Interview with Marek Šulík

Martin Šulík (1962) is an internationally successful and well-known Slovak film director. Seven years after his last feature film Gypsy, he is coming back with road movie The Interpreter. The film about two men dealing with their past decisions will be world premiered in the Berlinale Special section.

The film is about two contrasting men who travel around Slovakia to find the truth about their own pasts. What affected you so much that you made the decision to shoot such a story?

-When working on a film, several sources of inspiration and concepts always converge. The Interpreter was initially part of a ten-episode television series Faces (orig. Tváre) about various professions. We wrote it together with Marek Leščák and we expected to present a picture of society, rather like Balzac’s Comédie Humaine,via portraits of people in a variety of professions. We sought to depict each profession in some sort of ethical conflict and, by means of these conflicts, we wanted to understand not just the individual people but also the society we live in. The TV companies showed no interest in our project, it struck them as far too expensive, which is why, along with Marek Leščák and producer Rudo Biermann, we took the decision that we would gradually start to make films from the scripts already written. The first we chose was the interpreter’s story.

Both of the film’s protagonists are confronted with events from the period of the Slovak State. This theme is highly topical nowadays as the voice of ultra-right parties is getting ever stronger in Slovakia and across the whole of Europe, and people who have not learned the lessons from the past tend to succumb to it. Is The Interpreter intended to be a contribution to the discussion on this topic?
-Together with Marek, we follow what is going on in Slovakia and Europe, how people’s thinking changes at various levels. Views very close to Fascism are currently being presented not only by various militant organisations but also by politicians in top positions. As if they didn’t comprehend the impact of their words. We travelled across a large part of Central Slovakia, the places in which our story is set, and we had no trouble in finding people who would be keen to send someone to the gas chamber or shoot a whole ethnic minority. However, many Slovaks are not interested in the past, they are consumed by the contemporary social problems, they have lost all awareness of the context and, without batting an eyelid, are capable of accepting any political demagogy manipulating history and offering radical solutions. Our heroes, just like we did, encounter various people on their road, people who represent a variety of views from our past and, based on these coincidental encounters, they create a picture of the world they live in, of its values.

Peter Simonischek and Jiří Menzel are pronounced personalities. One of them is an experienced actor, the other an experienced actor and director. How did that show while shooting the film?
-Peter and Jirka are two contrasting acting types. Peter is a noted stage actor with big screen experience. He is used to rehearsing and he built his character gradually. Jirka says of himself that, despite the large number of films that he’s acted in, he is just one prominent type and so only able to play himself. Unlike Peter he doesn’t like to talk about his character. His principle was: “Don’t talk, act!” It was intriguing that they not only played two contrasting characters, but they also worked using different methods. Peter liked to check his work on video and, based on what he viewed, he was able to offer variations on the individual scenes from a critical distance. Jirka did not, on principle, view himself while shooting and stated that he placed all his trust in the director.

You tell the story non-traditionally through a road movie. Did you opt for this genre with regard to the motif of the journey which carries cognition in it?
-Marek and I liked the idea of making a road movie with two old men. They are both set in their ways, they don’t want to adapt to each other and there is tension between them. The shooting concept also resulted from this. I was happy to watch the faces of both the old men when they reminisced about the past. I wanted to see what they felt when doing so, I was interested in whether they were ashamed, laughing or moved. We shot a lot of material with the director of photography, Martin Štrba, we wanted to overlap the conversations with this material, to create an image counterpoint to them, but eventually we discarded everything with the editor, Olina Kaufmanová. That seems to have been a good solution. I like watching Jirka and Peter as they gradually get to know each other.

Abridged from Film.sk (English Special Edition)

published: 05.02.2018
updated: 24.01.2019