestors from Ukraine, Schreiber said he began wondering about his ancestry while traveling in Europe, working on films such as “Jakob the Liar” (1999) in Poland. Schreiber, who said he has been writing privately for years, had been working intermittently on a screenplay about his beloved grandfather -- a father figure for the actor who died when Schreiber was 26. Then he read Foer’s book excerpt.

“I said, ‘Wow, that’s really on the money, and the jokes are much better,’ ” Schreiber said. While Foer had no technical script approval or formal role in the adapting process, he spent a weekend at Schreiber’s country house in upstate New York talking out a treatment, and he read three drafts of the screenplay.

“Liev wanted my input probably even more than I wanted to give it,” Foer said. “I didn’t want to stifle him. I don’t know the first thing about movies.”

“There were definitely points where I would have loved to have just said, ‘Jonathan, you write this,’ but he wasn’t having it,” Schreiber said on location an hour outside of Prague, in a deserted house that was being made into a Ukrainian hotel for the day. “I sent him every draft I wrote. He just didn’t read all of them,” he added with a tight-lipped laugh.

“I had to get a little angry to let go of that crutch -- to go, like, ‘Jesus, he doesn’t want to return my calls, he doesn’t believe I’m actually gonna make this movie.... So I said, ‘Screw him, I’m just gonna make it.’ ”

Schreiber said that once he got down to it, the writing process was a swift three months.

He has taken a long, complex novel and turned it into a trim, stylish script, removing the historical passages, adding fantasy sequences for all the characters -- the dog included -- that he insists came to him in dreams: Hitler at an awards ceremony, the illusion of flight, Alex’s childish sexual fantasies.

Schreiber frequently lifted Foer’s memorable dialogue wholesale, changing at most a word, particularly in the case of Alex (“My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name”).

Foer said that Schreiber “took every liberty he wanted to, which is exactly the way I would have wanted him to do it.” The author had already worked out an eloquent sound bite for his theory of detachment: “I feel like I made a sculpture of, say, a person that I loved. And Liev took a photograph of that same person. I don’t feel protective of my sculpture -- I feel protective of the person.”

‘MORE ALEX THAN ALEX’

If the character of Jonathan Safran Foer is loosely based on the author, the character of Alex is based even more loosely on a tour guide named Alex (who, Foer said, “wasn’t as fluent and wasn’t funny at all”).

Which makes it all the more remarkable that the filmmakers seem to have discovered Alex incarnate in the form of a New York-based Ukrainian Gypsy punk rock musician by the name of Eugene Hutz. “He’s more Alex than Alex,” Foer said. “It’s uncanny.”

Schreiber was meeting with Hutz about using music from his band, Gogol Bordello, when Hutz, who had read the book, scratched his chin and said of Alex: “You know, I am that guy.” And everyone in the room paused and said, “It’s true!”

Hutz, who is from a family of circus performers, seemed to be having a good time on set. “I’m naturally drawn to a very eccentric way of performing,” he said in his strongly accented and eccentric English, adding that he was more challenged by the serious scenes than the “idiotic parts.””I was interested in Alex not being an actor,” Schreiber said. “I wanted that flavor.” But Schreiber said he had to “think strategically” about casting to get his film financed, picking Elijah Wood from among name actors of a certain generation to play Jonathan.

“Jonathan needed to be someone who, without doing much on the surface, could convey a lot behind the eyes,” Schreiber said of the awkward, introverted character, who walks around in an unstylish suit collecting artifacts in Ziploc bags and making notes. “And I really don’t think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood.”

When the best eyes in the business showed up on their day off for in-costume photos and an interview, they were magnified times seven in the character’s exaggerated Clark Kent-style glasses. The actor, who was as solicitous in person as Foer was reserved, is not an obvious choice to play the character based on the author. Except that both men look like they are 12 years old. (Wood is 23; Foer is 27.)

Wood, who has been acting since age 8, calls the role “vastly different” from anything he has done before. Midway through shooting, he said that the biggest challenge was not “to fall into the trap of simply playing the character deadpan -- to be so subtle that nothing’s happening. Because there is this world going on inside of his head always.”

He called Schreiber “articulate and incredibly specific, pointing out that in addition to a meticulous script, he had storyboards for every scene and made a ritual of his daily shot list. “He works all the time,” said Wood. “It’s really endearing -- that doesn’t sound patronizing, does it? -- to watch him work as a first-time director, because he’s so passionate and he pushes himself so much. There’s something really pure about that.”

In an interview that took place in between more pressing tasks over three days, Schreiber had the sniffles and a frog in his throat and complained of a headache and a pinched nerve in his neck, conducting one part of the ongoing conversation shirtless in his trailer, while being worked on by a Czech masseuse.

But he was full of energy on the set, betraying his obsession with the acting process by jumping up at the slightest provocation to give the actors a note, or circling them at close range during rehearsals. In one scene, just before calling “Action!,” he told Wood to improvise, adding two lines of his own to the dialogue.

“He did it word for word as I had written it, but it was really good and really engaged and filled with interior life because I had asked him to engage with the script,” Schreiber said. “Some actors need to be rattled and some need to be focused. And Elijah’s so focused.”

An actor after Schreiber’s own heart, he admitted.

EMOTIONAL CONTEXT

At 11 p.m. on a back street in Prague’s Old Town, the late summer twilight had just faded into darkness, and the art department hosed down the sidewalk for a scene outside a fictitious neon-lighted nightclub. Some of the film was being shot in Ukraine, but most of it would be filmed here in the low-budget Eastern European shooting capital for American film productions.

Schreiber said Ukraine is a fifth character in his movie. “The character of the country is represented in the industrial landscapes and the flat wide plains and the fertile green hills and the temperature of the sun and the speed of the clouds,” he said. “All of that has emotional context for me.”

If Americans have been making movies in Prague for the last decade, this is one of the only films being made by Americans in Eastern Europe that is about Americans in Eastern Europe -- on the road, out of place, chasing ghosts, relying on the English of foreigners.

“I am so used to being able to express myself from being an actor,” Schreiber said of the language barrier. “So when people don’t understand me, I’m just completely lost.” But he felt more at home in his new role: “I direct in the same way that I act, which is thinking about what the scene needs. That’s why I always thought I should try directing.”

He also wanted a break from acting. “Acting kind of insulates you from the world,” he said. “Ironically you go into this job that you think is going to allow you to be expressive to people and to connect to the world. And the more successful you are in a strange way, the less emotionally connected you are and the less often people emotionally connect to you.”

For Schreiber, the tale of two opposites meeting halfway between cultures and identities is a story of the common ground that human beings share and rarely embrace.

“Obviously I’m projecting a lot of my own issues onto the script,” he said. “But the idea of a Ukrainian kid and a sort of neurotic American Jew coming together is about as far-fetched as there is possible. And it brings that point home -- that ultimately our search for self leads to connection with each other. We have more in common than we thought.”

His highest hope for the movie is a bit less serious-minded. “I think if it’s fun, then everything works,” said Schreiber with the pained expression he often wears. “I think everything stems out of a sense of play and frivolity and joy.... It just needs to be a good time at the movies.”