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It's my job. That's how I make my living.
That's all.
Film is my job.
Sometimes it is fun, sometimes not so much.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
But I don't have any special sacred relationship to it.
It is my job.
That's all!
So... Come on down! I should introduce myself.
Hello! My name is Milota.
To the left, and to the right.
Good afternoon! I see you managed to find me.
Let's go!
They shot with me last year and some part got lost,
so they came back from India to shoot a short interview.
It's like an old castle here.
- Is that you? - Hello!
They're shooting us hugging here.
He wants me to keep going in and out of the door, to and fro.
Who is it, who is it...
So, we can start.
This is our guru.
Jean-Claude Carrière.
This house.
And it was fun because Greta Garbo planted some orange trees in the garden,
so every morning we had orange juice.
Jesus! I must have been strong. Very strong!
I was a very strong boy.
Hello!
Hello, cat!
Hold on... Now I have to pull it out. You see? These are pictures from my films.
I have to separate them.
This is the first one, somewhere here.
Ah, Yes.
The students are worthless. They shoot nonsense
they film bullshit
using the state's money
wasting our time.
It's a useless school. They should shut it down!
Fuck Stalin!
Pete's a dope.
He wants Bela.
Just to add another notch on his belt.
I collect hands
he collects notches...
We all do our best.
Hands, a strange human form...
They can't lie.
They don't know how to pretend.
My sweet...
This is the blessed spot where we met 17 years ago.
Only the leopard is new.
Kind Nature long ago probably relieved the other of its shackles.
Do you think it's freedom you've been striving for?
I don't know.
- You attempted suicide... - That's my business.
- You really think so? - I don't know.
All I know is that I'm all right.
It's all nonsense anyway.
What's the matter, miss?
Why are you crying?
The winner is Czechoslovakia for Closely Watched Trains.
Accepting...
Accepting for I Even Met Happy Gypsies, Aleksandar Petrović.
I am very happy that Americans
like Czech films.
Thank you!
He did say that Closely Watched Trains won
but you could hear from the loudspeakers
that a Yugoslavian film won.
And my colleague, a Yugoslav, a close friend, Petrović,
well, when he heard a "Yugoslavian film"
he started to get up from his seat because he thought he was getting an Oscar.
And then he heard Closely Watched Trains.
So he sat back down as if he'd had a stroke.
You know, in some way, it's a perfect film.
There are not too many.
You can always say something is too long or
some scene is not exactly what it should be.
In Closely Watched Trains, it's very hard to find a weakness in that film.
The rhythm is perfect and...
I think I would put it in the category of perfect films.
I've had many fantastic moments in my life
but one of the most fantastic ones was my encounter with this person,
who would be a great influence on me
and to whom I owe many of my films
that I had the chance to make with him.
He's my God. Or my brother.
As you wish.
What made Americans like Closely Watched Trains?
I also wonder what it was. Because...
It is a film made for Czech audiences.
But I'm glad they liked it.
And I'd love this film to bring Mr. Hrabal closer to them
because he deserves to be such a world renowned author.
At this spot, there stood a house
in which, from the '50s to the '70s
of the last century Bohumil Hrabal used to live.
I think, in fact, that creative work...
genuine creative activity is
a special prerogative of humans
causing them much... good. And giving them a good feeling.
Whenever I was making a film and I stopped being creative
and suddenly ceased having some kind of relation to the movie
what remained was only work.
It was then terribly hard, and mostly it showed in the movie
since creativity is man's privilege.
Work is violence while creativity is joy.
You know, the Czech film industry was very strong before the war.
Small country, Czechoslovakia in the times
14 million people, was producing over 30 full-length features
which only 14 million people could understand in the Czechoslovak language, you know
which was enormous amount.
But when... then the communists took power
and they nationalised the film industry
and the production dwindled to two, three films a year.
But meanwhile, the film school was producing new and new students.
So every year there were, you know, 5-6 new 'in-waiting' directors, writers, cameramen
coming out of the school and there was no work.
So in the time when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin,
we were like tense and tense
you know, waiting in front of the closed doors of the Barrandov Studio to start working.
And he said that one line - Khrushchev - there that,
"We must give more confidence, opportunities to young people!"
Okay, here we are.
So in 1963, the door opened and just, you know,
the whole army of new directors started to work.
Leaders of Western countries made a deal with Stalin during the war
that Central Europe, including the Czechoslovak Republic
would...
would eventually come under the Soviet influence.
So police terror existed here in the 1950s.
I mean...
the atmosphere in the society was not good.
There were human rights violations, and so on.
As a consequence of that
the '60s saw a bit of a mitigation
a kind of a liberalisation
which made it possible for...
for...
for the Czech and Slovak New Wave to emerge.
A friend used to say, "Culture tries to get its foot in the door
while the regime tries to shut the door again.
Every time the regime loses a bit of grip, the foot gains more ground."
So, during those 20 years, the regime alternately tightened and loosened its grip.
But the advantage of it was that in the '60s a group of people came forward
who wanted to do something new, and were motivated by an aversion to the regime.
In 1965, 1966, 1967, the situation got gradually more relaxed.
And we all searched for opportunities to make films we wanted to make
films that... we couldn't do until that time.
Orson Welles said that, "Little oppression is good for art"
so I think it was a part of it that we
were developing in an environment which was oppressive
and we didn't like it.
After all the atrocities, experiences, the killings
and everything that we saw during World War II
it looked like a new beginning.
Communism promised equality, freedom, brotherhood.
But after that, it dramatically changed its face
and we suddenly found that we were in a cage
that we were razor wired
and couldn't even speak about freedom.
And that was a disappointment of the highest order
that an intellectual can be hit by.
We were, of course, quite young back then - 19, 20 years old.
That's a time of idealism.
And the realisation of the 1950s was even more cruel
when they began executing the most intelligent communists
who were
firm in their thoughts and philosophies.
Then the executions happened, and what was truly horrifying
was that they somehow forced these intellectual heavyweights to
call themselves criminals, enemies, spies.
That was unbelievable.
And that was when our liking for communism stopped.
We knew that something must be done to change it.
In 1969, Antonín Liehm who was an important film critic in the '60s
subsequently left the country after '69
wrote an article in which he talked about the "Czech Film Miracle".
So that term was used as well at that time.
I think "New Wave", I'm not sure who coined it.
The miracle was that the Czechoslovak film industry
was financed by the state
was owned by the state.
This is something that especially
the West European film critics could not understand
why the communist government is paying filmmakers to destroy their own regime.
It was the time of the weakness of this bureaucratic communistic regime.
That means, they were losing control of everything
and that way we were out of focus of the concentration of the power.
And so, they were fighting between the both
and basically they let literature, music and films 'sort of' freedom.
And we used it - me, Chytilová, Menzel, Forman,
we just captured this possibility of the freedom and
we made a film.
Sometimes it happened that the film was forbidden, like
A Report on the Party and the Guests
then I was expelled from the film studio
but I was allowed to work for TV, and I was allowed to travel abroad
let's say, work for the foreign company.
That means it was time of relative freedom.
Everything is spoiled in this world.
What do you mean, "everything"?
You know, everything.
In this world...
You know what?
When everything is being spoiled...
What then?
We'll...
be spoiled...
too.
Us too.
Right.
Is that a problem?
Not at all!
Come in... come in... come in
The name "New Wave" was simply invented by journalists
because there was also a New Wave in France.
The closest to the term "Czech New Wave", without any doubt
was Jiří Menzel in Closely Watched Trains
but, of course, we shouldn't forget Věra Chytilová
who really stirred up those stagnant professional waters
of Barrandov by doing what was irritating, what was much more lively and not academic.
When the director of photography Jarda Šofr returned from a projection of Les Cousins
he felt so dazzled, he was out of his mind after watching Les Cousins.
Therefore, we saw the opportunities of film expression in Italian movies
but we knew them mostly from the French.
And I think that even Věra Chytilová was
in her first movies, influenced greatly by Agnès Varda.
The big drama about "La Nouvelle Vague" was this...
We saw that Jean-Luc Godard was shooting in the street and all
so a lot of producers started to think
that you could do whatever, with whoever in any way you wanted.
But the thing is that Jean-Luc had talent and maybe even had genius.
We saw Breathless. We saw other things.
And the way of shooting was the most enjoyable I could think of.
And it was very... It was an amazing time.
And many years later, in the '90s
when I was shooting a French co-production film
the French producer told me
"That short film of yours... it looks exactly like a Godard".
Godard influenced all young European directors so fundamentally
that, for example Skolimowski, the Polish director
would clean the walls just like Godard.
I thought Godard
was sort of a Pope of the disruption of the form.
That very much intrigued me.
And in my first film
I let myself be very influenced by the way he perceived space.
Earlier here, as well as in France, the films were shot mainly in studios
with heavy film cameras, shot on weak film material
that wasn't very sensitive and required complex lighting.
Suddenly, they marched on to the streets with portable cameras with sync sound.
For us it was a big inspiration
and that's why our movies also went out of the studios.
For that reason, I would say that they were much more natural.
Hi Miloš!
- Hi Maša! - You're looking smart.
You're looking nice too, Maša.
I know, when I'm going to see the Menzel film,
I prepare my mouth and I know that I will enjoy
and I will watch the film like this.
Because this will be the spirit, which I like so much
this is the Central Europe.
He is someone who can symbolise the Central Europe way of telling the stories
and...
living in not so simple times and sometimes
quite brutal political situations
and always having a smile and always telling the small stories
with themes that have nothing to do with the system
but they are talking about the system on their own way.
I think this is one of the films that changed the history of Eastern cinema.
It expresses so well what I love about Czechs
about this mix of humour and gravity
this self irony, this kind of distance to the life.
Don't take yourself and the life too seriously.
But, at the same time, it's what I don't like about the Czechs
that it's too easy for them to push away the responsibility for the things.
Everything is so light
that it doesn't mean that we are responsible for that.
It's what Milan Kundera, another great Czech artist
called "unbearable lightness of being".
So in Menzel movies, it's exactly this lightness of being
and sometimes it's unbearable and sometimes it's just beautiful.
It's basically a really delicate, intimate look at the life of a young man
who's confronted with someone truly unreal.
And it's done in such an intimate way that I see it myself, I breathe into his face...
He breathes into my face, I completely understand him.
That's absolutely simple... absolutely simple... it's Hrabal.
If there is something from Menzel then it is only reflected from Hrabal.
All around is war and big drama
and this young boy's biggest problem is his frustrated quest for sexual initiation.
That is the main theme and what drew Menzel to the book
because Menzel has a very specific and peculiar interpretation of eroticism.
It was a description of how Zdeníčka Svatá describes to the investigator, Zedníček,
what Mr. Hubička did to her at midnight, while on duty
and it got me excited.
The way he described how the dispatcher laid her down
and took her pants off and all that...
I remember that at the time it was almost pornographic literature for me.
Eleven... twelve...
Contrary to, like, the French New Wave
or the Danish New Wave
we didn't have any defined aesthetics.
I often protest against the summarising term "New Wave"
because it was a wide spectrum of authors, who were very diverse
and connected by friendship, jealousy
and all the usual things involved in filmmaking.
Jan Němec's films are very different from Chytilová's films.
Chytilová's films are very different from Evald Schorm's films.
Evald Schorm's films are very different from mine or Ivan Passer's films.
Miloš Forman... he... It was his idea.
It was he who called Štefan Uher "John the Baptist"
of the Czechoslovakian New Wave.
Because the film The Sun in a Net
was made earlier than Forman's Black Peter.
I was a big admirer of Fellini
I was big admirer of Alain Resnais
I was big admirer of Robert Bresson
and I was admirer of Louis Malle
but my biggest
influence, or I'll say, my God, was Luis Buñuel.
That's Federico Fellini, whom I drew this way.
He looks a little bit like a lunatic.
And this is how he perceived me, this is how Federico Fellini drew me.
Everything happens in a surprising way.
People act in ways they shouldn't be acting.
In this symbolic way, people were learning freedom.
You understand me? And Czech literature was just like that.
Páral, Hrabal, Škvorecký...
They were doing things in ways the things aren't done.
I guess the first one was Audition by Miloš Forman.
This is Věra Křesadlová.
Suchý...
This is with Miloš. I was shooting the movie on that camera.
That was a French camera.
And I brought him to Miloš, and Miloš said, "What did he do?"
I said, "Nothing yet, but he is going to be very good."
He said, "How do you know?" I said, "Well, I saw him when he was an operator."
And he worked for top cinematographers
and he learnt very well from them.
So Miloš said, "Okay, I..."
Also because we were very young and we didn't think that any, sort of a,
established cinematographer would want to work with us
on something which we did with our resources.
For a bottle of wine, we got film from television
you know, leftovers.
I started my first film Konkurs - Competition, if you want - as an amateur film
just as a home movie for my friends.
And then, when the doors to the Barrandov opened and
they gave me chance to finish it as a movie
which can be released in the theatres
then I needed to do a little fixing of the...
It's half documentary, really, but we wanted to give a little bit of a plot, so I...
I called on Ivan Passer, because we were together.
This is German camera.
You know, before war go down.
This camera, Miloš Forman buy from Germany for, say, 10,000 crowns at that time.
My dad always said, "I'm not a cameraman, I'm a filmmaker."
"I was left with a camera, I work with it, but I want the film to be good."
I think absolutely the most important thing that I admire the most about him is that
he is a film narrator. His tool is a camera. He narrates through the camera.
Mirek Ondříček was probably the ideal collaboration for me
because we were so much tuned into the same visions that we were...
I was not even aware of working with him.
This is a camera I got from my dad.
What's interesting about this camera is like my dad, it was 'born' in 1934.
And then Forman came once to see the performance.
He loved the band.
And he wanted to shoot a film about how Semafor, the theatre, is moving
to the centre of Wenceslas Square.
And he had this story in mind, with this girl, or more people
who would be in the movie, so that it wouldn't only be a documentary
but there would also be some acting. So he was looking for people.
And we were just having this big concert, the only one...
the only one the communists overlooked
in Lucerna, as part of this Big Beat bands gathering.
And Forman also came to see the concert, and he said I should also act in the movie.
And I said that I didn't want to.
I said I had school leaving exams coming and didn't want to act in a movie,
because I had a few walk-on parts in movies before
small roles during my studies.
But he said he wanted me to take part in it
that I didn't have to sing if I didn't want to
that he just wanted me in the movie.
So I took part in Audition.
He, kind of, tried so hard, he would invite me out for dinner
and take me to see all these interesting people.
And he took me to Semafor.
So, in short, I started dating him.
And I dated him for about half a year when I became pregnant.
And we had twins.
So before I gave birth we got married, I married with a little belly already.
And then the movie, Audition, was quite a success.
One day, in this one-room apartment
I remember that we were saying
how, in this country, you can make a decent movie.
And we took a piece of paper
and we wrote down eight points,
that it has to be a comedy,
because the censorship
following the Party's directive that
the public needs to be entertained, was milder
the censorship was milder,
that we are going to use non-actors
non-professional actors
because the professional actors, we thought, they were corrupted by the whole system,
they will shoot on the street
which, we saw it is possible from Italian Neorealistic movies
and also, outside of studio... less controlled
and we are going to use natural light
and... there were like eight points.
And, then we said, "Okay, so how do we start?"
He put an advert in the newspaper that the Semafor Theatre is looking for actresses.
And then we waited...
We received over 200 applications.
Miloš Forman used a half-hidden camera, not totally,
but so the amateur actresses wouldn't be intimidated.
So he was, sort of, hidden behind a curtain.
He let them do whatever they wanted to.
But he did a very clever thing.
He put in several of his own characters.
He instructed them beforehand what they should say, more or less.
For instance, he told one actress that, "In the end,
you won't compete because you'll have stage fright."
Like this... And he let them express themselves in their own words.
And then he shot it all.
When we saw it, we were amazed. Such a film hadn't existed until then.
The top editor in the studio
agreed to look at it and put it together.
We started, like, in the morning
and he was a... The guy was unbelievable.
So fast on the...
When he was moving the film
I couldn't follow if he's moving left to right or right to left, he was so fast.
And at some point, we fell asleep with Miloš
it was like 10 o'clock at night
and he woke us up at 6 o'clock in the morning and he said, "There is the movie."
I lived 10 years in Germany, but I know Hrabal...
It wasn't a relationship with the Golden Tiger pub, but a relationship with beer.
Hrabal used to say, "My relationship with beer is a sacred one".
He grew up in a brewery. Beer was something which was in a certain way sacred
something that was important, but also an everyday thing.
His mother, instead of buying him a lemonade
filled a jug from the beer tank and said, "Drink, little Bohumil."
He was drunk for the first time when he was five.
No, you can also turn right. But if you go left, you'll get to Mr. Hrabal...
That's what I want... but I mean is the end of the road there?
Yes, that's the end of this concrete road...
Menzel, unlike Hrabal, isn't a surrealist, of course.
And his overall approach is kinder, or more conciliatory.
He is sort of...
His narrative style is a bit different than Hrabal's.
But in Closely Watched Trains, the two clicked very well.
I think that the film is almost even better than the book.
Hrabal was a natural. There wasn't even a shade of falsehood.
The things he wrote corresponded with the things we all knew.
Moreover, he didn't describe it passively, he finds paradoxes.
In a single sentence, he writes things that make you laugh
and at the same time you find a certain depth and sadness in it.
He knows how to write texts that... His texts are like a mosaic
where one stone catches glitter from the other.
The sentences... how they fit together!
Or the sentences... that he just took directly from everyday dialogues of ordinary people
the things he experienced in the pubs, the gibberish that he heard
he managed to draw out incredible seeds of wisdom from that.
Suddenly unimportant stories became very important
the character you will never spend two minutes with
suddenly you want to watch that character for two hours.
The whole hidden world of little people and lives
suddenly became very important on big screen.
I'd say that the secret to Jiří Menzel lies in the fact
that he tried to make films
to entertain, but at the same time be understood by, his mother.
I think that's the key to understanding Jiří Menzel
that he didn't bother with any intellectual concepts.
Loads of the films from the '60s are dated
but loads of them are timeless due to the human element.
When I read his book Closely Watched Trains, I said I'd love to make it into a film.
And he said, "Why not? OK then."
In those days, Evald Schorm came to see me. He belonged to the group.
He was the oldest one of us and the one held the most in esteem.
He told me, "Juraj, I'd love to make Closely Watched Trains."
And because I was naïve back then, I thought, "The world is open now, we're in 1968."
"Now we'll be able to make anything we want."
So I said, "OK, I will make something else."
So Evald Schorm took it.
To my great surprise, I learnt that Evald Schorm wasn't filming it, but that another director was.
The Second World War setting isn't portrayed as black and white
as a simple clash of good and evil.
On the contrary, it shows that the boundary between good and evil is very grey, very unclear
just like between cowardice and heroism.
And in that sense, the film is very dear to me.
And really timeless...
I love it.
I liked the rhythm, I liked the pacing, I liked the...
It moved at the speed of one's own eye and thoughts.
And I thought the performances were very delicate, again
and observed and truthful and not performed.
I liked the fact that it wasn't
in fact all the films
I liked the fact that they weren't pushing you into a response
like American films do, where the music will tell you what you ought to think
and the action and the cutting is too pressured.
The Czech films had a quietness about them and it was the quietness I liked.
And I thought that it meant that you smiled with the characters more
you laughed with them, you wept with them
you were touched by them as you would be
if you met those people in a room.
I had to blow at the stamp
and then he said, "Do you know what a carp does, what a fish does?"
And then he showed me.
So I did it in the same way
and that's also what the audience liked.
They said it was not obscene but actually quite sexy.
The movie was done and I was summoned by the studio boss.
He expressed some worries about nudity in movies, that it's not good
and we should remove the scene.
I'm not very smart, but I had a genius idea.
I said, "Look, you say it will enrage the viewers."
"We will have a premiere, not official, but after the movie is complete."
So we promised to show it to the people where we filmed it...
to the railroad workers and the people from the station where we filmed.
"We will show it to them and if they are enraged by it,
the working class, if they hate the nasty stuff,
I will ask the workers," - there were railroad workers and common folks -
"I will ask them whether I should remove the scene."
We showed the movie, I thanked them for applauding me and I told them
"There is an effort to remove this scene. Should we remove it?"
"No!" shouted the whole room. They said no and so it stayed.
The working class saved me.
In The Firemen's Ball they decided "Listen, let's go!"
"Let's show this film to people in the town where they were shooting
so that the people can see what kind of fun Forman is making out of these people
and they will tear him apart."
So... And they even advised me not to go there so that I am not attacked by angry mob.
So I didn't go there but then I was told what happened.
What happened was that they screened the film...
it's over.
The planted person raises the hand and says
"Comrades! I think this film is just disgrace."
"It's making fun of our heroic firemen who are fighting to save our homes, our lives."
"And look at this disgusting way they are portrayed in this film."
"And all this is untrue."
"This is... This can never be happening, you know, in our community" and like that and blah blah.
"What do you think?"
And they were used that people would stand up and say
"Yes. You are right, comrade," and like that.
Suddenly, one of the firemen in the movie raised his hand, stood up and said,
"Well, I don't know why you are saying it's not true."
"Aloisa, do you remember how that shack was burning there and we couldn't get there
because Peppa was drunk and he couldn't get the car out of the garage?"
"The whole shack burnt down to... then..."
"Then we went up, you know, in the pub and got drunk and... like, you know."
"I don't know. I think the film is so true."
And what big laugh! Big applause! You know...
because they didn't realise one thing, that in this moment
the firemen didn't see themselves on the screen.
They saw themselves as actors.
In February 1966, I went for the audition at Barrandov,
and Jirka Menzel chose me.
At first he tried the role himself, but...
and they picked me on recommendation from the wife of one of the producers.
He said, "Take him... that Neckář is so ugly that he is beautiful."
I said to him, "Listen, you are too old to play this."
"You need somebody really young."
