'The films that came out of Romania were very strange... It was a lesson in how not to make films.'
Illegal abortions, bleak reality and life under a dictator: hardly the most winning film formula ever, is it? Only it is: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days has already secured writer/director Cristian Mungiu the Palme D'Or and we wouldn't write it off for an Oscar, either. Screenjabber — in the chunky form of Neil Davey — caught up with Cristian to discuss awards, humanity and the perils of continuous takes — not to mention the odd inspiration provided by Romanian cinema...
With 4 Months... doing so well at Cannes, you must be doing a lot of publicity these days. How are you finding the 'circus'? And you now itching to get on with the next film instead?
Not yet. For the moment, Im focusing on promoting this as there’s still one important thing in front of us: it would be great to get a nomination for the Oscars. That’s never happened for a Romanian film, so I want to do whatever I can. But I don’t want to wait five more years to make another film.
Without wanting to sound sycophantic (but clearly failing) it is a truly amazing film.
Thank you.
Admittedly the synopsis is a little, er, uninspiring but it's such a human story.
I think this is why it’s appealing to so many people, despite it’s historical place. People just get this universal human part, rather than needing to connect with the period in which it takes place.
What’s nice for me is that the sense of period is there, but not in a direct way. It’s just about the air and how was it to live in that period. And that’s hard to define, that feel, and the attitude of the people, everyone having this little authority and using it! It wasn’t a very easy life.
It must be interesting now for you looking back on life in the 80s…
There were people telling me it’s like a time tunnel, they were suddenly taken back 20 years and seeing this world and noticing the difference. If you live day by day, things change little by little. Once you get to see the film you realise things have changed a lot and, hopefully, for the better.
I wanted to make a film about my generation. I was born in 1968. Travelling a lot with my first film, I discovered that people of my age wanted to see films about themselves, because they belong to such a special generation, a baby boom. So I tried to look for something that would be coherent and represent me and the period at the same time. The other thing is I’ve been trying to make a film about the thing that concerns me and impresses me more and would create lots of emotion. Last year, when I was looking for a subject, I ran into a girl who had told me a story around 15 years before and this came into conversation and I was struck by the impact this story still had on me. I decided that if it brings so much emotion back to me some of that would still be on the screen.
I understand that casting took a while.
I started believing that I was going to use girls of 18, 19 as this was the age of the girls in the screenplay. But I couldn’t find any that were quite good enough, so I thought 22 will do. Then I said that 25 isn’t that different…! I ended up having two girls who are 28 but you can’t tell that on the film. I saw over 100 girls, but I was looking for something very special. I need them to be able to act very naturally, and this time I needed people I could trust to shoot in the way I wanted to on this film. I told everyone that I wanted to shoot in one take per scene, so the actors needed to know 10 pages of dialogue per scene and that was a test that very few people managed. So little by little I found people who were okay but I was missing the main character. I needed someone with a mix of strength and sensibility, so finally I had to fly Anamaria from London. It just happened that she’d moved to London two weeks before, after getting an agent after her first TV film and so she decided to move. But it wasn’t difficult to make the decision once she read. By the end of the day, I knew.
Am I right in thinking that the natural feel of the film is actually deceptively hard to achieve?
I hope that the film looks very natural and simple, but it wasn’t simple to make. I never improvise, the script is very precise. I use the period before the shooting to rehearse and rewrite the dialogue but once we get on set, I ask them to try and remember in detail. A 10 minute scene is very difficult to make, there’s all these physical things which interfere, so the dialogue they have to stick to. I was just trying to use my powers as a filmmaker and not have these tricks that you can use, like having music or signalling to people to feel this, or going for a close-up or cutting… I just wanted the actors to develop the characters emotionally in front of the audience without seeing me as an auteur. Eventually that happened. I like that people don’t notice the style, they’re just drawn into the story. If you ask them at the end did you notice that there were no cuts, they don’t and that doesn’t matter.
The birthday party must have been a challenge.
