Juraj Jakubisko

Juraj Jakubisko

Juraj Jakubisko was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 11 March 2004 by Peter Hames.

Widely regarded as the greatest of Slovak directors, Juraj Jakubisko emerged from film school in Prague into the fevered mid-60s film-making world of the Czech New Wave, and had begun to build his own idiosyncratic reputation as the 'Fellini of the East' when his career, and his cinema, became indelibly marked by the events of 1968. Subversive fantasies and fairy tales were amongst his dissident cinematic responses, and his taboo-busting project eventually proved resistant to the rigours of state censorship.

On the occasion of our major retrospective of his work, we were pleased to welcome Juraj Jakubisko - with his wife, actress and producer Deana Horváthová - to the NFT following a screening of It's Better to be Wealthy and Healthy than Poor and Ill.

Interview © BFI 2004

Introduction

Hilary Smith: Good evening, my name's Hilary Smith, the Programming and Education Manager here at the National Film Theatre. Welcome to our conversation, the centrepiece of our Juraj Jakubisko season. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Juraj Jakubisko and Deana Horváthová to London. It's a wonderful opportunity and a rare opportunity to see these marvellous films and I hope those of you who've seen the film this evening, that you have enjoyed the screening, and I'm sure you will enjoy the interview.

Many people contribute to make an important season like this happen, and there are a few very special individuals and organisations that I would just like to single out. I would like to thank Daniel Bird, the curator of the season. It was his passion - I've learned tonight that it was a long-held passion that has brought this project to fruition. I'd like to thank the Czech Centre for their support, but very heartfelt particular thanks to Renata Clark of the Czech Centre. It's also her passion that's contributed to this season. She's been a wonderful supporter of the NFT in the past; we've worked together very successfully on seasons. And I think it's even more remarkable that she's helped this project come to fruition at a time when she was involved in a very special project of her own - having a baby - that even while she's on maternity leave, she's contributed so much to make this happen. I would also like to thank the Slovak Film Institute for their support, Czech Airlines and Jakubisko Film, all of whom have contributed to make this season happen.

You are now going to see the interview on stage, and we will welcome Juraj and Deana on stage. They will be interviewed by Peter Hames, and the interpreter for the evening will be Tim Beasley-Murray. There's obviously the opportunity of questions on stage. You will see some clips from some of the films, and the opportunity to ask questions yourself. Now finally my most important announcement in many ways: we don't want any distractions, so this is your discreet moment, if you haven't switched off your mobile phone, please do so now, and, please, a reminder that there's no photography or recording allowed in the cinema. OK that's my schoolma'am bit over, and now I'd like to welcome Peter Hames to start off the evening proper for us. Peter, over to you. [applause]

Peter Hames : Thank you, Hilary, and it's a great pleasure to be invited to take part in this discussion. I'd like now to welcome Juraj Jakubisko and Deana Horváthová to the stage. [applause] ... well I'm going to ask some questions about Juraj's career and show extracts from three of his films tonight, which are going to be The Deserter and the Nomads ( Zbehovia a pútnici , 1968), Birds, Orphans and Fools ( Vtáckovia, siroty a blázni , 1970) and An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World ( Nejasná zpráva o konci sveta, 1997) The first two of those films have already been shown and will be screened again, and Ambiguous Report has yet to be screened in the season...

Getting into FAMU

Peter Hames: Juraj has been making feature films since 1967 and was one of the major directors of the 60s in Czechoslovakia, part of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and he worked and studied at FAMU, the Prague film school - and the Prague film school, as many of you know, gave rise to many talents: Milos Forman, Vera Chytilová, Jan Nemec, and later on Agnieszka Holland and Emir Kusturica. Orson Welles is reputed to have said that Prague's film school was the only school that could actually teach film-making. But I'd like to ask, Juraj, was there really a miraculous atmosphere there in the 60s, at FAMU?