And he listened and gave it to a non-actor who was perfect for the part.
They are making a whole documentary film on the Czech New Wave
and they would love to have you there...
I believe you, but it is really not possible.
I'm very sorry, I'm very sorry.
Please, please... It's not possible.
I'm very sorry... I'm very sorry... Thank you... thank you.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye... and happy journey.
Thank you.
OK, once more... really not.
It's not possible.
Only five minutes...
It's not possible.
Years ago, when European cinema was so impressive in New York City
and all foreign filmmakers were sending their films over here
films like Closely Watched Trains was enormously successful and enormously influential
on all the young people that wanted to go into film
they... we all wanted to make films like that.
And Jiří Menzel's films were particularly interesting to me
because they were funny, but they are also very sad and they had a very serious undercurrent.
They weren't frivolous, they had something to say in addition to the humour.
They can't imagine why we are here.
They can't imagine what was done, what was shot here 44 years ago.
But I think that, thanks to the situation that the movie was shot on black and white film
I am sure that these children will see the movie when they will be older.
As for Šofr, I did the shot, and Šofr did the light.
That's his... that's his great mastery.
He knew what it would look like later on screen.
I even always tightened the screws, so that the operator couldn't move it
because I wanted to have an exact... because I like doing static shots
because the movement of the camera always adds another element.
It changes something, as if you underline a word in the text.
The concept of the film was very archaic, like old cinema
like cinema with the aesthetics of a silent film.
Miloš... what has happened to you?
Let me see!
Dr. Brabec told me that an older woman should teach me.
So I was wondering whether you know one.
No, I don't, Miloš. You'll have to find one yourself.
What about your wife?
Vladimír Valenta was not an actor, but a scriptwriter.
He just fit the image of a Czech person, who can always duck at the right time.
In him, there is much of the Czech soul
more than a professional actor. That's why I liked his softness, his naïvety.
And thanks to me, he made his career, because then the Russians came and he emigrated to Canada
and there he could not make a living as a scriptwriter, so he washed cars.
Across the garage where he was working, they showed this very movie, Closely Watched Trains.
When the people came out of the movie theatre
they noticed the conductor from the movie was washing cars there.
So, they invited him to the television and did an interview with him.
After that they started to give him some roles, mainly in Canadian movies.
He even had some small roles in Hollywood.
By trivialising Hrabal's works
by making them simpler, yeah?
By actually turning his works into sentimental spectacles
he gave Hrabal worldwide recognition, yeah?
Meaning, he made the world aware of Hrabal
who was certainly a very quality writer, as evidenced by some of his works
and who also had some mystic traits, which in this culture is rare, right?
Meaning, I appreciate Menzel getting Hrabal into the limelight
but the films actually don't do Hrabal justice.
If you read Closely Watched Trains, you'll know that Menzel skipped
one very cruel dying scene of the main protagonist and Menzel said
that they even shot an optimistic ending of the film
they were trying to let the main protagonist live.
They showed him somewhere on a tree after the explosion
but it was clear that it would debase the whole film.
I think that story describes Menzel very well.
He doesn't like tragic endings.
He doesn't like suffering.
I just remembered Wajda's film Ashes and Diamonds
where the hero also dies over a very long time in a scrapyard
and I thought it was very powerful and at the same time
it reduced the impact of the rest of the film.
It is true that when we were shooting it
it occurred to me if it's not a shame that the end of the film should be so tragic.
And we shot a scene in which Neckář is stuck in the branches of a tree.
He flew in the air, fell on a tree and that saved him.
And it was really idiotic.
So I was sensible enough to let him die.
And it was a very substantial thing.
Had I not done it, the film would have lost its value.
Because unfortunately, in a drama, only a death takes the story to a higher level.
The death of Zbyszek Cybulski
the death of Maciek Chełmicki on the garbage dump
that is about an either-or decision.
Why does he die on the garbage dump in the film?
Because the censors said,
"Well...
here is an enemy of the People's Republic of Poland.
He murdered the secretary.
He must die for that."
Where does he meet death? On the garbage dump.
What kind of dump? On the dump of history.
As a result the censors said, "OK, let it go this way."
Yet, this scene, shown in a cinema,
evoked totally different impressions in the audiences.
Because the viewers said,
"This is our boy, in these sunglasses."
"He's been fighting all through the war, he fought in the Uprising."
"He's been courageous, he cannot accept the fact
that the Allies have sold out Poland to Stalin in Yalta, and he continues fighting."
"Where does he die then? And they kill him on a garbage dump?"
"What kind of government does that?"
And this discussion was only possible because there were only images.
If I had introduced any words - no.
For example, in the original novel, and even as late as in the script
it said that the soldiers that shot him run up to him
and say to him as he lay there dying,
"Man, why did you try to escape?"
Well, I couldn't say such words so I erased this, I cut it out.
I even filmed it but then I cut it out. Why?
Because he knew why he was running away.
He was aware that these soldiers were chasing him not to save him
they were chasing him to kill him.
Therefore, the government's attempt at reconciling
that the government tried to reconcile
those left-wing combatants with those who hoped for a different solution after the war...
Well, no!
This conflict is best shown in this very scene.
But it was only possible because there were only images.
That it was shown in a way
that made it possible to interpret it in two ways.
Ah! Uncle Hitchcock.
That was...
a big adventure for me because I was...
Here was this classic... we were two great filmmakers next to each other.
He was very nice to me, Hitchcock.
He knew my film and talked to me about it.
Whereas I couldn't talk much about his films because
there were no Hitchcock films in those days in Czech cinemas.
Uncle.
So... This is from the trip.
Ah! Jitka.
I have to add one more nice thing about Hitchcock.
That evening when I was there, he got an honorary Oscar.
He was very charming.
People usually come there to receive the award and give a speech
and thank their colleagues and some producers and thank and thank and speak.
Mr. Hitchcock...
came there, like this, and said...
"Thank you!"
Later on, I got a voucher to buy a car.
There was no other way at that time.
I got permission to go to Paris for three months to learn French.
Because they couldn't have paid me more than any other beginner.
There were rules that one had to shoot about four films
to advance to a higher category, etc.
It was finished and he showed it to us. And Vávra was quiet for a long time.
He didn't review it. Then he sat in a car, and told us that he was going on a holiday
and drove away. But then he stopped the car.
He opened the door and Vávra was calling
back to Menzel, who was standing in the back.
He shouted at him,
"Menzel, that's the most beautiful movie that was ever filmed here."
Josef von Sternberg is the one who made The Blue Angel,
When I was at my first festival, in Mannheim, with Tra in s...
he had a retrospective there. They screened all of his films.
And, later, during the award ceremony, I sat in the front row and he came by
stood in front of me, and bowed to me. I had no idea what it was about.
Then he sat next to me and then I was told that he wanted to give me his own award
but because I'd already got the main prize, he couldn't give me another prize...
so he didn't give it to anyone.
But this man, a legend, bowed to me.
They organised big celebrations for the 30th and now the 40th anniversary of the film.
The film was screened there, and all of us who were still alive came there to celebrate.
It was very nice, they had prepared everything for us.
Now the small town is far prettier. Earlier, it was quite an ordinary town.
But everything has gotten better since then.
I couldn't recognise it when I was there later. Not at all!
But the people still fondly remember the film
and the small railway station stayed the same as it was before.
I believe that the camera looks both ways.
Camera looks forward at the actors or whatever you want to film
or it looks backwards at people who make that film.
And I think
seeing Closely Watched Trains I got to know him better than from the school.
And that was very impressive
because for me, that's a sign of certain artistic honesty.
I'd like to say the director was very fond of this small crew.
Nobody has ever doubted that.
Nevertheless, we cannot overlook the fact
that he would often scream at individuals or everybody at once.
I want to apologise a bit
because I think it was somewhat my fault.
I noticed it from the very start, and I found it amusing.
And being the entertainer he was
I suspected he was screaming at you, because he knew I was enjoying it.
My suspicion was confirmed when he told me,
"Jirka, today is going to be a bit boring for you
but don't worry, I'll scream at somebody in the evening for sure."
So I was thinking I could take over for him in this sense tonight
to make us feel his presence.
But then again if he were here
he would probably just be happy to see you all
just as I am happy I've had the opportunity to be a part of this.
Thank you very much!
What can you say when your classmate dies?
When he passes away?
Of course that, first of all, it's a pity the person is gone.
Then that it's also too bad, because he could've done more things.
Or that - and that's the crime of the communist regime -
that the people weren't allowed to work when they were strong
when they were around thirty and they had things to say.
And the regime simply killed them.
It cut them off from their work with an axe
and if they were allowed to start working again later
they could only do things they wouldn't have done otherwise.
They would have made different films.
But that's...
That's the way life is.
Women - girls, chicks, Eva, Klára, Věra,
Zuzana, Helenka, Bohunka, another Zuzana,
Christie and Martina.
Sorry, I'm presenting my loves. I'm skipping random encounters.
Each of us shot films which were stylised totally differently, according to our character.
But all those films had a common spirit
and that's why they called us the "Czechoslovak New Wave".
We didn't know at the time that there was some "wave" or that it would become the "New Wave"
or that the things we were doing would be successful...
So it didn't mean any special thing to me.
Jaromil Jireš - sadly, he is no longer alive...
This is Ivan Passer. He lives in the United States.
Hynek Bočan is alive and working, mainly for television.
Pavel Juráček, unfortunately, also is no longer alive.
Mrs. Chytilová is alive and works a lot although she is almost 83.
This is Honza Máša, he is also no longer alive, unfortunately.
This is Honza Němec who is alive and though he is also way past 70
he works and teaches at school, just like Mrs. Chytilová.
This is Evald Schorm who is unfortunately not alive any more, either.
I guess you know this person... he is a farmer in Connecticut
who sometimes makes films. His name is Forman.
And this is me... a Czech pensioner.
Once in a while, I look at them, and...
it helps me to
in my mind, to go back to that time.
"How is it that for labourers' wages movies like that are made?"
"Movies by Honza Němec and Mrs. Chytilová."
That was a rude attack. Dangerous at the time.
We met and wrote a letter, as a protest against the proclamation of the politician.
And that's the only time, the only moment when we were all together.
Then someone had the great idea to take a picture of us together
on the street, in front of Juráček's house.
That was precious... these are the only pictures I have with them.
But...
It's nice to remember it all.
The bad guys and bad girl were me, Jan Němec and Věra Chytilová.
So if somebody is attacking me and Chytilová, that is attacking to our group or our movement.
And only way possible to do it was to make the pictures.
And this was, without comment, published in one literary weekly.
And of course people know it, learn it
and also these Bolsheviks said that we are together.
And that means that it would not be easy to eliminate one or two of us
you know, at this time, we were internationally in Europe, very well known
you know, we were winning festivals.
That means the attack on the whole group or the movement
would finally did big damage to the communist men.
The truth is that Novotný preferred comedies...
rather than...
to any ideologically problematic or dramatic films,
which is also why in the spring of 1967
the Communist Party was trying to split the New Wave,
trying to tear it in two, to pit Němec and Chytilová against others...
against those who made comedies, which was Forman and Menzel.
"Jasný..."
"You can shoot anything now. Your films are the only ones making money."
"People come to see your films. They're awarded at world festivals."
They were and always will be. And they still are today.
And then the thing was that...
I looked at him and said...
Because he said, "But when you oppose the Party, we will chop you!"
Like when you kill a rabbit, behind the ears.
"We will chop you."
It was still a communist country with the censorship.
But the voice of artists, including filmmakers
was so strong that it was possible to defeat the authorities.
There aren't many of us left now. Evald is gone, Jireš is gone. Máša, Juráček,
Honza Němec.
There is only Hynek Bočan and me.
Jesus Christ... And Miloš. And Ivan Passer. Thank God for them!
At this time he was completely unknown writer.
And "Pearls of the Deep" was his first book.
And immediately, the book was a great success.
And through one walk to the FAMU to...
I walked with Jiří Menzel.
We said, we can help Mr. Hrabal promote his short stories
and that would be best if it would be not done by one filmmaker but by different.
So, basically that we would keep our personal styles
but respect, in the way, that original text of Hrabal.
And it's exactly one of these generational groups, which studied at FAMU at that time
with some exceptions
that practically became the face of this New Wave of film.
When...
It was as if it were a reaction to the films of the 1950s
again optimistic, cheap, constructive.
We began to view this reality very soberly.
Or... even caustically.
And it's also no accident that they all met in one omnibus film, Pearls of the Deep,
when each approached the adaptation
of Hrabal's work in their own way.
How could you abuse the car so terribly?
- Just tell me how. - How?
As we were driving home at night, Slavek told me
"Mother, we're still one death short, so here you are. Drive." So I drove...
I believe that of all the filmmakers
he did the best job of it, because he detached the word from the image.
Hrabal's words aren't necessarily directly related
to what is happening in front of the camera.
And that's where a peculiar poetry is born.
I never was a student of the film school. So I wasn't a part of it.
My good friend Jaromil Jireš, who was a part of it
asked me to join them and adapt a short story by Bohumil Hrabal.
I accepted, of course.
Most of those guys and Chytilová weren't very--
they were against it because they didn't know me.
They didn't want to include me.
But then I shot one of the short stories
and Hrabal said, "This is the best one filmed of the lot."
The only problem is that, most likely, that's what Hrabal told everyone.
Kučera was director of photography, I was the operator.
This is Kučera... a picture of the two of us?
Christ! The things you ask... I can't find it.
I don't know how we don't have a picture with Kučera...
Because he photographed us.
Because he made photos.
He was extremely experimental. He was also making experimental films at home...
something we used in Daisies, for that broken film format...
where he was breaking the reality, frame by frame....
He used to shoot frame by frame, which means he was breaking the picture...
He was not, let's say, verbally communicating person.
He was very inside... closed person. That means...
It was not easy work with him.
But, you know, on the second hand, the result with him, to work with him was all time excellent.
A thousand angels in paradise...
I love you all.
Dear friend, what's wrong with you?
Nothing. Just something in my throat.
But I would prefer you telling me something about your articles...
It's one part of the Hrabal's work that is not so, let's say,
optimistic and humanistic, it is more cruel and cynical.
Menzel... all his adaptations of movie was
the way we are nice, a life is nice and optimistic.
We had it divided. Right from film school I was prepared to work with Jaromír Šofr.
I had already worked with him at school.
I respected Kučera a lot, but his style was a bit different.
The main thing was that he was Mrs. Chytilová's territory!
We persuaded Hrabal he had to appear in cameos in all the short stories
to play a small role throughout the short stories.
He told me later that he was angry.
He acted in Chytilová's segment The World Cafe,
and he told me, "I only wrote it was raining
but then the fireman kept on drenching me with water for three nights!"
And that discouraged him from any further acting in films.
There was a film club, and that's where I met with Mr. Hrabal.
That is where I saw him for the first time.
We were close friends with Věra.
She couldn't come for some reason, so she asked me to speak for her.
She wanted to do The World Cafe.
When Ivan said that he also wanted to do The World Cafe,
I started to fight for Věra. I said that it is her intimate theme.
I invented all that nonsense
because I knew that her father was a restaurant owner.
He managed a railway restaurant and the theme was close to her heart, I babbled.
Ivan, like a gentleman, withdrew. He decided to do a different short story.
By the way, A Boring Afternoon is the most beautiful of all the stories.
At least that is my opinion.
And when I fought it out in this way
I was curious why Věra decided on this particular story.
I wanted to know if I'd talked rubbish!
Věra said - "Why? Because I haven't read anything else by him."
I thought I would kill her.
My goodness! That's how a wedding should be.
By coincidence, it was the short story that I wanted to make.
But I had another one as an option, and I was eventually happy to have shot The Junk Shop.
Then, when everybody else made the movie, it was too long for a feature movie
so they released my film by itself.
I was the second one to raise my hand, and I said,
"If I remove mine, all of you will fit in it."
Good day, Miss Marcelka!
Good day, Josefínka Mánesová!
In oil paint, in a golden frame...
Damn it! That would be beautiful.
One day I came home and I turned on the radio
it was exactly like this, I turned it on
"And the first prize in Mannheim Film Festival
goes to the film, A Boring Afternoon by Ivan Passer."
I didn't know they sent it there.
I remember my first shot for the feature film...
We stood with the camera on the motorcycle circuit track.
I said 'camera' so quietly - so quietly that the cameraman did not hear it.
I had a weak voice and I spoke quietly.
And he gave me a terrible scolding.
These shots at the race track, we did with Ondříček because Kučera was ill.
But I'd like to add that we didn't play around with the speed of the camera.
We shot all at normal speed, 24 frames per second.
Only because it was done with a long lens did it seem slower.
When you see it from a distance, how the bikes swerved at the curves
and it has such a unique waltz rhythm. So I found that waltz.
Mr. Hrabal described so well how the people loved the motorcycling sport
but also - and this is Hrabal for you - he shows how they're all thirsty for a tragedy.
That's why they go there, that's why they talk about it...
about what catastrophe, what disaster they saw.
And then when we first met and I saw him for the first time in my life, I felt great respect for him.
And when we were parting, I caught up with him on the street and I said to him that
I would like to know how he does it - that I read about tragic things and I laugh at the same time...
and even then there's no cynicism or evil in it. And he told me that all this is part of life.
What really makes me laugh is
that you want to, out of my ramblings
which've been going on for about 20 hours,
that you want to cut a film from it.
I am very curious about that.
I was born in Hanspaulka.
It was a neighbourhood for rich people.
But one day, there was a heavy rainstorm.
My parents lived in a cheap apartment on the ground floor
and the whole apartment got flooded.
My mother got angry and said she didn't want to live there anymore
and so my dad found a new apartment in Strašnice.
So when I was about 6 months old, we moved to Strašnice.
We're going... we're going to Strašnice.
Here, where that ugly building is, there was an old Sokol centre
and there was an old cinema.
It was nice, as a child, I lived incredibly near a cinema.
This reflection that you see here
so that's the building I spent the first 12 years of my life in.
They showed Czech films made during the war, under the Protectorate.
They were mostly kitsch, but they were also comedies.
And I love them even today, the comedies by Frič.
For example, my sisters and I saw Eva Runs Wild about 11 times.
That's a movie which I enjoy watching even now.
They have a deeper meaning and aren't just laughter for laughter's sake.
Come on! There's no one here!
I know, I know...
I'll cough, okay?
No, don't do that!
I know what then...
- I'll bark. - Nooo...
Let's go rob the place!
Later, I directed the film Crime in a Music Hall.
It was a simple comedy.
It was supposed to pay tribute to Martin Frič, a pre-war filmmaker.
I tried
to make it black-and-white and in the style of Martin Frič.
But I think he was better at it than I am.
We met for the first time at Barrandov.
He was supposed to be driven home, and they put me in his car.
It was a Barrandov car. So I sat there and waited for Frič.
Frič sat down and I said, "Good morning!".
Because I was shy, I said it in a very quiet voice.
And I sat there, and he was angry.
We came to his villa and he got out.
He turned to me and said, "Young man, in my youth, it was customary
for the younger one to introduce himself to the older ones and greet them.
Thank you, good bye!"
So this is
where I spent my childhood.
This is where we used to play marbles.
This is where I experienced my childhood crushes
and I pretty much started everything here.
I was ten.
I experienced the war here.
From that balcony over there, I saw an Allied airplane crash.
And at the end of the war, a revolution broke out
and there were three barricades here
that were supposed to block the passage of German armies.
I don't know how it turned out, I was seven at that time
but I have beautiful memories of the end of the war.
Me and my mother used to steal corn there during the war.
Mamma was strict
slapped us and sometimes also caned us.
And when she felt she couldn't handle us, dad took over.
He used his belt.
He used to beat us quite hard, but I think it was good.
I don't like it when children can do whatever they want.
Is your family also as crazy as mine?
Childhood, see?
I was this little.
So all this seemed huge to me.
Here we would walk this way up to the second floor.
This is where I used to slide
and this is the way we took to the cellar.
During wartime, we would go there for coal, of course
but during air raids, that was where we went to hide.
It all looks completely different now.
It's all been so refurbished.
And I don't want to walk upstairs. It would make me feel sad.
So, this is the house...
the TV antennas weren't there before.
And that black roof over there, that was where my school used to be.
One of my schools...
Schools I used to go to.
My school was actually just a few steps from my home.
Not that I liked going there.
So, this is me with my little sister, and the child watching us is my older sister.
This is my sister Hana, and this is me or
the other way round - this is Hanka, and this is me.
I am not sure anymore who is who.
Here we are a bit older, we are probably at the zoo.
This one is nice. That is me...
And this is my little sister, my twin sister, who's eating my food.
So you see how I suffered when I was a child?
Even my own sister was stealing from me.
Otherwise, there are only silly photos...
This is also from the zoo.
This is an interesting one, my school class photo.
And I don't know which child is me...
I didn't really want to be a filmmaker
nor did I have any opportunity to become one
but my friend had a Super 8... That's a small camera with 8 mm film.
He lent it to me, and I tried to shoot something.
I was interested in everything, also in the camera too.
I was working with the 8 mm camera, and I was walking around Prague.
We had the Stalin monument
which was the biggest monument in the world.
It was standing on these granite plinths.
And that was, sort of, interesting architecture.
Steps, edges... I wasn't shooting the statue itself.
I was shooting the base of the statue, the plinth.
And I made an experimental set of how
I thought the blocks should fit within another.
It was an abstract film. But luckily, it's no longer in existence.
This is completely different.
Here, there used to be a crop field here.
Where did all this come from?
This is the first time I see there's a children's playground here.
It's really nice.
Because this was all a field
where oilseed rape was grown
where oat was grown and other things...
And there was a farm house in this direction.
This has all changed fantastically.
I have to look around... This is the first time I'm here.
This street wasn't there.
50 years... actually more. 70 years.
Since I lived here and experienced the war here.
The world is changing so fast.
So, let's go take a look where I shot my first film.
A documentary. Okay?
