You have already mentioned in several interviews how you cast your characters. On the one hand those who you have "admired" for a long time (László Sinkó), and on the other hand those with whom you have "something to do": Ervin Nagy was a fellow student of yours in college, Zsolt Nagy and Péter Kokics were one year your juniors - just citing a few examples from Eastern Sugar.

Bit players I often cast from my circle of pals. There are some minimum roles calling for a face only and not necessarily acting. In Szezon, I tried to pay attention to the actors even more. I am learning too with each and every film. In the casting process, I asked myself the fundamental questions: what do I want and who is the best for the task? In Moscow Square (Moszkva tér), I worked out of instinct and did not want the players to act. I often instructed them simply, such as "come in", "look at it" - I made them improvise and kept whatever I fancied. In Eastern Sugar, I attempted to move on so there would be work and actors would work. It is an intellectual challenge, a benchmark whether I can be an equal partner to, for example, László Sinkó? Or no matter how much of a pal or a fellow student Ervin Nagy and Zsolt Nagy are, they are still accustomed to the best stage directors. In order for these actors to accept me as a credible director, I had to surpass the level of animation where you can instruct "amateur" players where to go, look and turn. In Szezon, it was a different issue: I wanted to create a real-life situation. This was achieved with simple acting techniques yet severe actor's work.

Ervin Nagy and his character, Flower (Virág) carried a cross-reference in Eastern Sugar since the porn film casting scene with Kornél Mundruczó as the cinematographer clearly refers to his first feature film  I have no desire for nothing (Nincsen nekem vágyam semmi) in which Ervin Nagy was in the main role.

We are getting older enough to reckon in our films what matters to us even if slightly only. Nincsen nekem vágyam semmi was the first film to which I responded "Wow! This was shot by a dude here in Budapest, who is just as old as me!" Kornél was a fellow student of mine at the acting faculty and since this scene called for an actor who was also able to handle the camera, because he was capturing useful images, there popped the idea to make Kornél the cinematographer when Ervin was the hero.

Your own film history notes are being taken.

This became inevitable by the present. We meet almost everyday somewhere, a community is formed no matter how much we objected to being identified on a purely generation basis. We go to the same places, we watch the same films and we submit applications to MMK (Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary) at the same time, we know everything about each other. For this very reason, these films influence me the most because I am there at the very first sentence of the script or at the editing or the post production work on sound. I could mention anyone: Kornél, Szabolcs Hajdu or Bence Fliegauf. We obviously make different films and each one of us takes care in not being too "trendy", to retain his own microcosm, yet our films unavoidably affect each other. These films have become a lot more important to me by now than the Godard or Fellini films seen before my college years, they tend to float in the clouds while I grasp and feel these much more clearly, they are not in my dreams but here around the corner.

Anyway, how did you get near filming? After your often cited graduation from grammar school in 1989, which was told in the fiction story about Moszkva tér, you attended a school for photographers.

I did not really know what to do with myself after grammar school, so I studied to become a photographer between 1989 and 1991. This was the time when the world opened up for me. I spent my years in grammar school rather secluded from good films, though I saw one or two cult films. Before 1989, video films were not common, you had the chance to go to the cinemas and sometimes there was a good film on the telly. My first memory of this kind was the Hitchcock series, which I had the chance at the age of 14 to 15 to watch late Saturday nights. Of course Birds or Psycho was not really an experience from a film art point-of-view but for the dark feeling of fear which I still remember. The rebelling cult films of grammar school years were Alan Parker's The Wall or Péter Gothár's Time Stands Still  (Megáll az idő). I had encounters with the films of Tarkovsky, Fellini or Godard after my grammar school years. There had been a few older guys at the photo school who often told me what to see or read instead of the idiotic magazines launched at the time. Melinda Kovács, my classmate from Esztergom suggested that I apply for admission to András Lányi's course on film theory at the College of Esztergom if I had no better idea. (I am a drifting filmmaker.) Then in Esztergom, I met the works of Vertov, Murnau, Antonioni or Cassavetes; the mixture of names, films, movements and styles compiled into a mosaic story in the lessons of Uncle Pál Honffy, Tibor Hirsch, and Gábor Gelencsér. Gyuri Pálfi was also a classmate of mine; we applied for admission to the College of Theatre and Film Arts in the same year. We got lucky: Sándor Simó admitted a bunch of kids who had nothing to do with the practical side of film; we could say "outsiders".

