Walk on Water isn’t your everyday thriller about Israeli spies, gay Germans and an old Nazi. With a pitch like this, you can imagine Walk on Water took many years – six to be precise – to get its funding, yet out director Eytan Fox’s (Yossi & Jagger) latest feature is pretty darned divine.

Eyal (sexy Israeli superstar Lior Ashkenazi) is a hitman for the Mossad, Israel’s secret service organization. His latest mission: track down Alfred Himmelman, a long-wanted Nazi. Himmelman’s earthy granddaughter, Pia (Carolina Peters), now lives in Israel, alienated from her parents. Hoping to convince her to return to Germany for a big family event, her equally liberal gay brother, Axel (Knut Berger), visits. To ingratiate himself with the siblings, Eyal poses as a tour guide. At night, listening in with surveillance equipment, the assassin determines that the siblings have no knowledge of Himmelman’s current whereabouts, nor do they want anything to do with him. Yet Eyal follows Axel back to Berlin with hopes that Himmelman will resurface at the big family event… and he can take care of business.

Fox, who was born in New York City and raised in Israel, touches on many sensitive sexual, humanist and political issues in Walk on Water, including the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict was also explored in 2003’s gay-soldier romance, Yossi & Jagger. Both films are collaborations between Fox and his partner in love and art for 16 years, writer/producer and journalist Gal Uchovsky.

To discuss Walk on Water, Israel’s troubled state of affairs and gay life, the Gay & Lesbian Times spoke with Fox by phone.

Gay & Lesbian Times: Eytan, what did Israelis make of Walk on Water? For some, it takes very controversial stances and broaches very provocative topics.

Eytan Fox: I left the project in the middle to make Yossi & Jagger because I thought I’d die from not directing! It took many years to make this project happen.

You can’t make an Israeli film without the help of its government public funds. They give out grants and they didn’t understand what we were trying to do. They have these traditional “Holocaust movies” – old-fashioned black and white period pieces. [So they asked questions like] “Why combine gays and identities and the Holocaust and our current situations? What are you trying to say?” They were kind of suspicious of me. We didn’t give up and got the money from different sources, and the Israeli public received the film beautifully. The Berlin Film Festival chose it to open the Panorama section in 2004. Israelis are very nationalistic. When you succeed abroad, all your sins are forgotten! It doesn’t matter if you’re gay. [Eurovision Songwriting contest winner] Dana International is transsexual, she succeeded outside Israel, so we’ll forgive her for being transsexual!

GLT: Did you hear from the Mossad at any point during or after production?

EF: Yes. When we started working, they called us and said “we realize you’re making this film. We’re not going to interfere, it’s a free world and country, but maybe we should… talk, exchange ideas.” A polite way of putting things.

GLT: Eyal murders a terrorist early on by bumping into him and injecting him with some sort of poison. Is that how they do it?

EF: That was based on a Mossad fuck up. This famous story where some years ago there was an important terrorist so they bumped into him and sprayed this stuff into his ear and it didn’t work. He did get very sick. It was a crazy story.

GLT: So were you paranoid about being bumped into when the film premiered?

EF: In Israel you’re paranoid period! If I see someone wearing a big backpack or looks puffy, I move a few meters away.

GLT: Were there any suicide bombings in Israel during shooting?

EF: Yeah, there were. We heard a giant boom and we said “OK, it’s a suicide bomber.” We called friends and parents to see if everyone was OK and went back to shooting, and at night we went to a bar and drank. That’s our life. It’s terrible, it’s tragic, but we’ve gotten used to this. It was so shocking and frightening and crazy for the Germans to get used to the whole idea.

GLT: How did the German actors feel about being in a film that involved Nazis and was partially shot in Israel?

EF: It was interesting. Carolina came to Israel. She was interviewed on this hip young pop show. The interviewer asked “how do you connect to the film and your character?” And she said, “well, my grandfather was a famous Nazi.”

She said how difficult it was to come to Israel and how, on her day off, she was walking down the street and saw this old couple walking towards her and she literally moved to the other side of the street because she was afraid “they know who I am, they can see through me.”

GLT: Is Knut gay in real life?

EF: Yeah, he is. It was such a refreshing experience. I am usually this director known for taking macho hunks and throwing them into these gay situations or characters. I never got a chance to find the right actor for a gay role who was gay himself and it was wonderful! Did I know this when I cast him? I’m not sure.

GLT: What’s the most interesting aspect of Israeli gay life due to the current situation? And is there a club you can go to if you’re an Israeli who wants to pick up a Palestinian?

EF: No. You say that because as an American it’s a very big country with options and different existences so you can have a white looking for an African American, all that stuff. We don’t have that big world of gay existence in Israel. When I was a child, I remember Independence Park in Jerusalem was the cruising park. Arabs and Israelis mingling, meeting, doing whatever they were doing. My next project is going to be about that.

The working title is The Bubble, which is a term used by Israelis to describe life in Tel Aviv. It’s this love story [between an Israeli and Palestinian] and throughout the Palestinian is contemplating the idea of becoming a suicide bomber. It’s going to be a complicated story.

GLT: Eyal hates Palestinians and gets furious when Axel sleeps with one. He’s also very abusive towards other Arabs in the film. Have you received much flack for depicting Israelis as less-than-angelic?

EF: There is that. The “why do you have to take the dirty laundry and wash it outside of the country for our enemies to see?” That’s old Israeli-Jewish paranoia. “The world’s against us, they’re all against us and out to get us.” That’s part of what the film is dealing with. We have to overcome that fear and go ahead and realize the world’s not against us and we have to fix things up for ourselves in our lives.

GLT: Did Knut actually get lucky in Israel?

EF: The director is the last one to know! But I think Knut had some experiences in Israel with a few nice Israeli boys. That’s what I’ve been hearing!

GLT: What are your feelings about Nazis who still live in hiding? Should they be left alone to perish or tracked down and jailed or executed?

EF: It’s a difficult question on so many different levels. On a practical level, I wouldn’t bother. But on a philosophical level you ask yourself “Why not? Just because a lot of time has passed? Or these people are older? It’s something we have to pursue?” I myself would not invest a lot of energy in dealing with actual people. The stories, the histories, trying to learn and understand as much as possible and come to the right conclusions [is important]. Not letting things like this happen again. Not just anti-Semitism, but for us as Israelis. The way we behave with our enemies and neighbors, the Palestinians. We have to be very careful we don’t get close in any way, manner or form [to the Nazis] and we have been getting pretty close to doing terrible things and behaving terribly. We have to change that and heal.

GLT: How is life for you and Gal these days?

EF: Good. We’re working more and more together and he’s focusing more on our film work and less on writing for newspapers. We’re writing the next script.

It’s difficult to live and work and do everything together. A symbiotic kind of thing you have to struggle and deal with. How are we not going to fuck up our professional life or personal life? It’s a struggle but we’re doing OK.