"In 1945 I was nine and got interested in films." "In that time not only Soviet films but also many American films came into cinemas." "The war years were the best era of the American cinematography." "These films were shown in cinemas all over the country, often they were PG rated." "So I made myself a scout card and in a very clumsy way turned into a 15-year-old." "I remember being fascinated by the darkness in the cinema." "I used to play football and jog but this was like a difference between day and night and the darkness tempted me more than the films themselves." "I decided to make films just before I finished high school." "I wanted to go to a university but I'd been conditionally expelled several times." "Then I found out that art schools do not take into account family background as well as my manners at high school." "Jan Mimra, a jazz musician told me about FAMU, he studied film directing in the first grade there." "I thought:" "This could be it." "And half a year before the entrance exams" "I gathered all the books that were available and read them all." "I absorbed some information about film, went to the exams and passed." "Head of committee was Mr Krska and although we never shared our sexual orientation" "I managed to pass my studies only thanks to him." "I still feel very grateful and have to say that his works influenced me in many ways." " Good evening." " Good evening." "I loved his films The Moon Over The River and The Silver Wind." "During the totalitarian regime when people were sent to death he made these two films which had nothing to do with politics or some revolution like Mr Vavra and others did." "His films were emotional, similar to what Antonioni did in Italy on a different level." "I was fascinated by the fact that in those awful times someone is able to make a film which is mainly about love, melancholy or sadness of life." "Why were you walking around the house?" "No, I was just walking past and saw you talking to a lady who was all agog, enthusing about some Moon." "Why didn't you say hello?" " I wanted to." "But you said it first." " That's true." "A.M. Brousil may have been quite a Bolshevik but he belonged to the good old leftist intellectuals." "A very educated man who actually founded the school but made it very liberal." "So we were free to discuss anything without any fears." "He also arranged for us to see the special films which were to be seen only by selected few politicians." "So at FAMU we watched Fellini, Antonioni, first films by Malle or first films by Godard which were never shown in cinemas, they were banned as immoral or decadent, and we saw them." "Of course we were mesmerized and tried not to plagiarize but to follow their direction." "I borrowed A Man Escaped on a 16mm film and used it as a model for a reverse screenplay." "There was no VCR in that time so getting the copy was tough." "I was fascinated by his discipline and concentration and this lack of pathos or rules we were being taught." "That's why I never cared about Czech film pedagogues." "What for if there were people like Fellini, Bunuel, Malle." "We had Mr Vavra on a pedestal making propaganda garbage" "and these films outvoiced even the good ones he'd made before." "One of my professors was Borivoj Zeman who wanted to have me expelled because I filmed a short story by a Polish writer Marek Hlasko whose work was very daring." "The story was full of sex and no politics at all." "I started to shoot this film and they never let me finish." "Mr Zeman reasoned with me and I told him publicly:" "Professor, don't talk to me, you can't teach me a thing, you'll just ruin my taste." "So there followed disciplinary proceedings," "Krska stood up for me and prevented them from expelling me." "Let me tell you a funny thing, there was this professor Kucera who'd always been suspicious." "He'd teach us that dollying is a bourgeois means of expression because when you track a scene you can't make a selection." "And us, Marxist-Leninists, must draw attention to positive and negative things." "When you're dollying, everything seems to be equal, there's no class consciousness." "Then I found a book called A Bomb for Heydrich about an annihilation of Lidice with pictures of Nazis shooting some footage there." "And guess who's among them in a Nazi helmet?" "Mr Kucera." "I know those were tough times but to put on a helmet and laugh with Nazis into camera?" "Was there no way to avoid it?" "I'd chosen my own path and searched for something that wasn't in a curriculum." "I knew I needed a backup from literature." "I wasn't able to come up with a story which could make a valuable film." "So thanks to a magazine called The World Literature" "I found American authors." "Hemingway was too populistic so I went for William Faulkner." "Now, as I read his books, I'm not sure what he means." "I thought it was the right way to make a film, like in Faulkner's A Fable, three stories intertwined, or Wild Palms, two stories which have nothing in common." "When I started to work with Lustig, I'd advise him because he was too