KVIFF 2021: The Worst Person in the World and a Conversation with Rade Jude | Festivals & Awards

I tell him it must also be freeing to not have such specific fetishes, and anyway, there’s no mistaking his political point of view, a gleefully dark reckoning with the way history repeats itself. Every time I try to work my way back to his films Jude is happily caught up in semantic thickets. I start to tell him that there feels like an intuitive approach to his more pared down aesthetic in his latest work and he stops me, a slight, sly smile in the corner of his mouth.

“It depends on what you mean by intuition. Do you know about this? Antonio Damasio is a neurologist and he explains what intuition is. He says that there’s no intuition without previous experiences. When you jump from point A to point B, your brain makes the shortcut because it’s been there before. Let’s say three identical looking men come to beat you up. One beats you up, the second beats you up, when you see the third guy you know he’s here to beat you up. If there’s intuition, it’s only based on my previous experiences. There’s a lot of anti-intellectualism out there and I don’t want to lean on the idea of intuition, because a lot of work goes into every single thing.”

We’re both laughing as I try to regroup. I restate my question as a matter of resources. That a movie like “Aferim!,” a kind of witchfinder Western set in medieval Romania, is a more complicated work of art than “Bad Luck Banging.”

“Maybe there’s something to what you’re saying though, there’s a kind of evolution. I wouldn’t make a film like ‘Aferim!’ again. Not because of the effort it took, but because all of a sudden you feel you don’t need to make something so complicated. I did a bit of theatre after I made it and you don’t need all these resources.” He grabs a cup off the table. “This can be Hamlet’s castle, you know? You can just say it. You don’t need this huge set. I think cinema can learn a little from theatre. I think [“Bad Luck”] is a very specific film in a very specific time and place. I wanted it to feel very contemporary film, like it was made from a historical perspective. The details and little things, I thought This will disappear, so maybe if we capture them for all time, it becomes meaningful. You go to Pompeii and people are really taken with a brick or a drawing on the wall that they wouldn’t care about. I wanted you to look around with the eyes of someone seeing history happening. This is something to debate here. There are people, especially in European and Hollywood cinema, one life of it from the beginning was to make things non-specific. You see now there’s a film set in Croatia, but it could be France or Hungary or London – it’s just a ‘European’ film. Directors try to cut out what’s specific about their country and culture or society to make something ‘universal.’ But I’m interested in specifics! I strongly believe universality comes from specificity. I want to see an American film I want to see something from America, I want to see a Japanese film not an American version of a Japanese film.”

I tell him that it feels like something has to break, if we keep sanding off the specifics, every movie will look the same.

“I think it’s already happened. People now just watch what they want on their streaming services. Olivier Assayas said last year that cinema was designed to bring people together and that’s happening less and less. People who go to a classical concert are less likely to go see a pop concert or a metal concert. This fracturing of the audience … I don’t see how this can be reversed. I believe in general education, though it’s not just education because new technology makes it complicated. My kids are on their phone all the time, it’s hard for them to read a book. This changes with every generation. When I became interested in cinema in post-communism there wasn’t private TV networks. The only place to see movies was the Romanian cinematheque that black and white copies of old movies. I saw ‘Taxi Driver’ in black and white four or five times. I still remember it in black and white. You’d wait six months for a film to appear. When I saw that they were showing a film I really wanted to see like “A Clockwork Orange” my hands would shake with anticipation, I got there 40 minutes early. Now I have the hard disc, which is great, but the attention I used to pay was much higher. It was this film to be seen now. You had to be present to meet the work of art head on.”