...with, however, well-founded theoretical education...

Now that is a bit of an exaggeration. I finished Esztergom with an adolescently serious thesis under the title "The motif of trains in film history", of course riding through the tracks of film history with Lumiére, Mélies, (early) western and new wave. Trains and films can be matched in a thousand ways from the point-of-view of social history or spectacle.
In the course of the semester, I suddenly believed that I once would deal with films scientifically. That was a naive idea, yet it felt good at the time.

Is there a film branch on your family tree?

Nobody and nothing. My father's mother was a photographer in a village. My father was an engineer, my mother a secretary. The family was blown apart, my parents divorced when I was one. My uncle's family were applied artists; I might have some concept of the so-called intelligentsia existence from them. I never really had a day-to-day contact with film, even less so with acting.

Getting back to the point, Sándor Simó enrolled "outsiders", including you, in the college. How did he begin practical training?

We first made documentaries. (I already made a documentary in Esztergom in a sociological camp.) I really did dig the first year in college: the problematic of social history, sociology, reality and documenting. Everybody had to identify a subject area to be researched throughout the year. I chose refugee affairs. It was the time of the war in the Balkans and I visited refugee camps with my pal, cinematographer Miki Buk - who migrated to the US in the mean time - on a monthly basis. This is how Winners (Győztesek) was born. The eight short docs, of course, made a good little film. This was not really important though, but the fact that Pál Schiffer and Simó offered a strategy to lodge the subject: you pick what fascinates you, and then you slowly advance to the person who will once become the hero of your film. In this long process, you have to make decisions for which you ask yourselves some fundamental questions: what is "reality", what is "film"? Simultaneously with our practical courses, György Báron and István Szabó gave lectures on film history. Báron started from the beginnings and advanced steadily by period until we reached the present in our fifth year. Szabó gave subjective lectures on film history. We watched Leni Riefenstahl, Russian propaganda films. He educated us on the responsibility existence as film directors entails. Will we at all realise once where fate cast us? Are you willing to take charge of what you do? How far do you go in editing? And when you put down them camera?
For me, the relationship between reality and fiction in Moscow Square and in Eastern Sugar is a fundamental question. How does a film director or a script-writer project the essence of reality when the set of experiences is inevitably stylised into fragments whether they be personal memories (as in Moscow Square) or experiences as in Barely(Alig) or in Eastern Sugar. How can you grasp reality in fiction then shift it into cinemas without any substantial impairment?

After all, these are the fundamental and constantly recurring questions, dilemmas and issues of every artistic creative activity, aren't they?

These questions cannot really be surpassed. Everybody is struggling around these. Of course, from a fine arts approach, the form excites one more and the ethical question is raised differently from when a story is told. This might be the difference. Still, if looking in a mirror, you have to answer yourself credibly. If, however, you build a story from reality, then you not only have to meet your own expectations but also those of reality. There are a thousand ways to reality, this is what makes it difficult. Everyone has a different reality, a different image of reality.

Your first college short feature film Go (Hajtás) was also produced after a documentary (Győztesek).