Juraj Jakubisko: Of course there was something magical. When I went to FAMU, Forman was studying at the same time. In fact there was only one year where we studied together because Forman was older. The academy had in total, including staff, students, but also cleaners and porters and doormen and so on, only had 100 people. So we knew each other terribly well and when we were in the academy's canteen we used to look at each other's plates to see what everybody was eating. So, for example, I played a part in Forman's graduation film. I was involved in the editing of [Jirí] Menzel's film and was assistant director for Chytilová's graduation film Ceiling (Strop, 1962) , and so on. So we were continually involved in co-operation.

Now FAMU has, I think, about 2,000 students. That means that people who do photography, people who do scriptwriting, people in all these different areas don't even meet. And certainly this atmosphere in which the New Wave came into being was special and those were times which perhaps one won't experience again.

So as a young man I was inspired to see the treasures of the history of film, so for example Citizen Kane [1941] by Orson Welles, or the [ The ] Battleship Potemkin [ Bronenosets Potemkin , 1925] by [Sergei M.] Eisenstein, but on the other hand we also saw Antonioni, Fellini and so on, so we had both the past of cinema but we also had the future of cinema on the same screen. So we were all sitting there looking at the same screen, just like you're looking up here, and we took from those different films various forms of inspiration. We were looking at the same films, but everybody found something different. And this fact made everyone who was sitting there a different sort of person, a different sort of director, who saw different things.

The best school wasn't even FAMU - by the way, I've now become a professor... The main thing wasn't... the school wasn't the education, but it was the screenings of the films. Very often we would say to a professor 'no, we don't want a class, because there's this or that film being shown at the same time.' And that was it. We were following films, we were watching films. So I believe that, even now, for a director, the most important form of education is to watch films, not just new films, but also old films. And the best film education for a director is to see bad films, because then you learn how bad films are made.

PH: I think Milos Forman said something similar, that the Czech New Wave was a response to the bad films that everybody saw... One of the things that I think distinguishes your work is its strong visual quality, and I know that you began as a painter and your first interest was also in photography. You continue to work in these fields and in fact there's an exhibition of your work here at the National Film Theatre at the moment. I just wondered, how do you work with... what is your approach to working with your director of photography? Clearly the image means much more in your work than it does in most narrative films.

JJ: The visual aspect of my films is very important and in three feature films I did the photography myself, and I'm not even talking about the documentary films that I made. I must admit I never wanted to be a director. This was a terrible chance which worked against me. I wanted to be a cameraman, a director of photography, right from the very beginning. I studied visual arts and photography, but when I made my application for FAMU, for studying photography, it was written that I had to have a portfolio of my photography, but also I had to have some sort of reportage , I had to produce a photographic documentary of the environment in which I was living.

So I sent them about 200 photographs, but I didn't send them the 15 documentary photographs I was meant to sent, because at the time I was doing my military service in an airfield, and these were times when, if you took a photograph just on the street, you were arrested because you were photographing a street. Everybody was afraid that if they took a photograph in a station then they'd be arrested immediately because the idea was that if you took a photograph in a station then the Americans could attack immediately. So imagine taking a photograph of a military airfield... that would be the end; that would be terrible. So they sent my photographs back. FAMU, when they got them, didn't even ask me for an interview. So I wrapped up my photographs again, put them in an envelope, along with some short stories and with some drawings, and I sent off another application for directing.

And so I arrived for my interview, and because I didn't know anything about directors I had written here on my shirt, on my wrists, the names of various directors... and I didn't want to do this exam... and I didn't like directing. So I did everything I could in order not to pass this exam, and they could take only eight or nine students for directing. And there were 280 applicants, so I really had a task in front of me, not to pass this exam. And when they saw me, and I was a sort of little chap, inconspicuous... if they'd asked me about directing then they would have understood immediately quite how stupid I was. But I immediately changed the topic of conversation towards photography, towards cameras and so on. So I seemed to be a bit too clever, so in order to knock me down a peg or two, they started asking me questions about the history of art... how chairs came into being... Roman sculpture... about the Classical world, and on the art school where I'd studied, that was exactly what we'd done, the history of art. So, for example, when they asked me about the Trevi Fountain, I could have drawn it on the blackboard. So not only did I pass the exam, but I passed in first place, but it was rather embarrassing, having to do directing after all.

