An interview with Bogdan Mureșanu, director of Anul Nou care n-a fost (The New Year That Never Came), winner of the Best Film prize in the Orizzonti category at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
Interview by Daniele Perillo, with the participation of Sergio Dal Pra’. Transcribed by Sergio Dal Pra’.
Q: I think it’s very difficult to make a movie like this. Combining all these different elements together while also remaining on the same tone, with that balance of comedic and tense, it must be hard.
A: It was very hard, yes. Keeping continuity for actors was the most difficult part. I’ve checked out how other directors have done it, how P.T. Anderson shot Magnolia, but, of course, that was the United States, so they had a huge crew – I also had a huge crew, that wasn’t the problem… and a very good crew, so I’m not complaining, I’m just explaining the difficulties. But P. T. Anderson, for instance, had special teams for each story, a script supervisor for each storyline, so that each one could tell him “The character here is this and that and was doing this and that”, of course we couldn’t afford to have six units, so we had to keep this in mind and edit on the set. That was the trick: we were editing on the set, so that I could see each night where we left off and what the state of mind was, so if there was a problem I could fix it the next day. I had a Serbian editor on set, I met her in a workshop for script writing in Serbia and she joined our crew, and she was dedicated solely to this. She was coming to Bucharest and each day she was editing what I had shot the previous day, so at the end of each day of shooting, or in the morning, I was checking things such as the state of mind of the characters. Because when you’re there and you start working with the actors, you tend to forget that the character has to be in a certain state of mind unless you write it down and then you consult it, but that’s not really directing. If you’re always checking your notes… It should be more like a canvas. I wanted to be free with the actors, but check in the morning what we’d done, and maybe fix some things in the following shooting days. So that was the problem for me, to have all the actors kind of acting on the same note, but not all of them, because that would have been a bit boring in my opinion. For instance, the lady with the house that’s going to be demolished, she’s acting a bit different from all the others, she’s more interior, she doesn’t…
She doesn’t explain.
Exactly! She doesn’t explain, only in the taxi scene, maybe, she’s saying some things, but otherwise she’s hiding her emotions, she’s talking about a bed or some closet, but actually she’s clinging to memories. In a way, she gave up, because there is nothing to do, but she doesn’t want to live in the new flat.
One could say that the six storylines are basically six movies.
In a way, yes, you’re right in observing this because, again, this is something I did intuitively. I didn’t know this, but then I looked at how other directors did this, and they did the same as I did: they wrote each storyline of each character as if it were a medium-short. And then they had some intersections in mind, and again this was also very difficult in the script, because by having the action going on all in one day you are forced to put the intersections in certain hours, at the beginning of the day, or in the middle, or at night… So that was difficult. Basically, I had a huge whiteboard, and I put all these storylines in it and thought about where they could meet, at what hour, what they would be doing and all that stuff. It was more like mathematics, you know?
Or detective work [he laughs].
Yes, and then with the director’s department, with the first AD, the second AD and the script supervisor, we were in hell, believe me, because not all the actors could be available in the days when they were supposed to meet. There were some key scenes for which it was mandatory [for them to be present simultaneously] and we were also limited by the weather, you know, you can’t control that. So, I looked on the internet for P. T. Anderson’s notes on Magnolia, I saw a “making of” of the film, and also researched Altman. So, this is how I came up with the idea of an intro with the six characters, so we know we have six characters and we’re going to follow them. The music starts diegetic and then it becomes non-diegetic and so on and so it’s kind of a mix of music video clip and film, because I wanted to have a good feeling since the topic is tough, so I wanted to break it up, the intro and the outro, grand finale and intro with a bit of music to make you feel good. It’s a trick, I know…
…but it works.