populistic, with his ideological hints and proclaimed Jewishness." "I thought he should be more poetic, more mysterious." "When his first book came out, I think it was Night and Hope" "I thought:" "Finally a Czech writer who's worth reading." "So I went to meet him." "Coincidentally we lived pretty close to each other." "He was my mother's patient so our bond was above standard." "Although he was a communist, he was fun to be with." "I decided to base my graduation film on one of his stories." "I chose a short story called From Evening Till Morning, a story of a couple in a concentration camp." "Their son is missing, his death was never confirmed." "Mr Vavra became the head of our department, and my film was the first thing he was to approve." "He striked it off, cancelled and said:" "Banned." "No way." "Any discussion was out of question, he only said:" "We won't support pessimistic tales of a fading bourgeoisie." "So I chose another Lustig's story called The Loaf of Bread, an easy, 10 minutes long piece with a happy ending." "There I made use of my knowledge of Faulkner." "Everyone said:" "It's a transport and first you must show the prisoners milling about." "Not at all." "Faulkner always starts with a detail, some insignificant thing, and only later on you realize what role it plays in a context so in this film you can see boys drawing lots to decide who is going to run and then we get to a wider context." "49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56..." "Halt!" "Halt!" "Working at Barrandov meant a lot for me because I knew that watching films at FAMU and chatting with students was important for filmmaking." "I had an eye on Barrandov although I despised films that were being shot there." "I respected it as a factory and knew I had to learn the craft." "So I observed the big names." "Fric kept humiliating me and was one of my favourites." "When shooting The Flood he was too lazy to drive from his house to the locations so he had this dam built in a studio and he'd walk there in his slippers." "When they got dirty he'd say:" "Not dresser but my assistant director, the FAMU thingie that has wormed in here will clean my shoes now." "And I'll let this FAMU thingie come to my director's office and browse through my shooting plan for the day plus one more day." "And I thought:" "Hooray, I actually got promoted." "So I'd polish his shoes up and got my place in his office." "I felt good there and also I studied his directing method." "From one view he shot the beginning and the ending, and all types of shots so that the basic lights don't have to be redistributed." "And then the opposite view." "So eventually he came there at about 11, and by 3pm our daily quota was done." "Thanks God I was detached to The Army Film because my film The Loaf of Bread received many awards." "In The Army Film I made my first professional film." "The Memory of Our Day." "They had kilometers of film stock with footage from war." "They asked me to go through it and do something with it." "So I spent endless hours watching, selecting, making notes and I found about 5 minutes of a visually interesting material." "So I decided to place a camera on a spot from the footage and make an identical shot." "Life, death, war and peace." "Sofr was a very punctual cameraman, he was in The Army Film too so we made this confrontation of war and peace." "Jan Klusak composed a beautiful film score and the result was pretty good." "It could have helped me if I'd gone a different way because this film made Marshall Grechko cry." "The commander of Soviet Army which invaded my country in '68 but I had a special diploma from the Minister of Defence and that made a huge difference because when you succeed in The Soviet Union, nothing can jeopardize your career here." "When we saw that The Loaf of Bread works as a film we thought we should go on." "Diamonds of the Night were also about boys who escape from a transport and fight for their lives." "So we wrote a screenplay which was approved and we could start shooting." "If there is anyone I could call my guru, it would be Vlacil." "It wasn't for his work which is amazing but I reckon my films are somewhat different." "He influenced me as a person, as an essential filmmaker and we became friends." "When making Diamonds of the Night there was a rule that each young director had to have a warrantor who'd guarantee finishing the film at all costs." "I told them my warrantor would be Vlacil and he agreed." "He shielded the project and I'm still grateful for it." "Basically the film sticks to its screenplay except 5 key scenes which are missing in the script." "There was supposed to be a kind of an inner voice but we figured it was useless." "The coursing scene, the hunting scene and the pub scene." "In the script they were just hinted but during the shooting" "I could see the possibilities they'd given me so I made the most of it." "See, the thing is you write a script based on a book, it is approved by authorities in order to get financed." "When shooting you must forget the script and the authorities