The Deserter and the Nomads

PH : I think we'll move on and look at some of your directing now. I think you must be one of the few directors to have had all four of your first films banned. We have an extract coming up from The Deserter and the Nomads , which is actually the only film of Juraj's which has ever been released here in Britain. If you're as old as I am you might remember seeing it sometime in 1970. It's an absolutely compelling and frightening vision of war and apocalypse. I'd just like to ask how was this film developed?

JJ : The Deserter and the Nomads was my first cameraman's film, because when I got to direct I thought, 'now I'm also going to do my own camerawork.' At the time films were very static, as if they were theatre. So I said to myself, 'I'm going to do hand-held work, I'm only going to use the camera in the hand.' The most important thing for this which I had to buy was trainers, so that I could run around with the camera in my hand, but it turned out that it was very difficult for me to make a film with a hand-held camera. I used a very light camera, 'Cameflex', a French model, which weighed not very much, but the battery that I had to carry round weighed 35 kilos, and I myself weighed about 37 kilos, so all my equipment was heavier than I was, and the effort to film with a hand-held camera was so enormous, but in the end I did make the film with a hand-held camera.

But when I was about three-quarters of the way through the film the producer came to see me and my colleagues had seen the daily results of what I was doing, and he said that when this film would be shown in cinemas, that people would get headaches and they wouldn't be able to watch it, so he forbade me to carry on working in this way. The result was a very strange film, and moreover the problem was that I kept on running out of film stock, so that I had to work out how I was going to do this film without sufficient colour stock. So what I did was I used positive stock, which is very cheap stuff, which is normally used for making copies, and I put it into the camera where normally one would put negative material. So this sort of material would only expose if there was an enormous amount of light, if there was a lot of sun, but the colours changed and became deformed. So, for example, I would go up with the camera towards a woman and she would be blue, and she had a red rose in her hair, but then I'd turn round, more towards the light, and suddenly she'd be green. I invented for this film various oneiric passages, which was 'surrealist'... when this film was shown in Venice, I even got a prize for it, called The Little Lion of Venice, and the journalists came to interview me and they said, 'you, in Czechoslovakia, you've got Technicolor?' They thought it was some sort of system... and I said this was top-secret technology, the State doesn't want me to reveal it...

Various things resulted from the fact that there were limited financial resources, and one of the things was that I used the same actors in different stories. Indeed, this film has three stories because it's about three wars: the First World War, the Second World War, and the Third World War, which hasn't happened yet, but obviously was the nuclear war. This same dramatic method inspired Kusturica... so just the same as in Underground (Il était une fois un pays, 1995) where the same characters seem somehow to continue to exist regardless of time, this was the same principle that I'd been using, and this idea that somehow humanity is continuing through history, is the same principle.

PH : OK, well let's have a look at the first extract, it's actually from the first episode of The Deserter and the Nomads and it's the episode called Deserter , and Kalmán the hero is a member of the Austro-Hungarian army. He deserts from the army, and he approaches his wife and we go into one of these 'surrealist' episodes. So could we have the first extract please?

[Extract: The Deserter and the Nomads]

[applause]

JJ : By the way, the colours have changed with time. I had thought that nobody would ever see this film because it had been lost, Columbia Pictures had bought it, but then it seemed to have been lost for good... until after about two or three years of searching Deana managed to find it in a film vault in Los Angeles, and they're going to make a new print of it, and it will have the original colours.