It was a nightmare. Shooting that was really difficult, the most difficult scene in the whole film. The scenes in the hotel were very long takes but only with three people, but 10 people was very complicated. I told them that it has to sound natural so you need to all talk at the same time and that was a complete disaster. You have to train people how to speak, teaching then to start their line on the last syllable of the line before, it was like being the conductor of an orchestra. We were looking for a way of shooting the scene, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I had to stage things every morning, I couldn’t storyboard it. I had to find the ideas on the spot. I started having a little bit of a wider shot, but it looked too much like The Last Supper. I wanted the focus to be on the character that is not there, she’s thinking about the other girl, so I got closer, which wasn’t an easy decision because it left some of the actors out of shot!
It’s a very layered scene for me and it speaks about a lot of things at the same time. It’s about social classes, this girl not wanting to be there, and seeing how her life could be if she decides to live conventionally. I think we shot 17 takes… It was my last roll. I couldn’t do any more takes. I was scheduled to have two days for that scene and it was the fourth day…
I think it happened because I’m patient. I was never saying to anyone that they were wrong, they’ve forgotten what they were going to say…
The street scenes too look so simple but must have been a logistical nightmare.
The street scenes were very difficult. To respect the historical truth we couldn’t have any lights on the street. My cinematographer found some creative ways of lighting it, but we had to respect the period, which was gloomy and black and sombre. Technically it was very difficult. I decided to shoot in continuity, for the characters, for the actors’ development…
The long tracking shots in Goodfellas and The Player generated so much publicity but now they just seem like so much showing off. The effect in your film is of incredible naturalism.
The whole point is to try and make a film that you wouldn’t notice us. It should feel like the audience is dropped in, to witness the story without any interference from us as auteurs.
Did you have any inkling that you'd win the Palme D’Or?
I decided in October to shoot so it would be ready for Cannes. I wanted to have it in competition, that was my aim, so I was very joyful that we managed to make it and be in conmpetition. We never expected to get more than this! Things changed when we got there, after we got the first reactions… our sales agent told us that it would be three days of talking to the press and then it was two weeks, eight hours a day, of talking to the press… There was a buzz.
With such a prestigious award for this one, is there any pressure now on your next film?
Well, yes, but there’s a pressure in connection with any project you do. It’s not easy, it’s not helping you find your next project. But if I was to choose? I’d have chosen the Palme D’Or!
What’s going to be easy — well, easier — is to put the money together and find the people to work with you. But making a good film is not about money, it’s about finding another story that will impress me to start with, something that’s important to say.
How are things within the Romanian film industry?
It is very difficult to say there is an industry. There’s not an industry: that’s a big word for the scale of what’s going on over there. But things are developing in different directions. I think the most visible part is the new wave — the so-called new wave — of Romanian filmmakers. I think it’s happened because oif the way we work, we’re not only directors, we’re writers, cinematographers, producers… we then get the freedom to make the decisions that will affect our films. The cinema law managed to bring more money for filmmaking, so more and more people are getting the chance to make their debut. Every year there are more and more, and the benefit of there being more and more is that some of them will have something to say.
What I like about the new wave is it’s quite diverse and we don’t share the same vision of cinema, there’s no common aesthetic manifesto, it’s not a ‘school’.
What made you become a filmmaker in the first place?
It was from watching films that were strange... The films that came out of Romania were very strange, and because of the censorship and the propaganda, we were all witnessing these productions, with people that looked like us and were speaking the same language, but they were like aliens. It wasn’t real life, so you got this desire to do better: we need to bring real life on screen! This is not how people talk! It's fake! I think I developed my desire for filmmaking as a reaction to that style of filmmaking. It was a lesson in how not to make films. That’s why I insist on things being so naturalistic, I am drawing my inspiration from life rather than films.
My education wasn’t precise, it was pretty much random. We experienced this video period where you could get to see films from the West, because we had no TV programmes, it was mostly video in the 80s, and 80, 90% were American mainstream so I've seen… too many of these films. Which is helpful in a way. I developed this sense that films should be for spectators. I hope that what I’ve achieved with this film is to make something thrilling, that keeps your attention for two hours, but just using the means of an arthouse film. It’s for spectators and I hope that it’s not boring.