Yes, I had to use a lot of tricks in this film to make it work, because it didn’t work in the first cut, the first cut was three hours and forty minutes… But believe me, it’s too heavy, it’s like reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace [he laughs]. Too many scenes, in the end you say “Fuck, who’s waging war? Who was quarrelling with who?”, so I had to use these tricks. I also had a thing in mind, coming from more experienced writers than I am, for instance Nicos Panayotopoulos from the Mediterranean Film Institute, a mentor of mine, as well as Giovanni Robbiani, they are more experienced than I am, and years ago I talked with them about this and they told me this rule, I think it was Nicos, when you’re doing these things, you should apply this rule: get in late and get out early from a scene. You can jump in a scene without the beginning, you cut the beginning, jump directly into the action and then when it’s about to finish, you get out earlier. So, I had to use all these tricks to keep you there, make you wonder what’s gonna happen in the next scene.
As I said, the film was a combination of “mathematics” in the scriptwriting, but also, even though you expect to be very precise in the scriptwriting, I did some changes in the editing, because on paper it was a very easy reading, but once the film was shot, because of so many characters… On paper you can pinpoint who’s the main character, easily, but once the film is shot it’s a bit more difficult, with the character interacting with the surrounding ones, so I had to give up on this idea of simultaneous acting, I amassed some scenes in the beginning (which were not related) from each story, because in the script I was jumping – like TikTok basically [he laughs], or like a huge panel of cameras – from one story to another, from the beginning to the end. But, that draft was longer, and it was also very tiring for the eye, to jump from one story to another, so I had to linger on a bit more on each story and to connect, link two or three scenes from one story and then go into another one, and so on and so forth. This, again, is a trick I did in the editing, to make it more watchable. Some scenes are nice in themselves, but they can harm the film, because a film should have a rhythm. First, you have to look for “the drums”, I guess, like the heart of the film, and some scenes are off that beat, and can harm the overall result. And this film was mostly about finding the rhythm – and of course also acting and some other things – but the editing stage was very difficult because we had so many options. We only had a few constraints and we were happy when we had them, really, we were celebrating, “finally, we are forced to do something!”. For instance the timeline: some things could only happen in the morning or some others only in the evening, and that was a joy, it was liberating for us to be forced to do that because otherwise, in the middle, we played a lot with the positions of the scenes, and sometimes it was a bit crazy. I even edited the film in a non-linear way, trying to get chapters, I started to do that and then I got bored, I thought it was boring and against what I wanted to do, but I had to try, you know? There was a certain liberty in the editing, and I wanted to use that liberty to test some things.
The level of liberty may have been very different if you had made the film in the United States, for example, or for a platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, as well.
Oh yeah, I’m also the producer of the film, so I had all the liberty I wanted in a very “schizophrenic” way [he laughs]. Yeah, definitely, they would have tried to impose some rules, I’m positive. I think if I hadn’t been the producer, the film would have been a bit different, because I did whatever I wanted.
I think that one can feel it when watching the movie, that’s why we love it, because we feel the freedom of the movie, and it’s like an old-style movie but made by a new generation, with a new method, like a combination of these two styles in one.
I’m glad, because I remember that after finishing the script, which was like 200 pages long, I said to myself “Oh my god it’s like a TikTok film”. But that’s fine, it’s cool to have the old topic, as you say, but done in a different manner. I took some chances and risks of course in doing this but I was ready to show it only to my friends in a cinema in Bucharest, I never expected to go to Venice and win awards. That was not the purpose, really, I was doing this just to liberate my mind of these stories and do it the way I wanted to do it and if nobody liked it… There is this cinema close to my flat, and tomorrow I will show the film there… I mean of course I’m glad that I showed it in Venice, but I was also ready to show it in that cinema with only a couple of friends and have a few drinks. And I think that this was liberating for me as an artist, because I was ready for failure or for success, that was not the point, because you can’t control any of this kind of things.
That’s very romantic.
I think so, unless you work for Netflix or whatever moviemaking should be romantic, I mean it’s a bit mad to spend so many years doing what others expect from you, it’s crazy to spend four years collecting money and shooting to do something just because you imagine some festival would like to watch it.
I know the film started from the short [The Christmas Gift,ndr], and I was wondering how the ideas of the other plotlines came about, were some of those ideas you already had for other projects and decided to put them together, or did you let yourself be inspired from the short to do similar stories in tone and irony?