Deana Horváthová: I must say that the fact that this film has been found... I have to thank the bfi , I presume, because the copy that was found was here in London, and because there's someone here with us today, Daniel Bird, who worked out that the copy was here in London. As a result of knowing that the copy was here, we found out that Columbia had it and so on, so it was thanks to the BFI here that we're able to do this. So the father of the film is, in a sense, here in London.

Birds, Orphans and Fools

PH : Your early work was marked by a great deal of radicalism in film style and your next film, your third film, Birds, Orphans and Fools , seems to me to reflect Jean-Luc Godard in many ways.

JJ : We all liked Godard. He came and broke all the rules, all the canonical rules which one followed up to that time, in editing, the rhythm of the film, also using hand-held camera. Most of all, he went amongst ordinary people, he didn't have the sense of actors being different from ordinary people. He went into living environments, amongst ordinary people, and his films were provocative in that sense. It was full of life, it was full of truth, and it was shocking, it was youthful. There was also a sense of playing with form, at least in his early films. And he had a healthy sense of irony.

At the time there was an idea that in any particular film there had to be at least two actors from the state who was financing the film. So he did Franco-Italian co-productions and he dealt with this problem in an excellent fashion... so he's got his two main characters, a man and a woman who are arguing, who are shouting at each other, and the whole time you can hear this knocking on the door, banging on the door. They carry on arguing and they don't notice the banging on the door. It's a long scene... and the knocking on the door lasts a long time... and after a while they can't stand it any longer and they open the door and there are two men standing in the doorway. And the characters ask, 'what do you want?' 'We're here because of the Italian co-production,' and they were two concierges . And that was how they got round the problem with the co-production and the actors and we really liked that.

This was an inspiration for me, in Birds, Orphans and Fools , so I went out into the real world and let myself be inspired by what I observed there, and immediately filmed what I saw. This film was made very very quickly. It had a very short script; it's the shortest of any that I've used. Normally I have a script which might have 200 pages, but this had about 30. A whole load of scenes came into being just on the run - they were done on the hoof. We ran into something, we saw something and we filmed it immediately.

PH : One of the things I think is interesting and, again, a parallel with Godard, is that characters frequently address the audience. You have references to painting - Chagall, Dalí and so on... but also, of course, reference to film... I think we could go on to the next extract with that, because there is this scene where the characters come across a great heap of film...

JJ : Exactly, so it was in this film that I started playing with the material of film, thinking about film. In the clip that we're going to see there is exactly that sort of irony. Just as film companies today have various trade marks, as it were, various symbols, so there are parodies of that here, there's a parody of Mosfilm - Soviet film - and Columbia, and Rank. There's also a joke being made about the New Wave, which we belonged to ourselves.

PH : Can we have the second extract, please.

[Extract: Birds, Orphans and Fools]

An Ambiguous Report

PH : I want to leave some time for audience questions, so I'd like to move on... skip over the ten years you weren't allowed to make any films - and move on to the post-communist period and An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World , which is a film which has been shown in the UK, but only in Bradford. It will be having its London premiere during this season. This was a film in which Deana was producer, under capitalist conditions, and Juraj was writer and director. How long was this film in development, because it seems to be something which is very central to your kind of creative spirit?

DH : It was a very simple way in which the film came about, because after the fall of communism Juraj had lots and lots of scripts because a new young producer would come and say, 'I've got this marvellous script and we'll make a film together...' and I knew all of these various scripts that were coming and I also knew that only in one of them was there a possible role for me, and that was in An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World . So everybody was coming with these other film projects and they said they had the money, but in the end they didn't and the project went bankrupt, so we were at the National Film Festival when the film prizes are awarded - the Czech Lions... So I said, 'This is terrible, the sort of films that are being made, why don't you make a film?' He said, 'I don't have a producer.' So I said, 'Fine, I'll be your producer, but under one condition, that we'll do An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World and that I'll play the role...' So we went out of the prize-giving and Juraj said, 'I'd like to introduce my new producer and we're going to do An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World .' And all these Czech producers burst out laughing because I was a Slovak actress living in Prague.

