Director Radu Jude will make a film with Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan in the lead role, known for his roles in international productions and recently awarded a Golden Globe.
„I’m going to make a Frankenstein in Romania with Sebastian Stan, who invited me to work together. Sebastian contacted me some time ago, told me he would like us to collaborate, but I had no idea.
Eventually, while working on the sound for Dracula, I thought I could propose a film that starts from the reality of the CIA prisons in Romania 20 years ago, and combine these ideas with another cinematic myth, that of the Frankenstein monster. Sebastian said yes, so I started writing the script, but it will take a while," said Radu Jude in an interview for culturaladuba.ro.
The director says that present-day Romania is a very, very fertile ground for fiction, for narratives.
"Certainly, it's challenging for our daily lives, but otherwise, so many things are happening that this is the main reason why I decided to make more films, regardless of whether they are good or bad, meaning to focus more on quantity than quality, which is surely neither the smartest nor the most artistic thing.
But I believe that we are experiencing a moment in Romania, as a position on the periphery of Europe, near Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, with such a recent history of traumas, from fascist dictatorships, communist regimes, transition, the current regime increasingly full of inequalities and absurdities – all of these make Romania a very good place for cinema.
If you meet someone from Norway, Sweden, or Switzerland, for example, you'll find that they are quite stuck. It's a society that, yes, is functional, but in a way, it's frozen, whereas Romanian society is not," emphasizes Radu Jude.
He announces that next year he will make two films in Romania.
"I think that, in a certain sense, repeating, keeping proportions, Romania is in a kind of social, economic, political, ideological dynamic. And all this dynamic generates characters, as Balzac said, or stories, or situations that I find important to use, document, somehow integrate into what I do. Next year, I will make two films simultaneously in Romania.
One will be partly financed by a Brazilian producer, partly from Romania, let's see, most likely without CNC, and it will have as its main character a woman from the countryside who does video chat," the director added.