Israeli filmmaker Tom Nesher discusses writing and directing ‘Come Closer’, the deeply personal debut that became Israel’s official submission for the 97th Academy Awards.
“I really wanted to make a movie that celebrates life, sees life as a gift worth seizing, and that you really have to enjoy this gift and to really live it to the fullest, because it’s not obvious that you will get it,” says Nesher. “Not everyone has the chance to live a full life.”
In this interview, writer-director Tom Nesher reflects on the emotional and creative journey behind ‘Come Closer’, a film inspired by her own experiences with grief, healing, and young adulthood. She discusses the cathartic but collaborative nature of making her debut feature on a low budget, casting first-time actors, and shaping the story through extensive rehearsals and improvisation. Nesher also opens up about the film’s festival run, its reception amid political tensions, its Ophir Award win, and how she stays grounded while preparing her next project.
After the sudden loss of her brother, the untamed and impulsive Eden (Lia Elalouf) learns he’d been seeing someone in secret. Intrigued by the enigmatic Maya (Darya Rosenn), she’s pulled into a hedonistic vortex of parties, fixation, and illicit attraction—where grief and longing begin to merge in unsettling ways.
Written and directed by Nesher, ‘Come Closer’ stars Lia Elalouf, Darya Rosenn, Netta Garti, Jacob Zada Daniel, Shlomi Shaban, Ido Tako, Ofek Pesach, and Yael Shoshana Cohen.
Greenwich Entertainment just opened ‘Come Closer’ at the Quad Cinema in New York and will be opening at the Laemmle Royal on December 12.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you. How are you doing?
Tom Nesher: I’m doing great. I’m happy to be here talking to you.
AF: You drew on your own life in writing ‘Come Closer’. How cathartic was the process?
Nesher: It was very cathartic on more than one level. I don’t believe that people should make art just for therapy. I feel like if you’re taking resources from the world, you should give back and it should be a meaningful experience for other people as well.
It was very cathartic for me just to work on the movie and to have 60 people come every morning to make basically my dream come true. But it was even more meaningful to share the movie after with people, people who are going through just being young, who are going through grief, who are going through life, and being able to really be that exposed with them and them being vulnerable right back at me. It was just really a true gift that I got with this movie.
AF: How supportive has your family been?
Nesher: My family is amazing. My parents are very, very supportive. I started writing this movie right after our tragedy happened, right after my brother passed away after being involved in a car accident.
It started very quick so they didn’t have a lot of time to tell me to stop, but they were still very supportive and they loved the movie. They were there in every step along the way.
AF: Yeah. With your father being a successful filmmaker, at what point did you know that you wanted to follow in his footsteps?
Nesher: With my dad, he used to show me movies every weekend since I was a child. We used to do marathons of four musicals a Saturday, four westerns the next week, and then four sci-fi movies. We just really enjoyed doing that together. That’s my first cinematic education.
It was obvious that I will love movies until the day I die, but knowing that I’m going to make a film just happened when I started actually making short movies and then making this one.
AF: Having made the short films, did that make the experience on set for this one less daunting?
Nesher: Totally. I really recommend making short films because I feel like it really teaches you so much more than anything else about set dynamic and what can you ask from people, what could they ask from you, and how could you really collaborate? Something that is very beautiful about cinema is that it has a very collaborative nature.
It’s something that you have to do in a group. It’s not like a song that you can just pick up a guitar and finish by tomorrow writing a great hit. It’s something that requires a lot of people working together and really putting their hearts in. I can tell you that for me, that’s been maybe the most important goal was to find people, the crew that were really into it and could really tell the story as if it was their own.
For example, the costume designer, she never did it in any other movie. She’s just a friend of mine who has a great closet and has a lot of great clothes, so she brought in all of her own clothes. Or the set designers or even a cinematographer—I knew him because he shoots parties mostly. I really wanted people who have a unique voice creatively and with the actors, it was the same thing.
The two actresses never acted in anything before. I really wanted them to have a creative input with bringing their own personal stories. We did a lot of improv and rehearsals and I rewrote a lot of the script to fit them.
But it was the same thing with each crew member and with anyone else. When we got to the set, we already knew how was it going to play out. We didn’t have time to do any improv on set, but in rehearsals, we really opened up the story for everyone to give in their own takes.
AF: How much time did you have for rehearsals prior to going into production?
Nesher: We had a lot of time for rehearsals because it’s the first film for all of us, so we didn’t ask for money for it, which is great. I recommend working that way. When it’s your first time, everyone really needs extra time to prepare so it was great that we had that time.
The shooting itself was very short. We only had 20 days and we really had to push a lot in those 20 days. The rehearsal process was maybe four months or something like that. That was the pre-production, and it really gave us time to explore together.
AF: What was the most challenging aspect of the production?
Nesher: Working on a very low budget movie is always difficult. We made this movie for less than a million dollars. I also believe that it could be an advantage if you take it the right way. All of the extras were my friends. The house is my grandmother’s house. Everyone in my life participated in some way or another. It really added intimacy to the set.
