Ben Foster OF ‘THE SURVIVOR’

You have to be brave to play a character like Harry Haft, a boxer who fought fellow concentration camp inmates to survive. Were you scared?

When Barry (Levinson, the director) called, I was excited that he had a project, and I was excited before I was scared, I suppose. As we’d worked together 20 years previous, he gave me my first job in “Liberty Heights,” my first acting film. And 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.

You discover a role in small steps, and the closer you get to the story the more immense it becomes. And 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. I watched thousands of hours of Holocaust survivor interviews ... 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.

What were the emotional challenges of guiding your character through the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi regime?

It’s an altering experience to be (at Auschwitz), 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 . ...

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 . ...