I again chose the medium first. A bunch of my pals used to be working for "Hajtás Pajtás" (Go Buddy - a bicycle courier service) with their office located right across the college in Szentkirályi Street. I used the same methodology as in case of the documentary. I tried to become more involved, to familiarise with their peers and laws, then to tell the story of a character in a fiction. The story was about someone else, yet still related to the basic situations determining the life of a bicycle courier.
I simultaneously produced a documentary version. Go Buddy Goes to America   (Hajtás-Pajtás menni Amerika) was my first film nominated for an international festival. The bicycle courier subculture was also fond of this film. They always take films that they feel as their own to world competitions, which are mostly about partying and meeting. Thus they not only kept themselves in motion, but also the film: various bicycle courier services requested VHS copies from me every week.
Then we produced the "Sándor Török plays for the television", the 'Someone is knocking' (Valaki kopog) series, which continues to give me the creeps until this very day. This adaptation is about a young man migrating to Hungary from Transylvania in the 1930s, a so-called Sándor Török, who becomes a writer. He lives as a tenant at twelve different locations in Budapest, of which Simó allocated to us to adapt them for the screen. I, of course, received the last one, when he becomes a writer, the day of the premiere at the National Theatre; besides, I had to close the series, to complete eight absolutely diverging different episodes to achieve a series for broadcasting on television. Because this was already an external assignment commissioned by TV2. Roland Rába in the main role was the cohesive link, other than that; the eight episodes had nothing in common. It was a true nightmare, I suffered big time. Éva Schulze, our teacher of dramaturgy gave me an insight into the true nature of adaptation: to develop a single written sentence in up to 30 minutes while forgetting a hundred pages completely. I avoided adaptations until this very day, however, this summer I will produce a play for the television based on László Garaczi's Wonderful Wild Animals  (Csodálatos vadállatok). Now that is a tough nut to crack. Someone is knocking was distant from me both in its style and time. I love literature, yet I never took a book off the shelf with a view to shooting a film from it. This time, I also work on request, which I tend to rather regard as a challenge. I want to make something "wild", to experiment again because when I really wanted to live up to a material (as in case of Sándor Török); it did not really turn out well.

And after Someone is knocking you had the chance to shoot on a medium other than DV or beta.

Back in college, I attended a course organised by László Hartai at Tabán Cinema, where we experimented with how fiction can be constructed from elements of reality. Say, to find an object triggering a story. I wrote a short story on a photograph automat flashing four pictures after one another.

Amélie's Wonderful Life...

Yes, only five years before Amélie. Later on, the ten-minute short feature produced in college is about someone sitting to take photographs in a booth while instead of 10 minutes between the flashes, 10 years pass. Tranzit mattered because it gave Dániel Garas and me the first chance to work on 16-mm celluloid; this film was a winner of the students' film festival in New York, won an award for best cinematography in Moscow and an invitation to Cannes, where I spent 2 weeks exactly when Béla Tarr presented Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák). I already had written the script for Moscow Square then, that was all I focused on in the spring. Cannes was the last stage before the shooting, I took a deep breath, dove under the surface of the sea and emerged only months later: my first feature was shot by August. Simó, as the producer, realised that young people attending cinemas and directors attending our class are more or less of the same age. As multiplexes emerged, masses of cinema-goers rejuvenated to such an extent that Hungarian film production virtually offered no age group other than us that could tell a credible story to them. On the other hand, our pals and former classmates were egging us "what is the reason for Hungarian films being so shitty?", "don't they recognise that we are here and not a single film is about us!". We admired Truffaut, Godard, Szabó, Jancsó; we felt that a similar start is needed as theirs in the 1950s and 60s: personal stories first, then whatever measures up!
Moscow Square is autobiographically motivated. I told Simó and my classmates how I graduated and they all said it was a film. Maybe, because it was about an important moment in history that we all lived through, still it told a private story.

Your graduation in 1989 and the current affairs situation - which is already history -, the change of regime rhyme with each other awkwardly, don't they?

The title for the synopsis of Moscow Square was first "False Tickets": we counterfeited train tickets to go west and we took our final secondary school exams while we knew the questions beforehand... At the same time, this exact same year saw the change of regime, my falling in love for the first time and the death of my grandmother. These few (autobiographical) points seemed sufficient to make the story work, which we poached with Schulze, Simó and my classmates into what it had become. No funds were available for diploma films at the time. Simó figured out to get a diploma with a script instead and to seek funding for cinematographing it through grants. We should not play around with making a 25-minute film after a 10-minute 16-mm one as had been the case before in classes graduating ahead of us. We should not waste a full year, but write a script that could be the basis for a full-length feature film. Without a feature film, you cannot get into distribution and claim "to be here and wanting to make a film". Simó knew this exactly. And by today, all eight of us have made our first film. (Diana Groó has already edited Wonder in Krakow (Csoda Krakkóban), I have seen it.)

