Does the fact that you skipped "film school education" supported a kind of individuality in the way you write your stories? I think this is how everybody, every scriptwriter, every filmmaker should aim to make films. But in the particular case of the Romanian film school I have to say I’m glad I didn’t go there for four years. It’s killing. I know the teachers, they are filmmakers from the old times, and no good. It’s that simple. I wouldn’t even drink a beer with them, I don’t think they have anything to tell.

Do you co-write all your screenplays? Yes, and with one exception always with the director. I think it’s mandatory. First of all because many aspects related to what you see and what you hear come much closer to the director’s understanding of tension, fear, anguish – and those are very personal things. It’s better to have some of those belonging to the person who really makes the film afterwards. Second, if you work with a director, you have less surprises. There is of course when you write a script a path of authorship in it and ending up with a film that is completely different from what you wrote and is one of the most frustrating things in the world. Nothing from all your thinking and your raised questions and answers are properly represented on screen. It happened to me and it’s really a nightmare.

As a screenwriter and script consultant you have been one of the major figures of the so called ‘Romanian New Wave’. Do you like this term? No. Because I don’t believe that there is such thing as a new wave. Of course, it’s much simpler to put things in a drawer.

What happened in Romania is that for years and years and years making films for young directors was very difficult. All young directors, in order to make films, had to fall into the steps of the previous generation. To imitate them, to please them and therefore to make their debut. And all of a sudden with Stuff and Dough by Cristi Puiu, a movie that I also co-wrote, it changed. It was a film which has no relation to any previous, which was made without any help. And by seeing that this was possible, many others started to make films in the same way. All these young filmmakers know more or less each other but they are not friends. They just share the same enemy.

What about other countries? There is no Bulgarian nor Hungarian "New Wave" I wonder. In my youth I used to watch with vivid interest films done in Hungary and Poland. Probably the most relevant cinema in my young years were the Russian, the Polish and the Czech Cinema. They were some sort of models. Maybe those strong models were too strong for themselves. What I saw recently from Polish cinema is not at all remarkable. They still think about their old masters, Wajda, Kieslowski, I don’t think anything like this can be good anymore. Bulgarian cinema is not doing so great nowadays, they don’t seem to have a direction, they don’t know where to go. Financing is also a problem, that has turned out better in Romania.

So the success of the "New Wave" changed the filmmaking possibilities in Romania? Yes, not to a full extend though, the old guys still want to do movies and they still want to do it the old way. You have to imagine that a film done by a 60-yearold director costs maybe 1 Mio. Euros and it’s seen once or twice in the cinema, with five or ten people in the cinema. Sometimes I force myself to watch these movies. And they are really unwatchable. They are done for nothing.

What are your observations according to different cinema cultures? In Germany, where I come from, a lot of Romanian film, like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, weren’t even distributed, while in France it seems everyone has seen it… I do believe that Germany has a different idea about cinema compared to the rest of the world. This is probably the only place in the world, where you think you make a cinema-movie and in fact what you make is a TV-drama. But they are considered by everyone, by the makers, by the Berlinale, by the critics as being “Großes Kino”. There are very few films that are produced independent from Television. In Romania, France or Belgium, TV channels participate into making films they like because they can profit from tax redemption. I think good filmmaking here will start when people will make small budget movies saying what they want to say without the TVmoney and without the hope to distribute the movies; hopefully festivals will make them known and slowly, we’ll have a new system. The way it is now it doesn’t work.

by Arne Kohlweyer