We have to take a different way, though.
Let's try to go this way.
It's a completely different world!
It's incredible, because I swear, this was a...
That was a crop field and this was a fish pond!
A dried out one.
And that pond gave Strašnice, this neighbourhood, its name.
Some gas was coming out of the pond and it gave out light at night -
some phosphorus gas or whatever.
And that's why this place was called Strašnice.
I have no idea where all this came from.
Excuse me! Hello!
What is this company?
Oriflame.
- Excuse me? - Cosmetics, Oriflame.
Cosmetics!
- I used to live here. - Okay.
And I don't recognise the place at all.
I was just thinking that in those days, this house...
But no, I used to live across the street.
And I don't recognise it here at all.
Everything is different.
Thank you!
Take care! Goodbye! Thank you, bye-bye!
I have no idea where we are.
Let's try this way.
I think this tree, this spruce tree, it was planted by my mother.
A long time ago.
And the ground floor balcony with that cage or whatever
was where we lived.
And from there, I could see
looking through some trees
there was a crop field here
nothing but a crop field, and
that was where they started building the prefabricated blocs of flats.
Because I was lazy
I didn't feel like thinking of anything else
I said at school that I would make a film
about the construction of prefabricated houses.
The man of this age
does not belong to the balconies of houses that have grown old.
He wants to see further than into the windows on the street.
Under his hands, a huge construction set grows.
I came there. We brought a camera. I, as a director, had the battery.
There were the cranes and the panels, and I did not know what to do.
And Šofr was waiting for instructions and I didn't know.
So I sat on the battery and I tugged at the cable in order to break it off
so we'd have to return to school and have it repaired...
and I had one more day to think about what I want to do.
Well...
Nothing's changed here.
Even the seats are the same
as when my schoolmates and I used to come here
for screenings of old films.
One day I discovered a miraculous film there
Renoir's A Day in the Country.
It's a short film, about 15-20 mins long. But it made such a big impression on me
that later on, when I wanted to make films, it always came back to my mind.
Hello! May I ask you if you know where Capricious Summer was filmed?
Where was the swimming pool built?
- Down there. - On the other bank?
- No, on your side. - Does this road by the water lead there?
- You can walk there. - We were told that we have to walk.
- Right. - Is there some creek and some confluence?
- It is down there. Not far. - How far? 300 metres? 500?
- About 500 metres. - Ok, so to the end and then by foot.
- That's about right. - How far? 100 metres? Do you know?
- I don't know. - Thank you for your kindness! Goodbye!
I am weird. For me, it isn't about being inspired by something
or feeling the need to do something.
I get a job to do just like a joiner is asked to make a table.
He gets an order and makes a table.
My only advantage is that I get to choose
which table I want to make and if I want to make it at all.
But afterwards, you shouldn't see it as anything divine.
When they came to me with the script, I sent them to hell.
You can only ruin that by making a movie.
Vančura's text is exquisite, it's like a poem.
Adding pictures can only ruin it. Leave me alone, I said.
A few days later I met Jaromír Šofr, a cameraman, we made Trains together
and nearly all of the later movies.
He'd just married, and he had a child.
The regular salary we had was very low. The same as department store cashiers had.
He needed to make movies so he would get salary for that.
I told him I just turned one movie down.
So Šofr made me call the writer to see if it was still available - it was.
So I started filming Capricious Summer.
In 1968, three directors came to the Cannes Festival
to present their films which competed there.
Jan Němec: The Party and the Guests
Miloš Forman: The Firemen's Ball
and Jiří Menzel: Capricious Summer.
The Cannes Festival ended prematurely - there were no awards given.
Miloš and Honza Němec ended up badly because their movies were shown.
- We arrived in Cannes. - Right!
And the festival was cancelled.
But you... you participated in the cancelling.
You too.
Yeah, but because I didn't understand a word what you guys were saying.
Nobody understood.
Jaromír, don't walk so much, you're making noise.
What?
Don't move so much, you're making noise.
Come here!
Sit down!
Good afternoon!
It's sense of the provinces, sense of time passed, sense of loss...
a kind of romantic affection for that period.
These are unique... Although, of course, the three characters
are supposed to be, kind of, really criticised.
I mean, one is a pillar of the church, another is a pillar of the bourgeoisie
and the other represents the army.
And they are all incompetent, impotent.
Let us eat and drink!
Give me a fat cheese, venison, poultry, lambs
all that is brought forth alive or hatched from eggs.
Give me a fish and the slugs
favoured in civilised countries.
Give me food.
The Earth has revolved again, and it is time to eat.
Have you become a windbag or a glutton, major?
Showing off with your teeth or your tongue?
Too much talk makes me uneasy.
Uneasy?
We have hardly begun!
You follow a bad regimen with too much thinking.
Šofr had great sense for pictures, and I had it for the language.
So I forced the actors to speak, act and live normally,
but to speak in a literary way.
Vančura is legendary for this, that was his style.
The contrast between how they look, and how they talk, that impressed people.
I am Arnoštek, the conjurer.
Come here, please! I'm really scared.
Don't be afraid!
Come, Mr. Dvořák! Nothing to be afraid of.
You have chosen a beautiful, noble profession.
I never wanted to act. I was really shy and felt embarrassed.
It so happened that Ján Kadár was preparing for a film set in a court
and as per the script they wanted an advocate who is shy and timid.
But despite that, he wins in the end.
He didn't know of an actor who he liked for the role
and so he tried me out.
We were at the festival in Helsinki, at the International Theatre Festival.
We were invited there and we performed Chekhov and Brecht.
Mr. Bergman was there as well with "King Lear" played by Jarl Kulle
and he was clearly the most suitable candidate for an award.
It was an excellent, wonderful, spectacular high-level performance.
And then Menzel came with his "Boarding House for Bachelors"
which is a comedy and we didn't expect anything anymore,
but they almost fainted and gave him the award
and said that he is the only one in the world,
that there are many more King Lears and Jarl Kulles,
but there's only one Menzel and they gave him the award.
I've never learned it, but I know how to do it.
What are you looking for in that cabinet, friend?
He acted in several films, he also both directed a film and acted in it,
so he had to change places and he saw how his colleagues were working.
But most importantly, he knows much better than I do how to work with actors.
I also tried a few times to get into a film.
But I somehow cannot - I cannot concentrate.
When I see a camera, I pay attention to it.
It distracts me because I imagine how it sees me.
The camera distracts me. I cannot focus on acting.
I appeared in some films, but masked, it was something like... Godard.
Originally, someone else was supposed to play the part.
After two days, I found he was no good. He had kind of an ego about him.
Then, fortunately, it so happened that he had to go abroad,
and wasn't coming back for a long time. So I had an excuse to replace him.
The main reason why I'm annoyed with this magician is that whereas the other actors
know how to speak beautifully, I speak like a pig.
I don't have good pronunciation, and I speak only with half of my mouth.
That is what always bothered me.
But, on the other hand, if he was a masculine character
who was compared to those old men
it wouldn't have felt balanced. He wasn't supposed to act macho.
We were unlucky with the weather as
the whole thing was meant to be taken while it was cloudy
and the sun was shining all the time.
So, in the meantime, the grass, which was of course supposed to be nicely green
started to wither.
They had to paint it green.
To tell the truth, when I was there, nothing much was happening.
We played cards and waited.
We lay on blankets and chatted. And it was very pleasant.
I think at that time, the shooting style was different.
The terrible tension was not there that we have to shoot every day at all costs.
When I was making this film, I was under the illusion
that a man over forty is totally written off.
And that is where the idea came from that all shall fail with the beautiful Anna.
I remember that once at school I asked Věra, who had
a boyfriend, an actor, who was a bit older than her
and I asked her, "You go out with him?" And he was a bit over forty.
And she said, "Yeah, I go out with him." And I said, "Who do you sleep with then?"
Because I thought that after forty, men are good for nothing.
And later I realised it can happen to you, even when you're 20, even when you're 60.
It simply happens!
I want to extend a special welcome
to the crew who came here all the way from India, from Mumbai.
Let me welcome all of you to the opening ceremony
of the exhibition "Capricious Summers of Jiří Menzel".
I don't know exactly when I started getting interested in women
but it's a fact that I always liked my neighbours
even the older ones... It's true.
But I wouldn't call myself a loose character.
It took me quite a while to become active.
I love him...
except during the weeks when we work together.
During those weeks, I hate him
because he is so zealous in his profession
that nobody else exists to him.
I don't know.
I don't think the actors have the worst memories of me.
At times we went for a long lunch break, came back
and Mr. Šofr was still saying
"Not yet... Give me more light there. Wait! Let me see!"
And Menzel was like, "Is it done yet?"
But he always chooses him as his cinematographer
and it always pays off for him
because he owes half of his success to the visual composition of his films,
and he shot all of his movies, I think.
So that's a pair of wonderful gentlemen.
They gave me the first prize.
And to Šofr the first prize for technical quality.
We had no idea what would come of it because
we were waiting 3-4 weeks to see the dailies.
That was a different era.
But it had its advantages since when shooting
you had to know where you'd edit your film,
and that's really important. In film, you need that.
Now movies are shot almost like TV. Everything's shot
from multiple angles, then put all together in editing,
which is basically a TV shooting...
even though it is a feature film.
And the effort to make a film, I mean to put shots
in a comparison and a contrast, to tell the story -
one shot is one word, another shot is another word
and that they somehow follow each other...
and that you tell something by editing it.
Unfortunately, that's not how it's done anymore.
I was unhappy about the film. I did not like it.
I thought that no one would be able
to watch it, that it was boring and slow...
Miloš saw it somewhere and he said,
"Mr. Menzel, you have made a beautiful film."
And I said, "Miloš, why are you making fun of me?
I know that it is crap."
"Not at all! You have done a great job!"
I thought to myself, I see, he is happy that I am screwed.
But then they started praising me, and he was still kind to me.
The ways of expression, the language
the composition, the psychological treatment
of all characters and their communication, each character is exactly defined
and notably portrayed... I think that this movie is flawless. Well, it's hard to say
"flawless" about a movie, but I really think that this is the top. It is.
Mr. Hrušínský once said in an interview that
Chaplin's statement was that "in purgatory people should see their own films."
His reaction was "I'm actually looking forward to Menzel's films."
I think that's the greatest honour I could ever get...
In four months, before you finish the film
it won't even be ready... I might turn ninety.
I would like to live to see that.
I hope that a couple of people will remember me and say,
I hope that couple of people will remember me and say,
"Thank you, Mr. Řehák!"
So... I don't like saying it again, but I view Menzel's fate as...
talent which was ultimately wasted.
But let's at least be grateful for
his best works from the 1960s, which truly wrote him
into Czech history, or Czechoslovak cinema.
Should I climb on that? May I? Do you want to have a laugh?
I can't any more. Once I knew how to walk on this. Not any more.
There is no medicine for old age.
I never wanted to get married. What a fool I was!
Now I'm glad.
But I won't be around when the girls grow up.
That's my punishment.
I'm living a joyful old age. Essentially!
When I finished Capricious Summer,
I immediately got another proposal to make The End of Old Times,
which was by the same author.
But the script was written by the author of the book,
Vladislav Vančura, who also wanted to make movies.
Back then I thought, "Okay, since the script already exists,
why make another one?"
"Let's shoot it the way Vančura wrote the script."
Fortunately, we couldn't find the script.
So it was cancelled.
We only got back to it many years later.
They came to me and told me the script had been found.
And it was impossible to shoot.
Mr. Juráček, you want to blame me, that I don't give you the right chance.
Do you want to say something?
To young people, some message.
Yes I want, I want to say to young people
that there is great sadness in this world from the very beginning.
They should come to study at FAMU because it's great fun there.
My father was a journalist before the war and he had a journalist friend
who'd reported on the FAMU entrance exams the year before,
and he stole the list of questions from Otakar Vávra.
It was quite an important list of around 250 to 300 questions on different fields
from visual arts, music, films, architecture -
many questions with the aim of finding out what the applicant knows about culture.
Vávra wanted educated people over there.
So I had a year to prepare for those questions.
So I had quite an advantage... and one of those questions about Dostoyevsky.
There were many questions about literature.
I didn't like Dostoyevsky.
I never understood how to read him.
When I was preparing for the Dostoyevsky question
I went to my father's library and picked out
the thinnest Dostoyevsky book there was - there were two short stories.
I read them, and at the exams, there was indeed a question on Dostoyevsky.
I started talking about that short story which
no one from the committee really knew about
and so they were immensely impressed by me.
They thought that I was very well read.
And I started comparing it with another book and so on.
So Vávra got the impression I was well educated.
And that is how I got admitted to FAMU.
My father told me once that the loveliest wall decoration is a full library.
So, I've managed to collect many interesting things
about World War II, for example, or about film.
Or about theatre.
And this is Czech prose,
contemporary Czech prose...
These are books about Czech prose, same thing here.
And this is the era dearest to me
they are books from the First Republic and from up to the 1960s.
These are the complete works of Mr. Hrabal.
Here, here and here.
Everything that was ever published, even abroad.
Here are the comics. The literature I love, the humoristic books.
These were the books that were not allowed
to be published in Bohemia, in Czechoslovakia,
but they were published abroad and I used to buy them secretly and hide them.
That is how I hide the lowbrow books...
And the whole Czech history
and the times when we belonged to the Austrian Empire.
This is contemporary politics. This is English literature.
Please don't think that I have read it, but I have it here.
If I need to know something, I have it here.
I don't read books, I have them just in case I'd need them one day.
If you follow me, I'll show you more.
Here is Russian literature, and here are books about Prague.
And here is everything that didn't fit anywhere else.
This is a new bookcase. I'll start putting things in it.
These are books about visual arts, and this all is visual arts.
That is all. I don't have anymore...
They had a clause that the applicant
if he proved some kind of talent
he didn't have to have a graduation in the high school
which was really an opening for working-class background students
who didn't go to a high school...
So I thought this is a chance for me,
and so I filled it up.
And, having some experience with communist bureaucracy
I lied and I said I did graduate the high school
and they invited me to an audition.
And I spent, before that, six weeks in a university library
and learnt everything I could about films.
And 300 people... were first day...
showed up, and they would every day cut off 50 percent.
And the last day, we were about twelve.
And I got lucky.
I was among those six they accepted.
And...
But after three years, they found out that I did not graduate
and that I actually was a bourgeois background guy
and so they kicked me out.
But it was too late, I already liked movies.
The department of direction - that's the place where I studied direction.
I was admitted in 1992.
I climbed up the stairs to the second floor now.
I remember that Otakar Vávra, who taught here and was a huge personality
he was more than 80 and he always ran up the stairs, a bit quicker than me.
This is the place where all the famous directors of the New Wave studied.
And not only them.
I have experienced, as a student, that Jiří Menzel taught here.
He was actually the head of the department.
Věra Chytilová taught here,
Karel Kachyňa, in whose film I once acted, had his seminars here...
The head of the department is now Jan Němec
and it was possible to meet all these idols
from the '60s here and to talk to them.
That is where the New Wave was born,
partly here and partly in another building in Klimentská Street.
Let me introduce you to the film's director - Radim Špaček.
Věra Chytilová and Evald Schorm were my close friends.
I sat next to Věra during the entire four years.
And Evald was... Well, they were both older than me. I was a goggle-eyed nitwit.
I was a bit of an "enfant terrible". And Evald was always wisely reprimanding me.
If the 60's, that period had a saint it would be Evald Schorm.
The worst part is behind us.
Anxiety is, as they say, fear of our fear.
Now there's only fear left. We know what we're up to.
What is good and what is bad?
A man can be wrong even if he's right.
And the other way round.
Of the Czech directors, I quite liked Evald Schorm.
He was a very wise person
who could create an atmosphere on the shoot
in which he didn't even have to direct much,
but people were trying their best to do what he wanted.
He was a friendly kind of an authority to me.
What Schorm and I had in common was...
he liked documentary film.
In both documentary and fiction filmmaking,
we would sometimes both be working simultaneously on the same theme
without me or him knowing it was happening.
Silence there!
Initially, the story was about us girls
fooling around at the student dormitory where we lived.
That's where it started, but then when I found the people
I stylised the film more than I had planned to...
I collaborated with Ester Krombachová
and I was interested in finding a new approach...
She showed that costume design
is a major part of the language of cinema. Thank God for that!
But she influenced Czech cinema also as a screenwriter and dramaturge.
She directed only one movie and I worked on it with her, and it was a bit off.
So she's less visible as a director, but was a big influence on many colleagues,
not only the people from the New Wave
but also Vávra, Kachyňa, other older directors.
Because she was a catalyst, she brought fresh air, she brought ideas.
It's all messed up.
Everyone has their backs to the camera, and Ester Krumbachová faces it.
Věra Chytilová, who did very, very different movies
because her first one was
very realist, it was like a para-documentary film.
And the second one, Daisies, was one of the
most crazy and anarchistic movies I've ever seen.
Until now I am showing it to my students, and they love it.
I had an ambition to explore all the possibilities of film language...
so I wanted to do every film in a different way...
Different! So that every movie is different...
I didn't what to do what I'd already done...
And the serpent said to the woman:
Ye shall not surely die!
On the day ye eat thereof
your eyes shall be opened
and ye shall be as gods
knowing both good and evil.
Chytilová was wild, Chytilová was someone with
an anarchistic element in her, which I like a lot.
She was breaking all the rules, she was a wild animal among them.
She had a lot of faces. And most importantly, she was a beautiful girl.
She was almost thirty when she started studying at FAMU.
Prior to that, she was used to a life amongst rich people
always in cafe's and so on.
And suddenly, she started living like a student.
When she was almost 30. I appreciated that.
When we were walking together to the school canteen to have lunch
guys were turning their heads around and wanted to ask her out.
And then she was telling me about the dates.
Because she was intelligent, she could always look through the guys.
And then she was describing to me how the guys tried to conquer her.
That was an education for me, because through her eyes
at once I saw what idiots we men are.
I am glad that I got to know her. She was an exceptional woman.
She was a vibrant, honest, healthy person with sensible opinions.
She started doing completely different movies than me. I was a bit more critical.
As was she towards me. She didn't like my movies very much.
I never cared about leaving a legacy behind.
After I'm gone...
Darkness!
Thank you for being here! We are glad to be here, too.
I've been part of this school for so long,
because this is where I started...
and this is something few people remember...
I persuaded Zápotocký, the Prime Minister,
to get us free passes to cinemas and theatres.
Quiet! Yes...
He said, "You can have three wishes."
The first was the building in Klimentská Street,
which is owned by FAMU now.
I don't know when it happened before
that such mutual energy joined in one place.
That cultural blossom, this renaissance of 1968
taught us lot of things we'd later use in our films and in our lives.
The teachers there were unwanted by the regime.
But we found their perspective amazing.
Thanks to them we knew what freedom was.
For example, I was taught by the now world-famous
writer Milan Kundera,
Professor Kratochvíl, Rector Brousil.
They introduced us to world cinema as well.
And suddenly to our surprise, we found out that in Italy
you could make films freely and without any restrictions.
But Neorealists were against the government.
I'd known Milan Kundera for a long time because
he was a famous poet, and suddenly, I saw him teaching at FAMU.
Milan Kundera was always late.
He was always late.
And as he showed up late, he would ask...
He would say this sentence,
"What do you want me to tell you about?"
And out of that huge universe that modern literature is -
and to him, modern literature included the past few centuries -
he was able to start lecturing about absolutely anything.
Or he would pick a book
he would open a book by Sartre
read a passage from it and discuss it with us.
Everything was, more or less, with some kind of eroticism and sexuality...
So this was a huge discussion about 'orgasm' for, like, five hours.
We loved him, not because he was a handsome, young, slender man
but because he had some sort of energy, intellectual energy.
He said, "It would feel dumb to sit in a lecture hall
with just four people. Let's meet across the street at Debonais."
It was a small wine bar.
And we said, "But Professor, we are students, we are poor!"
"We don't have the money to spend in a wine bar."
And he goes, "I said I would teach you at a wine bar
I invited you there, so I'm going to pay for you."
You know, I lectured in many film schools since
and I very often would go to other people's classes
just to see how they are doing it.
And I've never seen anybody better than Milan Kundera.
My best friend from my home village.
Dear Vojtěch, all the best on your 90th birthday!
- I'm enjoying this. - Let's make it 120!
It is exactly 90 years since a great patriot was born in Kelč - Vojtěch Jasný.
He was one of the first FAMU students. In 1946, he enrolled in this department,
and the directing department, studying at two departments.
Then he launched an important film career,
at first, making short films with Karel Kachyňa...
followed by important Czechoslovak movies - Desire, I Survived Certain Death
and some of the best Czech films
All My Good Countrymen and The Cassandra Cat.
I also liked walking backwards with the camera.
And I also rotated around my axis.
- He's good right? - Yes.
Forman described Jasný as a, sort of, 'spiritual father' of the Czech New Wave.
He is right.
I made it possible for Miloš Forman to make films.
They didn't want to let him shoot.
One of the Czech novelists, Josef Škvorecký,
said that the artistic common sense was always gnawing at the, sort of, ideology.
And so, when filmmakers had the opportunity to
sort of, break the limits, they did so.
Karel Kachyňa, Vojtěch Jasný and František Vláčil
were kind of precursors, predecessors of the New Wave.
I usually don't record my visual concept
by describing it verbally... That would be time-consuming.
I prefer doing it in minor pictorial sketches.
I must say I was nine in 1959 when I met him.
I knew what a screenplay was but I didn't grasp that particular one.
I didn't understand it.
But the more fantastic I found the way
the adults - not only Vláčil - communicated with me.
Since I had acted before, I felt this group of people
was creating something different.
The way they communicated was completely different
from what I knew from other film shoots.
And as the little boy I was, I felt their incredible desire
to express something but I didn't exactly understand what it was.
What made an impression on me was that it was the first time
I heard somebody thoroughly discussing what the camera was supposed to do
what compositions they would use
how important it was for me to stand facing this way or this way
because of the lights they set up.
