Interview - Péter Bergendy Director of The Exam (A Vizsga)

The Exam is a psychological drama, a historical piece and an action film at the same time, which one interested you the most?

All three! Originally I’m a psychologist, I have always been interested in human relationships and in history as well. The Exam is like an action film, but without any car chases. I feel it’s very important to speak about history in film, so that people can understand it better; you can use this understandable film language to discuss very important historical issues. And human issues as well.

How hard was it to do research on the communist secret police?

Our scriptwriter Norbert Köbli investigated this matter. The agent lists are not public, we still have problems about it. However, we had access to educational films that were used for training agents, so our film is based on them.

Is the general public interested in the history of the communist secret police? Is it a big issue in society?

We don’t reallly know much about the activity of the secret police after the 1956 revolution. I think anybody who is interested in this matter can find documentary information in the film – this situation could have happened. Nothing is based on real facts, but everything could have happened.

Your characters are people who are hiding many things, it’s their job and they do it really well; how did you work with the actors on that?

We agreed to shoot everything as if it happened that very moment, we didn’t want any backstory. For example, when Andris and Eva love eachother, it’s a fake love of course, it was their task, but we agreed that they would act it as if they were really in love. There are so many twists and turns in the film, and before shooting we were wondering wether to tell the actors how the story ends, but we decided it would be better if they know.

How did the reconstruction of the fifties go?

I have been working with the same professional crew for more that 20 years, and they have experience with it because a lot of films about the fifties were made in Hungary. At the same time, I like to examine everything, for example I even examined the cobbler stones from those times in photos. There are also a few computer tricks; this is a low budget film and we didn’t always have money to reconstruct everything, but we tried to do as much as we could.

By Andreea Dobre