Interview
Camera Lucida: In your career, what do you consider to be the best or most satisfactory film that you have made?
Miloš Forman: I can't judge the films. You know, that it is a curse of every filmmaker as he never sees his own films, for one simple reason, that I know what's coming next. The moment of discovery, surprise and suspense is so important for the perception of a movie, so I can't judge it. I can judge my life experience, making the film, and then of course I feel more affection for the films that were justly or unjustly attacked or maimed in a way, even by critics or by distributors.
Camera Lucida: Do you ever have a gut reaction to the films you want to make, saying 'Yes, that is the one'?
Miloš Forman: It's a process because I read scripts, I read books, and when I finish them, if I like it, then it is very dangerous at that moment to say yes, and so I wait a few weeks to see if the idea grows on me or if it reduces its impact. Even if it grows on you, usually a story has to have some sort of hook to grab you, which is very rich, very different. Sometimes it is the plot, sometimes as in the case of Hair (1979) it is the music, the sounds and so on. Sometimes it is just one scene, like in Ragtime (1981) where they defecate on the Police Officer’s car and the Policeman is asking him to swallow his pride and clean it with his hands, and he says no out of pride and finally pays for it with his life. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) was mainly that final scene because that was the dream of Chief Bromden when he picked up that sink and threw it through the bars and ran away; so all that's besides everything else that may make me choose.
Camera Lucida: Do you think you have an instinct for working with actors because The Firemen's Ball uses actors which are non-professional but the performances are very spontaneous, and you've worked recently with Jim Carrey, Edward Norton, after Jack Nicholson. What is it about actors that you are drawn to?
Miloš Forman: Well, I think I have learned to work with professional actors by working with non-professional actors. When you work with non-professional actors you learn one very important thing: The less you talk, the less you spoil, the more you talk, the more you confuse their heads.
Camera Lucida: Do you like acting yourself?
Miloš Forman: Well, I don't really act. I don't feel very comfortable acting. Mike Nichols, who gave me two of his children to appear in Ragtime, asked me to appear in his film (Heartburn, 1986) to play some Yugoslav diplomat or whatever, and I couldn't say no to Edward Norton (in Keeping the Faith, 2000) as he is such a wonderful guy to work with and is a great guy. I did apply to drama school, but that was to be a director and not for acting.
Camera Lucida: Recently in your career you've been drawn more towards making biographical films. Has that been a conscious decision?
Miloš Forman: I consider every film I make to be biographical. If it is about a real character, it's all biographical and the fact is there are very interesting real-life stories.
Camera Lucida: Are you still optimistic about the medium of cinema in the 21st Century and American films?
Miloš Forman: Oh yes, because the new technologies will allow much more people to be able to make films because old technology was very expensive. Now there is the opportunity to try things and I think this new technology will produce much more interesting stuff everywhere.
Camera Lucida: Is there any of the new technology that you will be using?
Miloš Forman: I am curious to find out. Already I was told that it is very promising to shoot digitally and then to transfer it to film. It is something very funny when you see the digital stock and compare it to what is on film material because film breathes somehow better that digital video. It has some kind of inner life and I don't know what it is exactly.
Camera Lucida: What other ambitions do you have left in your career? Is there anything unfulfilled?
Miloš Forman: I would like (to live long enough) to see my two boys go to University, because they are one and a half years old.
Camera Lucida: When you look at your entire career, do you ever feel bitter about the route it took, like having to choose to stay in America when you did?
Miloš Forman: I guess it's some kind of self-rejection, I don't really think about it very much. I think that if I ever went back to Czechoslovakia I probably wouldn't now be making films, because if they banned The Firemen's Ball officially forever, they wouldn't let me unless I made some really stupid propaganda film. You can see a lot of my colleagues, enormously talented people and films, who were suddenly not allowed to work for five or ten years, and after five or ten years they are working again, but something is lost there, something disappeared. As a matter of fact, I left and I stayed in the United States, but that was my luck that I didn't have to stop working.
Camera Lucida: You have also campaigned for authorship, or against the censorship of your films.
Miloš Forman: It can result in censorship. It is totally absurd, the American law, because according to American Law the author is the owner of the copyright. For example, if I ask you who is the owner of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, Shakespeare or Laurence Olivier? It's MGM who is the author, whatever they want to do they can because they are the authors. So this is something I think will take a hundred years to change in American Law.
Camera Lucida: A strange irony considering that you came from a country that was initially censoring your work and then you move to a country that is supposedly free but has rules like this.
Miloš Forman: That's one of the paradoxes of life I guess as, yes, Communist Czechoslovakia was as it was, yet theoretically speaking you are the author there but if they didn't like something they could change whatever they wanted. On the other hand, the paradox is, in America, they can change whatever they want but they rarely do. They usually leave the films alone except maybe for some colorizing, for example.
Camera Lucida: Are there any cases in which you think censorship is right, that a film should be stopped?
Miloš Forman: Anything human we should be able to talk about. If any speech is abused, it is not the fault of the freedom, it is the fault of the individuals, to abuse it or misuse it.
Camera Lucida: As you get older, does it get harder to do the publicity machine in America, the press junkets, the many interviews a day?
Miloš Forman: Only for one reason in that you slowly realise the futility of it (Laughs). For example, when I was totally unknown, I was doing one interview before the release of Cuckoo's Nest, and that film was successful. I worked my arse off to promote Ragtime and nobody came (to see it). Therefore, I am suspicious of these kinds of junkets.
Camera Lucida: What do you hope that audiences take away from your films after seeing them?
Miloš Forman: Well I like to take away from a film the feeling of not being bored. I don't care if I am laughing or crying as long as I can still feel some sort of intelligent response, and it's something else if people talk about my films afterwards and have something to chew on with their minds.
After this interview, Milos Forman would complete just one more film, Goya’s Ghosts (2006), about the legendary Romantic painter Francisco Goya, which he also co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière. The film starred Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgård, but was not a commercial success. There were other unfinished projects, at least two of which were scheduled for production. The first was a film Forman developed in the early 2000’s, to be titled Ember, adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière from Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai’s novel and set during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Winona Ryder were cast, but when Connery fell out the with the film’s producer, Forman withdrew himself just before the shoot as he couldn’t envisage anyone else for the role. In the late 2000’s another film development was based on the role of French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier in The Munich Agreement prior to World War Two, with French actors Mathieu Amalric and Gérard Depardieu playing his young and older self, but unfortunately the production company Pathé were unable to finance the project
Steven Yates
Links
http://doku-arts.de/de/2019/programm/life-as-it-is-milos-forman-on-milos-forman
http://www.fictionfactoryfilm.de/tag/forman-milos/
