Danny DeVito on Reuniting With Barry Levinson for ‘The Survivor’ and the State of Film Distribution

thewrap.com:

When it came time for director Barry Levinson to cast the role of famed boxing trainer Charlie Goldman in his new film “The Survivor,” he went straight to his friend Danny DeVito. “This was all Barry,” DeVito said about how he came to be a part of the HBO Holocaust film, telling TheWrap it was like no time had passed at all since he and Levinson first worked together on the 1987 film “Tin Men.”“The Survivor” tells the true story of Harry Haft, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp who was forced to box other inmates to survive – sometimes to the death.

The film – which premieres on HBO and HBO Max on April 27 timed to Yom HaShoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day) – plays out in two timelines, as Haft tries to make a life for himself in America after the war but is haunted by the events that happened inside Auschwitz, told in striking flashbacks.“You see a lot of Holocaust movies – and rightly so, we should keep the education up so that people understand what we’ve been through as human beings – and this is a unique story,” DeVito said of the story focus in “The Survivor.”The actor, producer and sometimes director was unfamiliar with the story of Haft or Goldman when he was first approached for the role, but was intrigued. “Besides the whole Harry Haft story and what was going on in that time in our history, I found Charlie and that was great to find this time in Rocky Marciano’s life where he had Charlie as his corner man and his mentor,” DeVito said of what he discovered in his research. “But I didn’t know anything about Charlie or the details of his life, and how a lot of his family was lost in the camps.”Besides the story, DeVito was happy to work with Levinson again in a professional capacity. “Over the years after.