- Born
- Height6′ 5½″ (1.97 m)
- Adrian Țofei is an acclaimed Romanian filmmaker and actor best known for his cult horror feature Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) and the upcoming movies We Put the World to Sleep (2025) and Bucharest Horror Show.
IndieWire called Be My Cat a "hidden gem, nonstop nightmare, chilling character study and dazzling debut", Blumhouse said it’s a "new intelligent found footage film you need to see", Vulture included it among "the 10 best found-footage horror movies", and Dread Central named it "revolutionary and dangerous". Adrian won Best Actor at Nashville Film Festival for his performance, as well as Best Film at A Night of Horror in Sydney. He directed, produced, wrote and starred in the movie, which premiered in 2015 at Fantasporto, traveled the festival circuit and received critical acclaim (89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). It was released by Terror Films in 2018, and has since attracted a cult following.
Adrian Țofei has been married to actress and writer Duru Yücel since 2017. Together they star in their new features We Put the World to Sleep (2025) (winner of Best Midnight Feature and Best Supporting Performance for Duru at Nightmares Film Festival) and Bucharest Horror Show.
Adrian is also known for his Top 100 Genre Film Festivals and Top 250 International Film Festivals lists with submission tips, which he maintains on his website, as well as putting together Dread Central’s Top 90 Best Genre Film Festivals on Earth with the contribution of 30 industry experts.
- IMDb mini biography by: anonymous
- SpouseDuru Yücel(January 22, 2017 - present)
- Parents
- Adrian Tofei's filmmaking method usually consists of working for months or even years on an alternative psychological reality for the actors including himself, partially living in character, so that when they start improvising, Adrian mainly needs to record the unfolding events and to make sure the improvisation goes in the right direction. The script mostly consists of plot points. Adrian Tofei shoots tens of hours of footage guerrilla style and then watches the footage like a documentary filmmaker would and creates the details of the story in post-production during the editing process.
- Almost all of the scenes in Adrian Tofei's movies are first takes. He initially did multiple takes for his first movie, Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015), but then realized that the first ones are always the most natural and authentic ones and decided to include only first takes in the final cut.
- One of the reasons why Adrian Tofei began his film career with a horror movie (Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015)) was his theory that horror films put a mirror in front of the audiences, a mirror in which they see reflected their darkest and most violent subconscious impulses, and so they become aware of them and get to control them in real life, thus becoming better persons.
- The character played by Adrian Tofei in Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) was developed by Adrian over the course of 5 years. It started as a 15 min monologue in a theatre play in college, then Adrian transformed it into a full length 50 min one-man-show called The Monster, and ultimately, inspired by the success of The Monster in festivals, Adrian adapted his one-man-show character for the movie. Be My Cat was initially supposed to be an adaptation of The Monster, but as the project evolved, it became an original story and Adrian kept only elements of the main character's psychology.
- Adrian Tofei, who came from a background in method acting and theatre (Ion Cojar's method), partially improvised Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) in his hometown in Romania on a limited budget as director, producer, writer, lead actor, editor, cinematographer and most other jobs usually performed by a film crew, he never used a camera before in his life, had no crew present during shootings other than him and the actresses, partially lived in character, met the actresses for the first time in character with the camera on, and kept only first takes in the final cut. A language switch was used during filming to ensure the safety of everyone involved: speaking English meant everyone is interacting in character, and speaking Romanian meant everyone returns to be being themselves (with a few exceptions when the characters had to speak Romanian). Filming was preceded by months of preparation via emails and phone calls between Tofei and the three actresses.
- Adrian Tofei shot Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) and We Put the World to Sleep (2025) without any crew members present. Looking for authentic acting performances, he shot the movies alone with the actors in order to create similar circumstances to those surrounding the characters they play. This method was also a perfect fit for the budgetary constraints.
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