and shoot something totally free and independent." "But then in the editing room you must go back to the roots and add the new footage." "Actually it's the editing room where a film becomes a film." "Editor Mila Hajek was one of the key figures of our cinematography in the 60's, honestly." "He edited half of the Barrandov commercial films, all films by Lipsky, plus films by Nemec, Chytilova and Forman." "Mr Hajek is a key figure." "His view was totally opposite to what they taught us at FAMU." "No discussions, no conclusions." "He'd read the script and go:" "Alright." "What's your point?" "Where does it go?" "The film." "So I'd tell him and he'd say:" "Fine, let's get to work then." "And he'd do all the editing himself, chucking everyone out and work all nights long." "We had 32 versions of the last scene in the Diamonds and we were arguing over each frame." "Magazine Films and Filming announced him the best editor, it was like winning an Oscar." "When shooting Diamonds we got into a sticky situation." "I hired cameraman Kucera who was kind of a soul mate because I knew this film would take place in 3 levels." "A level of reality, a level of flashbacks and memories and a level of dreams, fantasy." "This third level was to be the most important one." "And Kucera was, is and will be a master of inexpressibility." "The other two cameramen were Mirek Ondricek and Vojnar." "In the middle of the shooting" "Kucera comes to me and says that he is done with his work." "He said he was going to a festival in Acapulco, he was to get some award there." "I go:" "We're shooting a film!" "And he says:" "I'll be back in 3 weeks." "I say:" "It must be done by then!" "And he goes:" "Mr Nemec," "I don't get too many chances to travel to South America." "I just..." "I'm going." "In that time I got quite close to Ondricek, we were friends while with Kucera it still felt a bit distant." "Ondricek was truly following the sense of the story so I wanted him to finish the whole film." "The studio refused because he was just an assistant but I wouldn't work with anyone else and they agreed." "Kucera left and Ondricek shot the second half of the film." "The final scenes with the hunt are Ondricek's work so I got the best two for a price of one." "All those dreamy surreal scenes and Prague were shot by Kucera while Ondricek did the rough reality." "It was the longest and the most complicated outdoor tracking in the history of our cinema." "This shot swallowed one third of the whole budget." "A steady-cam didn't exist back then so we had 2 cameramen sitting in carts to balance each other with a camera on a tripod fastened with rubberbands and this invention was used only in this film along with sound negatives and other technologies" "because we wanted to make the film as unique as possible." "The small boy in the Diamonds, Antonin Kumbera, he was there because of Evald Schorm." "People usually ask me if we were friends who hung around in pubs but not at all." "We respected each other and were interested in films of others, that's for sure." "Evald Schorm made a documentary about some railroad and there at the station was a boy who was working there and in one shot we can see a snowflake fall on his face and it is melting there until it disappears." "I was fascinated by this scene so I started searching for the boy until we'd found him." "After shooting he disappeared just like that snowflake." "He felt he'd become a star, had a grapple with colleagues and disappeared." "Noone has heard about him ever since." "So this film was his birth and death at the same time." "Lada Jansky had had some acting experience previously but his civil job was a photographer." "His fate is much better because he ended up in LA as a succesful photographer for Hustler magazine." "So the most disgusting close-ups of female privates were taken by our Lada Jansky." "So all went well." "The weather was just as lovely as today." " A proper party, as they say." " You'd make a great advocate." "I like company, fun and good food." "I absolutely disagree when somebody says" "The Party and The Guests was a concrete political parable." "Not at all." "It was meant to be a kind of an Aesop's fable but far from a given moment, society or people." "It was a pun about how we all want to sit at that table next to the host and how corrupted we all are." "We casted the characters according to how we viewed those people in real life." "Composer Jan Klusak was an insane exhibitionist and so is his character." "We knew Ivan Vyskocil was a talky author of weird plays." "A woman knows she must put her reason aside." "My cousin Jiri Nemec was a Jesuit, a hypocrite." "It is really beautiful here." "One needs a bit of fresh air from time to time, yes." "We knew Karel Mares was a false hero with a huge ego." "He must drive around in a Mercedes or a convertible even though he's bald." "And of course the only honest person Evald Schorm who believed in himself just as people believed in him." "His outlook was composed according to the famous picture of John F. Kennedy an icon of a right-minded