That was in February and in June we did indeed construct this village for making the film and I think that this was the most expensive film that had been made, apart from some of these Second World War epics.

JJ : Deana didn't just build the whole village in which we made the film. She had been playing Shakespeare at the National Theatre for a number of seasons. At the same time she was the only actress who I allowed to have a mobile phone in her costume. So there they were filming in the snow and all of a sudden: 'beep beep' - the phone was going off in her pocket. All the time while we were filming we didn't have enough money so whilst she was acting, she was, at the same time, getting together the funds.

DH : So I kept my word that we would make the film, and Juraj kept his word as well because I got the role.

JJ : I was very mean to her because she had to lose 10 kilos - in fact 12. And, in fact, it wasn't even clear, up to two days before filming started, whether she would get the role because she weighed 200 grams too much.

DH : He was terrorising me with this weight business.

PH : We're going to show an extract from the early part of the film. Could you say something about this scene of the film?

JJ : At the moment I'm talking about a film which will be made with Americans, which is called The Third Sex , and it actually has nothing to do with sex at all, rather it's concerned with reincarnation. And this film, that is to say An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World , was similarly inspired by Nostradamus and his prophecies. Nostradamus prophesised that with the coming of this millennium there would be catastrophes, both environmental but also amongst human beings. I normally like making films on positive subjects, but the one thing that interested me here was that Nostradamus said that there will be these terrible wars and that people will be in this terrible war again, but that after these wars there will be a thousand years of peace. And the idea that there would be a thousand years of peace inspired me in this film. The film is six hours long, but don't worry, that's the TV version. The version that you'll be seeing is 2 hours 20 long. It's a pity that you won't see the long version, the six-hour version, because for the first and, I'm certain, the last time I actually acted in a film. And I play the character Nostradamus.

DH : It was only 30 seconds...

PH : Well, OK, let's go on to the extract. This is a scene in which the village is attacked by wolves.

[extract: An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World]

[applause]

PH : Can we move on to questions from the audience now, please? If you have any questions...

JJ : They were real wolves... but the advantage is that if you give them something to eat then they won't touch people.

PH : Yes... front row... I can only see the front row actually...

Audience member: There is one very difficult and shocking scene at the end of Birds, Orphans and Fools where the main character commits suicide by setting fire to himself, hanging himself and drowning himself at the same time. Was that inspired by Jan Palach and others who set themselves on fire against the Soviet invasion? Could you also tell us what happened to the actor Jirí Sykora, (who plays one of the main roles in the film).

JJ : I had written this before the events with Palach, but it had particularly tragic significance after Jan Palach set fire to himself as a protest against the Warsaw Pact occupation. So I was investigated by the secret police, the film was shelved because of that but maybe for other reasons as well. And I was accused of having created an homage to Palach. But in fact I'd been working on this before Palach had set fire to himself because, of course, Buddhist monks and so on had self-immolated... so it could be a sort of pre -homage to Palach. The main actor in the end emigrated and worked for the Voice of America . And always on the radio, on the Voice of America he would reminisce about what a great time we had making this film. But despite the fact that I didn't listen to the Voice of America I always knew when he talked about me, because the police came and interrogated me. [laughter] By the way, the day that he started his retirement in America, that very same day he died.

PH : Yes...

Audience member : During this season, I have seen your short films from the Prague Film Academy and noticed that your editing processes are very different from your later work. Could you tell me more?

Tim Beasley-Murray (interpreter): I knew this would be a technical question, and I've got it here, so carry on...

Experimentation... television... Post-coitum

JJ : When I was at FAMU, my films were only experiments, it was an experience that I was gaining. But it turned out that these experiments were sometimes the experience of the teachers with me, the experiment of the teachers on me. We were taught to make films in a very Classical fashion - but when we were taught in that way, of course, we went to the other extreme and we wanted to make un-Classical films. The moment that we graduated from film school we started seeing film in a different way.

