Cristi Puiu We are all alien civilisations

When I arrive for our interview, I find him lying still in a large leather armchair, in the living room of his office. It’s pretty dark. His editor, his producer and a kid’s pink bicycle are in the room. I later see the bike in a sketch of the poster on his laptop. “I didn’t like their artsy proposals, so I sent them my own”, says Puiu.

He seems exhausted but calm. Acting in his latest film was extremely tiring, but he’s happy with the result - “I am a lucky guy”. We move to his even darker office. “You should’ve seen the bedroom atmosphere in this room while we were editing the film”, he remarks.

I ask for an outline of Aurora just to get him started, but he resists: “I would betray my film if I tried to put everything in two phrases”. He won’t even say if it’s a crime story. All I can get, after some talking, is that “it’s an enquiry of how we all live in our own heads”.

Instead, he talks about Hitler. There’s this legend that he once said: “All those who paint the grass in blue and the sky in green must be sterilized” - so all those who think differently must be punished. But, by saying this, he himself is different, since he’s the only one thinking it. “In a way, Hitler is a sort of a model for my character in Aurora. So then… this film is research of a man who defies patterns”, he affirms.

The trigger for Aurora was a night-time TV show he used to watch, with stories about criminals. “I realized there’s something out of this world that makes one eliminate another”, he explains. How does somebody get so detached from his own person that he can commit murder? For Puiu, murder is an erroneous impulse, a reaction of our brain which misinterpreted some codes. So, how then could one ignore his own brain?

He takes a small pause and tries opening the door to the balcony, but it just won’t stay still. “You know”, he continues, “it’s complicated. We are all fighting with our own brains. All the time. Our brain has some fixed data that helps it keep our body alive and protect it. That’s why it has all sorts of mechanical reactions to everything. It assumes, it edits, it keeps certain things without asking for our approval. So then, where’s the real You? The You-You?”. I take a nervous sip of my glass of water. He finished his a long time ago. “This whole living-in-our-head issue can become a real tragedy. Because we can’t get in the other’s head, since we are trapped in our own. We can’t really communicate”. It’s the same with the public that should receive films with a tabula rasa, but, by nature, can’t help judging. They say Aurora is way too long. “Three hours makes half of them faint”, says Puiu with a bitter smile. “But then, what is three hours? We waste much more time doing nothing, during a day. Three hours is long indeed, if you compare it to a drosophila melanogaster’ s lifespan. I do care about my spectators, but only if they care about me. The spectator can watch my film or not. It’s completely up to him. An artist is laid there, naked, exposing himself, and the public accepts it or not. That’s why, when making a film, I first of all have to be loyal to myself. The rest is only fiction and speculation. We are alien civilizations, each one of us. And we have a hard time decoding ourselves, so how could we understand others?”

He says that “if it were up to me, I could work on an endless film. People could walk in and out and watch different pieces of the film, in its different stages”. So, I conclude to myself while he turns off the lights as we prepare to leave, the films that reach us are actually coherent pieces of an intricate and endless journey in Cristi Puiu’s head.

By Miruna Vasilescu