It is commonly known that if you’re filmmaker and you’re visiting a festival in any official capacity, you’ll rarely, if ever, have time to actually watch any movies. Radu Jude is well aware of this, which is why our chat at the Viennale was slightly rescheduled, at his request, so he could attend a screening of the restored version of Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou.
“He means a lot to me, I’ve read all his critical texts,” Jude explains. “I’m not a fan of all his films, but that’s part of what fascinates me about him: how such a great director could also make quite a few bad movies.” Such a line of thought is one Jude, who possesses a very self-deprecating sense of humor, might apply to his own films. In March of this year, when he attended Locarno’s spring event ‘L’immagine e la parola’ (he was mentor to the 2023 Spring Academy filmmakers) and introduced a screening of his 2021 Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, he
jokingly stated that at least one of the film’s three sections should appeal to the audience.
Five months later, when Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World premiered at the festival proper, he addressed the public with these words: “The film is 164 minutes long. I
apologize.” And when he won the Special Jury Prize the following week, he said he was pleased because it meant his “artistic decline” was slower than expected.
This is par for the course with the Romanian filmmaker, who has previously stated he is not entirely comfortable with the “red carpet culture”. Ironically, the premise of our conversation is that his latest work is Romania’s submission to the Oscars. The cosmic humor is not lost on him, as he elaborates on his stance: “I’m not against festivals or awards per se, because they are very good in terms of giving exposure to films that might not get seen otherwise. But there’s also a lot of phoniness involved in that world, and I’m not a fan of the whole campaign concept. The film should speak for itself.”
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is darkly humorous in dealing with serious subject matter (the main storyline revolves around a company trying to cover up its shoddy safety regulations). How does Jude feel about the film’s title in the context of what’s going on in the outside world? “It makes you feel so small and useless, doesn’t it? Humanity has always been prone to destructive and self-destructive behavior, whether it’s the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine or the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s tragic.”
On a lighter note, back in July, the director took to Facebook to joke about how he had made the “original” Barbie movie (the short film Plastic Semiotic, which screened in Venice in 2021). Did he watch Greta Gerwig’s film? “Of course, I did the whole Barbenheimer thing on opening day, with my son. And I must say both films disappointed me: Oppenheimer, to me, felt like a very long trailer, and Barbie was a brand commercial. Even the self-mockery is part of the advertising.”
And once the whole awards season is over, what’s next? “My next feature film is about Dracula. I’m going back to the origins, to the story of Vlad the Impaler.” That is certainly a subject ripe for reinterpretation, given that this year alone we had two different Dracula films made by the same studio (Universal): the horror The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and the comedy Renfield. “Yes, exactly,” he says, referring to the latter. “What can I give the audience that is different from a Nicolas Cage movie?”
