Biography

[on Morgiana (1972)] the head dramaturg Ludvík Toman said that it was a sadomasochist film and it had to be banned. Then he also told me that he thought I would make a romantic film, so I tried to explain to him that it is romantic, but he couldn't understand that because he thought that I made it too scary. He couldn't catch that in romanticism the writers also used lots of scary, eerie moments. I was forbidden to make films for the next two years.

[on Zastihla me noc (1986)] When I was in the concentration camp I experienced one scene. The first day I came into the concentration camp they undressed us and sent us into the showers. There were only a few children and the rest were men who started a terrible panic. At that time, it was already known what the showers meant. I was there looking at the panic-stricken adults and I knew there was no gas in the tubes because there were glass windows in the room. It would be easy to break them and let the gas out. So I knew it couldn't be a gas chamber. After a while, water started to come out from the tubes, and all the men were screaming that it is just water and not gas. This scene you know from Steven Spielberg. But ten years before him, I shot this scene with women in the film Zastihla me noc (1986). Spielberg copied the scene shot by shot from me.

[on Kulhavý dábel (1968)] We were working on the screenplay, but the administration said that even though it's about a filthy devil everything filthy has to be cut out. Of course, there were supposed to be lots of erotic scenes. After that I just didn't want to make the film anymore. But I was an employee of the film studio Barrandov and they told me that everything is set for the shooting and they needed somebody to make the film. So I made the film with an aversion because the film was cut, deplumed from the very beginning.

[on The Cremator (1969)] I went to various projections of the film in many different countries, from the Netherlands to Naples, and I was keen to see how the reactions of the audience were completely different in every country. In Prague, people were depressed; in Slovakia, they laughed; in the Netherlands, it was a comedy from the beginning to the end; in Italy, the spectators went from the cinema right to the bar because cremation is just impossible, awful and unacceptable in their country.

[on Straka v hrsti (1983)] Because the film was "in a safe" for the next 13 years, it got really old. In the second half of the eighties, it was a very ferocious film. From all my films, time hurt this film the most.