That was where I realised, thanks to other situations as well -
that František was actually an image artist.
I think František Vláčil is one of the best directors ever in Europe.
Not known, but giving me, a kind of, strength to think with the image.
Out of all literary forms that come close to filmmaking,
I think it's poetry.
It's already in the structure of individual verses
that give a different meaning:
a structure so similar to that of film
where arrangement of two shots
which may have a different semantic and aesthetic quality,
creates, through film-editing, a third meaning
that may have not been directly present in those two original shots.
Now which one is... Mr. Hanák?
Let's call!
What's the number?
What does this say?
It's a university, and... this is... they are some... I think monks... or nuns.
And this we don't know who it is!
No. This says... M.D.H. It's Duš...
Ah! That could be him, because DH has initial letters
letters Dušan Hanák. That could be it!
Hi, Dušan, Martin Huba speaking.
Hi. Sorry to bother you, but I was asked a favour.
The thing is they're shooting an interview with me
for a documentary about Jirka Menzel.
They've spoken to you, but they're a bit afraid of you.
You didn't seem to be too pleased about their visit
so they're asking if they could come
to say good-bye and give you a little present.
...that they'd send questions, but haven't sent any.
To me, that's being irresponsible.
Tell them I said thank you very much.
OK, thanks!
He was rather stern.
It seems you promised him questions, but didn't send any.
And I don't know what else.
He says thank you for the present, but
he's somewhere else, so maybe next time.
He also said, that they were irresponsible.
He was expecting questions because he said he...
But we've sent it to him.
Oh! He said he didn't receive any.
Yes, oh yes, as we agreed together before this take
we really like the school, and you must not
badmouth or scandalise the school.
Mr. Nemec, didn't you get a prize while still at FAMU?
I got a prize in Amsterdam. As for FAMU, it gave me nothing
except education, a correct attitude towards
society, art, women, alcohol, religion.
In fact, it gave me everything.
First shot of the Diamonds of the Night basically is my major piece of filmmaking.
And it was my idea to have it in one shot - the movement of the train
these boys jumping out of the train going through the river and to the mountains
to the moment they are exhausted and sit, say they cannot run more.
For this shot, we built special, sort of, rail, on the top of the hill
This was built about one month
and... so, cost of the one shot
was one-third of the production of the whole film.
Diamonds of the Night, what he does with sound
with the atmosphere, that's unique.
I am completely independent for the -
not socialism, communism, you know, no capitalism.
Every time I was doing it, as Frank Sinatra said it,
"I did it my own way."
I think his movies will outlive us all
because they are filmed for the future, for a completely different audience.
He had a different relationship to the film than we had.
We made more or less distributional movies.
He was, in my opinion, an artist. He was obsessed with film.
I'm leaving through this door and nobody will see me again.
Goodbye! Bye!
I think without FAMU, there would be no New Wave
and I wouldn't become a director.
It's said, each of them, or almost each one, started out
wanting to do something completely different than directing.
Evald Schorm wanted to do opera
Jiří Menzel originally wanted to do theatre.
Petr Weigl wanted to do ballet, but they didn't let him since he was homosexual.
Schorm was turned down for opera, Menzel was turned down for theatre.
FAMU was a kind of second option for them, which is highly paradoxical.
On top of that, that graduating class was interesting
in that they were a really diverse crew.
Between Věra Chytilová, the oldest in the year, and
Jiří Menzel, there was an age gap of over 9 years.
I was at school - I was the oldest, and he was the youngest -
and we were sitting together at the same bench
because when I came to the classroom, all the seats were already taken.
Only the first bench was free. So I sat there and
there was a free seat next to me.
And then Menzel came gasping for air and he sat next to me.
We practiced some part of theatrical inscenation and of course we were all cast
because one of us was a director and the others had to play in it.
And I know that when he directed Věra Chytilová with Evald Schorm,
Evald said, "You are like a sun, you are like a sunflower."
He said that to Chytilová, which was very unusual, and in one moment Jiří -
because he was, or he is, very lively - he took a chair and threw it at them.
And that belonged... It isn't even a funny story, it belonged to his vision,
because he wanted it in one way and those two acted it differently,
so he sorted it out in this dramatic way.
I remember how we'd make a scene in a workshop at the film faculty,
he would go second and he did not know at that moment what the actor should do
so that it would be interesting.
So he would lie down on a bench and say,
"Direct all the head lights at me, I need to
light up my head... get some idea!"
You can see that even though Menzel puts on airs of being very conventional,
there is a bit of a wild artist in him as well.
Stop shooting!
I am becoming a bit nervous because of it.
It isn't sunny anyway.
We went for a family trip on the River Vltava
and I liked the way the stokers stoked up the coal.
I did not want to be just a stoker
so I told myself that I will become the main stoker.
But then I wanted to become a waiter, and many other professions.
Only when I was 15 or 16, my theatre era began.
Shot 24... Take 1
I fell asleep, guys.
It is interesting that when I met Jirka Menzel
and he took me to his flat for the first time
he used to live in a different flat then
I went there and was astonished to see that he lived in his bed.
He could reach everything from his bed.
I remembered the slapstick comedy, I am not sure if it was Chaplin
who was in his bed and he pulled something and breakfast would come
he would pull something else and trousers would come...
You know the comedy, don't you?
That was the way Jirka Menzel used to live.
Everything was in his reach and if something was not
he called his sister, Hanička, and she brought it.
He had a TV in front of him, a video
I don't know, a telephone, he had everything.
He could live in his bed, he did not have to get out of it.
I realised that Miloš Forman
has a very similar lifestyle as well
he also spends his life in his bed!
So these Czech guys who collect Oscars, I don't know about young Svěrák
love to live in their bed!
I think he learned me, in this period, how to
create the... an idea about the hero, or anti-hero.
The one who enters the world with a laziness
I would say, even coming from, designed in...
the tradition of some kind of Russian literature
in which laziness, resistance, and I would say,
not very active but more passive hero,
was like in a model.
So he himself...
He looks like this but in fact he is very energetic
and he is very, I would say, sometimes a bully.
Very strong! But he always acts like somebody with
low blood-pressure and with a distance to the world
which gives him a chance to make it funnier than it is.
My professor, Otakar Vávra
was in fact the father of this cinema.
Whenever I make the movie, I always try to remember his basic suggestions
that he was doing while three years he was giving us his lessons.
And I always remember him for this kind of attitude.
And, I would say, as I said before, tectonic approach to the cinema
that cinema is not just... you're based on the strong conflict.
He said always. And I always remember this.
Without strong conflict, you cannot make audience 2 hours or 3 hours being seated.
Please come in! Hello!
Hello! Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you!
Please!
Coffee? Tea?
They came here primarily because of Vávra this time,
they already had an appointment fixed with him.
They have already made an appointment with Mrs. Němcová
and now they're feeling very sorry that he died.
They waited the whole year and they came mainly because of him.
Yes, it is unfortunate, but you can talk to
his wife who knows everything about him.
Jitka is a miracle. She is his student, 40 years younger,
and she used to take care of him daily till the last day, which wasn't easy.
She shot her own films
and along with that she managed to take care of Vávra
in a very special... unkind, but still loving way.
I am very grateful to her for what she had done for him, for my professor.
Thanks to her he had a very comfortable old age. That is very nice.
I, of course, feel sad that my professor passed away.
I am grateful to him for many things.
Apart from my parents, I learned the most from my professor.
Otakar Vávra had two loves, actually three -
me, Jiří Menzel, and Emir Kusturica.
Menzel more than me, I think. They loved each other immensely.
I am not admirer... he is just opposite.
First step, when he entered the school as a chief of the directing department,
he said no to my diploma work's screenplay film ready for production,
and he just stopped it!
And I was very close to say, "I'll never finish the school".
And he just exercised his power that everybody was afraiding him.
This is the BIRTH OF FAMU.
You can see what it looks like...
It's wonderful... such a great school later...
Yes, what else do we have here?
What's needed here... another VHS...
Party Congress in Nuremberg, 1934. Wow! That's great, really!
Baarová was already there with that Goebbels, great.
Here are some albums.
This is the Czech Technical University in Brno
because Vávra studied architecture
a course he never finished.
Here are his designs, look! These are truly incredible.
Creating a movie, it's like building a house,
that you have to go from the foundation to the roof
that you have to have the strong sense of something very tectonic
vertical, horizontal, and as strong as
the formal reaction you could have to some pieces...
of architecture that belong to the history of art.
Otakar Vávra made many good films, following one after another.
He wanted to make films properly, which is why,
already during the war,
he invented a system for teaching new filmmakers after the war.
He prepared four years of lectures for us
which taught us everything we should know about our profession.
And when he died two years ago, in 2011, he left me the lectures.
He never got the lectures copied. That means that they are nowhere else.
It is only me who has them.
I have taken them and I followed Vávra. I teach them here at FAMU.
First of all, the beginning of the lectures is beautiful.
He reminds us that film is an art,
and that film can sometimes get ahead of literature.
I also think that the Czech New Wave would not have happened
if Professor Otakar Vávra did not help nationalise Czechoslovak cinema in 1945.
On one hand, he was a great filmmaker.
But there was also...
He was able to conform to the regime,
he was able to make regime-friendly films.
You know?
Vávra was the head of Věra Chytilová's class, but we had lectures with him...
on directing, on evolution of drama... I respected him as a professor so much!
I finished my studies by making a movie
Fugue on the Black Keys under his guidance, not under Wassermann's.
I also was Vávra's assistant director for Romance for Bugle.
I had very ambiguous relations with Vávra when he was teaching me
because he was very, you know, very ambiguous man.
His biography was very, very complex and complicated.
And I was very uncompromising young person.
So he wasn't the authority to me.
But I think he was a great teacher.
It means, he was able to give the insurance,
to give some kind of the faith in the cinema to those students,
and most of the students from the generation
of the New Wave really admired him.
And just recently after his death
I read some papers from my prison files
which I didn't know, of course...
and I learned that Vávra was helping me enormously
giving me very good opinion that I'm great communist and socialist person
that I am a... blah, blah...
just to save me from being thrown out from the school.
So, also politically, he wasn't so black and white
as some people described him.
I think Vávra probably is the quintessence of the 20th century -
in the filmmaking, in the politics, the destiny of the man
who went through different totalitarian regimes
and a bit like Zelig, try to know to change himself to accommodate.
But in the same time, you know, he...
He kept something which was the most important for him
the faith that making movies is very important thing.
Hurray, it's the Red Army!
There is peace!
People accuse Vávra of being a servant of the regime... it's not true.
What they blame him for, they can blame the whole generation for.
I later found in my life
that making cinema is much more important than
directly supporting just one political option or another.
That process of making an alliance with every government is far beyond me.
I can't talk about my professor without positive words
because he taught me things I never could've learnt anywhere else
except for here at FAMU in Prague.
Elia Kazan was getting his lifelong achievement Academy Award
and I will never forget the TV screen.
The audience didn't get up.
For lifelong achievement Academy Award!
But they somehow couldn't forget, they couldn't say
"Oh, that's OK. That was in the '50s".
The same year, Vávra was getting his lifelong achievement award
in Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
and I was sitting there
and I was so curious whether the Czech audience or Czech filmmakers
would give this kind of honour and give him standing ovation.
They did!
When the whole New Wave came, Vávra used to teach them.
But then he made two of his best films, Romance for Bugle and Golden Queen,
and thereafter Witchhammer
at the same time when Menzel, Chytilová, Jakubisko, and others used to shoot.
That means that in his older age, he had the same poetics like them.
After the screening of Romance for Bugle, I told Otakar Vávra
"Professor, you are as good as the New Wave!"
And he said, "What do you mean? I can't stand the New Wave!"
But at the start of Normalisation, he once again
became a turncoat, and recorded propaganda films.
Light Penetrates the Dark - have you heard about that?
That is a three-minute film, the first film by Otakar Vávra.
It's a musical piano, a wonderful film. Take it as you want, it's amazing.
Wow, get a look at him!
Such a gentle young boy!
I know that one, it's all Vávra.
Here he is with his brother, who was eight years older.
And he wrote... "A hned má hlad". He was a writer.
And they really cared about each other, I have to say.
When he started going out with me, his brother said,
"But Vávra, you'll get bored of fucking one day."
But I have to say he stuck it out a fair bit.
It was a relationship that was based on great tactfulness.
It was a relationship based on talking.
When he lost his sight, I used to read books to him.
He used to read books to me before that.
He would read books to me for twenty years.
And I'd read books to him for twenty years.
We exchanged the roles a bit.
He was one of the best narrators.
He knew what a story is supposed to look like.
Not only did he know this, but he was a great analyst as well.
When I shot my films, I could never show them to him...
he would crush them.
I showed them to him only when they were ready, never before that.
And when I showed them to him then in the end,
he told me about my mistakes and of course, he was right.
Sometimes he wouldn't say, because when there were many mistakes,
I threatened not to give him dinner. So he kept his mouth shut.
He was a great partner, we were together for 41 years,
from morning to evening, from evening 'til morning.
He is still with me, that is how it is.
When we were in our first year, he called us all and told us,
"Okay, so you all want to be directors, don't you?"
"You can still change your mind because, as UNESCO says
test pilots have the highest mortality rate
and second place belongs to film directors."
And this Otakar Vávra, who was telling us
this information, lived to be 100 years old.
I sometimes say "Czech", sometimes "Czechoslovak" wave,
as it was only me who was a member
of some sort of Czechoslovak Wave
because my friends and all the others kept a certain distance.
So, although I shot my first film in Slovakia
I was more a part of the Czech wave
because we understood each other better.
When I asked my colleagues, like Hanák, Havetta,
to start a Slovak 'branch' of the wave as well, to join it,
everybody said, "Well, I have other problems",
or "I don't think it's politically feasible",
"I have my problems", or "I don't have a prop master"
or "I just cannot do it in anyway".
So, in fact, I was alone.
It would be a bit unfair to say that I was alone
since there was Slovak film director Štefan Uher,
who made a film called The Sun in a Net,
and everybody said that this was a sort of precursor, an inspiration.
Don't move your arm!
You are a good-for-nothing.
- There's going to be solar eclipse. - Your arm!
Shall we watch it together...?
Dear Bela,
you don't care about snowdrops or eclipses.
Your problem is you hate staying in.
Is that why you said, "Let's go to the roof?"
I could have looked at you in the street.
The Sun in a Net is a mix of documentary film
and psychological painting.
That's Uher's method.
Stanislav Barabáš was among the first FAMU graduates
and shot Song of a Grey Dove (1961).
Second important FAMU graduate was Peter Solan
I know Solan, because we got on very well.
And Barabáš was my lifelong intimate friend.
And after the Occupation he left Czechoslovakia.
And he wanted me to leave too,
that if we both left, we would find better jobs
and he even got me a job in a Canadian TV station.
But I couldn't force myself to leave Slovakia.
1950s graduate Martin Hollý joined them.
All three of them brought new topics into Slovakian cinema. New topics!
That's enough! To the right!
Pull!
More - keep pulling!
Damn it! Move it!
C'mon, move!
Damn it!
Kiril!
Jump to the rope!
Grab the rope!
Leave it and jump!
Jump!
You've got it!
Hanák, Havetta, Jakubisko...
each one of them is different.
Each one has his own style,
which is what makes them interesting.
Films by these three directors
who are the main representatives apart from Uher -
three most prominent Slovak directors of the 60s.
Because it brought great desire to experiment and great...
spontaneous playfulness.
They weren't afraid to break taboos, to break the rules.
So, I can say I'm the most popular director, sort of, in Slovakia.
I'm, in fact, sort of a 'Slovak Menzel'.
Havetta and Jakubisko were friends, from high school, VŠUP
where they both studied photography.
Juro came to FAMU a year before Havetta.
He was one year ahead.
He was the one to convince Eliáš to study at FAMU.
They made a lot of things together, such as St Nicholas Day newsreels
original and funny things.
They were both witty and artists...
very gifted!
Later, they started heading in different directions
but during their studies, they were friends.
I know one thing, you love me.
- No, I don't. - Yes, you do.
No.
I will not lie to myself.
Better to kill myself....
My parents and brother didn't die.
They perished like sick animals.
And the others...
You understand...
I felt closest to the works of Havetta. They were most acceptable for me.
It was something that... I don't know where the tradition...
I would...
see it also in Parajanov
or in what came from the East.
It was something between Babel, Parajanov and...
and a kind of satirised Slovak reality.
I think that documentaries, as a specific kind of film,
and fiction films can sometimes influence each other
and they do, in the history of cinema.
We wanted to make films about life as it really was.
But we were only allowed to make films about how life should look.
By that I mean the future. And that was not compatible with cinema,
that has a documentary character after all.
It records reality, not illusions.
And so our defiance began.
Defiance against the rules set by the regime.
It's a film about an individual, one very strong individualist
that hated everyone else in the group.
Because individuality is different
and doesn't blend in with the crowd.
And that's the subtext that motivated me.
That's why I was so attracted to this topic.
Of course, it's a film about love, too. Unfulfilled love and so on.
But it's essential to say that it's a film about disdain of the crowd too.
For example, the scene where the village is deciding the fate of the Dragon
and they are talking as the Central Committee of the Communist Party did
when they were asking each other, "What to do with Grečner?"
It seems to me that Slovak films are more emotional.
Perhaps you could say that they are,
sort of, more honest, more heartfelt...
Slovaks have their Slovak context, cultural context,
some approach to folklore
which they wanted to revolutionise and modernise.
They had a completely unsentimental approach.
It wasn't that important to Czechs.
In the Czech New Wave,
the emphasis was on a psychological approach to things
and a social approach to things.
Have they announced it?
They announced the abdication of President Novotný.
There were movements for change from '63 onwards.
So you're looking at a progression.
And I think, there was... while there was movement for change within the arts
there was also a movement for change
within society and insofar as it was possible.
But this didn't really come to head
until '68 with the removal of President Novotný
who, shall we say, was an old-style communist
and his replacement by Alexander Dubček, who oversaw the Prague Spring.
They were trying to introduce greater degrees of democracy
towards the end they were trying to introduce
workers' councils, workers' control... they never got that far.
And as Dubček put it, the idea was the widest possible democratisation.
He came up with a slogan, "Socialism with a Human Face"
which was automatically really saying that what
was there before didn't have a human face.
In my case, The Elective Affinities meant that communists and anti-communists
you understand...
united for some time.
They realised they needed each other
and that they would be happier in a different mutual relationship.
And it only lasted those eight months.
You understand?
For eight months, Czechs lived in a different structure.
And those eight months in 1968
stood for a great intellectual power of this nation, which still lasts today.
This afternoon I'll be writing a speech...
If it's cleverly used, it'll be true...
This is the harvest period, for the film people.
Let's have lunch now...
Afterwards I'm to call up some people.
I'm working on the final version
for the Central Committee plenary session.
So we'll talk afterwards, right?
- We're off to lunch. - We'll be here.
To explain what is the Czech culture
I think that's the best image I can give you
is writers, filmmakers, singers - all these guys and girls
rent a balcony on opposite side of the square
and find someone half-crazy actor or
I don't know, person from the street probably.
They wait with him, when Dubček went on balcony and huge crowd start to scream
at the same moment, this crazy guy appeared on this balcony on opposite side
and they start to applaud him.
So they were laughing in probably the most important moment of new Czech history.
They have these things.
They didn't fall in pathetic moment and start to cry or big Czech and so on.
So, if you want to explain what is the Czech New Wave...
that's it.
They were laughing to themselves in very dramatic moments.
I shot the icon of Prague Spring, that is Dubček
and even worse, I was making fun of them.
We captured director Jiří Menzel and cameraman Jaromír Šofr
working on the final scenes of the new film.
Bohumil Hrabal wrote the screenplay.
He published the book "Larks on a String", which was short stories from the 50s
about the stupidity of the regime.
It was beautifully written! And I said to myself then
that it was a pity that we couldn't make a movie about it
because the Bolsheviks would never allow us to
make fun of the silly things they did in the 50s.
It wasn't silly as much as tragic, though.
And that's exactly what the stories were about.
It was merciless as much as funny.
It happened that Dubček came, the atmosphere changed
and the communists suddenly realised the regime can't be as hard as it was.
And right out of the blue they cancelled the censorship.
Prague Spring was about relaxing the rules that had been put in place
by those horrible communists under Moscow's patronage.
Many of them were murderers, they set up concentration camps.
You understand?
And the point was to get rid of all of that.
It was an amazing time
of great hopes
and growing optimism among people.
I was surprised to find
that they still could be optimistic after all those years.
We didn't know what to do first - watch TV, listen to the radio
or go out and walk in the streets.
We asked several people in that month of August 1968
"What is their greatest wish?"
A young woman -"That the beautiful National Spring doesn't end too soon...
that I may be able to bring up my sons in its spirit."
An old woman - "That I get back my apartment
which was unlawfully taken away from me two years ago."
A hippie - "The most important thing is love. War is crap."
The beautiful thing was he called me to his office
read the screenplay for All My Good Countrymen and said
"You can make this film your way and nobody's going to interfere."
"You can do whatever you like. You are the boss now."
That was beautiful.
It was thanks to Dubček.
In such a short period, utopia happened and utopia died.
It was basically six or seven months.
And you know how long you are preparing the movies.
So basically in result, practically, only few films were done in this freedom...
One was this Menzel film which was banned;
one was this Kachyňa film which was banned later.
I could finally shoot The Cremator.
What about the President becoming a granddad?
Is that classified information too? Can the Ear hear that?
Listen, Ear, Comrade President is a granddad.
It's a boy. Everything's fine.
The mother, unfortunately, hasn't got enough milk.
WE WILL DEFEND SOCIALISM
WE WILL UNITE THE PEOPLE
I walked and walked
through the green meadow
Honoured guests director Jiří Menzel, Václav Neckář, Jitka Zelenohorská
together with the audience marked 40 years since Larks on a string was made.