Actually, the project didn’t start from the short, it all started from the idea of the demolition, that was the first story that I had, but I couldn’t film it because it’s very difficult to focus only on that. Because if it’s that, you have to show the ruins and use CGI and I didn’t want to use CGI, at all, because I think it would have hurt this feeling of cineverité. So, I said no CGI because it would be fake, but we don’t have ruined houses anymore, so what to do? And then I wrote the Christmas short, it had success, but it felt like a fragment in my mind, so then I wrote some other stories and then during the pandemic I contemplated all of these stories and said “they belong to the same vein, I should actually use them and find ways to have this panoramic, kaleidoscopic view upon one day” and then that was it.
I put them together – it sounds easy, but it’s not, because this Christmas Gift was actually a pain in the a-… you know a thorn in my side, actually, it bothered me a lot, I even thought of giving up on it or reshooting it, I don’t know, I tried to get rid of it, but it came back with a reason: as I told you, it was a fragment, I knew that from the day I was shooting it. I was surprised, also, by the success of that film, because, in my opinion, it didn’t have head or tail, I was just presuming in the film. But maybe it was enough to presume, I mean to let the audience imagine the rest and it worked. So, I had this idea that maybe dealing with a short that is famous would ruin everything, and two things convinced me to do it. One is that I saw Sorogoyen’s Madre [Mother]. He had the same situation, he had a short, which was very good, and then he made a feature, and he put the short at the beginning of the film. So, I said: “Oh, wow, this guy had no problem!”. And then I also saw another film, Boyhood by Richard Linklater, which was actually treating the past as an archive, even more than with this Christmas gift. Whatever he was shooting for that film became archive. So, I thought “Okay, maybe I should use The Christmas gift as a six-year-old personal archive”, and it was old enough to be an archive, because I changed, and the actors were changing. So, then I decided to do that, and put it there and try to connect the rest of the stories around it. And, once again, that was like a nightmare, because of the certain hours of the intersections and you had to tick all of those boxes to meet exactly when the time came in the script.
So yeah, there was a lot of liberty but also constraints, but that was the game I was playing, I knew it was going to be like that, difficult.
Yeah, also, as you were saying, constraints sometimes help you in deciding what to do and having some limits to what you can do helps you figure out “okay, this is what I’m working with”, and it helps you maybe organise your workflow. Rather, if you have no boundaries and you can do anything, it’s almost madness [laughs].
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, you wouldn’t finish it, you know? If you had all the liberty, you would play endlessly with all these things, especially with this puzzle, you know, you can arrange it as you want. One other thing: for instance, in The Christmas Gift the camera was kind of shaky. It was too shaky, and for two hours and eighteen minutes to be in that same style – I mean, identical style – that would have been a nightmare. So, with Boróka [Boróka Biró]- she was awarded the DoP award in Venice and I’m glad, she won the under-forty women in cinema award for this film [Under 40 Female Authors Special mention for the direction of photography] – and she was clever, very clever in saying that maybe we could adapt the style with variations for each story, you know. So, for instance, whenever we have this guy from The Christmas gift – alone –, the camera is shaking and we do all these jump cuts, jump over the axes, we do whatever the… thing we want; but, whenever we are shooting this old woman, the camera is more elegant and slow, actually, even if this guy from The Christmas Gift shows up in the same scene, it wasn’t his scene, it was her scene, her story, so she was dominating the style. So, we made a lot of decisions, even colours are a bit different: Her world is a bit more…it’s a lot of green, and then orange, it’s more stylised than in some other parts in the film.
How many days of shooting did it take to complete the film?
