Demons of Our Day

10 February 2016

Czech Film

Demons of Our Day

Interview with Petr Václav

Czech Film

Demons of Our Day

Interview with Petr Václav

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A paranoid prison guard moves into a village flanked by a state motorway. He befriends his new neighbour, an unemployed hypochondriac supported by his wife, working in the local grocery. Weary of life and caring for her two sons, she develops an attraction to the nightclub bouncer, but he is in love with the club stripper, who is in turn waiting for the father of her child to return from the same prison where our prison guard works.

 

Interview by Markéta Šantrochová for Czech Film Magazine / Spring 2016

What inspired you to write this script?
I had the desire to make a film without a main character; a slow, oily, strong current which would carry away the whole set of characters, a film describing current society through the fates of several people.

Is it possible (or easy) to give up the principle of one main character leading the story?
That is exactly what I wanted to try: to describe a world where the freedom of people is cruelly relative. Where the story is not created by free characters; on the contrary, the fateful story is happening to the characters, forming and creating them. Not in the sense that the characters would be passive. On the contrary, they make decisions and they act. However, all their actions are crushed by the far stronger flow of fate, determination and inner limitations. That is why the character who succeeds in reaching the wider and more open horizon finally wins in the film. Because this character doesn’t let his source of freedom escape.

The characters do not even have names. What is the reason for that?
I wanted to conceive the characters as phenomena, as generalized characters, and that’s why they are nameless. The story doesn’t analyze the nature of the protagonist, which is reflected in the supporting, less important characters. We are following the story of eight relatively equal protagonists. The theme becomes the main character: the set of characters and their interaction.

Is that why you use basic, even archetypal formulas or patterns in the film? Mother-child, daughter-father/son-father, man-woman, man-man?
Yes. I am sure any drama must stand on archetypal and timeless rudiments. Any story can be played out successfully on such a foundation.

What is the main subject of the film?
That we are never alone. We are never totally ourselves, as we are constantly under the gaze of others, continually in interaction with the people whom we are lucky or unlucky to encounter. As for our emotions and opinions, we are very dependent creatures; and this dependence leads to feelings of loneliness, deprivation, grief and frustration... it brings anxiety or even anger. The story takes place in our contemporary post-industrial Europe, perplexed by unemployment and terrorism. The consequence of this is often an irrational fear of the future, of the loss of one’s identity and general dissatisfaction... and the desire to get revenge. That’s why my characters often escape into their own passions and vicious circles, or vice versa; they see a way out in the radical search for a new Leader.

On one hand, you have a very rough character with the tendency to be politically engaged. On the other hand, the majority of your characters try to escape reality. They are apolitical, lost.
Yes. Today, people begin to long for a Leader as they lose their trust in democracy, politics and its representatives, often having a legitimate reason to do so. Or they are at least trying to escape from reality. Via shopping, soft and hard drugs, pills, TV, alcohol... and when that doesn’t work, radical religions become fashionable. Although these are not directly the focus of We Are Never Alone, they are present in the film. One of the characters, who is scared of – among many other things – Islam – goes through a peculiar conversion: towards a personal faith in Justice, in the Nation. And he wants to enforce these values by fire if necessary.

Perhaps the only character who is not trying to escape and who accepts reality in a pragmatic way is the prostitute.
Yes, and moreover, she is a good mother. I like this character a lot. But let me point out that she is also looking for an escape; she boozes it up. On the other hand the boy who is in love with her doesn’t drink or use drugs, as he lives on his passion for her.

The only ones who really find escape are the children. It is not really a harmonious and hopeful ending. But still, there is magic on the horizon, hope, relief, sympathy...
Children have – despite all the faults in their upbringing, the thrashing by grown-ups or the devastating influence of poor schooling – a natural inclination for freedom. A kid who doesn’t get destroyed by the teen years and the subsequent normalization of the soul, forced upon him by grown-ups and the society, can realize his own self and the freedom of the soul. Children can be better than their parents. Just like the slightly mentally challenged Julek or his neighbour, a mistreated child, could perhaps be better than their burly fathers. In this sense I consider my film to be pretty optimistic

The visual rendering, choice of locations and the photography underline the disturbing atmosphere the film radiates. Was it your intention to show the present world in this light from the very beginning?
Some scenes and lighting were executed exactly as I wanted them to be. Other images were discovered only later, during the shooting. They emerged in interaction with the location or the weather... and many other circumstances.