The filmmakers shot it in Kladno.
Socialist-era songs, waving ribbons, banners, red scarves
and a kiss for the director from a girl Pioneer.
The organisers of the event recreated the atmosphere of the 1950s
in which the plot of Larks on a string is set.
What is interesting is that I had a Saab, a new car
and it had seatbelts, which was new, cars didn't have belts then.
I was driving Mr. Šofr to the stage
and he noticed the seatbelts, so he fastened his.
We were driving to Kladno to film, and there was this road, which...
It started raining, so the road was slippery and I did a full turn, 360 degree!
We went to the field and ended up on the side.
So as we were sitting.
Mr. Šofr, who until then was talking about something
he stopped, we were looking around
and suddenly he said, "Where was I?"
And he wanted to resume our conversation. That was genius.
All that you can see here will be smelted down into high-grade steel.
We'll make tractors out of this steel to plough our fields.
We'll make more washing machines so you can wash your dirty overalls.
These are our voluntary workers
mostly of bourgeois origin.
We'll also smelt them down...
into a new kind of people.
When all of a sudden you can look back truthfully at that recent past
which everyone remembers how they experienced it
but they couldn't see the real picture anywhere in literature, in film
because it was a false, ideological picture that the regime wanted.
In that sense, in fact...
that film was highly dangerous for the communist bigwigs
because it was not only revelatory in a precise way
but was witty and pointed too.
And, of course, it hurts to see the true picture
but when the audience laughs at it, it hurts twice as much.
Which is why Larks on a String caused such bother.
I remembered a joke from the 50s...
There is some training going on for workers...
a comrade is teaching his comrade workers...
teaching them how good it is that we have socialism
and that we will have communism...
so he speaks, he lectures, then asks if there are questions
and a worker raises his hand and says
"It's good that we have socialism and that we will have communism."
"But where is the milk, and the meat and the bread?"
And the comrade said
"That's an interesting question, but I'll answer it only next time."
And the next week, the next lecture was scheduled.
So the next lecture ended and he again asked, "Any questions?"
And another man says, "It's nice there will be communism."
"But where is the bread, milk, meat?"
"And where is that worker who asked about it last week?"
We really would like to know what happened to dairyman.
And where's the professor of philosophy?
And where are the good days...
- Yes, yes, yes. - ...when people respected
and loved each other?
What a nice person! Who is he?
A prematurely-wise person...
That was the joke which made me realise...
Aha! We have to put one in jail, then a second and a third...
and that made the structure of the movie.
I'm very proud of the idea. Naturally, Hrabal wrote it beautifully.
I shot it in the naïve belief that the communists can reform themselves...
and when we joked about how stupid they were
that they would stop doing this kind of nonsense
for example, sending intellectuals to be part of the production line...
But I was the stupid one, because I didn't realise
that the Bolsheviks can't reform themselves.
I think that the best scene was
- I was in that scene only for a little bit -
when Mr. Šmeral came as Minister Nejedlý.
That was such a wonderful scene!
That's why the communists cut it out straight away.
I think it's one of the greatest films of Czech cinema
especially as a paragon of mixing comedy and tragedy.
I would rank it alongside The Shop on Main Street
which is also a film with great comic scenes
even though it is a drama.
That was the only case when I myself decided what should be filmed.
All the other films I made, someone had offered me.
Look at me! Good!
Sit, please!
Czech culture... I call it existential humour.
That's... Švejk.
That's the style of the most typical Czech...
cultural figure.
And Menzel belongs here.
His irony... that's all from Švejk
and from the author that Menzel likes to adapt.
Now I can't... Cutting it Short Hrabal.
Hrabal is a successor of Švejk.
Did you hear anything about a soldier Švejk, named Švejk?
- Švejk? A Soldier? - Yeah.
Well...
Well, it's a popular figure in our literature, you see?
- Did you hear about him? - Well, no, you tell me about him!
Well, it's such a funny soldier, he was in the army
and always making fun of everything around, you see?
And we saw, as you are such a man making fun of all and laughing at all
you can know about this man too.
Well, where is he from? He's a Czech boy?
He's already... Well it's...
It's just a story about him, from the First World War.
Oh yeah! I see!
Well, we shall send you the book of him.
Yeah, ok, I'd love to read about him because before my time, I was just a kid.
We are quite a small community which is oppressed
from the Germans from one side and from the Russians from the other side.
And we can't fight them either way
not with the arms, and not with the military
but we are fighting them with humour.
That's the only thing we can do against those big powers.
And probably, that's the root from where the Czech humour comes.
"Oh, cats' ball... is better than dogs' dance."
"And a cat crawls through a hole, and a dog crawls through a window."
"The cat's king himself..." I can't remember how it goes.
My memory...
No dogs were invited
No mice were allowed
When all of a sudden
A mouse appeared in the crowd
Oh, the cat's ball
In the cat house
Is the one place
Which is no good for a...
Mouse!
All of us grew up in the spirit of the Liberated Theatre.
In the spirit of the Liberated Theatre, Suchý and Šlitr started the Semafor.
It was something completely different
but the first reason was humour, to make people laugh.
But they were intelligent people who had a certain education
so the humour in Semafor was wonderful.
At that time, it was also the biggest or the most frequented theatre.
A bit later, the Cimrman Theatre emerged.
It took intellectual humour to an even higher level.
It's intellectual, but accessible to everyone
who has finished at least high school.
When the national television had a poll to find the greatest Czech of all time
Cimrman won, even though he never existed.
Their whole theatre is based on a mystification
about an alleged historical Czech person
who was a forgotten inventor who invented just about everything.
And this is what I consider representative of good Czech humour.
Being poetic, ironic and using mystification.
So we lived knowing, 'You can't do this. Look out!' 'Be careful! '
And humour, the jokes people told, were a liberating social adhesive
when you told them in a group of people you trusted...
the laughter made you feel that we all think the same.
It was binding us together, the humour.
And when you're helpless, you turn to very dark humour.
It's our way to face death. We know we can't defeat death.
None of us can. But fighting back with humour is beautiful. Liberating.
Dear children! I think you all know me well!
I'm sure Jirka recognised me straight away...
Dear children! I think you all know me well!
I'm sure Jirka recognised me straight away, and so did Alenka in the back.
I'm your old friend, the Long, Broad and Sharpsight.
Yes, you're probably missing my two partners: Long and Broad.
You must be wondering, where are they hiding from us?
They aren't hiding, dear children. They died!
Films had humour, you know?
And humour... it sounds paradoxical nowadays, but...
you have to imagine the... very narrow-minded type of government
and they were anxious that
humour could bring something like, you know, open mindness.
We were not allowed to fight the Russians with weapons.
But, you know, the films and movies
let's say, I think they made a lot of damages
to their 'peaceful' face, what they were trying to show to the world.
This is what upset the Russians.
They knew that this kind of democracy
- whatever they said in terms of propaganda -
they knew that this kind of democracy was a threat to the Soviet system.
All of us knew it was a sensitive matter, because it was right after 1968.
We spent there whole vacations, many days, just to shoot it
and we saw the film only after 20 years. They did not release it.
You two hold your hands
and pretend to look joyfully into each other's eyes.
That's it.
And there will be the following commentary
about the two of you.
We're doing all this for our future, for the future of our young new people
who love each other, who raise families to have lovely children...
who will never again know war, suffering, but ever lasting peace.
I was ready to cry.
I'm sorry, it's just that...
It was clear to us all
that this would be the last time we'd see it.
So then it took 20 years
before they released the film.
I'm sorry!
You have beautiful eyes.
It's a nice film.
But I think that
the concentration camps were much more cruel.
And it's a kind of a soap opera set in a concentration camp.
And philosophy is deeper than just quoting Kant.
The film quotes Kant.
It's a bit more complicated.
And Kant was talking about more essential things
that are absent in Menzel's thinking.
So I don't care about that film. But it's a nice film.
The movie was screened after 25 years and it got the Golden Bear Award
and there when they asked me how I felt, I said it's sad.
Over 25 years, our lives and careers could've gone on a different path.
I guess it's a very powerful, comic portrait of communism.
I don't know of any similar film which actually deals with that era
and deals with it as comedy.
In fact, I think Menzel and Hrabal were
criticised for having treated it as comedy, even.
And Menzel said somewhere around the time that he...
he believed one needed to transcend these things and be able to laugh at them
even though they were, in fact, tragic and even though people were being persecuted
imprisoned, killed, whatever because of it.
It shows the genius of Jiří Menzel
that after 20 years, 21 years
when the film was screened at the main Berlinale competition
nobody wanted to believe how old the film was
because it was wonderfully filmed using absolutely modern cinema language.
And were it not for Václav Neckář, the main protagonist
who turned up looking very different from 20 years before
they might not have been believed at all it
wasn't a new film, but a 20-year old film.
The stroke came when I was on stage in 2002
eight years ago...
For half a year, I wasn't at all able to say a full sentence.
But now I'm already trying.
I speak like a book now, but like a badly written one...
August 21st, 1968.
At night, 500,000 soldiers from the Warsaw Pact army
crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.
This was the beginning of the Occupation of the country.
This is Radio Prague, Czechoslovakia.
The legitimate voice of occupied Czechoslovakia.
We were under Austrian rule, then we were attacked by Germany
and we were even attacked by our Russian brothers.
They already arrived here in 1945, but we welcomed them as liberators
until we grew to understand they were the next military occupation.
It showed most clearly when our country wanted real independence
and the Russians returned to Czechoslovakia
with tanks and an army of half a million
Long live Mr. Dubček!
When the Warsaw pact troops invaded the country
with tanks, we were in the middle of shooting.
And they invaded my WWII set and period props.
They thought some counter-revolutionaries put mines on the bridges...
to prevent them from advancing.
We had to hide old weapons, no longer functional, from the Second World War
because otherwise they would shoot at us.
On the morning of the 21st of August, we went out to film our last scenes.
The filmmakers whom you see here were not the only ones to be shocked.
Soviet tanks were thundering through the streets.
I had a handycam, a 35 mm Arriflex.
So I was shooting and people were even lifting me up as if we were a crane.
So I was able to shoot everything that was happening above and beneath us.
And this one situation happened.
There was this one tank and then another and people brought this one car
and one tram and put it in front of the tanks.
And that's where one of the beautiful characteristics
of the Czech nation manifested itself.
The tank tried to come through and was hitting the tram
and people were shouting, "Šájbu!"
"Šájbu!"
Šajba is a thing in ice-hockey
which is a Czech-Soviet-Russian constant problem
where they shoot šajba, which means a goal.
We are the generation
that first welcomed the Russian army in 1945.
I was 9 years old. I climbed on the tank, hugged them
feeling the pure joy of liberation.
And now the same tanks came to suffocate us.
And I spoke Russian, so as a radio reporter
I went to the trucks with my microphone
asking, "Why have you come?"
But I found just sleepy and very confused soldiers
who didn't know where they were or why.
It was a real tragedy for me as well as for many other people.
This was a tragedy
because it occurred against all the expectations we had.
We expected liberal reforms.
We were waiting for liberty but we got totalitarianism.
Those tanks entered Prague
but we had the feeling they'd occupied our hearts and souls
and I was amongst the opponents of this occupation.
Because we felt an affinity to their work
we felt...
had a sense of their pain, and had a sense of what they were experiencing.
But, like, two-three days after Occupation
Russian small troops, like five or six soldiers with some
I don't know, person in charge of them
went around, institution by institution.
As FAMU is between Academy of Science, National Theatre
and all those huge important institutions
they entered FAMU too.
And they said, "Okay, move! We are now..."
And Brousil was there, he came on the first floor, and they were entering down
and said, "Stop! Don't move! What do you want?"
"This is a school where we are teaching Russian history, Russian films."
"Do you know who is Eisenstein?"
He asked some stupid soldiers.
The guys were so impressed that - they hear
someone talking about the Russian in Russian -
they say, "Okay, fine!" and they exit.
So, legend is that FAMU was one of very few, maybe the only institution
which was never completely controlled physically by Russians.
If you were king
and could give me
just as a present
your country
or state...
If you buy me a castle
and a shield of gold
and a collection of all the stamps
I...
wouldn't want it.
All I want is to live!
As one should
live
and nothing more
that's just my crazy
wish.
And I mean
I envy the rivers, I see them flow
I envy the loaves, I smell them bake
I envy the fires their fragrant smoke
I envy the roses and don't walk
I envy the bees
their honey paradise
I envy April
for bringing May
I envy the blue cloud its freedom
When it was said that street signs must be removed so as to
make it impossible for the Soviet army to find its way
within ten minutes, all ladders to be found in Prague
were put against the walls
and people were removing street names and signs.
The Russians had no idea where the streets were leading to.
I told myself, "This nation can't be broken. It sticks together."
I was very cruelly mistaken.
My wife, who was a beautiful girl
and her friend
Jana Slánská -
maybe you know her from Czech films, she uses a pseudonym
she works as Kristina Vlachová.
The girls distributed and pasted the posters.
They got the idea to wear super mini skirts
to make the Russians desperate.
There was a humorous side to it
which doesn't mean we didn't know we were screwed
that it was all over.
I'm coming from the country where everything is very tragic.
Everything ends up with the blood every 50 years.
So when Czechs were occupied by Russians
in my country, in Yugoslavia at that time
no one understood why they are not fighting against them.
And when you live in Prague at the time
it was quite clear why they are not... they are never fighting.
They try to survive.
That's why Charles Bridge is there for 700 years.
In my country, everything is ruined every 50 years.
I arrived at a bridge over the Vltava
and there were soldiers stopping and checking all the cars there.
And I said to myself, "No. I can only be checked by a Czech policeman."
I drove on along Dlouhá Street to Náměstí Republiky
where there were soldiers
who'd already heard the soldiers on the bridge
shooting at my car as I was driving past them.
They started running at me in a spread line
and I couldn't drive past them, because I'd have to drive over them.
So I stopped and they surrounded me.
They wanted to pull me out of the car but I locked myself inside.
I was terribly angry.
But fortunately, as I was surrounded by the Russians, the strange faces
there were Czech citizens right behind them
shouting at me, "Don't give in, Jirka!"
They were shouting at me not to let the soldiers arrest me.
Then a Russian army officer showed up
and he was smart. He was way more educated than the Russians around him.
He asked me very politely to stop acting foolishly
and to get out of the car, that no harm would come to me.
Everything suddenly collapsed.
The...
Jakubisko, Havetta and Hanák had new films out
which were banned right after the Occupation.
The censors withdrew these films from movie theatres
and they shelved them. They weren't screened anymore.
So the situation was... absolutely depressing and hopeless.
In case of Jakubisko one can say why
the films were extremely inventive and free flowing.
They showed the influence of Godard.
They were critical indirectly or very directly with the Russians
for instance The Deserter And The Nomads (1968)
which was filmed with three parts, the first part on the First World War
second on the Second World War and the third after the nuclear holocaust.
The Occupation took away from me the most free period of my creative life.
I was young.
Wherever I looked, I saw a theme for a film.
I needed to make films.
I wanted to make a feature film every two years.
My notes would've given me enough material
I knew what films I wanted to make.
I had to say goodbye to that.
So much time has gone by since I last shot anything.
Well, who was Jan Palach...
He was a child of that era.
As I am continuously saying, it was a transformation
from Nazism and Communism
the change that was forming somewhere
and out of it the Prague Spring was born.
He was one of the children of the Prague Spring who believed
that it was bringing a certain freedom to the filmmakers
as well as to everyone else.
I don't like to walk in the crowd when I'm feeling sad
because I'm afraid I'll meet someone...
who doesn't feel sad...
or is just pretending.
As for cheerfulness, that is something I haven't felt for a long time...
a couple of years, I think.
From the euphoria that the Prague Spring brought with itself
the shock was so immense that the adults behaved in a way that they were
coming back to their former ways, they started to collaborate within themselves.
He was one of the few who wanted to point it out. He wanted to cry for help
that it couldn't go on like that, that we had to do something.
You can only hear people scuffing their feet as they were walking.
But other than that... silence. The entire nation knelt down
in front of this individual
who took the weight of the era on his own shoulders.
Well, hello there! I see somebody walking. Where are you coming from?
From the forest.
- Did you go mushrooming? - Well, we kind of lost our way.
Come in. Come in.
I was ready to make my dream film. But suddenly the Russians came
and everything fell apart.
All My Good Countrymen was banned
because it was against the crimes of the Communist Party
which were similar to those of the Nazis.
Not that much, but Stalin killed even more people.
In a way, the films made in 1969
were the most political ones of the whole New Wave period.
That's why some 8 to 9 films made in Bohemia and Slovakia were banned.
My film 322was to be burnt.
This was related to five movies: Sirovy's Funeral Ceremonies
Menzel's Larks on a String
Evald's The Seventh Day, the Eighth Night
Kachyna's The Ear, and Squandered Sunday.
Those five movies.
I don't know if they told anybody any reason, but they never told me.
I wrote a sort of an appeal
that was published in the most read newspaper back then.
In the appeal I was referring to Gandhi
that we should adopt his views to the Occupation.
And to not co-operate.
It was published and it had a strong reaction.
But it became the reason why
I then had to explain myself.
And not only me.
To tell you the truth, we were being watched the entire time.
They asked everybody especially the question
whether we agreed with the international "assistance" from our allied armies.
I was...
I wasn't able to say I agreed.
I said I couldn't come to terms with it...
that it was so deeply traumatising for me
that I hadn't come to terms with it.
With that answer, I risked my existence.
But I couldn't say I agreed.
Everybody who remained in the Party had to say they did.
I think it must have been extremely humiliating for them.
They had to say so even though they didn't think so.
Everybody was just fighting for their living,
for a little red book which, in fact, served as a working permit.
It was the Party membership ID and it was much harder without it.
But, of course, Menzel is a great filmmaker
and he's made excellent films.
And if somebody says, "OK, but he never said anything about the occupation"
that remark is completely irrelevant.
Because people who said something
about it couldn't work anymore.
Somebody... I know... Menzel once said that he agreed
with the statement that Russians aren't occupants, that it was a brotherly help
I don't know the exact formulation. I think that he came on television
and he started to repent and he started to relativize the Occupation.
Menzel said he did that
because he wanted to make movies.
Everyone has to answer this question on his own.
I said to myself, "I can't proclaim that it was otherwise
or that I agree with it just to be able to make movies."
Plus what kind of films would be made
under the new head dramaturges at Barrandov?
They were awful. I can remember two, maybe three movies
from the 20-year period of Normalisation.
Who would remember those films?
They were terrible!
Regardless of a group of directors who were absolutely incompetent.
Balik, Kachlik, Jaromir, Borek, they were the new favourites.
I didn't want to make movies with people like that, no way.
But Jirka wanted to make movies, and so he put up with it.
And I don't judge him, because everyone's responsible for himself.
That's everyone's personal matter
how they handled themselves.
I don't want to judge them
but the truth is, I've never done that.
Because I would feel like I had lost my identity had I done it.
That's all I have to say about that.
But we all had to say it and if someone didn't, they were punished.
Jakubisko couldn't shoot feature films anymore.
He was transferred to documentary films.
The same happened to Peter Solan.
They wanted to transfer me to documentary films as well
but I was defending myself
because deep inside I am not a documentary filmmaker.
There were people telling me
"Careful! Careful! We're going to scrutinise your film with a microscope
to make sure there's nothing anti-socialist."
I didn't want to make anti-socialist films.
But the three feature films I made that got banned were considered anti-socialist.
They also banned three of my short documentaries.
My parents were in the fields when I was about to be born.
My dad ran for help.
I fell out onto a spread apron
Thus I was born.
What is it?
I know nothing.
It took at least five years before Hanák could make another film.
For Jakubisko, it was perhaps 10-15 years.
And it killed Havetta.
Havetta could never come to terms with it.
And it's believed that...
he intentionally didn't go see a doctor
when he had problems with his stomach
and he quietly died at home instead of looking for help.
That was how depressed he was about it and how unable to cope with it he was.
So...
Havetta died of Normalisation.
One important figure was Jan Procházka, who was a writer
who was a member of the communist party and
so he had close links with the President.
He wrote his own scripts, some of them highly critical
like, for instance, Long Live the Republic
which came out in the mid-60s
and The Ear, which came out in... well it came out in 1990, because it was banned
but that was really one which was one of
the most hard hitting films about the communist system.
But he made it possible for some of the New Wave directors to work.
He defended, for instance, Němec's The Party and the Guests.
If you allow me, I'd like to remind you that I haven't committed any offence.
Neither have I.
And I haven't either.
If it isn't too much trouble, could I ask you for an explanation?
What have we done?
Don't you know?
He doesn't know.
Did you hear that?
And at one moment, in 1970, I think...
His profile was broadcasted in television
created from materials made by the secret service.
You probably know the story. It was the worst case of film media abuse.
I think he died of cancer, but there was another reason for his death
the internal fight of Normalisation.
He died exhausted... Exhausted.
Because on his shoulders he had to bear
the entire weight of the defiance.
He had to shoot films that he didn't like shooting.
And that is, of course, going to affect every sensitive artist.
Because then he feels like a servant
and not like a creator.
That was an inner problem of Štefan Uher
and that's what cut his life short.
He was just simply exhausted from everything.
Therefore, they no longer wanted to be rebels. They were exhausted.
They said to themselves, "No, let's just bow down
just so we can do something."
Everything was considered to be hostile - sex...
love, despair were hostile to them.
But those are the basics of a human story.
In that sense, we were anti-regime.
They said I have caused enough troubles because End of August at Hotel Ozone
was banned no matter what the political climate was.
The same with Josef Kilián.
So if I wanted to work at all, they suggested that I make films for children.
So I got a chance after five years, and not even in Barrandov
but with Krátký Film, to make a fairytale.
So I filmed two fairytales, and the irony was
that I've become a specialist in fairytales
which was fairly rare, because there were
not many of us. So I continued with that
and suddenly people forgot that I made regular films.
