Biography

[on Story of My Death (2013) and actors] This film was created in the same spirit as my other films, but I'm trying to add new things each time. I use non-professional actors, and always will, as I hate professional actors. I like to put some absurdity inside the films, because I think it's funny, and I also like improvisation, because it creates problems in the shooting. [2013]

[on the aspect ratio of Story of My Death (2013)] The cameramen shot the film for 4:3, and in the middle of the shooting I realized it was better in 2.35. But I didn't tell them. So they composed the whole film for 4:3, which is exactly the opposite of 2.35. But then you get an image that is very strange, sometimes, because there is a lot of empty space, an absurd composition, because in editing I had to choose the upper part or the lower part, and this creates a completely new compositional style. So I think my main contribution was simply that, not telling the cinematographer during the shooting. But I'm rarely focused on the composition of the shot, because I'm shooting with two or three cameras, depending on the scene, on the place, and I give the cinematographers a lot of freedom. I check the frame very rarely, only in a few cases. Here the idea was brilliant...it's new. It never looks like it was composed because it was not composed! It was composed for 4:3, and it's absolutely the opposite of 2.35. But it shares something with the way I work, which is based on the rejection of communication, even with actors. I know what I want - perhaps I don't even know - but I don't communicate this with actors or with technicians. I never say what they have to do. It's a rule that I discovered was better from the very beginning - you know, like Andy Warhol, don't judge your own work, don't judge what you're doing. But I do this in an even more radical way. I openly reject communication with people.[2013]

[on the dialogue editing of Story of My Death (2013)] It's very interesting because sometimes in the edit the conversations are completely created out of nothing. For the first scene where Carmen talks with Dracula by the river in the day, I had two hours of mostly improvised dialogue, with different answers, different questions, and in the edit I put one question with another answer. But during all the shooting the answers were not for the specific questions, say 60 to 80 percent of time. They said the sentences in the course of the shooting, but not in that order. So they are beautiful dialogues because they are very natural, quotidian, and spontaneous, but they are more original than that because it was not "written," nobody thought that the dialogue would end up in that way...it was done in the edit.[2013]

[on the cinematography of Story of My Death (2013)] It's complicated, because at the beginning we were shooting with the [Arri] Alexa, which I didn't like, then we changed to another one, and then another...Nobody has invented a camera that suits my purposes, that is mobile, that can shoot well in the dark, that can be close to the actors, that can record hours of improvisation without needing to stop to change cards...We were in Romania, in the middle of nowhere, we had two Alexas, two Sonys, two Panasonics. The producer in Romania said that even Ridley Scott never had 12 cameras on the set. In the end we used the same Panasonic camera that we used on Quixotic/Honor de Cavelleria (2006), which is not pure HD. It was a little bit of a mess, but I like to create a mess, because what counts is inspiration, not technical things. Technical things are boring.[2013]

[on his work and criticism] The films are so radical and special in themselves that there are no weak points: they are impossible to criticize. There are no mistakes inside, you simply cannot find bad things in the film. It's not exactly that they're flawless, what's important is the concept, that it's unfuckable...it's the whole thing that's good or bad. To put it in more extreme terms, it's excellent or horrible. You cannot think about my cinema in subtle terms. And I always think that my films, and some other films, are unfuckable because they are beyond criticism.[2013]