Tamás Tóth : The Russian line?

Would you like to tell us what Natasha is about?

Do I really have to?... Well, it is all right, but in just a nutshell... A young Hungarian man studies in Moscow, a linguist who speaks a great number of languages, and he is just about to finish his studies, graduate and go home. In the students' hostel where he lives everybody is getting ready for going home anyway, parties are thrown all the time, everybody is saying good-bye, and the building is resounding with the noises of having fun. The Hungarian boy's friends chase him along the building out of mischief, the boys bursts into a room, and there he stands face to face with a young woman, whom he seems to remember from somewhere before. He is enchanted. Our Hungarian hero happens to collect bells and the next day he meets a man on the market-place, which he visits to buy bells. The two young men look each other in the eye and just then a shooting starts, the Hungarian is injured, and the young man of Moscow takes him to his home to dress his wound. It turns out that he and the enchanting young woman, Natasha, are brother and sister. The unusual pair comes from a family of shamans in far-away Siberia. Following in the footsteps of her shaman grandmother, the young woman is a healing shaman disciple, and she owns a bobcat, while the young man is the priest of black magic who hangs out at nights in a mask, and participates in the darkest of dealings (This is something the audience will probably have difficulties understanding... ) The Hungarian man finds himself in this weird family, where the brother and the sister themselves seem to be entangled in incestuous love. But the Hungarian does not seem to grasp the situation. He is moved by all this, but does not comprehend what is going on. The man and Natasha are falling in love, they are on the verge of confessing it to each other, when the prophesied fate of the brother, - who is enormously jealous - is fulfilled, and he is shot by unknown persons. The magic disappears, and the brother and the sister with it. The boy has nothing left but his memories. He takes them home to Budapest. The closing frames show the man walk across the Chain Bridge alongside with the bobcat, Natasha's bobcat, this perfect animal.... But the audience will have difficulties understanding this, too, and they will say it is nothing but kitsch....

Why are you so keen to get prepared for the audience not understanding your film, that the message will not get through?

Because here in our country, the mere word "Russian" immediately calls forth a repulsion. That repulsion has historical-political roots. There is a looking down on everything Russian. I have not experienced it so strongly with my first film, but by now I have become a trifle more sceptical. But I still insist that the audience should not think of that! I am going through the very same story now again with the producer that I have gone through with Children of the Iron God , i.e. he is trying to get political topocality into my film. He wants to see what the word "Russian" evokes in him. And for all this, I insist that no realism, no real Moscow be searched for in my film! This is a story for adults. I am more proud to acknowledge this than I at the time of my previous film, but I am also full of anxiety. That is what prompts me to keep repeating that this film is not about what everybody thinks it is. This is not the Moscow people take Moscow to be, this is not the same Russia.... Not the Russia that is shown on the RTL or the news-reel, the fearful madhouse and the total misery. I do not wish to deal with that, to take that as the subject matter of may art. That is material suitable for documentarists perhaps. What I would like to make people meet is a micro-world in the terrifying Stalinist architecture. For all Moscow's being poverty-ridden, and decline, the city is still imperial. An imperial metropolis, with a multitude of all kinds of different people. A melting pot. It is a centre, juts as it used to be, but before the kids of party men use dto flock there, and now those who are interested in all this, or who want to try their luck there, do the same out of their free will. And there seem to be more of them than before. I know and love Moscow to a great extant. Cartographically speaking, it is very simply, but is huge, wide, elusive, adventurous, dynamic. In one word, imperial. I have a romantic inclination...

Being a young Hungarian director, it is the second time that you have made a film of a Russian theme. You are shooting in Russia, with Russian actors, a Russian crew, Russian(?) money...

Shall I give you my short CV, then?... I was born in Budapest in 1966 to parents who were teachers. When fresh out of collage, my parents went to teach to Szentkál, a tiny village in the hills of Bakony. I spent my first few years there, never going to a kindergarten, being brought up among the kids of the village like a tough little village boy. Then my parents, for having been so-called good cadres, were sent to the town of Veszprém to work as political administrators. They were young, enthusiastic people from working class origins, which was not unusual in those days. I went to elementary school in Veszprém, my father worked at the party committee, my mother in the trade union. Then again, as a result of their position, we moved to Budapest, and I started in the Kölcsey Secondary Grammar School. In 1982, - I was in the second grade then - our family suddenly packed up, and we moved to Moscow where my father was to work in the diplomatic corps. I suffered a lot because I was just in love then, and this foreign mission cut through everything, right in the middle. Yet now I think it was an advantage, because from 1983 onwards, up until now, from Breznyev and all through I have been an eye-witness of everything that happened in the empire. And I am at home in Moscow as well.

You must have lived in the diplomats' quarter. Could you separate yourself from that kind of living?

Not in the diplomats' quarter, but in a diplomats' building, to be sure. I was privileged, there is no denying that. That I successfully passed the entrance examination to the Academy may be partly explained by the fact that my father worked in the cultural field, knew many people, and I know that there were many who loved him. At least I hope that this was the case. I had to sit for the first turn at home, and the rest in Moscow at the VGIK. I have wanted to become a director ever since I was in the seventh grade, and I wanted to direct animation films. I was a member of the children’s animation studio run by Ferenc Varsány, and I never got tired of drawing, and I still do a lot of drawing today.

Some people say that your drawings are better than your films...

They may be...

When did your eyes first open - as a privileged son of a political cadre - that reality is not exactly what is written on the posters?

