Steve Buscemi joins Joseph Cedar's new film
'Boardwalk Empire' star heads cast additions to Israeli director's international production 'Oppenheimer Strategies,' starring Richard Gere.
According to Hollywood news website Deadline, the film's cast, which already includes American actor Richard Gere and Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi, has been joined by Steve Buscemi and Michael Sheen.
Michael Sheen is a British character actor, who is best known for portraying broadcaster David Frost in "Frost/Nixon" and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in "The Queen."
Anglo-French actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg also joined the "Oppenheimer" cast several weeks ago.
"All of us are absolutely thrilled to have this incredible cast bring Joseph’s brilliant script to life,” said the film's Israeli co-producer, Oren Moverman, who has become one of the most famous filmmakers in New York's independent cinema scene. "We are so excited to start shooting and to bring this remarkable film to a worldwide audience."
Moverman's co-producers are Gideon Tadmor, Miranda Bailey, Lawrence Inglee, David Mandil and Eyal Rimmon.
"Oppenheimer Strategies," an Israeli-American production, focuses on the relationship between Norman Oppenheimer (played by Gere), a Jew from New York, and Micha (played by Ashkenazi), a rising Israeli politician.
Joseph Cedar, 46, is one of Israel's most successful filmmakers. His debut film, "Time of Favor" ("HaHesder" in Hebrew) about a complex love triangle in the middle of a terrorist conflict in the West Bank, hit the screens in 2000. Four years later, he wrote and directed "Campfire" about a woman's battle for acceptance into a new settlement of religious Jews.
In 2007, he directed the Oscar-nominated "Beaufort" about an IDF unit stationed at the isolated mountaintop post in Southern Lebanon during the First Lebanon War. He co-wrote the screenplay together with Ron Leshem, based on Leshem's novel of the same name.
His last film, "Footnote," which was released in 2011, won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The movie focuses on the troubled relationship between a father and son who teach Talmud at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
