Slovak-born film director Juraj Herz has secrets, of course, but very few of them are sinister. In person he is dignified, charming, and often generous in sharing his thoughts. He has some rooms, however, that he prefers to keep locked.
Houses, like people, hold secrets. Some are hidden in plain sight. Others lurk behind closed doors that open only with firm, unyielding pressure. Some are buried within the walls.
Juraj Herz has secrets, of course, but very few of them are sinister. In person he is dignified, charming, and often generous in sharing his thoughts. He has some rooms, however, that he prefers to keep locked.
The filmmaker’s shadows contain horrors from the past. When he was still a young boy, the second world war ripped him and his family from their home in Kežmarok, Slovakia. German families in Eisdorf attempted to help the family, but they were discovered by the Hlinkova garda and sent to concentration camps within Germany. The family survived the war and returned home, only to find that the same Slovak thugs who had collaborated the Nazis were now in league with the communists, that Eisdorf had been liquidated and its German residents expelled from the country.
As a young man and aspiring film director, Herz was looked down upon by the rising FAMU anti-establishment, who thought the AMU student didn’t have the proper academic credentials. Sběrné surovosti, his contribution to the omnibus film Perličky na dně (Pearls From the Deep), was cut from the final version. Bohumil Hrabal offered him both Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains) and Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England), but as Herz tells the story, both stories were taken from him. His lingering anger is one of the things that he would prefer to conceal.
The films he succeeded in making were often manipulated by the communist regime and, if released at all, emerged dismembered and scarred from the idealogues in the editing room. The final straw was when his film Straka v hrsti (The Magpie in the Wisp) was banned from release.
Exasperated, he emigrated to West Germany on July 31, 1987. “I remember it clearly because I had visa until 30 July,” he said. “The main reason was that I fell in love with a certain Tereza Pokorná, who became my wife.”
Herz continued to work as a director in theatre and in film in Germany, but it wasn’t easy. “There were professionals in the Czech Republic, whereas in Germany almost all were amateurs who pretended to be professionals,” he said.
It has been 12 years since Herz’s film Pasáž was released in cinemas. Now he returns to the screen with the horror T.M.A., which had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July. Herz has recently finished shooting historical film Habermannův mlýn, which will be released in Czech and German cinemas at the beginning of next year. What does the 70-year-old director plan next? An erotic horror.
You lived in Germany for a long time. Now you come out with two Czech films at once. What was the return to the Czech environment like?
I lived in Germany for 12 years. I shot films for the French and I shot in America, but I lost my relationships and connections here. A new generation of directors and producers grew up. It was difficult to return after 12 years.
Why do you call your latest movie T.M.A. instead of Tma (Darkness)?
I do not call it that. I did not like that title right from the start. Darkness has been used in many book and film titles. I had other ideas, such as The Singing of Dead Children, but Warner Bros, which is releasing the film, said that T.M.A. was a good name for Czechs and foreigners. What happened is this. Somebody from Warner Bros called me and asked: “When will T.M.A. be finished?” I said: What is T.M.A.? “T.M.A. is your movie.” No, I am shooting Tma, I told him. I looked in a dictionary for words beginning with letters T, M and A and I came up with “The Mysterious Address”. The house that is in centre of the film stands alone. There is no street and no number.
It is your first film in 13 years.
More precisely, the first film for cinemas. I was shooting TV films and also theatre plays.
You were not interested in films for cinema?
The problem was money. I had scripts for films written down but I had no one who would finance it. So I had to do other things until I found a producer.
Critics did not like T.M.A. very much. What do you think happened?
I spend a lot of time in Germany, so I have not read any reviews. Except for my beloved critic Mirka Spáčilová. She always gives me a hard time but I think it’s just a game between the two of us … T.M.A. is a horror, and there is no horror tradition in the Czech Republic. I have been to a number of countries. In recent years I was in France, Spain and Belgium, and there they have an amazing community of horror lovers. Here, the viewers have to discover it first.
It seems that you like horrors, though.
I have been reading fairy tales or romantic stories that were also scary since I was a child. I wanted to make movies like that too. It started with Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator). It was not the kind of horror where blood splashes around. I had four more movies like that ready but they did not get approved. So I opted for the path of least resistance and I shot films like Petrolejové lampy, about the wife of a syphilis victim who wants a baby but cannot have one. This is also kind of horror.
What are you afraid of? Do you have any phobias?
I used to be afraid of bandages. I don’t know why. This was between 1966 and 1987 when I couldn’t shoot anyone wearing a bandage. My first feature film, Znamení Raka (Sign of Cancer), takes place in a hospital but you do not see a single bandage.
Spalovač mrtvol was shot in 1968, one year after Night of the Living Dead. Did you know the movie?
I knew of it but back then there was no chance of seeing it. I could travel abroad only rarely and so I had no access to movies like that.
What about now? Do you follow new horror movies?
I often get invited to international festivals of horror movies, so I have access to the newest and most interesting of the genre.
Have you met George Romero or other horror directors?
Yes. They all are very nice. Horror festivals are different from normal film festivals. We are a big family, we all know each other. We are happy when a new horror film comes out. The audience is different too. They know a lot about horror.
What are your favourites?
I like The Others by Alejandro Amenábara. There is no blood and the movie has a surprising twist at the end. I like the content and the way it was made. I also like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. That is the kind of movie I would like to do if there was someone capable of writing it.
Your horror films have elements of black comedy – tragic or scary themes with a comic overlap, which has become quite trendy in filmmaking. Can you take credit for it?