When I was at film school I wanted to surprise my fellow students. I was making things for my friends. But when I started making real feature films, I realised that I was making films for people whom I didn't know. Indeed, I said to myself, for my very first film, I'm going to make a film of the telephone directory and I'm going to make it in such a way that even a film about the telephone directory will be interesting. But then I said to myself, well who'd be interested in such a film? And since that moment I've always said to myself that a film without a viewer is a dead film.

I've tried to make films in such a way that they find resonance with their viewers, to discuss problems that are human problems. As a result I found less space for experiment in, say editing... formal things. Nevertheless, even if I was more or less keeping certain conventions, I was still on the edge of those conventions so that in any of my films there are scenes where I showed that I was still aware of experimentation.

We never know in what direction cinema is heading, what the future of cinema will be. My friend Federico Fellini hated television. When I wanted to give him a video so that he could look at something he said, 'I'm afraid I don't have a video recorder. The only people who have videos at home are Italians who want to watch porn.' He hated television, but something incredible happened... when you're making film then you have to put colour onto the negative and it's a matter of chemistry, in effect, just in the same way as if you want to print something, you have to put it in a machine and you have to pour ink into it so that it's going to have colour... but the great thing about television is you don't have to pour ink into it every Monday so that you get colours.

It's a real miracle because you see colours that in reality don't even exist. Just in the same way that television has always stolen things from film, for example, just as film went from black and white to colour, so television went from black and white to colour, or stereo was taken from film, CinemaScope and so on, and now, for the very first time it's happened that television has given something to film... and that's digital effects... What you used to have to do if you wanted to do some sort of visual effect on the film was to copy onto the negative itself a number of times, but you couldn't do it more than, let's say, three times because it would all start to go wrong. Whereas on TV you can do 200 different animations and the whole system of making television makes loads of numbers and then puts it all together so that you can allow yourself to enter into your fantasy world and produce these unreal things... change colours... so I think that if Fellini were alive today I think he would come to appreciate television because it would allow him to realise his dreams, his fantasies.

The latest film which I'm making, called Post-coitum , I'm using a system called HD and I have to admit that about half of the work that is being done can be done in the editing suite. After the film has been made, not just in terms of editing, but also in adding colours and shapes, a completely new film comes about. So I'd like to say to our friend here, who was asking about editing, that these new techniques have allowed me to do much more inventive work than I was even doing back in the days of my student films.

Tomorrow morning I'm flying off to finish this film. It's a very controversial film which will have its premiere at the beginning of May. Because there aren't too many small children here, and because we've already shown you this terrible scene with the wolves, I think that I will be able to show you what is basically a sketch, just a working version, of this thing on which I'm working, Post-coitum . It's a film about morality, about relationships. There's a lot of eroticism, but there's nothing much to see [laughter] . The Kama Sutra has 114 ways of having sex, making love, and in a film, perhaps one could use three or four of them, but nevertheless nothing can actually be seen... The Latin saying goes that after coitus every animal is sad. So I've taken on a difficult task - I want to make a film such that, after coitus, even my dog Eddie would have a good laugh.

PH : Well we're actually going to end with the trailer for Post-coitum , but before that I'd like to thank Juraj and Deana very much for their discussion tonight, and you're flying off back to Prague at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning... It's Deana's birthday today, and she's given up her birthday party... [applause]

DH : Thank you very much.

JJ : Thank you very much and good night, and I hope that after this clip that you'll be able to have a good night's sleep. But maybe it'll inspire you not to sleep...

DH : I have to say this really is a working version of the trailer and the sound hasn't been properly mixed, so as the producer, I'm not very pleased that we're showing it, but it's my responsibility... so I'm an irresponsible artist...

Tim Beasley-Murray (interpreter): she's complaining that she has this at home all the time... this is a sort of marital issue about who has the last word... [laughter and applause]

[extract: Post-coitum, trailer]