Movie producers often close sets to protect the secrecy of their films, but they don’t usually do so to protect the physical and mental health of those nearby.
That’s just what happened with the four-part series “Red Alert” about the Israeli heroes, who rose up in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel. During a scene about the terror attacks on Kibbutz Nir Oz, Lawrence Bender, executive producer of the series, told the crew to line trucks up around the set, so that children in the nearby town wouldn’t see the actors dressed like Hamas terrorists.
The children “were sent to a kids park for most of the day,” Bender told JNS. “We paid for them to go have a fun day.”
The producer also worried about what adults in the village might do if they saw the staged scenes, particularly a shootout between Hamas terrorists and Israeli soldiers.
“The mayor and the police were freaking out,” Bender told JNS.
He was told that “the town’s cemetery is full of men who died in this war, and the men that are left all have guns,” he said. “They’re not going to run away. They’re going to run to a problem. If an innocent happens to walk by the set, or looks down from an apartment building, these actors look real, and someone might start shooting.”
The crew took what he described as unprecedented precautions, including setting up large speakers every 10 yards, blaring in Hebrew that what was unfolding was an active movie set.
“They made us so worried that the actors playing Hamas, when they went from the holding area to the set and then back, we would cover them in these white hazmat coverings,” Bender said.
The crew wore light blue shirts to further signal to passersby that this was an organized gathering and not a chaotic attack.
Given that many crew members carried real guns for protection, there were also thorough inspections of prop guns on set.
“We all know that’s a recipe for disaster,” Bender said. (In October 2021, Alec Baldwin fatally shot a crew member with what was supposed to be an unloaded prop on the set of “Rust” in New Mexico.)
“This was not a normal movie,” Bender said.
‘Help my people’
Bender, 68, came to fame in 1992 after producing “Reservoir Dogs,” which Quentin Tarantino directed. He produced “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, and has also produced “Pulp Fiction” (1994) and the dark Holocaust comedy “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), both of which Tarantino directed. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, and his films have won eight.
Some three months after Oct. 7, Avi Nir, CEO of the Keshet Media Group, made an “emotional presentation” about what would become “Red Alert” to Bender in Los Angeles. The pitch, and the “incomprehensible” reality that “the world had turned against Israel on Oct. 8,” made Bender resolve that he “needed to do something to help my people,” he told JNS.
The team, which included Green Productions in Israel, started developing scripts based on interviews with survivors. Lior Chefetz wrote and directed the project, which was funded by the Jewish National Fund-USA. Keshet signed on as distributor.
The show marked Bender’s first time shooting in Israel, which he found can be pricier than other locations. But he told JNS that the show had to be filmed in Gaza, Beersheva and key points in southern Israel.
Bender, who met with the heroes the show would portray, kept artistic liberties to a minimum, even as he told JNS that the true stories were often hard to believe.
“I spent a lot of time with them. A lot of emotional time,” he told JNS of the heroes portrayed. “I feel like they’re my family.”
‘Art imitating life’
When the crew filmed a scene in which Batsheva Yahalomi, of Nir Oz, runs to freedom with her daughters, the soundtrack got an assist from actual background noise.
“She survives barefoot, running for hours and hours through the fields and the heat, and they stop under a tree,” Bender told JNS, of the actress Rotem Sela. “She’s running while we’re filming.
“And then, you hear the bombs going off,” he said.
That sound of bombs was actually audible from Gaza, where the Israeli military was conducting an operation about a mile from the film set.
“You have life imitating art imitating life. It’s just very strange,” Bender said, describing an initial silence, followed by a resolve to move forward.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to do another take.’ Like, what are you going to do?”
Fortunately, those involved in the show didn’t need to use portable bomb shelters that were brought on set daily via flatbed truck. Their presence reminded Bender regularly that he wasn’t filming in America or Canada.
One of the heroes portrayed in “Red Alert” is Liat, whose last name is not given. Bender said Liat took him around the site of the Nova music festival, where her best friend, Yulia, was murdered. Liat told Bender that she had blamed herself for a long time for her friend’s death, believing that she had left Yulia behind.
Only through trauma therapy did Liat realize that Yulia was running in front of her, trying to escape, she told Bender.
“She’s so traumatized, this woman, but still, it was like some minor relief,” he said.
Liat gave the producer a bottle of wine with Yulia’s picture on it. Bender told JNS that he brought it to a Passover dinner, where he told the guests about Yulia and Liat.
“It was beautiful and human and difficult,” he said.
‘Angering, isolating’
The key to Bender’s work on “Red Alert” was to make a movie with which Israelis would be happy, but one with potentially global appeal, he told JNS.
That’s a particularly thorny issue for Bender, a prominent Hollywood Jew in a post-Oct. 7 environment.
“On Oct. 8, I didn’t get those phone calls asking, ‘Are you OK?’” he said. “‘Do you have family over there?’ ‘Do you have friends over there?’ ‘Is everybody safe?’ ‘Can I come over and hang out?’ ‘Tell me what you need.’”
That silence was “really angering and isolating,” yet freeing, he told JNS.
“When I decided to make this, I didn’t care what anybody else thought. I’m not asking for permission. I’m not seeking anything,” he said. “I’m on a mission, and everything kind of falls away.”