I did it in three stages. One was of course The Christmas Gift: that was four days, I think, and it was six years ago. Then, three years ago I shot some scenes with the actress (a forty-minutes-long film, with other scenes), just because I wanted to see how I could edit these together, and if it would make sense. I did it and it started to seem to have sense all of a sudden, they could fit together and be there. That was almost like a documentary approach – or mockumentary, if you prefer. Because I was shooting fiction and treating it like a documentary, I was shooting that and then I didn’t know where it would go. But once I’d done it, I said “okay, it will work” – how it would have worked, I didn’t know. In these kind of structures you can break your neck very easily, I did some research about this type of film and I also watched films that didn’t work just to understand why they didn’t work, and now I kind of know why: you have to always chase the same atmosphere, the same vibe, and also to have the theme somewhere, to put it somewhere, to be there, you have to have hooks. For instance, Dog Days has the same end-of-the-world feeling all over the film, but in Short Cuts and some others you don’t have this, you get lost in too many narrative details, at least in Short Cuts. For me, Short Cuts doesn’t work, because it’s too much information, too many stories and at the end you don’t… If I had to tell you now what the film is about, I couldn’t, I really don’t know. And I don’t even know now, I’ve watched it a couple of times and I still don’t know what it is about. Whereas, for instance, with Magnolia or Amores Perros or Babel or Dog Days or other films you know what the theme is. Even in Crash, the first scene is very powerful, but then you lose it, whereas Magnolia is powerful because it has the same… I don’t know, material if you want, for all of them: they have a sort of desperation, it’s a father-and-son, father-and-daughter, broken family relationship all over the film, and also this almost biblical sense of punishment: that justice will come from above, you have the feeling that something terrible will happen. So, I decided to have this feeling in the film that is boiling, that something is going to happen anytime, though I knew that it would happen only at the end. But in the film, I was trying to put some other moments where things are bursting, when this woman is going to the neighbours, with The Christmas Gift, or the next day when she is in the TV studio. But it’s also a film without too many actions, though it seems that it [does] – but it doesn’t: it’s a film based on suspense, that was my intention. There are not too many things going on if you come to think of it. There’s a lot of sitting, for instance: people are actually like rats in a cage, and they move only when they are disturbed, but otherwise they are sitting or something. So, that was one thing. And then, when I decided that I could do it, we did thirty days of shooting, but in a span of three months, because it was very hard for us to find the locations and to put actors together. It was absolutely hell, because one of the actors that I chose in the casting, for instance, broke his hip and had to be replaced. Some other things happened, but generally we were kind of lucky.
Are there some aspects or elements in the film that are still present to this day in 1989 Bucharest or in Romania in general, that “survived”.
Yeah, of course, I mean it happens, but less and less. I mean; to tell the truth our film works in some other countries, even in the Western part of the world. I think that Romania has changed quite a lot, I mean in a good way. I remember that four years ago there was a huge protest in Bucharest, huge, and we managed to overturn the government and throw some prime ministers in prison, which is unheard of in some democratic countries, and people were just there because of the principle, justice. And I thought – in that moment I remember, I thought “Oh my God, how much this country has changed if people are in – freezing, actually, it was very cold – for days, weeks, just for a principle”. And that principle was that some corrupt part of the political class should be in prison – and of course they were fighting, they were trying to bend the law, you know, so that they could escape. Something similar happened in Italy with Berlusconi, and some other things in other parts of the world. And in that moment, I said “It changed a lot, Romania regained dignity”. And in this respect really, it’s like an example, because it’s functioning. Bucharest, for instance is a very artistic city, it’s a bit anarchic, I mean I doubt that it could ever happen again – unless being imposed by force from something exterior, but I doubt it. Now it’s a very vibrant city with a lot of artistic groups, it’s very political – and that’s really democracy, I think. It’s not only one vector, one… you know. But Romanian institutions, state institutions, I think it takes ages to change and update them. It probably happens with any institution, I think, that is always lagging behind the times, always. I think that in this respect, for instance, Romania is very similar to Italy – as far as I know, I mean. I have Italian friends, and they all complain about the State and bureaucracy, and it seems like – impossible, like the Italian State is not keeping up with Italian society, it’s always three steps behind. Well, yeah, we are very similar – Romanians and Italians, and… yeah, sometimes the same thing happens.