man who died early." "Of course we never told them who they represented and were looking forward to see how they'd fit together." "And they did." "Well, I'd better go." "Good bye." "He crossed the line!" "He crossed the line!" "Excuse me." "Where are you going?" "The party is about to start." "Don't you like some fun?" "Didn't you hear it was fun?" "It's a joke!" "It's a joke!" "A joke!" "Let's go and get him!" "Let's go and get him!" "This is my one and only film which was shot precisely according to the script." "No changes allowed." "Ivan Vyskocil wrote his improvised text himself." "Banned." "He had to learn it." "Of course he didn't like it." "The script included everything, even the mechanical language." "Dialogues were strictly given and the only added thing was in a scene with Klusak walking down the pier with a barrel-organ and they march on and turn with words, The party's on!"" "That's the only change I commited." "The party's on!" "The party's on!" "Main characters, step into the spotlights, please!" "I'd call it mannerism, where all disturbing elements like types of cars and stuff..." "It's like miminalistic approach concentrated on precise details and Mr Sofr portrayed it in a brilliant way." "This film was shot solely on location in the shortest time ever." "See, when shooting outside the weather changes a lot so the footage is hard to edit." "We wanted to work without break so the scene of party was covered with a huge scaffold and a translucent polythene which dispersed the sunlight." "It was Sofr's invention." "I've been misplaced too." "I couldn't find my name either." "Perhaps they forgot about me..." "In Diamonds of the Night" "I wanted to create a visual, kinetic variety of a dynamic film language while The Party and the Guests was a static, thought-out, quiet and respected film where the dynamics and life are hidden inside the story in clashes among characters, mixing freedom and obedience." "I wanted to portray these conflicts not on the outside but by means of a Bressonian or a spartan discipline." "Come on!" "One for all, all for one!" "Let's go and bring him back!" "We must restore an order here!" "A story of Mother and Son was pretty bizarre." "At a festival in Amsterdam" "I was awarded Silver Rose for film The Loaf of Bread." "A year later I was invited as an official guest to open the festival with a speech." "So I got ready." "I took my Fiat which I'd bought for money from a festival award but Fiat is not the best car and it broke down on a highway." "When I told the organizers" "Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen from Scorpio Films they said they'd pay my bill if I write, shoot, edit and soundtrack a 10-minute film in three days." "So I called Krumbachova and we made up a story about a heartless mother who while protecting a memory of her dead son shoots some boy's butt because he took a dump at a cemetery." "I wrote a script, on the phone she designed costumes and we did it." "Then we added Christmas carols of different nations about a birth of a baby-boy, it was multilingual, sad and it worked perfectly, so they paid the bill." "It received an award in Oberhausen and in Locarno." "Martyrs of Love was a film-chanson, not a musical because there were the 2 songs, both quite melancholic." "It's not too serious but not too funny either." "I attempted to create a film musical genre of something that exists on a musical field." "Originally it consisted of two short stories but during the approval they said it wasn't enough and it should be a triptych." "So I and Krumbachova added one more story in a week." "She wrote it as one of her never published stories." "I think she published only one tiny book, sometime in 1990." "She never finished her books so I made her put her stories at least on a screen." "Back then directors used to go to concerts of classical music." "Klusak composed modern music." "We all went to see a concert of Komorni harmonie when they played his Little Vocal Exercises of Franz Kafka." "There we started to talk about film because he was a big fan." "As an educated and gifted man he was easy to work with because he knew what to do." "I always thought a composer should be an individuality who can do even without film, a person who projects himself into his work." "When I was working on Kafka's Metamorphosis in Germany," "I really missed Klusak there although I worked with Eugen Illin who is brilliant too." "I knew Klusak would compose a suite that would last forever and could always be played separately from the film." "His music always added new dimensions to a film." "Oh my lady friend you've stolen my soul from me" "The night grew darkened wings Oh my lovely lady friend" "Oh my lovely" "Oh my lovely" "Martyrs of Love were to be a colour film, it'd be great." "But hardly anyone could obtain this kind of film stock." "Actually noone could." "So the studio said:" "No way." "Still I consider Ondricek's B/W shots one of his best." "His photography is visually just beautiful." "Colour was out of question." "When Forman wanted to make The Firemen's