And at that time (in 2000), the film factory offering security in the good old days had not been in existence for long.

Of course, we had not seen much from it, only a few offices on death row and the property of TV2. We never got salary from the film factory, we had no live contacts. Simó connected us to some degree but it was pure agony, the broken pieces of a state-owned studio system, an anachronistic formation. In 1995, when we entered college, it existed more or less, but by the time we graduated, there was no film factory at all. Around 1997-98, when commercial television was launched, my classmates, the entire production management faculty, as it was, left college and joined RTL. It was a stage in Hungarian media history when state television and film factory were over for good. Simó had his good contacts; still he did not throw us to foreign bounty hunters visiting the college constantly. Especially when Péter Barbalics's class led by Attila Árpa marched out from us. The college had not really seen in its history a third-year production class setting up firms in the middle of the making of its exam films to join commercial television along with their head teacher as suppliers, then coming back to the yard of the college two years later roaring motorcycles. Original media accumulation was taking place in front of our very own eyes. I have never received a penny from commercial television since then.

After Moszkva tér, we chatted around the time of Alig, and then you were planning a spy movie.

On the one hand, when Moscow Square became a success - awards and over a hundred thousand viewers - I got carried away a bit. On the other hand, I was attracted to the French crime stories of the 1960s and 70s or to New Hollywood, and I fancied Foto Haber from Hungarian black-and-white good fair quality films. Film history was flawing without any directions at the time, we did not know anything about the Iranians. Then came the reinterpretation of genre film by Tarantino-along with Dogma, which had a rather great impact with regard to form.

Gergely Bikácsy believes it to be an overrated direction.

Certainly, Dogma is a very well marketed, spiced up story and Lars von Trier is a genial media player, but they practically brought along the Godardian moment: "Every human being should make a film by virtue of citizenship!" Here comes DV, use it. "Cogito ergo video!"

So then came the time for a spy film: Jean-Luc Godard Germany nine zeroes.

I wanted a comedy on the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow and on the nuclear power plant in Paks, the world's "geekest" spy who is detailed in Washington to come to Hungary and investigate the "thing in Paks" under construction, whether it is a nuclear military base or not. It is the final moments of the cold war, the Americans boycott the 1980 Olympic Games - tensions are high throughout. (These Olympic Games with Norbert Növényi - Hungarian gold medallist in wrestling, translator's remark - and with Misha Bear were the first I recall.) The American secret service finds a single man in the whole lot who speaks Hungarian, of course the miserable kid of a family that emigrated in 1956, who is eventually cast back to Hungary. So I wished to make a "lunatic" film around this idea, I even wrote it under the title Pax (as Americans pronounce Paks, which otherwise means "peace" in Latin). Of course I did not get any funding for it. Still, it should be made once.

But socialism still exists with its enormous obelisks, monumental buildings such as the Kremlin in Red Square: the nuclear power plant in Paks, the sugar plant in Kaba, the party resort in Balatonaliga, which rumours exactly around the film review say to be up for sale after all. Why did you become interested in its fate?

Certainly like Kremlin, but in a much more "small time", "Ungarische" style. I contacted Professor Schiffer upon a news article of a friend of mine, who explored this subject in great depth. I took a dictaphone and a camera, went to Aliga and made interviews with the old staff residing there. That place is total anachronism, still owned by the state even though it is not exactly a party resort. It was dreadful and shocking as the Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats, a political party formed in 1989 - translator's remark) elite of the time was showing off there: the new world of cadres was on vacation. At first, it blew my fuses, but when I decided to make a feature film, I became much more detached from all of it. I was not interested anymore in whether it was to be privatised or not, but in the kind of people that lived in such an atmosphere. I began to make interviews with the young ones living in a workers' hostel, then I reached a story seedling in which we engaged in together with Szilárd Podmaniczky. Alig is a pure case study for Eastern Sugar.

