Interview: Cristian Mungiu (4 months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)

It would have to be a special film that would walk away with top honors at the past, 60th anniversary edition of the Cannes film festival especially with the harvest of titles such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men and Persepolis in competition. Ultimately it would be a film import from a nation with less than three dozen movie theaters that grabbed the Palme D’or and thus follow in a trend of such recent Romanian examples as Death of Mr.Lazarescu and 12:08 Bucharest.

In a reflective and meditative style that we can compare to the likes of Bresson and Ozu, and with a narrative prose that remains non-judgmental with regards to ethically and morally questionable acts, Cristian Mungiu’s tour de force is a punishing look at a country where its citizens were suffocated and cornered into making difficult, unimaginable decisions and a mesmerizing character study about two young women feeling the pressing weight of a flawed Nicolae Ceauşescu communist regime era system.

4 months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is very much deserving of the top honors at Cannes, and the grocery list long of kudos in the form of nominations, festival awards and end of the year critic’s best lists – Mungui’s style, and punishing long takes pulverizes the senses – and the piercing portrait introduces to international audiences the talents of actress Anamaria Marinca.

Ever since Cannes, Mungui has literally been on the road promoting his picture at various festivals – prestigious fests like Toronto to actually distributing the film himself in his homeland: exhibiting his film caravan style. I had the chance to speak to Cristian at the Toronto Film Festival.

[Update: The flawed Oscar voting system means that his will not be competing for the Best Foreign picture: IFC First Take releases the film in theaters today]

Cristian Mungiu

Eric Lavallee: I’m curious to know. When you submitted your film to Cannes,
did you submit it to all categories (Director’s Fortnight, Un Certain Regard,
In the official Competition?) [Note his previous film Occident was presented in
the 2002 Quinzaine des Réalisateurs/Director’s Fortnight section]
Cristian Mungui: Nobody has asked me this before. It happened in a very strange
way. I never got to submit this film officially. I made a screening in Rotterdam with
a rough cut of this film two days after I finished principal photography. The
festival was kind of helping me from the beginning – they even put some money
into the post-production of this film so it was possible for me to ask them if
I can organize a screening with the material that I had for the sales agent – this
was a very good choice. There was a buzz that started to circulate from that
moment on and then with yet another version of the rough cut, I sent someone to
Berlin, that person gave the DVD
to several sales agents again – because I knew that I needed a strong sales
agent for the film to have a good fate later on. It was one of these people and
I really don’t know who for sure who sent this film to some Cannes
organizers because the person was so enthusiastic about this film and this is
how I got the first answer from Cannes
before even sending the film there. I got this phone call which was very
rewarding for me, from Olivier Père who
is the director of Quinzaine that
told me they haven’t started the selection yet – he asked the selection
committee to come and they decided to start the selection then with this film –
this was supposed to be the film that would start the Quinzaine. He was telling me this at a point where I wasn’t sure if
my film would be ready. Later on I got an interesting phone call from Un Certain Regard – they were interested
because I met some people there, but I never got to send the film to them. All
I did is I asked some friends in Paris who are pretty much connected to the big
people at the Cannes festival – I asked them to talk to the Cannes people and
see when is the deadline for me, if I can respect it or not so if I can send it
or not. And once he checked he realized that they were having the film already
– the found out about it being with the Quinzaine,
they were interested in seeing it – they let me know very early that the film
was going to be in the Official Selection [for UCR]. And the last piece of news
that we got was just one or two days before they announced the sections they
let me know that my film was going to be in the main comp which made all the
difference for us, it was what we really hoped for to get in the 60^th.
I still have the papers back at home from the people at Cannes
that say “this is great..this is the first time in 12 years that we do that”. The
rest of the coverage was really on the films that stand a chance to fight for
the Palme d’or – nobody ever considered that we stood a chance.

I was at Cannes
this year and from the moment 4 months (2nd day) had screened there was plenty
of critical buzz, was this something that you were aware of during your time
there?
This was our decision to start at the beginning. We were
allowed to choose when to schedule the film and we decided to start at the
beginning. I had this talk with my sales agent and he said “I know a little bit
about the others films, there are going to be a lot of knockers, so its good to
be at the beginning because at least people will remember that you knocked them
down first” which was a good way of putting it …but nobody expected that this
kind of buzz would spread and last during the whole festival. At the beginning
we thought it would last two or three days and then maybe I can have a nice
vacation with my wife and child and enjoy the rest of the days – but it never
happened like this. We were experiencing this kind of buzz and actually it was
really a nice thing to happen because people were so honest, people didn’t know
who I was, so you could cross into the croisette I was listening to people talk
about this anonymously this was really funny and rewarding. And the other thing
that happened is that from time to time, despite all this work, we had to go
here and there to some official party and stuff like this and whenever people
found out that “you are the guy that made the film” – they became very warm and
interested. This was the biggest surprise that we and together with the fact it
lasted until the end. We thought it was going to stop some day, but this unanimity
of the press and the media interest was built up and left us with the idea that
…maybe we have a chance..

