“It’s an incredibly New York story,” suggests Bartlett Sher how he helped give birth to “Oslo”. The play-turned-into-film tells the true story of the behind-the-scenes negotiations that culminated in the Oslo Peace Accords. Sher’s daughter was the best friend of Mona Juul and Terje Rod-Larsen, the Norwegian couple who orchestrated the talks in Oslo. The stories the couple told Sher during their daughters’ soccer practices were “so amazing” that he introduced them to the playwright. JT Rogers. An exciting drama is born. Sher directed the Broadway production of “Oslo,” which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2017. He went on to direct and produce the HBO film adaptation, which is nominated for the TV movie at this year’s Emmy Awards. . Watch the exclusive video interview above.

Sher is steeped in the world of theater (he has nine Tony nominations, with a victory for leading the South Pacific revival in 2008), but “Oslo” marks his first real foray into cinema. While the director had long envisioned projects that would take him from stage to screen, nothing seemed perfect until this piece. “In the case of ‘Oslo‘, I could see what film could be made,” he explains.

Sher describes the film as being “deeply in the first person”, and cites this as the biggest difference between film and theater mediums. “The first step we took was to take the piece from a story told by this couple to a story almost exclusively about Mona Juul,” says Sher. This change was the reason for a new opening flashback sequence where that of Ruth Wilson Mona lives first hand the violence and grief in the Gaza Strip. The timing was important to Sher because it immediately “gave some kind of moral structure” to the film and put Mona on the path to justice. “It’s always interesting to me what drives someone to enter the public service,” he reveals.

The film’s many Israeli and Palestinian characters are all played by actors from this region, a conscious choice by the producer that has paid off enormously during production. “As an artist from the United States, they were teaching me constantly,” he says. They all knew each other from the Middle Eastern theater scene and frequently shared stories during rehearsals for the film. “Their experience as artists is sort of the greatest hope of what ‘Oslo’ does,” suggests Sher, noting that these artists loved and challenged each other, despite tensions between their countries of origin.

Asked about the film’s release during a period of renewed tension between Israel and Palestine, Sher notes that “Oslo was only meant to be the beginning” of the peace process. “When the movie came out, we were sitting in Oslo’s hope and idealism against the truth about what it’s been up to over the next 25 years,” he explains. “It is important that the public see it as a call for dialogue, but not as a solution. “

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