Ball in colour he had to sign a contract with Ponti and they got it." "Fire!" "I guess Forman influenced me." "Once in the USA he told me:" "Jan, this is bullshit." "No story." "No plot." "Just a few stories." "Nobody knows what it is about." "Blurry, not even good to watch." "Why did you shoot it at all?" "Don't you dare to show it in public, it's awful!" "Milos Forman can be very suggestive when talking not only about his films but also about himself or his views so somehow I surrendered." "He was right, the film faded away, no scandal, nothing." "It won some second prize at Locarno festival in 1968 but it didn't mean much." "For me it was a swan song with Barrandov and the New Wave." "Cannes 1968 was a climax of the Czech New Wave and the August 21 meant the end because that's when many people emigrated, stopped working or were forced to sign some documents, make compromises." "The climax in Cannes in 1968 is quite symptomatic." "Three Czech films took part in the main competition." "One of the hottest favourites was Forman's The Firemen's Ball" "Jan Nemec placed great hopes in his The Party and the Guests" "We were over the moon to see this parade of Czech films." "But in that time Paris went through commotion and Godard, a famous friend-enemy of film" "had brought it to Cannes too." "He was an ultra-leftist Maoist zealot back then and said Cannes was a bourgeois feast where nobs are having fun while students are bleeding on barricades." "He made a scene, cut a curtain into pieces, the police arrived so he gathered other filmmakers like Lelouch, Truffaut, Forman and withdrew our films from this competition." "I didn't want to withdraw anything but Forman said:" "Come on, you could thank me for signing your film off." "They'd beat you up." "Anyway, it was a total debacle, no festival, no awards." "I say it was because France had no good films there." "On October 31, 1967 students at Strahov college demonstrated" "That day there was a blackout in the whole college area." "Students walked out of college proclaiming they need a light to be able to study." "The whole crowd then set off to Small Town Square." "The crowd of several hundred was stopped by police forces." "The history of the Strahov event is following." "I was on a plane from Bratislava where we were shooting some musical film with Karel Gott." "A.J. Liehm was aboard with us cheerfully talking about an abolition of censorship." "I said:" "Now it's a perfect time to make some films." "And he went:" "Anything, Honza." "Nobody can ban it now." "I was silently thinking about the massacre of students in '67 because this event moved our nation more than November '89." "I met a dramaturge from The Short Film Studio and told him:" "I hear censorship has been cancelled." "And I told him about my topic, about reconstructing the event and he agreed and arranged it." "In two days we had a camera and a sound engineer so I simply went to the places where it all had happened and freely talked to the students involved." "...and somebody shouted:" "It's him!" "He was yelling too!" "Two policemen jumped at me and one of them twisted my arm." "The other one went:" "You swine!" "I've been after you all the time and now I finally got you!" "And they started beating me over my back, kidneys and when they thought I'd had enough, they put me in a van and took me to a station." "The Short Film Studio decided to release it as a newsreel." "So they did but not only was it banned, they screened it in cinemas all over the country in about 200 copies." "A film about police beating up students and a black guy who they call, Black mug"." "This film came as a big shock, no wonder it brought some kind of censhorship with it." "The following day, we took in 2 patients." "Pavel Dvorak suffered a grade II concussion, a laceration to the left side of a skulp and an internal ear injury." "This injury is classified as a serious mayhem." "I had to interrupt my studies and that was the worst thing because I am in the 5th grade and the loss of one year is a serious problem." "Another important thing that happened in that time was my disengagement from Krumbachova." "I didn't need Lustig either." "But I needed someone to lean on and guess who I came across." "Vaclav Havel." "A succesful writer of my age, my removed cousin who attended the same parties, a big fan of cinema and an unsuccessful applicant to studies at FAMU." "He agreed to cooperate on a new film with me so we wrote a script which has never been published." "Quite an interesting project." "Anyway I found a producer willing to invest into a film but meanwhile he wanted us to record life during the Prague Spring on a film." "So we were filming people gathering on the streets, singing, watching Dubcek's arrivals from Bratislava etc., unguided prisoners picking hops so it was kind of an idyllic view for Americans." "He'd placed an order and paid us real good money so we went shooting and then in the middle of editing it was August 21 and they arrived." "I put together a crew and took the first shots to Vienna." "The Viennese TV