4 months’ POV was not that of the one having the abortion
Gabita [Laura Vasiliu], but the one of Otilia [Anamaria Marinca]. Her
experience is arguably a more painful, traumatic one. Can you explain what made
you choose to tell your story via this character’s perspective?
For me the main character is “he who understands what
happens” and not to whom it happens. Clearly for me the decision of the
character — the character who understand something that happens to them. I
hope this becomes clear by the end of the film that if someone has second
thoughts and try to understand what happened to G and O. This is from the
nature and being of the character and to be honest I never thought that Gabita
would be the main character but at the beginning of the script I thought I was
making the story of a couple of girls but by page 15, I realized that it is
about one main character. So I finished the first draft and when I was
rewriting, I decided that I would have to focus on her and see everything
through her perspective and from that time and moment. I wanted to make a film
from the “inside” because people who were living at that time everyone else was
not making judgments about freedom and about justice but just living the moment
and trying to solve the moments of everyday live. I wanted to have this perspective
for the film.

My favorite shot is the dinner sequence: Long take centering
on Otilia, where you see everything begins to sink in. Can you elaborate on the
process of that shot and how you coached Anamaria.
It was the most difficult shot for me to get with this film…because
it needed a lot of precision and because it evolved so many people who having
to remember precisely what they have to do. It lasted four days instead of two.
It lasted five thousand meters instead of two thousand meters and I was at the
point of giving up because this is the most difficult moment for you as a
director: everyone knows what they need to say but they can’t get what you want
and the problem wasn’t that much with Anna-Maria but the others for here the
problem was to manage to find the same concentration after so many takes because
peeople were making mistakes and it was so frustrating because it was a
12-minute shot.. I cut off two and half minutes from the end of it. But when
you get to minute seven and an actor draws a blank and forgets a line it was awfully
frustrating and there was nothing I could do and for her it was very tiring. What
she had to do was very clear. She is the center of the scene, she is supposed
to be somewhere else, physically there but she is mentally someplace else and
she is the only one who notices that that telephone is ringing and she is
thinking that somebody should answer it but nobody else sees this, of course
there was no telephone on the set, – because there was no telephone on the set
I had to make that sound and she did this very well…but what we discovered
later on was that if she was not doing anything and so I allowed her to eat something
and things like that. Still the shot wasn’t right, the mistake was mine not
hers – she was doing it properly I don’t know when it happened but I realized I
don’t see her well enough the shot is too wide  -At the beginning I not thinking I have all these actors come in and I’m
not going to shoot them – so what I did after two days of shooting is I just
decided this is wrong this doesn’t have to look like the last supper of Jesus
Christ – so I said we should just go closer – so I changed the lenses and I was
different from that  on. So we rearranged
the setting a bit and we re-choreographed the scene a bit  – just to give dizziness  and everyone is talking nonsense and she is
thinking of someone else and I hoped that something that she might give in the
scene would be that she has the revelation that  “this is how my life could look like at some
point” something that some people might understood.

The echoing theme throughout the film is that there is a
“price to pay”. From Gabita’s unfortunate pregnancy, to Otilia’s involvement
with Mr.Bebe and even the scene where Otilia leaves a pack of cigarettes to the
reception. Are there links to be made with the manner in which these people
resolve problems and the difficulties of living in a communist society?
For me the meaning of this is not only that there is a price
to pay which is true, but that there is a lesson to learn. I hope that this is also
understood from the film. All these scenes showed how the society worked I hope
to give a hint about how it was to live – it was all caused by this lack of money
and food but freedom and this feeling that you really didn’t belong to yourself
– there was someone watching you all the time and anyone who had this authority
on you would use it and I hope this is present in the film. When you are living
through a period where you have to make – its about making compromises and when
you have to make compromises everyday this kind of becomes part of your life. It
was a very difficult time to stick to principles – this is not moral, this is the
way I should live, this is the way I should behave – because we were not
seeing any end to this – we thought we would just die under communism and it
was a period where in order to progress socially and to have a better life you
need to do a lot of compromises starting with the little ones and continuing
with the big ones.

