MICRO_REC WEEK 1

Look, you’re mentioning 4 or 5 names, maybe we could add 4 or 5 more? But not much more. It was a time in the Soviet Union where you had like 300 practicing directors making a film from time to time; same story in Poland, less so in Hungary, it’s a small country…or Serbia, but I knew most of the people you mentioned. Tarkovsky wanted me even to play Jesus Christ…..I was very thin at that time. He liked my feet, he said: “Oh these are feet to my cross.” Perfect. OK, Makavejev was a friend and Jançso of course I know a bit.

First of all, you’re talking about some sort of elite, and bizarrely even when they really fought by the authorities because of their films –our films if I may be arrogant enough to say it this way– they knew perfectly well that they are against this culture that they wanted to see, this system; but bizarrely all this talent was with this small group of people, and when we started to know each other, to meet, we got films done, so it wasn’t an Eastern European-Russian conspiracy. Remember that at the same time you had the best Post-War European cinema, there was also the best Italian, French, British. So it was not like an Island of savage expressionism, no…the cinema was interesting in itself and what you said Daniel was very right.

Sorry to say, but a school can not teach you to be a genius. You can learn how to be a technician, then it’s up to you, to draw from your life, your eventual studies, and whatever is speaking to you to make films. I think the basic reason for this small explosion of talent, of striking something with visual sensitivity…it’s simply the fact that –and I can say this I think after so many years of being on this planet– to do something interesting in so called Art, you have to have an enemy. The more powerful the enemy the better, so you must hide what you really think; then you find the formula probably which squeezes between Scylla and Charybdis. The collapse of the Polish cinema today is because they have no enemy. There is no enemy politically now, they all want money therefore capitalism is not an enemy.

Andrzej Żuławski in 2013