I was labelled someone who makes films for children.
I wasn't the only one who was fired from Barrandov.
It was Standa Milota, Ladislav Helge, Antonín Máša, Pavel Juráček...
They said, "Juráček? No! Never!"
"He is done, fire him and end him."
I admit this might look suspicious to you.
It would to me, but I...
I really don't know how it happened.
It just occurred to me that I might borrow a cat.
That's all.
I'll gladly tell you why I did it, but I'd have to lie.
I had no reason. It never dawned on me that I needed one.
I know it was my mistake. One should have a reason.
Next time I'd like to set things right.
You see, whatever happened, I'm just an ordinary person.
Evald Schorm - one of the major directors made no films until '89.
And so on...
As is quite apart from the ones who went abroad
who were not merely Němec, Forman, Passer, Kadár, Barabáš, Jasný...
you know, more, even more, plenty more you can name
who just went abroad, and some of them were able to pursue their careers
some of them weren't.
I had to leave because
otherwise they would kill me.
That's it.
That's why I emigrated to President Tito who provided the best protection.
If it weren't for President Tito, I'd be dead. The KGB would've murdered me.
The ambassador Trpe Jakovlevski was helping certain intellectuals, directors
and dramaturges to cross borders to Yugoslavia in order to
emigrate to America, Canada, Germany, and other countries.
Approximately 80 intellectuals left Czechoslovakia via Yugoslavia.
But those who stayed, of course
suddenly found themselves on the horns of a dilemma
because they were not allowed to shoot
and at the same time did not want to claim allegiance
to the current that came thereafter approximately from the year 1970
actually already in the end of the year 1969
the period of "Normalisation" as we call it.
It was a period when the rule over politics
but also over culture was captured by totally different people
those who did not share the ideals of the young people
who were considered to be a part of the New Wave.
Well, I worked at an incineration plant operating the incinerators
I drove a van for the grocery company, so I was a professional driver.
Then I worked as a book salesman.
It's ridiculous.
But you have to live with it.
You've made your choice, so you have to enjoy what you have.
At the Muzeum metro station, I worked as a cleaner.
That was great.
I remember that
Andrej Barla, my friend and Jakubisko's original cinematographer
- he was shooting with Vávra, the big films of his -
he was in the metro, saw me on the stairs and said
"What are you doing here?" I said, "Cleaning the stairs."
It was quite obvious.
I was married to a famous pop singer Marta Kubišová
and she was not allowed to sing
as she was part of the protest movement against invasion.
We lost the child before the child was born.
That means it was only very bad thing and then I was really very close to suicide.
That means it doesn't look that there is any light at the end of the tunnel.
When I recall this period, it seems to me almost impossible.
As if you were walking in winter, freezing
almost exhausted, lying in the snow
and somebody would find you and take you home
and from a fireplace it is pleasant to think about it.
Like this, it is so pleasant to think about it
that it all seems to you like a dream
you wonder about it all, you imagine and sigh.
We were so traumatised that I feel the trauma even today.
I really liked Russian literature and other things
but I still feel a certain aloofness towards Russia
and Russian language.
It's still inside me. The tanks in our streets and...
I will never...
I will never get rid of the image in my mind's eye.
It was the 9th of January
I got a phone call from somebody that the Russian tanks are leaving the barracks
in a small town near Prague
and they are coming towards Prague.
And so I took my car and
went to take a look at it, and sure enough
I saw them coming. So I turned back
went home, called Miloš, told him what I saw
and Miloš said, "Ok, pick me up in an hour, and we'll leave!"
So, I packed up my little luggage, and we went to...
Miloš chose a small border crossing between Czechoslovakia and Austria.
We go there at 4 o'clock in the morning
there were patches of snow around, nobody there.
So we stopped, and the officer came out
with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder, and he said, "Comrades, where are you going?"
And we said, "We are going to Vienna for a weekend."
And he said, "Can I see your passports?"
So I was sitting on the right side, Miloš was driving
I gave him our passports and he said
he was going through it, he said, "Where is your exit visa?"
which was a yellow piece of paper which
you had to have in order to leave the country.
And they never gave it to anybody, yeah
except some prominent Party people.
So I said, "They are not there.
They must be in the luggage in the back of the car."
And I got out of the car pretending that I know that we have it
and I opened the back side and I'm going through the luggage
and I hear this kind of a dialogue...
The officer said, "Are you Miloš Forman, the film director?"
And Miloš, who has a very deep voice, says, "Yes."
He said, "You know, I have seen all your movies."
And Miloš said - I didn't believe what I heard -
Miloš said, "And I bet you didn't like any of them."
I thought... Is he crazy or what?
And the officer said, "Are you kidding?
Do you remember that scene from Loves of a Blonde...
that ring rolling on the floor and..."
And he began to talk about different scenes from Miloš's movies.
Then he leaned like that and he said...
looked at me, he said, "Don't look for those exit visa!"
And he let us go...
and he used an expression in Czech
which you use only when you never see the people again...
"Be with God!"
So within five days, two French guys picked me up in a roadster
and took me and the two kids, poor things, in the backseat to Paris.
So we were there.
They got us a flat in Paris and all.
But Miloš didn't have any money for us as he hadn't finished the movie yet.
And I never quite understood it
I think, he didn't want to make the movie with them
with Claude Berri, the film producer.
Maybe he disliked the script, I don't know.
So he left us in Paris and went to America, to New York.
We had no idea that it's going to last that long.
It was so bizarre, it was so... you know
"An Invasion of Czechoslovakia", I mean it's...
you know, it would be a great comedy, if I ever had a chance to do it.
We thought we are leaving just for a year.
We had... I had 300 dollars, Miloš had 600 dollars, one small piece of luggage...
Altogether I went three times to New York, always with a ten-year break.
So I went there and he was living quite well.
And he would later send us some money, but never very much, as the dollar was high
and he thought, "That should do for them."
So we got by. I mean, not that we scraped along.
I played in the theatre, I went for tours, I would knit clothes for my friends.
So we somehow managed to get by and Miloš was abroad all that time.
So we stayed in touch
we would call each other, every Christmas, then less and less.
Then not even on Christmas. Then we met once, in Paris.
Then we didn't see each other anymore.
I told him once how sorry I was that his films
Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball, a wonderful film...
I told him I was sorry these got lost because of his later films
like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
He told me, "If I wanted to gain something new, I had to sacrifice something."
So I came to understand him.
And I was so happy for him and his great success
which made the regime here so terribly upset
that a man of Forman's quality had to flee the country
in order to be able to create.
Not every Czech can run away.
So I ruined my Hollywood career.
But...
I don't think I would make such good films in America...
as I did here.
I was replaceable...
making American movies.
But nobody could make Intimate Lighting.
I guess you'd prefer a leg.
I want a leg!
No talking during the meal!
Kaya, grandpa also didn't get a leg and doesn't complain!
Do you grandpa?
Please stay! He doesn't have to have everything he sees.
But he likes it. Here, have the leg, and...
Kaja, what are you doing? Put it back immediately.
Let him have both of them, I'll share with Peter, right?
Of course!
No, you can't do that! You won't have enough. Take mine!
Leave that, leave it!
Here, take mine!
No, then you won't have any. We'll share ours.
Why do you want to split a leg?
We'll manage
I cannot really take credit for it
because I saw it in my brother-in-law's family.
In his family, if they had, like
six people for dinner, they only had food for five.
I mean, always!
And so, I saw exactly that scene.
They had a chicken, and they... suddenly one portion was missing.
So there was this game.
You know, of course, in a film we made it more funny.
When it was finished, there was a screening for the group
and Mr Šebor, the group's chief and a great fan of Forman
and the rest of us, said after the screening
"Guys, this is the most boring film of all times."
That was my first review.
So I thought, "Ah! Okay."
And then, it was just before the Karlovy Vary Film Festival
and somehow the studio didn't have enough new Czech films to show
because it's a 'A' type festival in Europe
so there are lots of critics and important people from all over the world, really.
So they showed Intimate Lighting.
It became such a success that they had to show it several times over.
I said to myself, that I would never make anything better.
That's pure film. Beautiful!
We'll be standing here like this until judgement day
After five years of trying to get some smaller jobs
in television or the dubbing industry
where I ended up working for about six months
when I was... how should I put it...
let into...
when I was mercifully allowed to make a film
- as a test, as it was called - which all of us had to do
it was something I wouldn't wish for anybody
because not only was there a five-year break
we actually had to sign that the film was just a test.
And if we didn't pass the test, they would kick us out.
This is what happened. At Barrandov, they did not want me to work.
In the same way, they did not want Jan Němec to work
as well as our whole generation. It's the same old story.
Our colleagues, Sekvenc, Vorlíček, etc., wanted us, who were more successful...
to disappear.
That is the Czech character.
And they were successful, because they had
the support of the management of Barrandov.
They could not fire me
because at that time, the law did not allow that.
They did not have any reason.
They could not fire Jireš, Bočan, Mrs. Chytilová either.
Nevertheless, when we wanted to do something
they would tell us that it does not suit them
and they offered us scripts that were un-filmable.
To put it bluntly and to be completely vulgar
it provided opportunities for pillocks, half-wits...
all of a sudden they had this enormous power.
All the capable people were suddenly cut off.
It was a horrible regime!
And there were enough communists in this country
who joined this regime.
Or who would pretend nothing had ever happened
such as Menzel when he made Who Looks for Gold?
I would pee myself.
And that's horrible.
Horrible!
Everything, especially in the arts and especially in filmmaking
is the result of a compromise.
If you're an engineer, you have to make a compromise
with the laws of physics.
You have to adapt to them, you have to accept them.
If you're an architect, a joiner, anything, a shoemaker or a waiter
you have to accept the restaurant you work at, carry the food they make
you simply have to do that.
The point is to do it the best you can under the given conditions.
The same goes for filmmaking.
You can't stop making movies just because the communists want it.
I called Evald, who was sort of our counsellor
as he was the eldest one of us
and the wisest one as well, I think
and I asked him, "Do you think I should quit the job, Evald?"
And Evald said, "It's they who have to fire you."
"Don't quit. Wait for them to fire you."
"If you quit, what are you going to do? Sweep the streets?"
"And how are you going to sweep them?"
"You'll do it well, because you do things well
and you'll support the regime with your work anyway."
"So, don't do anything and just wait."
During totalitarianism I chose a tactic...
I made certain they knew I was prepared
for them to drown me... But I'd take them down with me.
I made sure I could take them down with me.
I would have made such a scandal
it would've cost them their positions.
She said, "They all have wives at home."
"And they're all terrified of them, particularly when they become hysterical."
"So I decided to play the hysterical wife, basically."
And so she threw fits and she behaved in whatever way was necessary to
try and persuade them to let her do what she wanted to do.
Among the scripts I'd been offered, there was this one...
I met the writers, they were two journalists
and the script was about the construction of an oil pipeline.
I met the authors and I asked them
if they would go to see a film based on that script...
if they would buy the tickets.
They said that they would not!
I liked their honesty, so I told them
"Alright, I will do it. I really have to do something."
We went to see the construction
but it was just a hole in the ground.
A digger here and there, but otherwise nothing that could be filmed.
So I again said that it was not filmable
and they advised me to go and look at a dam
which was being built - and it was interesting.
It was a beautiful space and the people who were there were really nice.
The employees were mostly people who were thrown out from better posts.
"If you shoot this film, we might allow you
to shoot something better as well."
At that very moment, he invited me to
a pub, he told me about it and said
"Zdeněk, I wouldn't shoot this normally
but help me improve the dialogues at least."
In order to build this dyke
they first had to blow a tunnel through that rock face there.
The river runs through there now.
The four pipes you see over there will go under the dyke.
Each is six metres in diameter.
The water will power the turbine.
And at night, when there is less need for electricity
the turbines will pump water back into the dam.
After the Revolution, many people didn't have a clear conscience
but they were very eager to point fingers, saying
"Aha! Menzel made pro-regime films."
If you watch the film, you will see that it is not good
but it is not pro-regime, not in any way.
The story can be whatever.
What's important is the creator's approach.
That's what's interesting and unique.
It's original because we're all different.
We perceive things differently.
That's what interests me, the relationship to it.
Naturally, Věra Chytilová decides to do it her own way.
So instead of celebrating the construction of the housing estate
which was the pride and joy of the socialist regime
she made a film unmasking the regime.
Jireš made a film about the building of the Prague Metro.
other people made equally vacuous and empty films at the same time.
It was, as if, the authorities were saying
"You know, here's the theme. Make a film about that!"
"We're not interested in the quality.
We just want to fulfil the production program."
So we had to make films so that certain ideas were hidden
so that we did not say directly what we wanted to say
to let people feel it, put it in between lines, so to say.
And that was very interesting because we put... we put there...
we call it a white dog, or a white animal.
We wanted to hide there something they would not be able to see.
They started to notice it and also started to interpret symbols.
So then the worst was happening, fortunately not too often
they started to see symbols even in places where we intended none at all.
For example, after the Warsaw Pact troops entered our country on 21st
we could not use 21st in a calendar or so, this number could not be used.
If we used it, they would argue.
Or the clocks could never show midnight because
it was at midnight when the troops entered.
So they were searching for symbols everywhere in a film.
I remember that when I made one film... due to the censorship... one film...
it was not... it was not Build a House, Plant a Tree
it was before, before, I'm Sitting on a Branch and I'm Fine.
In this film, I consciously made a scene where a man
is kicking Russian flags and throwing them around
so that a censor could look and say
"Yes, this is it. This is the white dog.
This must be cut out, otherwise it is all right".
By the way, I heard this idea once
I also talked to Jaromil Jireš about it
that there's no doubt the New Wave was severed by outside forces.
But inside, with the possible exception of Mr. Forman
they were already abandoning
that exploratory documentary style of narration anyway
as if they had somewhat drained it already.
Let me point out, I can't speak on their behalf
but this was a feeling I had...
that the excitement that you could have to see living people on the silver screen
as opposed to the films that were shot before
and that the people on the screen could communicate with the same language
as the people sitting in the audience
that suddenly, everybody started abandoning that
because they wanted to express something more
in the sense of expressing more fatal, existential moments.
That was why, I think, Jaromil Jireš shot
for example... Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.
Věra Chytilová shot Fruit of Paradise.
Almost all of them shifted
as if they wanted to start expressing themselves differently.
Where is the Paris poorhouse, dear child?
Over there, Father.
One thing, what I think, what we were trying to do is in a way has
diverged a little from what the Czech directors did, was that there...
there seemed to be increasingly an element of surrealism and...
a kind of surrealist humour in their later work.
And I guess we've stuck fairly closely, I guess
to trying to tell stories of how things are.
And that's because in film culture here, it is about...
the film culture is about exaggeration
it's about escape, it's about pretending that everything is fine, that...
it's about promoting wealth
it's about saying the United States is
the defender of freedom and democracy and...
their soldiers do nothing but help the human race to progress.
And I suppose, our response to that is to say
"No, no. Look at how it is! Look at how it is!"
and trying to make films that have said, "Look! This is how it really is."
And the political and social circumstance
I guess, in Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic
has been to... they have to work through images and metaphors
because they couldn't say, "This is how it is"
because that would have been deemed unacceptable.
One day Mr. Toman
gentleman who made all the decisions regarding what gets made at Barrandov
offered me a story which I turned down.
He summoned me to his office and said
"Are you sure you don't want to shoot it?"
I started making excuses that I didn't understand this subject, etc.
And he told me in this voice I still remember today
"But it would be a pity to have you on hold for a long time."
It meant, "Turn it down and you're done."
I don't know.
It is true that...
thanks to Toman the New Wave disappeared
because all of them stopped working.
Had I not shot it
I wouldn't have shot My sweet Little Village
I wouldn't have shot Cutting It Short.
Nevertheless, there are some zealots here who cannot forgive me for this.
Do you have enough material?
It's Larks on a String here - Jiří Menzel film...
This is Věra Chytilová... Something Different
an amazing combination of documentary and fiction.
You can see Evald Schorm, Jan Němec.
Seclusion near a Forest is one of...
the most popular films amongst Czechs.
Everyone knows all the catchphrases
that people hear from the film and are used in everyday speech.
Somewhere else the frogs croak in an unpleasant way.
But here they do just, "Hu... Hu..."
What do you do about the mice?
It was after the long break, I felt insecure.
I was afraid that I would spoil Zdeněk's and Ladislav's work
so I was very tense.
The Bolsheviks shut the borders and people were not allowed to go abroad
that is why they started fleeing to the country.
There was a big boom at that time.
People started buying village houses, or building them
to be able to escape the city at least during the weekend
and live their own lives.
We want to talk about the cottage.
Yes, you should buy it.
- Yes! It's all the same to you - Exactly!
That's what we wanted to talk about.
I'd keep my little room, and the rest would be yours.
I'd keep an eye on the place for you. You would have milk...
You mean, live on here with us?
Yes. When I die, it'll be all yours.
You know, we'll have to think about that.
We hadn't thought about that solution.
We get on so well though, no?
It was nicely dingy, and one could feel the smell of the village house.
I had wonderful kids there who came for casting on their own.
It's nice to meet them today.
Mafia is a midwife
and her brother, the small one, is an IT guy. He works with computers.
It is terrible how time flies...
When he moved here... in 1965 or 1966...
he was getting to know his neighbours
and wrote some short stories about them.
It's simply an illustration of how people live here, the Czech nature, and so on.
It is about Czech hedonists, about their drinking and eating.
I will not tell you a funny story from the shoot...
They do not exist.
They exist only for people who took part in the shoot.
It's usually not funny for people who were not there.
So, I don't have a funny story, unfortunately.
The crew that is here with me wants to take some shots with me
because they like Hrabal.
They're from India. It's an Indian crew.
Somewhere here there was a cesspit because there was no toilet...
Mr. Hrabal refused to act in the film.
In the end, I persuaded him to appear in one shot.
He agreed, he took a ladle and started spilling the shit on the flowerbeds.
He would come, feed the cats and then sit inside near the tile stove.
I'd come and knock on the window.
I'd hear, "What is it? Why are you bothering me? Who is it?"
So, I'd always enter very cautiously and he would say, "Oh, it's you!"
And then he would calm down.
He was ill and that is why he was nervous.
It was a sad ending. But otherwise I liked coming here.
We were fond of each other.
Oh - and there were cats everywhere.
As with all the Hrabal film adaptations
you have to mix the material and put it together in a new way.
Because the content of his prose isn't the actual plot.
It's the way the individual situations are told.
And it was always about...
It was true for Tra in s
Cutting it Short and all the other Hrabal adaptations
that it had to somehow connect together.
I swapped this camera for two sacks of grouts.
It was an innocent film about the countryside
or how people lived there
but it scared the watchdogs, the communists, etc.
I had to promise that it wouldn't be against the regime.
And I received training.
I was invited to the police, who explained
that in the film the policeman must not be an antagonist.
I told them, "He's portrayed by Mr. Somr."
"He's a very congenial person. It will be... It will be okay."
But they were still afraid. They were scared by Larks
that I'd be protesting against something again.
Eventually, the film was green-lighted.
But later, when we were shooting Mr. Somr in a police uniform
he got so drunk during the shoot
that when he was supposed to rebuke a drunk, in a close-up shot
you could tell that he was himself drunk!
That was a problem. I thought
they will never let me shoot a foot of film again!
So, we had to reshoot the scene later.
The Snowdrop Festival comes very close to
Closely Watched Trains
when that main - Herr Zedníček, who's a negative character
says Czechs are "laughing beasts"
think this is captured perfectly in The Snowdrop Festival.
Do you know what Czechs are?
Laughing beasts.
The soup, gentlemen!
Menzel found, exactly in Hrabal's drafts, which he then filmed
in particular with The Snowdrop Festival
something like the core of Hrabal's statement
which is precisely the Czechs' enjoyment of good food and...
good beer, and such things.
The same thing happens in Cutting it Short
where a brewery is actually... the main setting.
But it's also a great flattening of Hrabal's text or draft
because Hrabal obviously didn't write about this
- the way the Czechs like to eat and drink well -
instead, he wrote about the mentality of the Czech nation.
I fell asleep with the rosy image
of two steaks for breakfast.
Yes!
It will be long, long, long film.
Yes?
Every woman has a tendency to evil.
Good morning!
What were we talking about?
Women.
Woman is the only good
we have in this world.
My mum used to tell me that
if a girl is nice
I shouldn't start anything with her.
And if she's bad, I definitely should.
So I had real bad feelings.
And it took a while before I understood that
there is nothing bad about liking girls.
So then I tried to catch up.
I had a lot of... "friendships", as I would call it.
You couldn't say that they were
love affairs or...
I kept my distance.
Because I knew if I was with just one girl, I wouldn't get to have the others.
That would make me sad, so...
I knew that it was all...
on the basis of...
that we should like each other but only...
so much that we could go to bed together.
But... nothing more.
Jiří Menzel claimed that one of the ways that helped him survive Normalisation
was climbing into bed with one woman, then another woman, and that
helped him a bit to survive Normalisation.
His penchant for presenting eroticism
in a semi-theatrical manner
and even his protagonists
are Don Juans, womanisers.
Menzel is always interested in semi-nudity.
There is always an element of voyeurism
and it is always present with him, whatever the theme or story.
Well... You know
you can't make a nice movie without girls.
But they have to be pretty girls.
It may be my weakness, but... I know no other way.
I have to like the girls.
Sometimes, one of them ends up here.
Eliška, there's a cobweb up there
on the very top
on that clock...
Good.
Got this.
Lovely questions.
Finally, quiet place!
So... what do you think?
As we have Democracy and the Rule of Law behind us.
One day we met on the street and he asked me how I was
and we went for a coffee together and we laughed all the time.
We had lots of fun and I ate about two pastries
and in the end when we were parting, he said
"Magda, I have a script... Would you take a look at it?"