In this time, do you see the world becoming a “black” world, like fascist and racist, like what is happening in Italy, in France, in Germany… and in a lot of countries… with Trump, Bolsonaro…
You’re asking me if there’s a danger of returning to those forms of political organization, to extremisms…? I think that we learned the lesson, I hope. I’m an optimist, so… I’m a realist, I think, but I’m more an optimist than a realist. We are doing this film, we are having this conversation, it’s a bit different than… and we should keep this. This is natural, this is the natural state of being homo sapiens – sapiens, knowing things. And how can you know things? It is about communicating across the borders, and then you realise that for instance is not so special – there is nothing special to be a Romanian or to be an Italian, you see that we are more similar with some other guys, you can find similarities with people from South Africa and you say, “Oh my God!”. And then you realise that we have more things in common than things that separate us, like artificial things like borders… First of all, I don’t believe in the “pure breed”, I don’t think that there is anything pure Romanian, pure Italian, pure whatever. There is no such thing. So… why should we bother with this? It’s all sort of an invention and sometimes they are good, these inventions. These are fiction, as well. Nationalism is a fiction – sometimes fiction is good, it shouldn’t be thrown away. But… as long as we keep this dialogue and we – at least, I’m talking about myself – we use art not just for entertainment, you know. I mean, that is cool as well, I mean to have Deadpool vs. Wolverine – whatever the shit it is –, but also I think that we need to express something, and because the audience gives us voices we should say something with it – not just clap our hands and go on red carpets, you know. We should, because we are invested by some people who like certain things that we’ve done, and… yeah, so it’s an obligation, at least, to be present to society. To be a political being, to be aware and to say some things, if possible – in your little circle, or whatever, but to use it. As long as this happens, there is no danger of returning to that period of time. But sometimes – for instance, I was in New York when Putin attacked Crimea. It was in 2014, and I remember, I was interested – all of a sudden, I was disinterested in anything around me because I had this feeling that history was repeating, it was like Hitler attacking Poland. Sure, I didn’t experience that, but I was like “Oh my God” – and then, to my surprise, the Western world didn’t react. It was one to one with that period in time, one to one. Even now we are amazed that there is a war in Ukraine, it’s like, why should we be amazed? He attacked and did it in 2014, I mean that was ten years ago. So again, if I wonder about something, it’s about the mental health of the political class worldwide. Sometimes it makes you think, what are the criteria for selection? Because people in general… I’ve met a lot of “common” one would say, ordinary people who are very smart, sensitive and have a lot of common sense. How come all of a sudden… Not anymore, but there was… Berlusconi was in Italy, Sarkozy in France, Putin there, it was a time where most of the leaders in Europe were complete whackos, or at least they had problems with the law, morals, you know, all of them. Maybe you say “who are we to judge”, but come on, there was a huge scandal with all of these. And luckily now it’s not the same anymore, I think that maybe it’s different. Maybe the general public got involved, and they tried to… somehow sanction the politicians. The problem is coming from politicians, in my opinion. And I gave the example with Crimea: The Western world, I mean the free world should have reacted differently.
Can I ask you… the idea of the firecrackers in the end of the movie… was it thought of before, in the beginning, or did you think of that during the shooting?
A: It’s as I said: fiction and reality, they mingle in this film. This idea started with me hearing a voiceover, with Ceaușescu in an archive… I think it’s not translated. When the woman is fainting, in her flat, you can hear Ceaușescu’s voice and there’s another voice saying, “someone threw a firecracker”. But that’s the real fact, so Ceaușescu in that time was so out of his… you know, was living on another planet. He couldn’t simply think that people are revolting, you know, and he said “What is happening?” and his wife said “Maybe it’s an earthquake” – she said that –, and then you have this guy, Securitateguy, saying “Someone threw something, maybe it’s a firecracker”, and I said “Alright, I will take this voiceover as a motif”. I would put it in; I would create a fiction to justify this… ridiculous supposition. And maybe it’s true, we don’t even know – apparently there’s been some research, and some guys – from Timișoara, actually – were upset because their friends were killed… they came to Bucharest and they threw some firecrackers, actually, it seems, in an official report, there is a huge possibility for this to have happened. And I just fictionalised it – as you say in Italian, “se non è vero è ben trovato”, no? [laughs].
