A duo of burly, gun-toting Hasidic gangsters and their doting bubbe are the breakout characters in Darren Aronofsky’s 'Caught Stealing'.
To bring them to life, the film had a secret weapon: a Yiddish whisperer.
Motl Didner, program director for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, first heard rumblings of the crime caper through a casting notice seeking Yiddish-speaking actors. He didn’t know the notice was for an Aronofsky film, but he passed the details along to members of the company, and even sent in a self-tape to be considered for a role. Later, the production got in touch to use him as a Yiddish coach.
“That’s when I found out who exactly it was that I lost out to,” Didner told our PJ Grisar. “I don’t feel so bad about losing out to, like, Liev Schreiber.”
Didner worked with Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Carol Kane — respectively playing a pair of frightening drug lords and their grandmother — settling on a Hungarian dialect for their dialogue, and even rewriting some of their Yiddish lines. The duo show up as a threat to the film’s protagonist, Hank (Austin Butler), who finds himself caught in the middle of their quest to recover piles of money from other ethnic gangs in 1998 New York City.
And Didner wasn’t the only dialect coach for D’Onofrio and Schreiber; they had a separate one for English.
“Darren Aronofsky was very specific,” Didner said of “the boys” — how Aronofsky referred to the characters. “He didn’t want them to speak English with a Yiddish accent.”
The film is a “love letter” to a past New York, Grisar writes, “stuffed with tributes to bygone establishments like Kim’s Video, cameos by WFAN’s Mike Francesa and an ethnic patchwork that gives observant Jews a central role.”