Interview with Peter Sparrow

1

25 January 2009

Filmhu: How is 1 doing?

P.S.: Things are already determined at casting for me, i don't want to work on the actors during the shoot, but i'll do it by editing if necessary. We had to create a chemistry between our four actors, as they were together on the screen constantly. I first found my oldest and my youngest actor, László Sinkó and Vica Kerekes, and then we had to find partners for them, Balázs Czukor and Pál Mácsai. Zoltán Mucsi, the leading character is a phenomenon by himself, we're trying him in a kind of role, which he hasn't played yet; he is way too good of an actor to be put into any kind of box.

Editing took a whole year, including the collecting of archive materials, of course, which was a time consuming enterprise because of the limited financial resources. I didn't want to leave anyting to fate, i wanted to try everything out beforehand.

Filmhu: Why were you inspired by this particular story?

P.S.: Lem's essay, One minute of humankind is interesting because it disintegrates the story into separate pictures on the one hand, and on the other hand, has no action to it. Lem wrote a review of a nonexistent book in 1986, which is even more up to date today, as it was then. There is a narrator in the movie, who interprets the book for us; we cannot see it, but it is there in other visual ways throughout the film.

The movie version is of course very different from the book itself, the die-hard Lem fans won't be thrilled with that. I am not even adapting his work, i'm just using it, taking it apart according to my own vision. There will be a contrast though, some of his words will be used unaltered. It is too bad, he cannot watch the movie (Lem died 2006)- i would have wanted to hear his opinion, especially as it is a constant complaint with Lem-adaptations, that the world of Lem does not come through, it is just always missing.

Filmhu: You have said, that you count on the activity of viewers as well, what does this mean?

P.S.: I like it when people feel, that they are watching an intelligent movie, and they feel the same way about themselves, and they let these two things interact. People who don't want to think together, get a thriller and we trick them into it: real things start to get more and more abstract, and than they get a meaning, this creates the feeling of intelligence.

It will work like a painting. Everybody can decide what to do with it, and because the movie concerns itself with the possibility of declarative sentences, everybody will have to decide for themselves what they think about it. One thing is for sure: we only ask questions, this was very important to me.

Only lies are evident to me, my experiences of the world are all processes, not set states. Everything is moving forward, everything is changing and getting questioned. If the movie meets its objective, and will be enjoyable, it will be due to this scepticism, which should not mean that i think myself smarter than the people i made the movie for.