I don’t think so. All my life I have wanted to shoot a black comedy, set in a concentration camp, from the point of view of a 10-year-old boy. Those who read the concept told me I was crazy. They said I cannot shoot a black comedy from the concentration camp. When I was in the concentration camp, though, I experienced it as a black comedy.
Explain that, please.
I was born in Slovakia. Even though we were christened as Protestants we were warned in advance we would have to go to the concentration camps. We were hiding in a village that was purely German. The whole village knew about us because my father was a pharmacist and everyone knew him. Then, after three weeks, they told us we could come back. The Slovak soldiers from the Hlinkova garda informed on us to the German SS and they arrested us. In the end all of us — my father, my mother and I – came back from the concentration camp and we went to thank the Germans that tried to save us. The village was empty, they were all driven away. The same soldiers who helped the SS already held high positions and later entered the Communist party.
Who were those people?
In almost every occupied country there was a group of people who collaborated with the Germans. The Slovak state was relatively well off back then because we had our own president, Jozef Tiso. During the war it was calm. The Slovak soldiers from the Hlinkova garda were similar to the Croatian Ustaša – they simply collaborated with the Germans.
The film you are currently preparing, Habermann, is also set during the war. What can you tell us about it?
Habermann is a loose adaptation of a novella by Josef Urban. It takes place on the Czech-German border in 1937-1945. The film opens a new perception of those times. I think it is very true. It is more about the reality, about what really happened. Those times have not been spoken of much. It is only now being opened up in Germany and there is a great interest in that.
What took it so long?
Some things need time. Look at my film Pasáž, for example, which was shown here in 1997. Even though it was a French-Belgian-Czech movie, it came too soon. Local audiences were not ready for it. I had been in the West and I had a different perspective from the Czechs, who were very optimistic back then. That movie was too pessimistic for them. But we were talking about the war.
Habermann is basically about things that were impossible to talk about some years ago but that we can talk about now. People have changed. A new generation of grandsons has arrived and they want to know what their fathers and grandfathers kept from them. I experienced it 15 years ago in Germany. The children suddenly wanted to know what it was like during the war, what was the story about the concentration camps. People used to keep quiet about those things before.
Germans only started talking about the war only 15 years ago? Wasn’t this topic common there in the 1960s and 1970s?
I think that that is too early. I experienced it at the end of the 1980s and beginning of 1990s, when young people started to be interested in it. There was a TV series about the war and people were quite surprised. Then Schindler’s List came out and significantly shifted the thinking.
How do you depict relationships between Czechs and Germans in Habermann?
The relationship is good at the start. Then there is a crisis in Germany. Germans living in the Czech Republic knew that there was a crisis in Germany but they thought and hoped that they would be better of with Hitler, who promised jobs. Many of them did not know the war would come.
You mentioned the crisis in Germany. Do you see any parallel with the crisis now?
I am not an economist. Every crisis, though, favours dictators. People want a strong hand that will lead them out of the crisis.
Do you feel any sympathy towards the Sudeten Germans?
No, but the way the Czechs took revenge on the Germans is unacceptable for me. Those were not only mistakes. Mistakes can arise out of misunderstanding. The Czechs only found women and children in the border region. The men were already dead or gone. In the first wave, before the Beneš decrees, the Czechs murdered, destroyed and sought revenge. They wanted German property. That is why the first wave was so terrible.
Do you favour abolishing the Beneš decrees?
Basically, yes. The decrees, however, do not play a role in the film we are making. The decrees became valid in September 1945, and our film ends in May 1945.
Have you met any Sudeten Germans who were expelled after the war?
Not really, but while I was working on the film, one very good actress accepted a very small role. I asked her why she wanted to do it. She said her grandparents had been expelled from the Sudetenland. I expanded the role for her.
Jiří Menzel also touches on the Sudeten issue in I Served the King of England.
That is something else. That is in Bohumil Hrabal’s book [on which the film is based]. I was in fact the first director who was supposed to shoot that movie. At the beginning of the 1970s, though, the movie was not approved for political reasons.
T.M.A also touches upon the Sudeten German topic.
That is a coincidence, really. T.M.A. was not supposed to be about the Sudetenland at all. It was supposed to be about the murder of mentally disabled people. I was interested in why the Germans were killing their own. They were not Jews or Roma but German.
Most seem to think that Germany has largely paid for its crimes. Do you agree?
There are Germans and then there are Germans. When I was in Germany and I met a 70-year-old German, I would ask myself: What did he do during the war? I have a very good friend, a producer, who suffered from depression for a long time. I asked him why. He said he had an 80-year-old father whom he both loved and hated because he was in the SS.
What’s next for you? Do you have a new film planned?
I have a good screenplay, an erotic horror called Secondhand Paradise. I am 75, though, and I do not need a new movie every year. I also want to do some theatre. I am very bad at going around asking if anyone has anything for me, so I am glad the theatre bosses come to me.
Juraj Herz (born 1934, Kežmarok)
– 1943-45: interned in Nazi concentration camps Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen.
– Studied photography at Arts and Design school in Bratislava and later studied directing and acting at the puppet faculty of DAMU in Prague (together with Jan Švankmajer).
– 1967: his first feature film, Znamení Raka.
– 1968: made his most idiosyncratic film, Spalovač mrtvol, based on the novel by Ladislav Fuks.
– Further filmography: Petrolejové lampy (1970), Morgiana (1971), Holky z porcelánu (1974), Holka na zabití (1975), Panna a netvor (1978), Deváté srdce (1978), Upír z Feratu (1981).
– His film T.M.A. (2009) can be seen in cinemas at the moment, Habermann will be released in 2010.