There was no kind of idealism in our family life. We were a family of politicians, but there was no political education at home, and for this I never had to face anything unexpected or shocking that had been kept a secret from me or of which the exact opposite had been told to me. My parents are enlightened, democratically-minded people, and this makes me have great respect for them, although my way is taking me somewhere entirely different, the difference is like day and night between us today. Politics as a profession never moved me, I respect it, I know it is needed, but I prefer to take a distance to it. My first two years in Moscow were spent in suffering, because I suffered from what I had to leave behind. And only what I allowed infiltrated into this suffering from the outer world. I certainly noticed the fact that our fellow-students made a distinction between themselves and us Hungarians, and perhaps the Yugoslavs, and said that we were doing it better. I went to school with the average Russian kids, and they seemed to be keeping a respectful distance from us Europeans. They thought that I was from a more developed and cultured socialist country, while they belonged to a giant, hard-working nation. I was the little one, being well-off, and they were the big, who are in poverty but carry the little on their back. And I was even proud of this. But that I, well we, did not notice that we were approaching the end is just a fact.

What have you seen of the big Russian reality?

Almost nothing. I lived among intellectuals, alongside with young would-be artists, and I saw almost nothing of the life of the ordinary people directly, yet perhaps I did indirectly, through the families of my friends. Of course, I have seen unbelievably poverty, but I would not know more of the problems of the common Russian people if I had lived with a Russian working class girl for two years, as I did live with an actress. I was not part of the big Russian reality, and never became an integrated part of it. I am not quite a part of there, as I am not yet quite a part of here, either. There is a breathtaking raw material in me, which somehow got into me and is just there, which I am unable to process, while it also disturbs me placing myself back here. And I would like to preserve that feeling that I have seen the BIG...

In Children of the Iron God people lead their lives on a subsistence level, typical almost of nomadic societies, exchanging goods. This is an almost pictueresqly disastrous, run-down environment which you had to experience yourself....

This is a post-modern environment which is run-down symbolically, romantically, sentimentally and idealistically... Just a pretext. Out of the pretext of reality, I wanted to draw up a big question-mark about this lanky, musculous human existence, and ask the question why is there all this? Things of extensive dimension happen, they fill entire lives, unbelievable energies whirl around, and they lead nowhere. Such a huge piece of thing, and it is all about nothing! I wanted to produce a big sound with a hit of the hammer. The screen-play writers have been my fellows at the VGIK, one an Orenburg, Suksin type, the other a typical urban intellectual, and they nicely complemented each other. One was all flesh, the other all brain. The guy from Orenburg has since then climbed drunk from one window over to the next on the tenth floor. He fell down and died.

How come that you have not turned into an alcoholic?

Why should I have turned into an alcoholic? There is always someone to ask this question. People here drink an awful lot, too! My organism suffered from it, but I love it and I like the culture of it, the culture of feasting. My friends come, we lay the table, put the vodka forward, then the glasses...

There is little Hungarian money in Iron God, it was shot mainly with Russian money...

There is almost no Russian money in that. There are many who say that it is a feature film that has not turned out quite good, while it is an excellent low budget film. It was made five minutes before the collapse of the empire, at a time when it seemed that films could still be made out of friendship. I was given a roll of raw material for one day, thanks mainly to Sergei Kozlov, my director of lighting. Our graduation piece, the Madman and the Angel was made together, which was my graduation piece as a director, and his as a director of lighting. Attempts were repeatedly made to stop Iron God, it was successfully halted for six months, and we had to push forward, bring it along, not let go, to demand hysterically that it be made, while Bulgakovian motives were experienced in an apartment with shared tenancy, etc. When it was given an award at the Film Week, there were many who grumbled about that one of the prizes went to a Russian film. Only János Rózsa congratulated us in a telegram.... I was getting prepared for returning home, feeling that I have nothing more to do in Moscow. It was then that János Rózsa called to ask me to make another film there. I was thinking a great deal what about... What about? Well, Moscow, myself, my years as a student there. About a boy, who went somewhere, got to see something strange, beautiful, touching, which never became his, because it can never become his, but the memory will stay with him forever. I wrote the screen-play, but Andrea Vészits, the dramaturge was of great help, as well as my friend Géza Bereményi or an unusual man called István Bálint... , and Zoltán Ternyák, the protagonist in The Madman and the Angel. Ternyák, having graduated from the Hungarian Academy, went to the Moscow of the perestroyka on a fellowship of the theatre, which has been his deepest desire, it was fulfilled, and in two weeks' time he was about to flee the place, which was when I found him and persuaded him to stay, and the two of us made the film which in a way is a pre-study for Natasha... I did not want to have anybody with me on my journey, knowing that they would only disturb me. Eventually a script-writer accompanied me, and that was the first time he was doing a script. Again I asked Sergei to be my director of lighting. In the meantime he became a real star, and Konchalovski invited him to America. When I met him, he was already shooting in London, but in view of an old friendship he said all right, let's do one more film together. I took good Hungarian forints with me, turned into dollars of course, and two-thirds of the budget was Hungarian, one third-Russian.

Everything went smoothly in the end, didn't it?

Disregarding the fact that everybody thought, well, that Tamás Tóth equals the Russian line. As if I was the Russian ambassador, they thought that Tamás Tóth would surely do a good little Russian film rather cheaply again, and everybody will get to see the daily topicality, the political in it, that is what the audience would like to see.... But you can't make a cheap film any more in Russia, nobody knows what really is going on in Moscow or in Russia, for all that everybody pretends to. Making a film financed by the Russian state debt was also an idea...... And this is what I did. This is what I had to shoot a film about.