Biography

Member of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS) since 2016.

[on the narrative of Son of Saul (2015)] It's a paradox: you can't bury in Auschwitz when you burn, and it's supposed to be one of the very first acts that made us humans. [2015]

[on co-writing Son of Saul (2015) without any screenwriting experience before] We started working on this project in 2010, but I think he was thinking about this as early as 2007. László and I go way back. He used to be my Hungarian teacher in France. (...) He came to me with this one sentence that was the heart of the film and, of course I said, "Oh wow! I want to do it with you! Really!" (...) We learned together. I learned a lot from László. I write other types of things and this has been a great lesson in humility. You have to be very humble when you write a script.(...) You immerse yourself so much into the research, but then you can't make this film about that stuff. We were always trying to take the low-key, undertone approach, which was also true for the dialogues. I remember when we killed tons and tons of lines. These guys are in hell. They wouldn't speak in poetry or speak in an expository way. They barely knew each other's names. They would say, "You!" Those are the kinds of details we found in the historical research. [2015]