Biography

Screenplay and/or source novel by László Krasznahorkai

Music by Mihály Vig, featuring accordion

The countryside, especially the Hungarian plain

Uses black-and-white Kodak stock

Uses long, uninterrupted takes or tracking shots

He originally wanted to be a philosopher and considered film making to be a hobby.

In the 2012 Sight&Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, Tarr listed his favorite films as: Aleksandr Nevski (1938), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), Frenzy (1972), M (1931), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), The Round-Up (1966), Tokyo Story (1953) and Vivre Sa Vie (1962).

Jonathan Rosenbaum, the American film critic, has dubbed Tarr a 'despiritualised Tarkovsky'.

Attended film school after he made his first movie.

Lists Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Jim Jarmusch, Guy Maddin, and Pedro Costa as being among his favorite contemporary filmmakers.

I have nothing to do with the filming community in Budapest. They don't like me, because I don't make conventional films. I can't talk with them about films, because I live and think differently than them. They are film makers and I am not. I don't know what I am.

[on why he likes long takes]: You know I like the continuity, because you have a special tension. Everybody is much more concentrated than when you have these short takes. And I like very much to build things, to conceive the scenes, how we can turn around somebody, you know, all the movements implied in these shots. It's like a play, and how we can tell something, tell something about life...Because it's very important to make the film a real psychological process.

If you are a real filmmaker you have to have your own style, your own language. Which is depending on your cultural background, your history, and your budget of course, and a lot of things what you already have. Because as I see, what I think, filmmaking is a kind of reaction to the world-you're just telling people how you see the world, from your point of view of course. But, you know, that's the reason why I do not listen for the other circumstances, what the other people are doing-because it's impossible to follow someone, impossible to say OK this is a trend, or what we would like to keep it or-it's definitely fake, wrong way. You have to be yourself, you have to tell everything from your side and you do have to have your own language; and if you have your own language you don't care about the world and anything really and that's what I feel, what I learned during these 34 years.

Without light in the darkness you cannot make movies.

I don't care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same. We have no new stories. We're just repeating the same ones. I really don't think, when you do a movie that you have to think about the story. The film isn't the story. It's mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions. The stories are just covering something.