EXCLUSIVE: Ten years have passed since Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize with his debut feature Son of Saul. In that time, Nemes has only released one other feature, 2018’s Sunset, but he’s back in Competition at Venice this year with a new work titled Orphan.
Set in 1957 Budapest, after the uprising against the Communist regime, the film follows a young Jewish boy, Andor, raised by his mother with idealized tales of his deceased father, who has his world turned upside down when a brutish man appears, claiming to be his true father. Newcomer Bojtorján Barábas stars as the young protagonist. The wider cast features Andrea Waskovics, Grégory Gadebois, Elíz Szabó, Sándor Soma, and Marcin Czarnik.
The film is produced by Ildiko Kemeny and Ferenc Szale of Pioneer Pictures and Mike Goodridge of Good Chaos alongside Nemes. Mátyás Erdély, who worked on the last two Nemes films, once again serves as director of photography. The film was shot on 35mm film. Paris-based Charades and Warsaw-based New Europe Film Sales are handling world sales on the film.
Ahead of his trip to the Lido, Nemes spoke with us about the story behind Orphan, which is inspired by his father’s upbringing in post-war Hungary. The filmmaker also tells us how what he described as his unsuccessful attempt at developing feature projects with the Hollywood studios, following the buzz around Son of Saul and Sunset, stalled his career.
“It’s hard for me to be compatible with the system run by executives,” Nemes said.
Orphan screens in Venice on Thursday. The festival runs until September 6.
DEADLINE: László, this is your first feature since 2018?
LASZLO NEMES: Yes, there was a worldwide pandemic that left its mark on my work, as well as on many others. I was supposed to shoot this film in 2021. Alongside the pandemic, we also didn’t get the financing we were hoping for, so we had to wait an extra few years to put the whole thing together. I had also been trying to enter the Anglo-American film industry, without much success, so I’m happy to return as a continental European film director with Orphan.
DEADLINE: That’s surprising to hear. I feel like there’s been a lot of buzz Stateside about your return this year.
NEMES: It’s hard for me to be compatible with the system run by executives. It seems that it’s increasingly not human beings who make the decisions. It’s whole teams or marketing algorithms. It’s all the more disturbing because they’re not so good. Every time I wanted to make a project, they would say, ‘Oh, it’s great, but it’s not for us.’ Maybe they want me to do something else, but last time I checked, the filmmaker is still someone who’s supposed to bring their own vision and sometimes material. I had to go all that way to bring down my fantasy of the Anglo-American system. Really, I was valorizing a system that has passed.
DEADLINE: Where did this project come from?
NEMES: This project originated in my own family. It’s my father’s story that I adapted to the screen. The story follows a 12-year-old boy in 1957, one year after the failed Hungarian Revolution. The boy thinks that his father can still come back after being killed in the war. But then another man shows up at his door. He’s a brutish guy from the countryside, and he claims to be his father. He’s an abuser, and it’s the journey of this young boy trying to discover whether he can live with this man. When I came to terms with this whole story, I realized it’s a Hamlet story. It’s the ghost of the father.
DEADLINE: Was this history something your father discussed a lot throughout your life?
NEMES: Yeah, especially my grandmother. It became a constant ghost in our family. And in a way, it reflects the fate of 20th-century Europe, the effects of which we still feel today. The traumas that are layered upon each other. The repression, genocide, and war. After the war, they just turned the page as if nothing had happened, but it all remains in the unconscious. It still haunts us. You see wars popping up in Europe again, and they wonder why. This is why.
DEADLINE: Did you shoot in Budapest?
NEMES: Yes, in Budapest and a little bit in the countryside. But all in Hungary.
DEADLINE: What’s it like shooting in Hungary these days?
NEMES: It’s crazy. It’s so hard to get a crew nowadays. There’s Dune 3 and so many other major series and big films being shot. It’s a big production hub. And because the talent level is high, it has effectively become a mini Hollywood. On one hand, it’s good because there’s a big filmmaking community, but on the other hand, it has become very expensive. Even the international productions are now thinking it’s getting a little bit too expensive.
DEADLINE: Politically, though..? Do you feel any pushback or pressure from the state?
NEMES: No, not at all. I’m lucky that nobody has ever interfered with me creatively, which is funny, because after trying the Anglo-American system, where everybody wants to control, it’s ironic that in Hungary, they give me so much freedom.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about your lead, Bojtorján Barábas. He’s 12 years old. How did you find him?
NEMES: We had a huge open call for the movie. Thousands of kids sent in self-tapes. There was one video with a young guy. You could barely see him, and in the background, a little dog was running around him. He was a little bit nervous. But you could immediately feel there was something very specific about him. He had a strength. He had opinions, and it was immediately apparent that he was very photogenic and smart. So that was the process. It was very interesting, even during the read-through of the script, Bojtorján had all kinds of questions. At every line, he had questions about the motivations, like a professional actor. It was very impressive.
DEADLINE: This is your ‘return’ to feature filmmaking. Do you feel pressure to live up to your past success?
NEMES: At some point, I had to leave all those anxieties and expectations behind. My wife keeps telling me not to be attached to the outcome. And I have to say, I’m not so much attached to the outcome anymore. What’s important is reaching the people and connecting with audiences. What really touches me is when someone at the end of a screening comes to see me, and I can see some emotion in their eyes. That’s the most important thing.
DEADLINE: If you’ve given up on the Studio System, what do you think is currently the best environment for you to work?
NEMES: I would love something like the new Hollywood era of the 70s. A world in which entertainment and art are cohesive and not separated. Good art is entertainment, and good entertainment is art. When I think about Jaws by Steven Spielberg, the way it’s directed, you cannot find that level of directing in any of the Cannes competition films anymore. At least that’s the way I see it. That kind of directing is hard to find. It seems the world has stopped believing that old archetypal stories can be told in ways that are different. There are a limited number of stories that can be told, but the way you make them can be very different. People are hungry for the retelling of the old stories. A system in which we are allowed, as filmmakers, to bring our singular vision, to tell one of the great human stories, would be the ideal environment. Hopefully, it can exist.