broadcasted it all over the world." "He flew from Texas to Vienna and we got this idea to connect our kitch cheerful film with this war footage." "We thought the result might be really interesting." "The first screening of the film took place at a Genova festival before The Firemen's Ball and it was an instant success." "Not many films get reviews like ours were back then, from New York Times etc." "The Czechs and Dubcek were very trendy among NY intellectuals." "Cinema 5 bought the programme distributing it round the USA." "They announced it as The Best Program in Town." "The original copy was lost and I've never allowed showing this film on TV or in cinemas here because this film was made very hastily and requires my explanation so that people understand its content full of things like" "We have been wronged!" "The ugly Russian stepped on our toe!" "The world has been evolving in a rather different way even I consider the film a little naive and comical but at the same time charmingly unintentional." "I decided not to emigrate." "Though it might sound pathetic" "I really felt sympathetic to the suffering of my nation." "Those who emigrated in '68 or '69 took hold but I didn't want to do it." "I though after 4 years the Russians get tired and that the world would stand up for us while we endure the worst." "But it lasted 20 years and then I realized it's too late." "Back then I made Between the 4th and 5th Minute, the only film I made as a banned filmmaker, husband of Kubisova, who was a prominent public enemy." "I went to Kamil Pixa, the head of The Short Film Studio and a KGB officer, and told him I was a filmmaker and that I could have emigrated but I didn't but I'd like to make films because that's all I could do." "He stopped me and said:" "Why, we know who you are." "So I said:" "I'd like you to give me a chance to make a film." "And he said:" "OK, make a documentary. 10 minutes long." "It must be current, positive and no propaganda poster." "I come from a doctor's family and at that time I didn't suffer from any disease but I knew about the new wards of intensive care which greatly improved a medical care here." "The best ward was on Charles's Square and it worked well there the system when something happens, they hook you up and have to make a decision." "A brain works for 5 minutes while a heart is out of action." "So I made a 10-minute film about an accident." "A helicopter." "Last minute." "Boom." "They save him." "No commentary, just an action like this." "A 10-minute film." "They sent it to a festival of medical films in Bulgary and it got a Grand Prix." "So I thought Hooray!" "And went to see Mr Pixa and asked him:" " Mission accomplished?" " Yes." " Is it a propaganda poster?" " No, it isn't." " Is it about positive aspects of our society?" " Yes, it is." "So I asked:" "Could I get anotherjob, please?" "And he said: "Mr Nemec, you've just signed your sentence." "No films for you anymore." I asked:" "Can you tell me why?" "Look, we've discussed it." "You're better than the people we support, they get a chance." "But you'll be doing a good job, build yourself a reputation and when the party and society gets into a crisis, you'll stab us in our back We can't afford this anymore." "Thank you but don't even try to find a job in a film." "In that time they even let me move out of the country so I filled an application, got myself a work contracts and I could move away." "Not every accident ends up with a death." "And not every death means an actual end." "Even in the moment when a patient is declared dead there is still hope." "Unless the critical time while a brain is without an oxygen, which is between 4th and 5th minute, has passed." "The sixties, it was a paradise." "I know that hippies and stuff, it's all idolized." "But it was a pure tolerance." "Imagine there is a state film plant which gives you money." "No need to keep coming to a producer and beg." "There is a censorship but it's always there, only acceptable." "You can communicate because a human element is present." "When they banned me from film I started working for TV." "Or when I got a job I could have travelled abroad." "If I speak production wise we were 12 or 14 directors and we liked each other." "We'd go see film screenings and shared our ideas." "The atmosphere was filled with tolerance, decency, hope and it all ended, and not only in our country, in 1968." "Assasinations of M.L. King and Robert Kennedy in the USA." "The world turned upside down." "It's interesting because you can't make a good film of it, you take the facts and the result is abstract." "Something creative and friendly was floating around back then and we were lucky to have the chance to make films." "In 1974 Jan Nìmec obtained a permission to work abroad which soon changed into an immigration." "He lived in Europe and the USA, made several feature films and documentaries." "After 1989, back in his home land he affirmed his reputation of an, infant terrible"" "of the Czech film, now also by a groundbreaking use of new technologies." "(The Ferrari Dino Girl, 2008)."