I actually became aware of the presence of a party resort in Balatonaliga when in the mid-1990s; we were unable to "circumnavigate" Lake Balaton by bike because the road ended with a barrier.

Lake Balaton continuous to be impossible to "circumnavigate" by bike because of a fence which closes the lower road between Balatonaliga and Balatonakarattya. You have to go up to Route 70 and proceed in heavy traffic. The old lock is still there. When privatised once, it might be replaced by a shinier one, but the fence will still remain. It is a damned place.

Are you attracted to the "chasing" professions of the hotel and catering industry? You made 2 films on both occupations. Waiters and couriers are distant relatives, aren't they?

Yes, indeed, since they both represent a sort of temporariness, a parking lane. I seek people who have not yet decided what to do with themselves. These days, one seems so unlikely to decide to pursue studies at the secondary school for catering and then to be a waiter/waitress for the rest of one's life. Being a bicycle courier is fun at the age of 17 - not as much as at the age of 45. I do not really like intellectual heroes, artists and journalists. I cannot identify with them when writing a story. I prefer more down-to-earth, simpler characters. These peers fascinate me more and I can interpret them better.

This mentioning of characters brings us back to the beginning of our discussion, the character of the "old" bartender in Szezon. I might have found an apt wording of the scene with László Sinkó in the film - irrespective of the specific weather - in Dezső Szomory's short story, Hófúvás (Blizzard), which I read today. The hero awaits a train in a small railway restaurant. but it is late because of a blizzard:

"It is already 3 hours late.
- And it will only be more! - says the waiter, who puts a cup of coffee before me on the table." (.) "This voice, the voice of a simple night waiter was such and this voice was uttered from a soul that was virtually part of the blizzard, the night and the sadness. I have never heard an actor who was so much into a situation with his own voice, with the three words he uttered. I could write columns of this voice. The mysterious connection between the blizzard and the life of this waiter could be explored further. The way this resigned voice spoke, it could be felt that this man was also in the blizzard. That his whole life was blown away by the snow. Blown all the way to this place, this little railway station."

László Sinkó is an unbelievable character, what is more, he comes from a catering dynasty, and his father was an innkeeper. He can tap beer with his eyes closed. We need the calm and security he radiates.

What will happen to the Strand Film Society (Madzag Filmegylet) grown from the class of Simó? Will you remain a group with throwaways and rallies or will you convert into, say, a film production company?

It might be shaping up by now. We try to take ourselves seriously; it is just that everyone is so occupied elsewhere all the time. We make different kinds of films, we make a living from different projects, and we have different goals. If we could at least agree on what makes a film good and bad - as Dogma markets itself, if you like - then something could develop from it, a lot more than a simple film production company. To us, personal integrity matters the most, this of course makes it a lot more difficult, though maybe more sincere, too. This is otherwise a general sign of the times. No one likes to be embedded closely in a team. The cult of an individual voice and personality is in fashion these days. Friendship and nostalgia, however, binds us together. And if there is big trouble, we do something. What keeps us together is that nothing is certain in our lives: there is no film factory, and we are not employed by any other firm either. And you must belong somewhere sometimes because it is extremely difficult to wander around the world saying "something will surely happen once". The deaths of two of our professors are inevitable forces of cohesion for the Madzag. At least we had Simó, we had Schiffer before. Now there is nothing. Of course when we are praised or backbitten from within or outside the guild, we are often squeezed onto the same platform; this is a lot simpler for everyone. A shared studio was a long-standing dream of Simó, to implement the same type of workshop efforts by renewing Hunnia that worked so nicely in the 1960s, say at BBS (Balázs Béla Stúdió). Madzag is made up of ten people and a thousand kind of stories. I should rather say, tends to exist. It does not revolve at 150 percent all the time, sometimes only at 90 percent.

(Pictures are taken from the home page of Eastern Sugar - the editor)