Or the way that you have to just deal with cutting out scenes from the script because we don’t have enough time to shoot them. We really only take whatever is necessary for the script. There’s nothing that is left on the floor of the editing room because you already do that beforehand.
For example, when there’s the most dramatic scene where Eden gets the phone call telling her her brother is in the hospital, there’s lightning in the sky, even though we shot it on a beach in the middle of the summer, and there wasn’t supposed to be rain and lightning. That just happened, and we didn’t have a chance to stop shooting because we didn’t have the budget for it.
But it was also amazing because then we have lightning in the shot, and that’s the take we took for the movie. If you take it the right way, it could really free you from a lot of things. I feel like sometimes when you have a big budget, it’s also a burden in some ways.
AF: How quick or long did it take to find the right actors for the roles?
Nesher: It took me some time. I really met with anyone in that age group, also people who are not actresses. With them, they are girls who wanted to be actresses, but they didn’t have any prior experience. It took me time to convince even the producers that these girls could really do it.
They came into their first audition not really knowing what to do, but I really worked with them because I had meetings with them, just talked with them, and understood they’re interesting people. I really tried to bring out all of the colors that I see in them.
I sometimes say that it was like casting in nature. I had to find a tiger and a bunny. If they weren’t a real tiger and a real bunny, it just couldn’t work. Lia is a real tiger and Daria is a real bunny. After I knew I found these traits that I was looking for, that’s when I could really get into bringing the great acting out of them.
AF: Yeah. The past two years have not been so friendly for Israeli filmmakers. How honored were you to have ‘Come Closer’ selected to world premiere at Tribeca?
Nesher: It’s been an immense honor. It’s been so amazing. We’ve screened the movie since in many places in the world, and it’s just been a beautiful journey.
I won’t lie—there were also difficult parts. There were protests against the film in certain places in Europe. It was also difficult, but that’s just the nature of politics. I don’t find this movie political in any way. I don’t find it having anything to do with the current affair of things, but people see it in another way.
AF: I watched the film shortly before its Tribeca premiere as a screener, and I did not find it political either.
Nesher: Yeah. Yeah, but that’s just the nature of people. They feel like life is a soccer game and they need to choose a side. They just need to choose a team to root for, and life is much more complicated than that.
AF: Yeah. How honored were you that the film won the Ophir Award and was selected for the official Israeli submission to the Oscars last year?
Nesher: It was amazing. It was such an emotional day. It was right before our premiere in Israel and it was really just surprising in the best way.
We worked really hard on that campaign, even though we had no money. It was just going to all the screenings and talking to everyone. It was a great honor when we got when we got that prize.
AF: Now that you’ve won multiple Ophir Awards, how do you stay grounded?
Nesher: I live my life. Life hasn’t changed in the everyday sense of it, but I also try to really be happy about the achievements of the film. Making a movie is so difficult, and it takes so many years to get anything done.
Now that I’m working on my next feature, I know that it’s the process of years, and you really have to enjoy the achievements you got from the last movie in order to have the gas to make this car continue running.
AF: Going back to the writing process, how long did it take you to get the script in a good place to where it was close to the final script before all the improv was added?
Nesher: I started writing right after everything happened in my real life. It was when I was 21, and I really wanted to have this feeling of young people in a script while I’m still young. I always loved coming-of-age films, but they’re usually made by a 40-year-old male director about a 17-year-old girl.
I wanted to make something about a 20-year-old girl while I’m still a 20-year-old girl. I started writing right away, and I had a first draft within maybe four months. But then from that point and up until shooting it, it changed a lot. I rewrote it many, many times.
I had mentors that I worked with, and I had a lot of people reading it. I did my own share of coming of age of growing up. It took me time to be able to see things in perspective. I always knew that this will be the ending of the story to some extent, but I didn’t really know how will I get there.
Eventually, when I grew enough to be able to see things as they are in the movie in the end, that’s when I was able to really write it.
AF: When did production actually take place?
Nesher: It was the summer of 2023. It was the best days of my life. It was so fun.
AF: So production had already wrapped before October 7?
Nesher: Yeah. We were editing when the war started. It was very, very, very intense, as you can imagine.
When we released the movie and it came out in Israel, there was something also beautiful about being able to share it with people who experienced grief. I don’t wish this upon anyone from any country in the world. But if someone experiences something like that, it’s better not to feel alone.
I was looking for films and books about experiences similar to what I had. It was hard for me to find something about siblings. It was hard for me to find something about a girl in my position. Making a film that will fill that space for those people was very meaningful for me.
AF: What do you hope people take away from watching the film?
Nesher: Eventually, this is a film about grief, but this is much more like a film about life than that celebrates life. That is something that was very important for me from the very beginning: to make a movie that is funny and that is sexy, and that is a movie that I would enjoy watching.
That is in the tone of the movie. It comes across in the cinematography, the costume design, and any other aspect. I really wanted to make a movie that celebrates life, sees life as a gift worth seizing, and that you really have to enjoy this gift and to really live it to the fullest, because it’s not obvious that you will get it. Not everyone has the chance to live a full life.
AF: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you this morning.
Nesher: Thank you.