And I said to the producer that I found the actress, Mrs. Vašáryová.
And the producer told me I was crazy - she acted daily
in the theatre in Bratislava, really far away.
She worked for TV as well, and she wasn't ideal for the production.
I called Magda in Bratislava
and when she heard my voice she asked, "Jirka, you saw my message?"
It was just a postcard and I wrote on it
"I like the book a lot. I've emptied the fridge. Yours, Magda."
And I realised, for God's sake, that this was it.
This is a woman who knows how to live, in every sense of the word.
I met Mrs. Hrabalová, the mother of Mr. Hrabal
when she was still alive. She was a real lady.
Mr. Hrabal writes she was queen of the town...
she was beautiful, she was admired.
He was conceived while his mother was unmarried, and his real father...
the war came and he had to go fight. So they did not marry.
And then she had a baby and she started to work in a brewery...
in Nymburk, I guess. And the administrator of the brewery asked to marry her.
He incorporated all this in his novel Cutting it Short
which Jiří Menzel adapted in an ingenious way
making it perhaps one of the most wonderful films of
I would say, popular culture.
And later, we filmed somewhere in Moravia
and some man came to him and said
that Hrabal's real father was nearby and wanted to meet him.
And Mr. Hrabal told him that his father was the one who'd raised him
and that he didn't want to see his father.
That's the other thing I keep in myself...
Fatherhood isn't... isn't in the sperm. Fatherhood is in the raising and
how much the father is concerned about the baby.
When we were climbing the chimney, he turned back
covered his eyes with his hands and asked all the time, "Am I down yet? Am I down?"
He was scared... But I'm never scared.
Jirka Menzel, because he is a bit of an artiste, I mean a circus performer
started climbing the chimney first. He showed us, "Look, it's nothing".
And right after him, Magda started climbing.
With the director and lead actress climbing
I had no option but to climb as well. Right?
We built the top of the chimney on the roof of another building
and it was just one and half metres.
That is where the scene with the flowing hair was shot, with the help of a fan.
The actors obviously do not climb the 20 metres
only the first two, three steps...
I still remember the revelation that Cutting it Short was for me in the 80s
with Magda Vašáryová.
He made her an icon, a beautiful goddess with that long hair
drinking a pint of beer.
He always had a gift for the erotic, seeing every woman as beautiful
and he's able to present it in such a way
that the person watching must fall in love with her
whether she is a laundress or a countess.
We shot it at night... it was cold... and used only three little lamps.
I was worried, had a bad feeling, and when we finished shooting
I told myself that we'd have to cut the scene
because I didn't like it at all.
Then I saw the dailies, and I was astonished how
Šofr is able to conjure up the atmosphere.
He is indeed a magician.
For some reason, that film is magic.
When you saw this film in times when everything was grey
disgusting, bad morale, bad relationships
generally terrible taste
and he brings in this image of the good old times
and some kind of elegance.
It really felt like a memory of some better... better past
and a glimpse of hope for the future.
When I was cutting it later
I realised the movie was too sweet, too rosy, too idyllic...
I needed to bring it down a notch.
So, I made up these stories...
Whenever Junior Ruda sees Uncle Peppin, he gets hurt.
And it worked very well because it lightened the romantic bit...
It wasn't scripted.
You must come up with it because you can see
that the film is heading in a different direction
into seriousness or into sentimentality.
And...
So you have to come up with gags to lighten it up.
Shakespeare did nothing different.
Where would Hamlet be without...
those... the gravediggers?
Jiří Menzel, already when directing in theatre
was capable of building each gag in such a way
as to have the punchline at a specific place.
This is very... that's mathematics.
And he did the same when working on films.
All the...
the fights in Chaplin's films
or the awkward situations of Laurel and Hardy
it all has a big human drive in it.
It's a sort of a shortcut of
what we experience in life.
And when you can laugh at it
that's... there's a big lesson in it.
That's why I want to make comedies
because those are the things that...
that stay in your head and heart longer
than the serious, pretentious stuff.
The film was screened at the festival in Venice in 1980.
When Italian feminists saw the movie, they held a demonstration against me
and even threw eggs at me. So I had to pay the price...
One critic referred to Cutting it short as "a flower in a desert of Barrandov".
As though, sort of, suddenly in this desert of, sort of, meaningless films
there emerges this, sort of, blossom.
And I think that's true. And I think...
it's an effective adaptation of Hrabal's novel about his
life in the provinces and living in a brewery
and his uncle used to tell his unending stories
and the, sort of, idealised picture of the mother and so on and so forth.
Yeah, I think it is a very good film, and it's one of...
possibly, even the best film produced in the next 20 years
you know, during the period of Normalisation which is 1970 to 1989.
A pig fell in a gutter, not so wide, not for long.
Ferda rides a bike, Ferda rides away.
Who'd have thought the pig would fall?
Ferda rides a bike, he carries a spade.
Personally, I think the late 60s
were so inspiring to me
I so much appreciated what the New Wave had the opportunity to speak about
and what it actually did speak about
that I didn't even want to make any other kind of films.
In other words, Pictures of the Old World
Rosy Dreams and I Love, You Love all represent a continuation of the New Wave.
There were also so few brave ones
maybe not even seven brave ones
who moved abroad
and were able to function there, they were able to work there.
Of course, a director is in a better situation if he is Czech
and wants to make a living in France or in the USA.
Still, I think it's an immense change.
Many filmmakers find it absolutely unique
that Miloš Forman could succeed abroad to the extent he did
because others, such as Mr. Passer or Mr. Jasný, could get teaching jobs.
When arrived the new medium home video - VHS
then I was the first to get the idea that people would need it - home video
at first to like to have it - not funeral, but wedding.
And I start to do wedding video.
The people who left the country ceased to exist for the Czechoslovak government.
They couldn't write about them.
It went so far that, for example, when Martina Navrátilová won the Wimbledon
the newspaper headlines said "Evert Lost".
Martina's name could not appear in the newspaper!
The same thing happened when Miloš got his first Oscar.
It was nowhere in the newspapers.
Miloš finished school when I came there.
He left school when I was in my first year.
He was my senior by five years.
I found him very annoying.
He was handsome, had this flair, was always in jeans.
But mainly, he'd speak so loudly
he was impossible to miss.
I felt inferior. And... I envied him.
I found him annoying because he was so self-confident, so easy-going.
Then he made his first film, Black Peter, which was screened in the film club.
I thought what kind of a film can such a dandy make?
It must be some rubbish.
I went there with a friend and I told her, "Be ready to leave".
The film started and I stopped breathing.
It's such a wonderful film about how people really are.
In my mind, I apologised to him, and much later I apologised to him for real.
Thereafter, he shot the most beautiful Czech film ever, The Firemen's Ball.
It's about the real nature of the Czechs, the ill-mannered bastards...
And then he fled.
He struggled there...
He made Taking Off, which wasn't successful in America
but it is a beautiful film.
It took him a long time... He had a longer break than me
before he could shoot the Cuckoo's film.
By then, the situation here had improved
and a French actress, Marlène Jobert, had seen my films
and she got the idea that I will shoot with her.
She came to Prague and she persuaded the authorities to let me to go to France.
That was somehow possible at that time.
So I went to France. She waited for me at the railway station in Paris.
And she said she had a surprise for me.
She took me to a hotel where Miloš was staying.
Exactly at the same time, he was in Paris because of the première of Cuckoo's.
In that room, Milan Kundera was sitting there as well.
We had a nice chat. They asked me what's new in Bohemia. It was nice.
Miloš bought me a record of the soundtrack and bought me a ticket for the film.
So that is where I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I told him that I hadn't liked him, that I'd found him annoying.
And that after seeing his films, I couldn't help but like him!
The last time we saw each other was when I was in the US.
He was very nice.
He does not like to move, because he has bad knees.
But otherwise, he was in a good mood. We watched the Oscar awards together.
However, this playboy
this handsome man who used to seduce girls with the speed of an assembly line
when he came and I sat down, his first question was
"How many pills are you taking?"
I realised we were in the same boat.
It was a nice meeting.
I do not like to admit it, but he is a good filmmaker.
I mean, I think my favourite sequence of all time is the scene in the dance
when the factory girls waiting for these
what they imagine are handsome young men
to step into the ballroom and...
far from them being dashing young soldiers
they are middle-aged, look like conscripts.
And the attempts by these older guys to make friends with the girls
and the girls, they're clearly disappointed
really are not turned on by them at all.
And the guy trying to get his wedding ring off
under the table and it rolls under the...
it's just beautifully thought through, beautifully done
with simplicity really.
Andrzej Wajda, Polish director, told a story that when he was teaching
he was shooting a movie in 1968.
He left his teaching post for two months and when he came back
he found that all his students were making comedies.
He asked them, "What happened?" "We saw Forman's Loves of a Blonde."
We were driving through Prague with Miloš, going to his apartment
and there was a... near the National Theatre
there is a tram station and there was...
it was like 10 o'clock at night, and there was this single girl
with the luggage standing, waiting for the tram.
And Miloš said, "Let's pick her up."
I said, "Yeah, sure, why not!"
And, so we stopped and started to talk to her and she
said she was looking for her boyfriend in Prague
and couldn't find him, because he didn't give her his address.
And Miloš invited her to come with us and she agreed.
And then, in his apartment, she began to tell us about the town she came from.
In that small town in the northern Bohemia
90 per cent of their inhabitants are women.
And lot of them young girls working in the factories... shoe factories
and they are in panic.
And this girl met some engineer there, who came there for just one day.
And she fell in love with him because he was looking there and
they ended up sleeping together that night.
And the next day he left and gave her the address to visit him in Prague
so she came to Prague
only to find out that that address doesn't exist.
I remember we just looked at each other and we knew that's a movie.
God! Isn't that just beautiful? Can I borrow it?
- Just for a minute, okay? - All right.
God! It's so gorgeous.
- Is it gold? - Of course.
The real thing?
You think he would give me anything else?
Let me have it for a while.
Did you notice the stone? It's a real diamond.
A real one?
Yes. Look how it sparkles.
I've never seen a real diamond.
He told me it was.
- He's nice, isn't he? - Really nice.
Do you have his picture?
Before every take, he would explain the situation
and say, "Use your own words."
So that's what I did, and I was worried if it was okay or not, and he'd always say
"No, it's fine." So it's all me, my own phrasing
the way I would say things.
What was wonderful for me, experience-wise
was that I come on the set and I tell them okay
"Okay, so now listen, you are here, you are there
and you say something like this and this and this
and you do something like this and this and this
and that we'll end up something like this and this and this."
And, you know, they remember little bit, but not every word...
"Okay, let's do it!"
And now they have to do this
which they just could barely remember the ideas what they have to touch upon
in their own words.
And I tell you, 50 percent times, it was better than what was written on the page.
Miloš didn't let his non-actors read the script
because he didn't want it to be directed by their wives.
They would read it and say
"Daddy, don't say this. You would sound stupid."
That is how he held back the spontaneity.
He wanted it to be according to the script.
That's why he demonstrated every scene in every film to every actor.
He always showed them what he wanted from them.
So the non-actors just copied what he had shown them.
Ondříček used to say that Forman was the best actor of the New Wave.
He played all the characters of his films for the non-actors.
Miloš's films give an impression
that lots of things happened spontaneously on the set.
And it's not true.
Miloš tried it and it usually doesn't work because
it's difficult to control the rhythm.
I regret that the Czech New Wave could not continue.
I would have never left if I could have made movies there.
Because I believe, and I know that many people would argue with me about it
that you cannot really make a film for ages,
which is not grounded in your culture.
We were very much influenced by some Italian films
the Neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti.
And then later the French New Wave like François Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais.
But the nearest influence came from Prague
from some people, they finished FAMU a little bit earlier as we
like Jiří Menzel, Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer
Evald Schorm - fantastic film directors.
They did their first feature film and they were really very influential for us.
We are twins, you know?
Yeah, we are twins.
- Hi! - Hi!
- Are you okay? - Is your work going well?
Yes. The singers are good.
I was here for the last half an hour and they are magnificent.
- They are good. - They are very good.
I won't disturb you because you are working, and we are waiting...
This group is amazing.
The only idiot here is me.
There is another one in this room right now.
Another one. My twin.
Watching them reminds me of the shooting, which is nice.
But on the other hand, when I remember the film, I idealise it a bit.
When I see it in reality, I am slightly upset.
If you ask me which film I'm looking forward to seeing
it is my next film.
No film will last forever.
When you're watching it
with respect, that it's an old film, a famous film
it bores you, but you just don't admit it.
All the Antonionis and the...
the serious films, the valuable films
you watch them only with respect.
But there's no pleasure in watching them.
Unlike Laurel and Hardy, or Chaplin.
Or the Italian comedies from the 1950s.
You can watch them all the time.
Martin Frič's films. Some of them. His comedies.
But the serious things...
Boring.
Boring!
While shooting Those Wonderful Movie Cranks
what I enjoyed most was filming in Prague.
In the old, historical parts of Prague, which have a charm
no other city on the entire planet has, at least for me.
Even when I'm abroad, visiting some nice places
I always look forward to coming back to Prague because
Prague's atmosphere is one of a kind.
And...
And I'm happy I was born there
and live there
and will die there too.
A wedding!
I always say that the 20th century brought two unfortunate events:
the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the sound film.
So what I enjoyed most during the making of Those Wonderful Movie Cranks
was the silent slapsticks.
I'm even proud of some because...
for example, when...
during the duel
the witnesses shoot each other instead of the enemies.
That was my idea. But I'd never have come up with it had I not
already seen a lot of other gags before.
We had to shoot the old films.
The real old ones were unusable
and back then I was tempted to come up with new ones.
So...
We shot it.
The biggest gag is that...
some smart critic wrote about the film that
the plus side of the film was that it used little known
slapstick comedies.
The idiot did not realise we'd shot it ourselves.
I have a bizarre, odd expectation.
First of all, I'm curious as to what all has changed over the past 25 years...
because I'm sure that plenty has changed.
I can't say anything more exact now. I'm only trying to convey the feeling I have.
A curious, strange sense of anticipation...
It's been a long enough while.
Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.
My house is somewhere here. Here it is.
And here is the garage, the front of which sticks out.
This is really the same.
Sometimes, I'm saved by a sort of an instinct.
In the case of Little Village
Zdeněk Svěrák imagined the driver as the usual driver type:
well-built, energetic, and so on.
But my life experience told me
it would be more thrilling if things were a bit different
if the wretch János Bán is pitted against another wretch
a person with an inferiority complex, somebody who is short and fat
which makes him fight for his dignity even harder.
Good morning! Can you tell me where Mr. Labuda lives?
Good morning! You are very few.
Good morning!
He offered me the script of My sweet Little Village.
When I read it, I was excited. So we met Menzel, and I told him
"Jiří, this is something wonderful!" And this is his character.
He only said, "Yes, it is nice. But you know
we have to make the effort to shoot it well."
That was my first realisation that he has doubts about everything.
I always say that he catches each of his films like a disease.
A disease. He looks sick the entire time, expecting everything to go wrong.
He pretends to be this helpless, poor fellow.
But in here, it's all working.
I think the choice is important - I don't do screen tests.
Gradually, I started to always choose actors either because I knew them...
or, if I didn't know them, then I had a chat with them...
just like that...about different things, like what they do
about their parents and that kind of nonsense.
And from that I could gather... the trick is...
if I could enjoy a weekend out with this person
if I could tolerate him next to me - for half a day, a day or a week.
Let's consider those films... those approximately eighty films
which I shot during my lifetime.
But if I hadn't made anything else other than this film
it would've still been worth coming to this profession.
This is contemporary.
Good morning!
Let's start feet together, arms extended
and palms up.
- Raise your arms... - Washed your feet?
I can tell. Makes a difference to the driver.
What about the ears?
You always forget something.
Those sails must not be neglected.
Yesterday's load was cement.
If it rains, concrete will set behind your ears.
They'll have to chisel it off.
It is difficult to have a character who is mentally retarded
but who is not... laughable
who evokes pity, but who is funny at the same time.
And he chose a Hungarian actor who was absolutely unknown here
and the fact that he did not understand Czech became his advantage.
He did not have to act like he could not understand.
He actually didn't understand what was being said.
Menzel doesn't psychologise...
and he hates psychology in an actor, he's almost allergic to it.
I was taken aback by that, because I'm a theatre actor.
It's essential for me to psychologise my characters, from A to Z.
When Menzel wanted me to forget about it and
leave it all up to him as the director
I sometimes wasn't sure what to do with it.
He creates psychology using image composition.
He creates psychology, instead of with the actor, using editing.
He creates it using special compositions of details
that he offers to create certain atmosphere.
He doesn't like it when it's the actors who create the atmosphere.
We got to the point when I said
"Jirka, let's be careful not to fall in between two stools."
"Because you see the world this way and I see it that way..."
"We might be in danger of falling in between."
And he said, "Martin, you know what?"
"We'll push the stools together, and sit on them comfortably."
Here time has stood still.
And here was the pigeonry.
And every morning, while others had breakfast in the pub
I had to come here and do my job with the pigeons.
After a week, somebody put a few grains of wheat on my shoulder.
I kneeled, and as by then the pigeons were used to me
the pigeon sat here and from then onwards every day, whenever...
and they shot it -
I have it in a shot that the pigeon sits on my shoulder.
It managed to deal with the characters with so much humanity
from such a human side
with so much love... It is so trivial, because it is human... It is human.
Excuse me! Good morning! Good morning!
Yes, yes.
A little bit older...
like was Otík before
twenty five years ago.
And...
You haven't aged at all.
He taught us the basic rules of comedy
so that the comedy has exact timing, that it works.
You time me.
Now!
Jesus! Vašek. Don't be a fool!
Don't, Pepik's here!
- Thirty three! - Too bad!
Once more!
- How long can he stay underwater? - About 30 seconds.
- Please, go away! - We have plenty of time.
Just a carp.
That was nice.
It's a situation I experienced myself during a walk...
One lady was measuring her husband's time
and when he dived under water, she invited me for coffee.
That's Svěrák!
Svěrák wrote it... Beautifully!
Of course, with Libuška and Honza Hartl, it was happening on its own...
He showed us the slapstick comedy Tom and Jerry
and that's how we learnt gags.
That's how he used to torture us.
Their humour is different than Hrabal's.
Definitely. And it's closer to me.
It's humour that always touches you
you always think of something you wouldn't.
That's the essence of Svěrák's humour.
I'm not lucky
because Svěrák is possibly the best scriptwriter here
but he has a son who does film.
He is the director, and he, as a father, writes only for him.
He should've put his son to the post office, not film.
I was comparing my work with his when I was doing my first script...
technical script, you know, how many shots to do.
I was thinking, "Oh, isn't it too much?"
I ended up with 1150 shots in the technical script.
So I took My Sweet Little Village from Jiří Menzel, and I counted the shots.
And he had 125 shots. And I had 1100...
What should I do?
And then I took some American film, it was Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
and I counted the shots... each shot a mark, you know
and he had 1000-something as well.
So I said, "Okay, so I'm going closer to the American storytelling
and Menzel is the classical storytelling."
Because he comes from the theatre background
or he loves the theatre very much
and he loves actors.
So he's setting the scenes for just few shots.
Varicose veins.
Look at mine!
- Do you wear elastic stockings? - I have to.
- Do you take Anavenol? - I do.
That's it then. So, go on.
I'm serving beer...
someone asks for the bill...
I turn my head, and it won't go back.
Can you turn the whole body, like this?
- Sure. - Turn the whole body then.
He rehearses a lot. I prefer to capture the spontaneity.
So I don't repeat shots too much. I try to shoot every shot
every take, from a different angle, so that I have really rich material.
I think that he works with a more fixed script.
I have the script only so that I don't forget what the story is...
but I actually almost never look at it.
What gave you the idea that
the seventh step would give it the right temperature?
Long-term trials. It's warm on the sixth
too cold on the eighth.
How beautiful the people are!
What kind of love he has concerning the people portrayed by him...
what kind of warm feeling is coming from the screen.
And if you're laughing about the stupidity of his characters
you are laughing not about the people, you are laughing about yourself
because you know that the people are doing exactly what you are doing.
So he is, I think, one of the most lovable film director
whose stories are giving you new power for the life.
It's atrocious. It isn't a Hrabal adaptation anymore
it's that good boy Svěrák.
It's kitsch.
The old Menzel wasn't kitsch yet.
But this is kitsch.
Because the most important thing in the film is sex.
I think Hrabal is deeper than me.
He captures reality in a more plastic way.
It's true that I like nice and polite people
and so does Menzel, so our films are a celebration of people like that.
Even so, I regard it as a film
which was escapist, deliberately non-controversial
even idyllic...
Once I heard critic Jan Rejžek criticise Mr. Menzel
for sugarcoating village life, which was nothing like that in reality.
I told him, "Look, if I were the director and Radek John wrote the screenplay
it'd be about the manure in the village."
But in this case, the authors wanted to show something else.
I have no problem with it.
That's what Turgenev does in Russian literature.
But Dostoyevsky doesn't.
So, if you see the difference between Dostoyevsky and Turgenev
you will see the difference - I'll be vulgar now - between me and Menzel.
You see, there are different Menzels. There is Menzel in connection with Hrabal
that is Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a string
and Menzel in connection with Svěrák.
And the one connected with Svěrák is a little sweeter. Too sweet!
They both seemed to be doing it as a sort of a side job.
"Okay, Zdeněk wrote something, so I'll try to film it."
But they had no idea they were making a film
that'd get an Oscar nomination, get sold to the whole world
and 4 million people would come to see it
in a country of 15 million citizens.
The fact is that the moment they were announcing the winners
my heart was beating and I was thinking
"Maybe after all.. it would be nice to have two Oscars."
It makes you this crazy and vain.
But actually...
I don't know what film won that year, but I don't care.
I think I've had enough fame.
When they came to the gate with the star, both of them jumped
and that closed the film beautifully.
