Quotes

[on Aferim! (2015)] [We used an] Arricam Lite [35mm camera]. Film stock: Eastman Double-X Negative Film. The camera was the choice of our great DP, Marius Panduru. We went for black and white film stock because we wanted a classical look and, since we tried to emulate old Westerns, we thought that this is the best option. [2015]

[on Scarred Hearts (2016)] I believe that the strength of cinema does not lie in the story or in the different philosophies behind the stories, but in its immense descriptive capacity. I hope this movie will not 'express' something, will not have any 'meanings,' nor convey 'denotations,' I only hope it will show; it will offer the detailed description of an extreme human experience on which to relate with tenderness, fear and respect. [2015]

[on Aferim! (2015)] An exercise, which is important for any society, is to know its past without embellishing it ... many of the problems we have nowadays have at least one root in the distant past. [2015]

[on process and working a lot] If you think of the classical cinema, I think John Ford was making a film every year, or something like that. (...)...if you work every day you get a lot of things accomplished. I'm more interested in working because the process itself is really nice. [2016]

[on writer M. Blecher and Scarred Hearts (2016)] Apart from people in the literary milieu, he's not a popular writer, although I think he has the potential to become a popular writer, and I would really like to make the people, especially the Romanians [aware of him]... he's a very particular and special writer and has a certain kind of sensitivity which is not common. (...) Then he died immediately [on 31st May 1938], just in the moment when Romania was becoming a total fascist and Nazi state. I didn't want to shy away from this aspect because for me it was very painful and important to see my country, the history of my country with this strong connection with antisemitism and the Nazis. You know, Romania is the 2nd country after Germany regarding the number of Jews which were killed [in the Holocaust]. Romania killed [up to] 400,000 Jews, [who were] Romanians. This is something which people do not like to talk about in Romania, and I belong to the Romanian community and I feel somehow not guilty, because it's not my fault of course, but I feel responsible to bring it to light. I wanted to include this part in the film because my reading of Blecher is from the present to the past. I think it's justified to see it in this light. [2016]

[on working as an assistant director for Costa-Gavras as a young man] I was the third assistant director actually, and one of the few things I was in was Costa-Gavras' movie [Amen. (2002)], which was shot in Romania. At that time, it was a very powerful and impressive experience... but I felt somehow not very close to his kind of cinema in that moment? But I admired him a lot, and I respected him and his way of dealing with people. He's a really polite and elegant person, but he didn't impress me then. But now, when doing these two films which deal with history and Scarred Hearts (2016), I started to remember a lot of things from working with him. I would say that only now there's an influence. [2016]

[on the static shooting style of Scarred Hearts (2016)] ...it was an idea to play with the conventions of cinema. People justify the reasons [for camera movement in films] that the more something moves on the screen, the more 'cinematic' it is. Cinema from a theme-logical point of view is: The images that move, and the [more] things move, the more 'cinema' this is considered. Here [in "Scarred Hearts"], we have a case where the characters move very little... so I said the camera [should] move very little to have an anti-cinema, in a way. To go against the idea that cinema should be moving all the time, that it should be connective. That was the reason for that. [2016]