Biography

[on the planned U.S. remake of Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966)] "At the Locarno festival, we were approached by an American producer William L. Snyder who then came straight to Prague, where he himself had produced several animated films years ago. We gave him the rights, he paid us and arranged for us to travel to the US, where we got a hired scriptwriter, Stu Hample. Before Miloš Macourek and I left, we had time to prepare our own version, and Hample more or less accepted it with some minor variations here and there. Personally, we never got our hands on the final draft of the English script; in 1967 the producer was sending it out to companies and seeking funding, and when he went to Prague again, he was about to finalize the contracts for the filming. But it was just August 1968. So as soon as the Russians arrived, he pulled everything off, got on the first plane and flew back to America. We talked on the phone and corresponded for a while, and even at one point it started to look like it might work out after all, but after awhile the project was over."

[on speech bubbles in Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966)] "I asked Vladimír Dvořák, a Barrandov Studios employee and an integral part of the special effects studio, to create the bubbles. Among other things, Dvorák previously made the backdrops based on Josef Lada's illustrations for the fairy tale Hrátky s certem (1957). He was also originally one of the invited artists for the comic drawings, although he was of course unsuccessful in the end. I commissioned him to draw a view from a skyscraper with Superman flying through, but he did it in his own style, lacking the right comic book style I needed for the film, which only Kája Saudek could do."

[on troubles with casting Olga Schoberová in Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966)] "Olinka Schoberová, whose type resonated exactly with the respective figure from the comics, promised to accept the role. However, she was a very popular performer in Germany and Italy at the time, and so she was filming in Yugoslavia with a foreign production as our deadline approached. Her filming was dragging on, and I was faced with the necessity of finding another Jessie actress. We started shooting in the Prague Old Town, and we had the crew in a restaurant. And after about the first three days of filming, Olinka rang me there from Yugoslavia, told me she was finally available and was coming back. After some dilemma about whether I should continue with the substitute actress, I decided to recast the role. A costume was quickly made for Olga and we started again."

[on why was Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966) shot in black & white] "I knew I was making a comedy and I knew that the audience's eye would rather rest on color material than on black and white. I wanted color at first, of course, but I was told that Barrandov Studios only had some leftovers for me, because the main dose of color was being saved for Otakar Vávra. They offered to order material from Germany, but no cinematographer wanted to shoot on it, because it was of poor quality. But in the end I was still glad that we had to stick with black and white. The employees from the trick studio with the special effects cinematographer Jiří Šimůnek told me that the tests proved that the necessary comic speech bubbles could not be copied onto the color material at all. So the problems with the color were solved, but then came new ones concerning the lens. For 10,000 German marks we had to buy a condenser, basically a larger lens for the camera, with which it was possible to shoot difficult special effects scenes, especially scenes using bubbles. The lens had to be bigger because if you worked with the original one and then enlarged the material, it would lose sharpness considerably."

[on his fascination with comic books] "The idea of translating comics to the screen was a dream of mine from my boyhood, when I came to Blatná after the war in 1945. There were American soldiers staying there, and they got lots of magazines so they wouldn't go wild when they didn't have anything to shoot at. They would take the printed matter out of the dormitory in the distillery and dump it in the dumpsters, and that's where my friends and I found piles of comic books. We'd flip through it, anxiously awaiting new batches, and that's how we actually got to know American approach to comics. Up until then, the only thing we knew from the pre-war Young Herald magazine were Czech comics like 'Quick Arrows'. Then there were some other comic books that came in before the war, like The Adventures of Tintin, a Belgian series."