Director Rachel Israel has three feature films under her belt, and they are all full of very different kinds of Jewish joy. There’s “Keep the Change,” a wondrous movie that centers a JCC social support group for autistic adults, “Influenced,” the Jill Kargman comedy about rich Upper East Side moms that centers Kargman as Danielle, one of those moms who is throwing a b’nai mitzvah ceremony for both her kids, and now there’s “The Floaters,” her newest film, which features a Jewish summer camp named Camp Daveed and a group of misfit summer campers called the floaters.
That this movie exists is a miracle, and not just because it’s the best Jewish summer camp movie ever made.
Israel was six months pregnant when she was shooting the movie in the summer heat, filming with “one of those little handheld fans stuck in my bosom, oriented up, between takes to cool,” she told Kveller in an interview last month. The plumbing in the nurses’ office at Camp Tel Yehudah didn’t work, just like the plumbing at the fictional Camp Daveed at the center of “Floaters,” and Israel had to flush the toilet with shower water while filming (she’s fairly certain it’s been fixed since!).
The road to making this film was filled with challenges; they had to get special permission to film amid the SAG-AFTRA strike before they even recruited the principal cast. And the heat and the fan weren’t the only challenges of shooting; bear sightings and lightning storms and a COVID outbreak threatened to — and sometimes did — shut down the shooting of this already tight-budgeted film.
But the vision is brilliant, and the cast is stacked, with Jackie Tohn playing a reluctant but actually really good camp counselor for said floaters, Sarah Podemski playing her best friend who manages the camps, Aya Cash as an over-enthused and wonderful camp rabbi, Steve Guttenberg in a delightful side role as Manny an old camp counselor and millennial icon Seth Green as the head of the rival Camp Barack.
We’re so grateful this miraculous movie made it to our screens. And we had so much fun talking to Israel about making “The Floaters.”
On being a floater herself
I was homeschooled, and maybe that has something to do with the heart I have for misfit experience. I felt like I always was [a misfit], so I felt very much like I belonged in that world. I definitely would have been a floater. I wouldn’t have wanted to participate in any of the activities. I’ve always been an artist, and on top of being homeschooled, I didn’t even fit in an art school. I wore Sears sweatpants — I was just not cool.
Why not going to Jewish summer camp actually helped her make this movie
I didn’t go to Jewish summer camp… I feel like as a director, every world should be like, you need to go through that process of discovery and not take for granted that you know a thing. I didn’t know it, and got to discover what it is.
On working with Seth Green
Seth Green was just such a treat. I remember, for instance, we were shooting… it’s actually, gosh, it’s a scene that got cut, but it’s in the… it’s in the end credit scroll, where the sewer system explodes, and he’s covered in it. He went into the make-up department and was like, this is not enough, give me the muck, and he just completely doused himself in the stuff.
He’s such a humble guy, and just knew exactly what to do to take the comedy to that next level; [he knew] that you have to push it further.
On working with the younger cast of floaters
Thani Brant as Tal, Jacob Moskovitz as One-Nut, Jim Kaplan as Tums, Jake Ryan as Wetspot — their characters were great on the page, but [the actors] brought so much backstory to them, so much depth and detail. The first half of the shoot, the floater characters weren’t filming yet, and during that time they formed bonds and worked on their character relationships together. By the time we shot them, there was so much meat there, and their characters became bigger in the edit because we left space for improvisation.
On the “rikkud” — Jewish summer camp dance — scene in the movie
Our producers, Shay, Lily and Becky Corman, went to the summer camp that we shot at, and their parents met there.
Shay would tell me oh my god, you know, the rikkud experience is so central. I didn’t get it until I actually went to a rikkud, which we did weeks before filming, and then I got it. It’s just such a space of joy and relief, and that feeling of youthful energy and sexuality, and all of it… that really did need to be the centerpiece of the movie. It was necessary in capturing that feeling of summer and youthful possibility, regardless of what age you are. I hope we captured it.
On what “The Floaters” is all about
Kveller: I love that this movie is not romance-centered… it’s just really about friendship and the experience of summer camp, and how summer camp is like a mini-coming of age experience for everyone.
Yes, you can be someone different at camp than you can be in other places in your life. Talking to so many people who went — Seth, whose mother was a summer camp director, Sarah, Jackie, the Kormans — frequently the takeaway was that at camp you can be someone else. It’s [a space that] allows you that… and then maybe that [version of you is] someone you can also bring home.
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