Mungiu thrives in the fine art of storytelling
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FOR multi-award-winning Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, working with people who haven’t worked in films before is much more fun and enjoyable because “there’s freshness about them.”
To cast the actors for his films, Mungiu says he chooses people who are close to the characters and look like everyday people, the kind one would see on the street.
“I want my cinema to be truthful, it’s more important than being popular. I want to have people who come to watch what I propose to them without compromising. I don’t want to make a film that’s popular but not truthful enough.”
Mungiu, president of the Golden Goblet Awards jury panel at this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival and the first Romanian director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, held a master’s class on Thursday to share his experience and understandings of filmmaking.
Born in Iasi, Romania, Mungiu worked as an English teacher before taking up film.
“I felt this kind of joy to tell stories to people in my adolescent years. I found many interesting things next to me that I want to speak to people, but it wasn’t realistic for me in the 1980s to go to Bucharest and study film,” he says. “The school for cinema had very few place. It was fierce competition, very often you need to have a relationship with the industry to get in, and I was just a man from a town.”
He later enrolled in the University of Film in Bucharest to study directing.
His career in the film industry started with several short films. His first feature film “Occident” (2002) was praised by critics and won prizes at film festivals, including being featured in Director’s Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Mungiu’s success as a storyteller is widely recognized. His second feature, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” was a major success.
It was selected in the official competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d’Or for feature film.
In 2012, Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills” was included in the Cannes Film Festival again and won him the best screenplay and best actresses awards. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards.
In 2013, he was a jury member for the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Mungiu says that cinema was one of the few arts where time matters a lot. It can depict how time passes, but on condition that the storyteller respects the natural flow of time.
“I would respect the integrity of every moment. I won’t interrupt it. Once you interrupt a scene and a moment, you are sending a message to the audience that it’s me telling you what’s important. I would show you the best perspective for everything because I know better.”
When reading the short descriptions of films in the booklets at different film festivals, Mungiu finds they all look alike, but the difference is made by the details and the director’s approach.
“The basic decision I make before making a film is that I would check every moment I place in the film and ask myself if it’s likely to happen in reality. Sometimes filmmakers prefer to use the moments they like because they are spectacular, or they like it, but it’s not psychologically believable and they disturb the rhythm,” he says.
Mungiu used the first scene of his film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” as example. It was also the first scene he had shot, as respecting the chronological order of the screenplay is very helpful.
Shooting is a long process and everyone changes during the process. The actors also change during the shooting process as well as having more knowledge about the characters.
It’s useful to give them the freedom to become a little bit like the character by advancing in the order of the screenplay.
The scene started with a realistic conversation. Mungiu says he tried to focus on what’s important and the reaction of the characters instead of spending too much time giving information.
“One of the problems I see in cinema nowadays is that the writers use a lot of time writing dialogues that people don’t do in real life. For me it’s a key thing to be able to write dialogues which look like real conversation between real people.”
Mungiu grew up watching films about the Romanian history, but his generation of Romanian filmmakers is not into that kind of cinema anymore.
“We think the individual life is way more important than just the histories. We should be telling the stories that belong to somebody,” he said.
“Always find the story of somebody, an individual story that would stand for more, stand for society, and you can get the meaning of society through one particular story.”
Keeping the details consistent throughout the film is also a key. He tries to foresee as many details as possible, but at the end of the process, the challenge is to get the actors to do everything as it happens for the first time.
Mungiu is the writer, producer, director and distributor of his films, which gives him full freedom in making the film. “It’s my decisions and my responsibility,” he says.
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