He slipped his copy of the Psalms into his briefcase, patted his jacket pocket for his wallet, wrapped his neck in a scarf, and stood for a minute in the dark, trying to remember if he had forgotten anything. Then he double-locked the apartment door behind him. The taxi he’d called was already waiting downstairs. A cat ran into the beam of the headlights and yowled. Epstein got into the passenger seat, and the driver greeted him, and after a minute of silence turned up the Mizrahi music on the radio.
The location manager met him with a car at the appointed place by the side of the road, in the desert not far from Ein Gedi. Things were going terribly, he reported, running his free hand through his thinning hair. Did Epstein mind if he smoked? Epstein rolled down the window, which brought in the sulfurous smell of the Dead Sea. Because the budget was tight until they got the funds from him, they’d had to make compromises. This had turned the already moody and irascible director into a tyrant. Even he had come to despise him, the location manager told Epstein. His sole motivation had always been to please the directors he worked for. All he wanted from his effort, and the endless hours he put in, was to make the director happy. But Dan was impossible. Nothing was good enough for him. If he weren’t so talented, no one would have put up with it. He blew his top over the smallest mistakes, and made a show of humiliating those responsible. When the assistant director let Bathsheba go home, thinking she was done for the day, Dan threatened to cut off his dick. When Goliath’s greaves were nowhere to be found, he also went batshit. “Goliath has four lines,” he screamed, “and one of them is ‘Bring me my bronze greaves!’ So where the fuck are his greaves?” In less than an hour, Props had found some shin guards and spray-painted them gold, but though they looked convincing enough, Dan took one look at them and threw a chair. The next day, when the tech guys had no dolly for a battle shot, Dan stormed off the set, and could only be soothed back after Yael shut herself up with him in the van for over an hour. But rather than return peaceably, he came back demanding a larger crowd of Philistines. Seeing as he had just fired the casting director, and the budget wouldn’t stretch for more paid extras, Eran—though by now he wanted to kill Dan—had posted a call for volunteers on Facebook, and had his rock-star cousin share it to his three hundred thousand followers, with the vague hint that he himself might show up.
And how many came? asked Epstein.
The location manager shrugged, tossed his cigarette, and said they would see tomorrow. The battle scene had been put off until they could locate a crane.
When they arrived at the set, the sun was starting to rise. Dan and Yael were still on their way from the hotel at a nearby kibbutz, but the DP was rushing to set up, and wanted to begin as soon as possible, while the light was still magic. They were supposed to shoot three scenes of David in the wilderness on the run from Saul. First, David and his band of misfits and outlaws showing up at the house of the wealthy Calebite, Nabal, to demand provisions in return for the fact that, under their watch, no harm has come to Nabal’s shepherds and three thousand sheep. After that, the scene of Nabal’s death, and his wife, Abigail, being forced to marry David. At midday, when the sun would be too hard for anything else, the DP wanted to shoot inside the cave, where David secretly snips off the corner of Saul’s cloak while the king relieves himself. Just before sunset, they would do one final shot from the end of the film.
David was in the truck, getting his makeup done. Thirty sheep were on their way, led by their Bedouin shepherd. Saul, who struck Epstein as too eager, was wandering around in costume, joking with the grips. Next to Epstein, Ahinoam, Saul’s ex-wife, was curling a lock of hair around her finger as she mouthed her lines. She was having problems, she told him. Epstein asked her why, and she explained that her part was one of the more controversial aspects of the script. She’s mentioned only twice in the whole Bible: once as the wife of Saul, mother of Jonathan, and once as the wife of David, to whom she’s apparently already married when he weds Abigail, too. But nowhere does it say anything about how David must have stolen Saul’s wife—which amounted to an attempted coup—and that’s the reason he had to flee into the wilderness, and why Saul wants him hunted down and killed. But since the point of the book of Samuel was to establish David’s kingship as an act of divine will, obviously the biblical author couldn’t go too much into the whole Ahinoam debacle, Ahinoam explained, which would have exposed David as the ambitious and cunning prick that he really was. But they also couldn’t totally ignore what everyone knew back then, either. So they had to stick Ahinoam’s name in on the sly—oh, yeah, by the way, David also had this other wife, whoops—and then gloss over it, just as they had to do with the fact that David joined the Philistines and probably really did raid the towns of his own people in Judah, just like he told Achish. But Yael had a different vision, Ahinoam told him. Her David was a little closer to the real David, and her script also emphasized the female characters’ roles, which was good for Ahinoam, otherwise she wouldn’t even have a part. Still, she only had three lines in the wedding scene, so she had to squeeze a lot in. Handing over the script, she asked Epstein to prompt her.
After a long morning they broke for lunch, with only the final scene to shoot in the early evening. But by three thirty the actor playing the elderly David still had not appeared. A call came through on the satellite phone: Zamir was ill. He’d thought it was nothing, and hadn’t wanted to cancel, but now it was something. He sent his regrets from Ichilov Hospital, where he was getting some tests. The director, too exhausted to scream anymore, slowly poured the remains of his coffee onto the desert floor and walked off, talking to himself. The set was nearly empty now. The other actors had all returned to the kibbutz, and only a small group had driven in jeeps to this remote spot. Yael huddled with the production manager and producer. A head taller than both, she had to stoop to keep their voices within their circle. Under stress, in the chaos of the set, she alone remained unflappable. Without her, Dan would have been lost, and, understanding this, Epstein begrudged him her attention a little less.