Sometimes, I have moments when I am a genius
but sadly not so often!
We have a custom that when someone dies and he has a funeral
his favourite music compositions are played.
For reasons I have just mentioned
I'd like to get an edited version of the lines from this film
and play them at the funeral.
Everyone would remember the scenes just like you and they would smile.
I think that'd be a beautiful departure from the world.
Beneath him the beautiful, distant places lie
around which mountains darkly rise
a wreath of forests embracing them.
Amidst the flower-spattered ground, the bright lake sleeps in slumber sound.
When it was the worst in the 70s, Jiří Menzel said a beautiful thing.
He said, "That we are suffering, that's God's punishment... punishment for
having experienced the best period of Czech cinema, and in that time
we made our own movies."
We are a generation that experienced not only the turn of a century
but of a millennium.
We experienced socialism, the Second World War
contra-revolution, the fall of socialism.
The only thing was that when I made Capricious Summer in 1967
the next year the "capricious summer" 1968 came with the arrival of the Russians.
And when in 1988 I made End of Old Times
one year later the "end of old times" came.
Now I say I won't do Vančura anymore.
If I made Fields of Plough, Fields of War, there would be war in Europe!
The Berlin Wall was a global problem.
It almost led to a world war.
It's not possible that we can't manage to pull down this wall of ours which
consists of our current representatives.
Resign, Resign!
Actors were the ones who started the Revolution in Slovakia
and I was one of the first who came out on the square
and spoke in front of people and read out the resolution.
We did not know yet what would happen. There were snipers on the rooftops
and we didn't know if they were going to shoot us.
At the end of the 1980s, it was clear that the situation in the whole Eastern bloc
with political repression and constant pressure was not sustainable
and that society would have to undergo some type of transformation
in a more democratic direction...
It wasn't sustainable economically, socially.
The young generation was revolting more and more, which culminated
in the events of the year 1989.
Students' problems can't be resolved without sorting out
the accumulated social and political problems.
These events are a logical consequence of the social and political crisis.
I'd like to express my hope that no one will manage to separate
the students from the workers and the intelligentsia. We are one nation!
Mr. Reagan, with star Wars, let's say, he killed the communism, you know
that only this fiction, Star Wars, and also the space system
which was never really possible to do it
the Russians were scared to death, they cannot follow it
and basically they gave up, you know, at Gorbachev.
That means, they killed Communism on their own.
The Soviet Union as a system, the Soviet system crashed
because it was unsustainable from the very beginning.
It ignored all human rights and economic laws.
And finally, it stifled any freedom of expression
and society without freedom is just helpless.
In the end, Americans were so ahead of Russians
that Russians couldn't compete anymore.
To save the Soviet Union that was going bankrupt
Gorbachev had to do something
and he did something quite radical.
Together with him, dozens, hundreds, and subsequently thousands of people
started to feel a direct responsibility for the fate of their country.
They were asking for a dialogue...
and they got an unmistakably violent answer.
The moment when the Velvet Revolution took place
it was a moment when we were...
We were in a state of euphoria, because
for us, it wasn't completely unexpected.
For some two years before, we felt that it was coming.
And the fact that we were located in the city centre
that the demonstrations were passing by these windows
and we were in those demonstrations, it was great.
Plus the artistic colleges
because not only schools but also theatres went on strike
so we went to talk at the theatres
and to theatre workers.
And we had editing rooms and such things at our disposal
so all kinds of film footage and eyewitness accounts
were copied here or at the FAMU studio
and then it was distributed.
So we were very actively involved.
November 17 was the day of demonstrations in Prague, which were connected with
the alleged death of a student and the whole country was
within a few days, on its feet.
Suddenly, students with blood on them started coming to my apartment
to see my son, who was also a student then.
I understood something horrible was happening.
Then the news that somebody was killed got around.
The shameless show of arbitrary power sparked off nationwide resistance.
I'd say that only a few people believed the regime would collapse so quickly.
It took everybody by surprise, and I'd say
back then, few people would be happy
with the idea that we'd reinstate capitalism.
It wasn't a revolution for capitalism
it was a revolution for freedom... of movement, thought and information.
And in my opinion, not many people in 1989 knew it would bring capitalism
if not only a few. For me, as a student at the time, it was freedom.
Suddenly, the Rolling Stones were in Prague.
Three years before, a friend told me in a pub
"I tell you, Václav Havel will be president."
It was absurd. It was unimaginable.
And now, here's is Josef Kemr!
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
The feeling was absolute joy.
I never would have imagined I could live to see such a thing happen.
None of us dared even hope anything like that would happen.
Let peace remain in this country
Hatred, envy, spite, fear and strife
Let it all end
And my life took a 180 degree turn, in the right direction.
Today, I feel I live in a country just like
that of those whose freedom we used to envy.
They're leaving.
What you called 'Revolution', I call a 'coup d'état'.
Because that's what happened, in fact.
And...
that's how I assess it.
I believe that...
on one hand, it really helped the society
because suddenly, it was free;
on the other hand, a lot of damage was done.
Amongst the biggest damage of the coup was
the privatisation of cinema in Slovakia.
The leadership, which belonged to the Communist Party, restricted us terribly.
But we weren't restricted by money.
I never knew the cost of a film that I was going to make.
I think the transition must have been very difficult
because they all dreamt of making films in a free country...
but then it turned out there was nothing to make
that there were no screenplays for the new audiences...
If I shot the film Dragon's Return today
I wouldn't get a single penny to shoot it.
And...
in the regime that I fought against
I didn't have to worry about how much it costs.
If you see today's democracy
you see that this is changing into a, kind of, distorted idea about capitalism
that cannot stand anymore democracy
because capitalism is imposed as
the system in which everybody has to believe.
There are 3-4 institutions that are just...
reigning the world and we are just in position to be very passive.
And now, remembering the Soviet times, without sentiments but with the knowledge
now I could say that democracy in the West
existed parallel due to the existence of Soviet Union.
After the 1989 November Revolution, Czech cinema changed totally, absolutely
more than you could possibly imagine.
Until then, the Iron Curtain which divided East from West
made it possible for cinema to be a kind of self-financing circuit.
In fact, whatever cinema earned was channelled back into the film industry.
The best and biggest blockbusters from the West weren't allowed in.
When E. T. came, it was bought at a set price
and whatever it earned over that amount
wasn't returned to the producer in America
but remained in Czech cinema
and Czech filmmakers were able to film with that.
So we lived inside a sort of jar, living in a kind of glass bell jar
which wasn't accessible to everyone.
But then after the Revolution, suddenly the rules of a free market applied.
Suddenly, there wasn't the certainty that Barrandov had the money
and Barrandov was out of money.
Menzel, just like other directors after November 1989
wanted to catch up on the lost period.
So they mainly reached for material which was
forbidden, in vaults, etc.
Maybe this is also why
he filmed Václav Havel's Beggar's Opera.
It was, as we know, one of the plays that was strictly forbidden.
And when in 1975
amateur actors tried to introduce it outside Prague
the police immediately clamped down, hard.
So it's as if Menzel wanted to repay this debt.
But, unfortunately...
his adaptation was very hasty and, like in Hrabal's case
he didn't manage to find in Havel's text
the other plans and subtexts.
It's as if he was really only filming
a famous historical story, or a paraphrase of...
Bertolt Brecht
and forgot Havel again wanted to publicly express
his view of a society controlled by mafias and gangsters.
The sets were ready, but we were not employed at Barrandov any more.
The new director fired all of us
and no one knew if we were going to shoot it or not.
In the end, it was the last film which was produced by Barrandov.
Actually, all of these directors were employees of Barrandov Studios
because as I said, there was a monopoly of
Barrandov Studios over the feature production.
This is the premiere.
Here is President Havel.
Jirka Menzel.
Labuda as Peachum.
The film delegation.
I think that Beggar's Opera, The Chocolate Cop and Chonkin
are things which Menzel shouldn't have even tried.
There was nothing wrong with the Chonkin film in my view.
It's a perfectly good script
it was faithful to the novel which is considered a satirical classic
film was well made...
I think it failed because it was produced...
It was a wrong film at the wrong time.
We should've left it to the Russians. We have Russian actors there
but it should have been written and directed by Russians, too.
I hadn't taken into account the degree to which
the Czech allergy for everything Russian
was so intense.
One of the reasons he didn't work after that for a long time
was because that film failed.
And it failed for some obvious reasons.
One, that it was shot in Russian, used Russian actors
it wasn't going to be popular with the Czech audience.
Two, foreign audiences, because the Soviet system had collapsed
somehow the resonance of the story was lost as well.
That's why the first movies were so easy for me. Because I wasn't scared.
I jumped in headfirst without thinking.
And then, when I wasn't allowed to produce
the next movies, after I had the mandatory pause
I had to think very hard. That's not good.
I was scared of making a bad movie.
One starts to speculate a lot
one thinks about his own experience, compares, and it's no longer so natural.
I always say it's the same as making love.
When you are young and start, you follow your heart.
You don't think much and jump headfirst into love.
When you get older, you speculate. It's just not the same.
When I did I served the King of England
after those 12 years, I was curious myself
when I came on the first shoot day
what the shooting would be like.
I didn't think about it much, about those 12 years.
Whenever I did something, it was because
someone asked me to do it, and so I worked.
No one asked me to do anything and I didn't want to beg for work somewhere.
So I did not work for a long time.
I wasn't very happy about my two last films
I mean Chonkin and Beggar's Opera.
I think Beggar's Opera didn't turn out well, and I spoiled the end of Chonkin.
I was not very self-confident.
Moreover, I was offered to work in the theatre, which is more comfortable.
It is a completed text and you don't have to suffer with the script.
So I worked in the theatre, in Prague and abroad as well
and it was enough for me.
I didn't mind that I wasn't shooting films.
If I missed something
it was the fact that the royalties in theatre are smaller than in film.
That was the only thing I missed a bit. But otherwise, I always used to say -
"When I'm not making films, I'm not losing anything
the spectators are losing."
I am sorry for being so vain.
"Every actor should feel like in a crib."
And I think that it's quite an accurate expression
of Jirka's relationship to the actors.
Jirka loves actors.
He gives you a feeling of freedom
you feel that you're free to create
but it's all under his supervision.
He knows where this freedom of yours is going to end up
and it ends up exactly where he wants.
One person I met told me
"Jiří Menzel in this movie
I think this is the thing of an old man doing cinema
so many women, naked, and..."
It was... What is this guy talking about!
Because I felt this love, this part of the story
and for me, it was so wonderful...
loving the actors, really, the characters, and loving also the women
and to show how he sees them or how he loves or what he loves about them.
And I loved the way he did it, I loved it very much because...
he has not women that are so beautiful when you first look at them
but he takes so much time
he gives the camera so much time to observe them and, in such a...
It was really a special way to see, so...
Yeah!
He takes the time to... that you really...
When you're watching the people, the character
you really can fall in love with them.
A director who suddenly has two films under his belt
which didn't turn out to be the best
who's used to... scooping up the biggest triumphs
he suddenly started to doubt himself and was very
very careful in selecting his subsequent material.
For this reason, even though he got loads of material
and I believe that some of it was good
he wasn't able to choose. He felt insecure.
Suddenly, he began doubting himself.
And, of course, for a director, any creator...
if you stop practising your craft for a while
you lose your sense of security
lose your confidence.
And to start...
the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.
The fact that he wanted to start with
I served the King of England is logical. It's Hrabal.
And that he wanted to make his comeback with something different than
what people expected, is also logical.
As to whether it succeeded or not...
the response from the Czech critics was relatively unkind.
Because naturally the book
I served the King of England is a national treasure
it's one of Bohumil Hrabal's best works.
And when we read the book, all of us, all of us saw the filmed version in our heads.
So when Jiří Menzel came along years later...
Twenty-thirty years later with his own version
we labelled him as bad
that he didn't film the one we had in each of our heads.
But thank God he came back.
An unusual way of settling disputes at the Karlovy Vary Festival:
Director Jiří Menzel attacked the producer Jiří Sirotek...
who one year ago sold the rights to Hrabal's I Served the King of England
to Nova TV, even though it had been agreed that Menzel would make the film.
The script was for me, the rights were for me
and he sold them behind my back.
Here in the Hotel Thermal, in front of a packed auditorium
Jiří Menzel attacked Mr. Sirotek with a stick like this.
Karel Kachyňa already wanted to make the novel into a film.
So did Jiří Menzel.
Then there was a great confusion around the rights to the novel.
The film was put on hold for a while.
Then other filmmakers got temporarily involved, including myself.
I think the novel is un-filmable.
Menzel made it into a film
and as a person who'd created four great films in cooperation with Hrabal
he made a fifth one which emphasises a single aspect of the novel.
But this novel is much more complex than the Closely Watched Trains novel
or Mrs. Poldinka, which Hrabal and he made into the screenplay for Larks on a String.
And...
I think that when Petr Jarchovský and I were working on the screenplay
- I must emphasise that at that point, Menzel didn't want to be involved -
he had grown bitter about it
and I made sure to check with him that he didn't want to make the film.
Meanwhile, we were trying to write the screenplay
and then half a year was spent trying to get the money for it.
And whenever I returned to the screenplay
I would discover it was all wrong.
Everything we added was nonsense.
Everything we took out...
Because the novel had turned into a legend.
When Menzel was shooting Closely Watched Trains
Hrabal was a well-known writer, but he wasn't a living legend yet.
But with I Served the King of England, people would ask us in the street
"Are you going to film The King of England?"
"And who did you cast as this character?"
And you think to yourself, "Christ, we left that character out!"
This trauma remains deep inside, taking different shapes
and from time to time, it surfaces again.
And by a turn of fate, mercifully
I was able to play that character in the film.
But again, I repeat that all our experience we bore
was despite the brutality we witnessed
consciously or subconsciously reflected in the way we played our characters.
There were fantastic absurd views of the world which I still remember.
I've never thought about it as a real story of a person living in that time
but as an imagination of the world itself. What possibilities does the little man
have in the big world and what the world is like. For me, the adaptation
was disappointing because I don't see a lot of Hrabal's fantasy in it.
Unfortunately, again, at every meeting of Menzel with Hrabal's draft
only the surface remained, and not the submersion
into the soul or the character of the Czech nation.
Whatever you do, they want you to be somebody else.
And I think this was the case.
They wanted him to become somebody else. And why would he change?
If you know, that in history of cinema, Hitchcock was doing fifty films
in which you could recognise Hitchcock like this, but you could enjoy it.
And the sign of Jiří Menzel is recognisable
the question is that you expect Jiří Menzel's movie
not the movie that is based on the book.
The film has Menzel's poetics. It is, kind of, tender.
I'm not happy that the part is missing where Jan Dítě lives at Šumava...
how they shoot his dog and those kind of stories...
I think that they are important.
That's where Hrabal tried to insert his philosophy...
that Tao Te Ching, to be at the bottom and look upwards.
The absence of Hrabal was important, you know.
I felt that there were certain things in the film
which would not have been presented that way
if Hrabal had himself been involved.
Suddenly, he was not there and I had to deal with it on my own, without him.
It was very hard work, precisely because all the time
I tried to remember how he'd react to the changes I made.
On top of that, the book is very rich.
I had to leave out many things in order to fit it into two hours.
I had to rewrite it and shorten it
and devise the "braid" as we used to do with
Mr. Hrabal to create a distinct story.
It was a job for a murderer.
If I were to criticise anything about Jiří Menzel
it's that
he's an amazing director
but far from an amazing screenwriter.
In fact, for the script you always need someone else.
He's able to elevate the material that's been written
which is a rare gift.
But he's not exactly the one to write...
who's able to write material and then direct it.
When I meet him up there one day, I'll ask him if I made it well or not.
He imagined this character 'Jan Díte' to have something from Charlie Chaplin.
And I was promoted to front waiter
under the tutelage of the maître d', Mr. Skřivánek.
The people who wanted to criticise the film would say
"He cast it wrong. The main character was really disgusting."
And I would tell them
"The protagonist is disgusting even in the book."
"The book is based on the fact that the protagonist is an asshole
who betrays his friend
robs people, collaborates with the Nazis."
He's a real crook.
He's a Czech crook who tells beautiful stories
in the poetic language of Bohumil Hrabal.
Menzel is repulsed by the idea of creating a disgusting character.
And the audience doesn't want to identify with a character like that.
But the novel contains this essential paradox.
You can't completely avoid it
because the protagonist acts like a Nazi collaborator
his actions are spineless.
But at the same time
- similarly to Švejk, with whom you also don't know whether
he's a hero or a villain or what -
he speaks the language of the most poetic novelist...
Bohumil Hrabal.
So it's a conundrum.
That's the problem with all movies I did based on Hrabal's work.
He is way richer than I will ever be.
He perceives the world as a synergism
or a sisterly relationship of sorrow and joy
bad things and joyful things
like they just belong together in life.
I don't have... the strength. I'm spoiled by life, unlike him.
So I rather want to see the better side of the world.
I base this on the fact that everyone has sorrows, every viewer.
But the good thing is to enliven his will to live, his desire for life
or if he finds out that life isn't that tragic.
Hrabal is a genius in combining this together. I am not.
I realise that's my big handicap in Hrabal's movies
that I can't achieve what he can.
That's why I refuse to make movies based on Hrabal's work.
I want someone else to do it, someone who understands the other side
the drastic side of his works.
As far as I'm concerned, Jiří Menzel...
made great films and I really like Bohumil Hrabal's books.
And the truth is, Menzel was the best at it.
When somebody else tried to make a Hrabal film, there was no Hrabal in it.
The film wasn't received so well in the Czech Republic
even though it was well received outside.
And... he wrote that it is so wonderfully made
and that it is such a moving metaphor
of everything we experienced in Czechoslovakia.
And if we are lucky, we are going to experience once again.
I find it hard to believe that you are also Czech.
I don't know if that's a compliment per se
but from Miloš it's nice.
Cheers!
The beer is good here. This is where I'll be coming.
The past is past.
As they say, "Lumberjacks have come to our woods"...
and all that's left is the memories.
The fact that no film comparable to Closely Watched Trains or Daisies
was ever made after 1990, I believe isn't a matter of financing.
It's a matter of...
I don't know how long Ancient Greece lasted
but all the famous plays we know were written within a fifty-year period
maybe even less than that.
All the ancient Greek plays that are still staged today
were created in Pericles' times.
But the empire lasted how long? Hundreds of years.
Considering my age, you have to say that
it's the end of my work.
Bye-bye!
Bye-bye life!
The truth is when I was a young filmmaker, Jakubisko and I were saying
"It would be so great if at least one of my films stayed relevant
for a long time, if it passed the test of time."
So, I hope I managed to do that with some of my films, yes.
...35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43...
Halt! Halt!
Julie...
Now I know what love means.
I wish this moment would last forever.
Don't be so mean to me!
Life without you is miserable.
No elements can hurt us!
We are lilies of the field!
Gunpowder Test No. 1... No. 2... No. 3!
So I tell you gentlemen, when one day you see a chapel amongst the wild thyme
for God's sake, remember that the road leading here
is one on which everything we no longer believe in, departs from us.
That girl
that drowned girl, looked like Marketa.
Strike up the band!
Continue, please. Continue!
Go on, go on up there!
Music! What's wrong?
We're supposed to play alone?
Of course.
I'm going over there!
Bartošová, I see you!
That's all?
Another question?
The time spent with Menzel is a... how to put it...
a pleasant walk
that expresses and reminds you of the moments offered to you by life.
That's funny!
I've definitely seen all his films.
Once, it was at Barrandov, I assisted Vávra and he was used to walking around
and I, as his assistant, had to walk behind him in case
he had some idea or something. He was walking in that long hall
it was quiet, and suddenly he stopped, stepped in front of me and told me
"Anyway, Menzel is the best one out of you." Well. And it was sudden
it came out of nowhere.
I think that Menzel is like a drug, he is like marijuana.
He gives you a sweet, cheerful feeling.
There aren't many such filmmakers in the world.
I don't know what you're going to cut out and I didn't talk about him very nicely
but I think that he really is one of the most significant Czech directors.
The only thing I am sorry about is that
he wasn't able to develop his talent fully because of the time.
He is an ironic God.
There's a great sense of human frailty
and the warmth towards people, which I respond to.
And there's an enjoyment of people.
And I think that's the...
a real enjoyment of people's idiosyncrasies, of their failings
their shortcomings, their strengths.
It's the humanism that I like.
And in those early ones particularly, there's...
just the sense of finding the right camera position, the right frame
the right movement, the right rhythm, the right editing...
that just allows you to share the experience and
understand the people in front of the camera.
I've always let people talk me into it.
And the problem is that now
there's nobody trying to talk me into anything.
Nobody wants me to make any films.
I'm probably too old for everybody.
I try to see myself with the same eyes that
I used to look at my older colleagues with when I was young.
So, I understand I may not be one of them anymore.
It's not that I want to make another film to preserve my status as a director.
Definitely not.
But I'm a bit ashamed that my wife works
and I'm just slacking off.
So, maybe I could make another film.
I was particularly proud...
that Josef Somr was in the film...
though he looked a bit better and was livelier back then.
I'm still alive, you know.
Which is why I want to invite you all...
to the 60th or the 70th anniversary of our filming in Loděnice.
Actually, my father
was also a train conductor.
And when he saw the film, he said something like this...
"What you are showing in the film, that a..."
"that a..."
"that a girl would come at night..."
"to the station and you did such things with her there..."
"That is simply out of the question."
When I told this to Mr. Hrabal
he laughed at me and said
"Much worse things were going on there..."
"Or more beautiful things..."
Nothing survives a few years or even a season...
and this applies also to art.
At every moment, there is something new which they
write about for half a year then forget about...
And the films are also being made in a hurried fashion.
They appear in the cinema for two weeks and then the curtains close on them.
Unfortunately it's like that... and that applies
also to books, to everything, to visual arts...
There's always a new wave, always something new...
and everything is only short term...