‘To be with the film even after the film’
An interview with Vaterland director David Jarab

Readers unfamiliar with Vaterland may wish to read a review found here…

David Perilli (DP) At the screening of Vaterland I saw you speak and you gave nothing away, basically talking in two directions at the same time. For example ‘some of you might like it, some of you might not like it’, ‘some of you should sit near the screen, some of you should sit far away from the screen’ and so on. In this frame of mind could you describe Vaterland for me?

David Jarab (DJ) It’s impossible! For me Vaterland is a really personal film, a view of society. I’m using the requisites and all these things from my country but you can use it as a model for other relationships, other cultures. At one screening someone asked if it was about the Germans and the Czechs. I said okay if you found this inside it’s possible but it could be about the English and the Indians; it could be about a variety of relationships between the first, second and third, fourth and perhaps fifth worlds, so it’s just between the cultures. The first world is at the top but it can rot, and the second is damaged by being between the natural and the first one, the third is primitive and so on. It’s a vision of the world, and I’m using the humour and everything else to describe this. People are not stupid to be told things like ‘this is good, this is bad’ I’m saying this – I’m saying there are lots of problems in every class in every culture, so maybe the Skeleters [the quarry of the hunters in Vaterland] are the lowest – they cannot defend themselves but if you move it’s going to be someone else, it’s all about the problems in society. Looking through my eyes, through my dreams and the things I’m using is like morphology, it’s my vision but people can take part of this. It’s open for interpretation so you can put your problems which you might feel more than mine into it. I try to keep it open, I try to give everything two or three answers and that’s why I think it’s good for someone who’s not afraid of thinking and to be with the film even after the film.

DP David, I understand that you’ve got a background in theatre. Did that have an influence upon Vaterland?

DJ I write, I direct, I’m an artistic director of the Theatre Comedy in Prague. I can’t say it had an immediate effect on Vaterland, it’s difficult to say. I’m trying to separate my thinking about this film. In the theatre I’m just trying to put forward something like real life. I have a text and a space, and then the actors bring their own talents to my texts. In films it’s a double vision, it’s much more in my head so it’s a bit different. I did use actors from the theatre so I knew everybody which is different to other filmmakers who just pick faces. I think this sometimes doesn’t work because they don’t know each other and you have to have some sort of special placard on which you can communicate. It’s much better if they’re with you.

DP So how did you come up with the idea of Vaterland?

DJ I wanted to make a film for a long time ago. I was thinking about it, writing about it also. It was my hobby. Maybe I know more about film history than theatre history. I was thinking years ago about using film methods in the theatre but this didn’t work. In the beginning Vaterland was just a joke, a funny story which I created about the Skeleters and the hunt. Later I put it to the circumstances and built this whole new world. This world has come to me and to the people who watch the film is real and that’s why it sticks. I made a new world from all these things, added more and more things in the re-writes, 26 versions in all, obtained the money which took a year and then spent two years making the film. So it took three years to make the film because I was working at the theatre and because we shot over two summers.

DP Vaterland was shot digitally. Why?

DJ It was cheaper and much quicker. Vaterland was made on digital video and then changed to film later by computer. We also changed the colour and used some other tricks which are non-visual and concealable. I don’t like such visual tricks and I avoid them in the theatre. Vaterland was shot in 30 days which is all that we had the money for. Later we tried to find what is good doing it this way - shooting on video, and this had a big influence on the visual language. With video you must film very close, you must do close ups because it works only if you are very close. Generally that is its nature, you must have close ups. The film camera however is a magical thing - you point it there and it works! Video you must do much more work with, more than pointing, it’s like drawing. You must go with the camera inside of the actors, be with them. It’s like speaking about them not painting. So that’s why the visual language is very different to film. In the end we changed the colour because colours are so prominent in video. We changed everything with the correctors, changed to more stylised colours.

DP Part of Vaterland’s fun is its different-ness. It’s the same but it’s not the same. One of the things I loved about it were the hunting tools, all these made up tools that can do all these different things. There’s the one that gets the Skeleters out of the pit or the one with the net. Who created them?

DJ I designed them – not everything, but it’s my fantasy generally. All these things, the names, how it works and how it looks, and the artists who made it – it doesn’t exist.

DP Something that occurred to me is whether you have hunted yourself?

DJ I’m not really a hunting guy, just fishing really, but I have a very ambivalent feeling about hunting. In some sense I feel it’s something really atavistic. Really something part of our culture. It transforms another way in our minds. In some ways it’s necessary to hunt.

DP You mean like kids playing computer games…

DJ Yeah but it’s not the best way of using our hunting sense. The characters in Vaterland – they come back and they want to hunt. They want to continue the tradition but they only have half the map. They know ‘how’ but they don’t know ‘why’. Hunting is like ‘how’ and also ‘why’, and if you say you can answer both why not. This is for the villagers in the film they know how and they know why, it’s that whole part of the world. We have lost some reasons for doing such things and that’s why we have some traditions which we do not practice. I have some sympathies to hunting and in some sense I think it’s necessary sometimes. I’m against the feeling of the western culture that hunting is barbarian. In the film they come and say something like we are ‘ecological hunters’, but the killing happens accidentally anyway.

DP When I saw your film I thought of fox hunting in England.

DJ Yes I was thinking about England a lot because all these things in England really inspired me such as tiger hunters in India. The pictures Richard has in the car in the film are from a book called ‘Hunting in Turkey’ - which is really strange because it just has photographs of people holding bloody animal heads. That’s why I shot the same sort of scenes with these animals. So it has some connections to fox hunting. Hunting foxes is like, crazy. It’s good if they hunt deer for food for example. I’m not against hunting animals with guns if it’s for a normal way and you then eat the meat – that’s the normal way. In some ways it’s good if one kills and eats something. It’s a process far removed from the ‘meat factories’ which provide us with meat wrapped in plastic bags. In this way hunting is not bad, but hunting foxes is crazy solely to continue a tradition. It’s more than fox hunting though it’s about hunting people, beings. The Americans pulled Saddam Hussein from his hole! I didn’t think this but it works. This happens very often to me, I write it in a play and it happens in some way in life.

DP When you wrote and directed Vaterland did you have any cinematic influences in mind?

DJ Not really but I can certainly find connections to some directors which I like of course. Buñuel and Goddard, and in some sense there’s a connection to Lynch in mixing dreams and reality. A lot of the influence was from books and the landscape. I was just driving through the landscape of the film with the verity of the music in the car. The car was like a camera, driving through that landscape. This was near the border in the North of the Czech Republic where the German occupation occurred, a very poor area. Yet still these German villages are there and the forests you see in the film. The church for example – it exists. Finding these locations, which were pregnant with history, which are already forgotten and which we don’t speak about - this was a big interest. Also ecological or adventure literature from Kerouac to Livingstone influenced me.

It’s about somebody who’s coming from somewhere to another world, in the present. It’s also that here’s some connection to this world, not literature but some roots maybe. The outsiders come but it’s not like they can come and then they can return to their safe world. This world is coming to them at the end. If you open the gates it opens both ways, you can never keep the world safe for you. If you want to go there, they can come here.

DP Talking of leaving, I have one more question to ask about food. I was interested how people reacted to the food in the film, the soup or the rock hare for example. My question to you is this though: Have you heard of Blood Pudding?

DJ Yes.

 

Vaterland has been shown extensively in the Czech Republic were it was received rapturously. It has since been shown at the Bratislava International Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival where I had the pleasure of watching it. It will shortly be shown at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film and the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival.

Check out the website here: http://www.czech-tv.cz/specialy/vaterland/