The choice of Ravel’s Bolero, it was wonderful, amazing. Is it also a little tribute to Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale?
Yeah, sure, it has more justifications than one. First of all, I wrote the film as a bolero. I usually listen to some things, and I write something that has a similarity with some piece of music. Sometimes I give up on following the music, but I start with something. So I did this on purpose, I wanted the script to be like a bolero, because I thought “What’s the most at-hand analogy with the musical piece, when you have a lot of instruments and they accumulate and they develop you have the same theme but it’s a lot of other things and they reach a climax which is the ending?”. And I said “Okay, that’s a bolero”. So, I used the bolero, but I was looking for a piece of music for the ending and I couldn’t find it, then I told a Serbian friend of mine “You know, I wrote this script as a bolero and I can’t find the music for the ending” and he said “But why not use a bolero then?”. Yeah, it was like the pencil, I know, [he mimics resting a pencil on his ear], it was here but I couldn’t find it [he laughs]. And then we hurried and put the Bolero there, and of course it did work, we didn’t do anything actually, we just put it there. Also for some reason, in the communist times I remember that the bolero was all over the place – I don’t really know why. At least in Romania you were listening to the Bolero everywhere and that’s…crazy, it was very much in fashion, on TV, on the radio, people at home, I don’t know why.
What is the book – if there is one – that you’re thinking about the most in this period? Also, what is a film and a record that you really love? What are your projects for the future? You made a great movie; we are looking forward to your next project.
Oh, books and music, I used to be a writer, actually, to tell the truth, so I was reading a lot more books than the films I saw. There’s this one Italian writer that I really loved, Italo Calvino, that I simply loved, or Dino Buzzati, I actually adored that book – The Desert of the Tartars – love it. And also, music – I’m addicted, it’s like a drug, but I can’t really… because I’m listening to so many… yeah. I love, for instance, Lucio Dalla. There was a tune that was released two or three weeks ago with someone else I don’t know – it’s called Tender and it’s very modern – you should listen to it, it’s very cool. I also love Nicola Conte, and a lot of music from all time. My next project is an animation that I’m going to finish in the next two months, probably to be in festivals next year. It’s like Sylvain Chomet, you know Chomet? Like Triplettes de Belleville, L’Illusioniste, almost like that – the same atmosphere, let’s say. I worked a lot on this. I don’t know how to draw, I’m just the director and the script writer, I’m just telling… That’s why it took us too much time to do it. And then I’m thinking of another project, immediately after I finish this hullabaloo with launching and everything I will start writing again.
If you wouldn’t mind, could you tell us something personal about you, something for people reading the interview who may be wondering – to say it with a cliché question – “who is Bogdan?”. For instance: how did you become a film director, what made you decide that would be your career?
You mentioned that you used to be a writer, do you consider yourself more a writer or a director?
I’m a writer who is trying to learn how to make films. But most of all, I am a reader: I always carry a book in my pocket while traveling and that gives me great comfort, and I shall always remain a writer.
What is the Romanian film you would like the whole world to see?
Child’s Pose by Călin Peter Netzer.
What is a job you had before which had nothing to do with cinema or writing?
I taught English for half a year in a high school when I was a student. But I wouldn’t say it had no connection with writing because I was studying and preparing my lessons on Shakespeare’s plays. I remember carefully reading Macbeth like I had never done before.
What’s the film you have watched the highest number of times as a child?
Popeye the Sailor. I was a fan. But no, actually… it was The Jungle Book. this was it.
You remember the first thing I said to you after I saw the movie? I said: “You’re going to win, because this is the best movie”, and I was right!
You were right, yes, [he laughs]. And I didn’t believe you, I thought “Oh, come on!” [he laughs].
Thank you, Bogdan, I really appreciate this. I wish you the best and I’m looking forward to meeting you again. Thank you very much!
Grazie mille, ci vediamo! Alla prossima, no? Thank you, thank you very much, see you soon.