If the roles were reversed and that Otilia was the one
having the abortion, do you think that Gabita would have let herself be
humiliated in the same way?
Who knows? This is very difficult to say, it was difficult for
me to realize why would you do something like this for a friend? No matter how
good this person could be to you…this was something for me to figure out. I
knew that this is how the story went. And I had a lot of details from the side.
Sometimes people make decisions and they have spontaneous desires to help
somebody out in terms of friendship or for unselfish reasons – they are not
aware of why they are doing it. We act. We make decisions. We don’t have all
the arguments. We don’t analyze it. I wanted to get this in the film. Live is a
little bit more chaotic than what you see in pictures. Pictures tend to organize
and structure everything – it’s not like this. This is what makes the
difference in the film – not everything gets solved. By the end of this day you
will have thoughts that will go on until the end of the year – it’s not the end
of this story it’s a slice of it. Just one day. I wanted this to be felt in the
picture. I started the film with the end of a conversation that you never here.
And the film begins with a long silence and then the dialogue with a girl who
says “okay”. I did this to make people understand that the story is bigger than
this conversation.

I heard many gasps in the audience during the scene where
Mr.Bebe begins the procedure on the bed. Can you discuss what has been the
general feedback you’ve gotten from female audiences so far on the festival
circuit.
There were most feedback were from male audiences – male spectators
were fainting. I don’t know why – because people tend to be very cool when you
talk to them and this issue of abortion is very cruel. Its easy when you think
about it as long as it is abstract…point is when you are inside the situation
it is a little bit more difficult to imagine and I suppose it was a little bit
more difficult for a man because they weren’t forced to attend something like
this. If you had the occasion you will think about it twice and I wanted to have
this in the film. I wants to think to the way I remember things, be honest to
the story and  make the crucial moment of
the film without cuts. If you want to make a film about a subject like this and
remain truthful to the story you either have the balls to show how things go on
or not. If not you better just do something else. I wanted that scene to be
precise. I brought this woman who was making abortions at the time on the set, to
perform and show us in detail how this would happen. I never wanted to have
this feeling where doctors watching the film and saying “ha ha ha it is not
like this”. It is like this. This is the way it went. 

I haven’t seen your first film. But there was an absence of
a score/music in 4 Months. Was this a clear choice from the start? And was this the
case for your first film.
It wasn’t the case for my first film but this was clear for
this film from the beginning. For this film I really wanted to abstain from using
all formal means. I didn’t want people to notice that there were authors behind
. I didn’t want the audience to notice cuts and close up and music coming from
the background with violins all of the sudden just. Its about what you can do
with your bare hands and some actors. People don’t realize that there are no
cuts because they are watching the story and that there is editing in a film.
But what they are noticing is the emotions are coming to them because I let
these actors develop emotions from the beginning.

Critics are talking about a Romanian New Wave in cinema, I
think there is a commonality between the films (same actors, DOPs and critical
viewpoint of your countries’ past and future). Can you discuss the filmmaking
community in Romania
– and why films’ like yours, 12:08
East of Bucharest and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu are touching an international core?
It is difficult to say why it this is happening here and
now. It is true that something happening but perhaps this feeling that there is
a generation comes from the fact we got international recognition at the same
time (in the last couple of years). We all belong biologically to a generation of
people between 30 to 40 on and this is why people generalize and see us as a
group. But apart from this there is no aesthetic – group like Dogme …What is
interesting for me from this group of people is that this kind of cinema is
that the work they are doing is very diverse – we don’t generally have the same
view about cinema. Perhaps there is a humor and desire to bring the stories
onto film in a certain way…we pretty much started by not liking the films that
we were seeing stuff from the late 80’s – but I don’t see us as a model. It is a
very romantic way of thinking of it and we help each other from time to time,
and we have managed to change the cinema in Romania

Can you tell me more about the ‘Tales From the Golden Age’
project…will this be several episodes within one feature film?
Yes. I wanted to make a series of short films pasted
together based on the late communist times to talk about the system through the
small misfortunes in daily life. Finally I discovered at some point that it was
too funny as a project and for some people it might come across as a funny way
that we lived back then – this is not the way I want to remember it so I
decided to make this film to balance the series. Eventually 5 or 6 films of 30
minutes are going to follow. I have wrote them and will produce them but these
aren’t going to be my films as an author. I’m going to bring some other
directors along – we have three of them in post-production but I don’t know if
it will be one more or two more films it depends on the length.

[This interview took place during the 2007 edition of the Toronto film festival.]