‘NAZA’ Producer James Wilson Addresses “Hysterical, Vituperative” Israeli Government Backlash Against Directors

Melanie Goodfellow
Thu, October 8, 2026 
DEADLINE

‘NAZA’ Producer James Wilson Addresses “Hysterical, Vituperative” Israeli Government Backlash Against Directors


NAZA producer James Wilson has addressed the Israeli government and military backlash against co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor over their bombshell documentary exposing Israel's deliberate targeting of civilian targets in Gaza.

Wilson told an onstage conversation on his career at the BFI London Film Festival that criticism of the film and threats against the directors were largely from people who had not seen the work.

He said the "hysterical, vituperative, aggressive backlash" from members of the Israeli government and threats to revoke the directors' citizenship had been been "very difficult, stressful, horrible and scary".

"They are safe, and they are okay," he added, suggesting that the reaction from the Israeli government also came with the territory.

"I think it's part of the film," he said citing a piece by Israeli activist and producer Libby Lenkinski in the Jewish American newspaper The Forward.

"She wrote about the reaction to the film being part of the film, and how the sort of cognitive dissonance, around that reaction of people who haven't seen the film talking about the film, was sort of what the film was also about," he said. "There's a sort of meta aspect to that reaction to the film that the film embodies."

Wilson emphasized, however, that the overwhelming response to the documentary had been positive, even if the subject-matter is difficult.

"The majority reaction to the film has been, from my point of view, extremely positive, and I'm personally very pleased at that. The critical reaction to the film has been extraordinarily positive," he said.

"One thing that's been particularly pleasing to me is how many serious film critics have discussed and thought into the cinematic formal ideas in the film… it's a really important piece of cinema in terms of its content, but also its form."

Framed around nighttime rooftop interviews against the backdrop of the Tel Aviv skyline with 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, the documentary exposes the AI, phone surveillance and crude points-based systems deployed by the Israeli military in Gaza to decide targets, Hamas-related or otherwise.

It probes the Israeli military's strategy of taking out targets in their homes regardless of whether children and other family members are likely to be killed in the strike as well.

The title NAZA is taken from the Israeli military's Hebrew acronym to describe the number of civilians that could die when tallying up an estimated death-toll ahead of a strike.

Monday's conversation also dug into Wilson's wider 30-year career spanning time as an exec at Fox Searchlight Pictures and then Film4, where he was the production executive on films such as Sexy Beast and Dancer in the Dark, through to the creation of JW Films, under which his recent credits include Jonathan Glazer's Oscar and Bafta-winning The Zone of Interest, Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice Of Hind Rajab and Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to Ideology.

Looking back at the early days of his career, Wilson said the UK cinema industry had been an entirely different landscape when he started out.

"I came of age watching films in the late 70s and the 80s as a teenager, and always did want to work in film," he said, recalling he had no idea what shape his professional life would take.

"I was an art house film buff, late 70s Time Out, [I] used to cut out those little quarter-page ads of Nosferatu and Herzog films… I was old enough to be too old for Star Wars… I remember seeing Stars Wars and thinking it was a bit uncool," he said.

"Looking back, I'm among the last generation who came up with cinema as the jewel in the crown of moving pictures language… What was happening in the 90s that you can sort of see more from a distance… in the film industry was there was this explosion in specialty film. There'd alway been independent film, but it was crossing over into the mainstream. There wasn't an internet then. Cinema and film still had this kind of aspirational… elite thing."

He recalled how his time at the American Film Institute in L.A., after an English literature degree in the UK, had coincided with the release of Reservoir Dogs.

"There is the beginning of Sundance explosion and these ideas of 'independent films', films that weren't in the formula of Hollywood blockbuster films. There had always been independent film, but it starts to reach a wider audience."

Wilson's first job in 1994 as an assistant at Fox Searchlight coincided with this time and eventually saw him propelled into the heart of this trend.

"My then boss Tom Rothman, who now runs Sony Pictures, had this idea that studios could get involved in making these same kinds of films… I was a baby assistant and then an executive in the white heat of that," he recalled.

"I remember going to Sundance in the mid '90s. Do you remember the film Shine, with Geoffrey Rush?There was a fist fight between Harvey Weinstein and the person who was selling it. People were buying films for millions of dollars."

He said that at the time no-one saw that the trend had a finite lifespan which would end with the rise of the digital age.

"It was the end period of a period of that would be ended by the beginnings of digital, the beginnings of the internet…into the aughts, that would change the landscape forever. "

Before that, however, Wilson's career also coincided with the rise of European broadcasters such as Canal Plus and Channel Four piling into film, with cinema's status waning from the early 2000s onwards.

"We begin a sort of slow movement into this period you're talking about now, where there's this massive proliferation of moving pictures, entertainment, and film is no longer the jewel in the crown as it was when I started… to sum up, I was very lucky timing-wise to start in that period in the 90s," he said.

Jonathan Glazer Collaboration

The talk dug into Wilson's longtime working relationship with Jonathan Glazer, which began on the director's first feature Sexy Beast (2000) while he was at Film4 and continued with Under the Skin (2013) and most recently The Zone of Interest (2023)

"He's not prolific. The processes aren't happening fast. Although, how do you define fast? I'm not using that in a pejorative way, although it would be nice to have more John Glazer films and we do talk about that," said Wilson.

"You can see from that time span that the creative process is long. It's very organic. It's a lot of turning the soil, as he calls it… turning the soil on an idea, so you're thinking and talking and exploring and researching."

He said that their Oscar-winning feature The Zone of Interest – about the wife of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss who is blind to the horrors taking place beyond the walls of her manicured garden – had been born out of a joint desire to make a film exploring "the Holocaust, the Shoah".

With development beginning in 2014, Wilson revealed how it had taken them "a year or so" to connect with the Martin Amis novel on which it is based.

"We didn't know what it was, and certainly with him…. he's always looking to do something that hasn't been done before, trying to find what that is, what's unique, what's singular, and what's unprecedented," said Wilson.

"It takes so long to make a film, and especially a John Glazer film. The thing has to make you want to get up every morning for a long time… we were reading and watching films and reading articles and plays and everything for a year or so, and then John came upon a description of the Martin Amis novel and was like, 'We could hang it on that that unique perspective'."

The film finally world premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, where it won the Grand Prix, and then went on to win Best International Feature Film and Best Sound at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Glazer sparked controversy when he used his acceptance speech to refute his and Wilson's "Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people".

Acknowledging the people killed in the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel as well as those who had died in Israeli military operation in Gaza, Glazer said they were all victims of "dehumanisation".

Wilson said he could not take credit for the speech but that he stood by Glazer's every word and was proud of his decision to make it.

"I don't want to take credit for that, but yeah, we were sort of partners in crime maybe on that one… John decided to do it, and he shaped it, and we did talk about it a bit at the time… it was John's speech, but I knew what it was going to be, so kudos to him," said Wilson.