And how about the black-and-white versus colour parts of the film? What is behind this visual concept?
Black-and-white comes in the moments of depression and the monotonous drowning of the characters in their hopeless present. The colour comes with the birth of emotion, passion, excitement. That was my concept from the very beginning. Black-and-white also plays a role in the parts where there is blood in the film. The characters are thus not primitively realistic. Their story is not ordinary. Everybody is in conflict with everybody. That’s why there is a clash of the black-and-white and colour worlds, too, in the immense differences between the characters and their perception of the world.
The father of my DoP, the famous Czech cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, used to say to us: the black-and-white image is an extreme stylization of a colour image. I wanted to have exactly this kind of extremism in my film. And not only in the image.

"As for our emotions and opinions, we are very dependent creatures; and this dependence leads to feelings of loneliness, deprivation, grief and frustration... it brings anxiety or even anger."

In We Are Never Alone, famous Czech actors, Roma non-professional actors and children perform equally important roles. Was it difficult to work with this diverse cast?
If the characters are well cast, I see professional and non-professional actors as a minor matter. Children are of course another story...

How did you find those little boys?
As I needed characters wounded by the world and their parents, I intuitively looked in orphanages. After the experience I had a year ago when I, together with the producers, found all the Roma non-actors for The Way Out, I didn’t feel like travelling the whole country again: to see dozens of TV rooms in the orphanages again and make pictures of hundreds of children, to wait, drink coffee in staffrooms and browse school buildings, which always give me depressing reminiscences. Casting agencies don’t like to do this work either and moreover they are expensive. That’s why I hired my own mother, who understands children well. She made the first selection out of hundreds of children for me, and by the end of the first two days of visiting the selected homes, I had all the protagonists. I dedicated next two weeks to further searching, only to realize I could not find any better candidates myself.

The film, despite its multi-layered structure, has an interesting rhythm. How hard was it to create a functional and well-balanced composition from the footage?
I wouldn’t call it hard. What’s hard, or lets say adventurous, is the shooting. You can’t recover a single lost hour. You are working on a budget which doesn’t allow you to reshoot anything, and if so, then it comes at the expense of other scenes. So you can’t fix hardly anything. On the contrary, you have to omit all you haven’t managed to shoot, whatever circumstance caused it (perhaps the wrong weather). It is an adventurous process, sometimes the right thing for the expression of the film and the shortening of its length. But there are also limitations which undoubtedly hurt your project. You know it and your producer knows it, too, but you play the only possible game offered to you. The editing room is in this light just a recreational matter. Apart from the structure, which was in the case of We Are Never Alone more or less given and didn’t change radically, the editing was mostly dedicated to the actors and how to get the best out of them. The rest is a question of the rhythm.

The protagonist of your first film, Marian, was a Roma boy from a children’s home. How did you arrive at that subject then?
I grew up during communism, practically without any opportunity to travel, without the opportunity to meet any foreigners or get to know any foreign countries. The only experience we had with the world was the one that penetrated through literature and film, through art. It was very frustrating. Roma were in fact the only really different people one could meet. But meeting them didn’t happen. As a child, I only observed them from a distance. I remember clearly how the kids in my classroom enjoyed a story in which a Roma family was drowned in their caravan. As the story went, the parents of one of my classmates released its brakes and let drown, together with its occupants, in the Moldau River. Nobody took umbrage; on the contrary. Everybody was scared of Romas. To spend time with Romas was, during communism, equally adventurous as visiting a faraway country. And it remains so to a large extent today. I myself was lucky enough to experience a couple of very important things with Romas when I was 16. Naturally, this experience was reflected in the choice of the my first film’s subject.

Marian was made 20 years ago. Do you think anything has changed in the relationship of our society towards Romas since?
The only change in recent months is that the citizens of the Czech Republic have shifted their anger from Romas to Syrians and other refugees. Recently, during the demonstrations supporting the current Czech president, one could not only hear xenophobic abuse but also anti-Semitic invectives. Once this wave subsides, it will be the Romas’ turn again. As one of my characters says apropos racial purity: “Those Gypsies mixed a lot with poor Jews in the Slovak villages. And then in the camps during the war, they had all kinds of things together, too.”

Petr Vaclav

one of the most watched contemporary Czech directors, graduated from FAMU in 1995. His short documentary Madame Le Murie (1993) was nominated for the Student Academy Award. Vaclav’s first feature film, Marian (1996), won the Silver Leopard and the FIPRESCI Award in Locarno. His feature The Way Out (2014) was screened at Cannes (ACID Selection) and was awarded by the Czech Film and Television Academy in seven categories. At the moment, he is working on his most ambitious project thus far, Il Boemo, portraying Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. His latest completed films are We Are Never Alone and Skokan.

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