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CANNES 2021 Directors’ Fortnight

Radu Muntean • Director of Întregalde

“I think heroes are very boring in cinema”

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- CANNES 2021: The Romanian director takes quite a deviation from his usual urban dramas, as his seventh feature is set deep in the freezing Carpathian Mountains

Radu Muntean  • Director of Întregalde

Almost 20 years after his feature debut, The Rage (2002), Romanian helmer Radu Muntean changes direction with his unsettling drama Întregalde [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Radu Muntean
film profile
]
, now showing at Cannes, in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. Here is what Muntean has to say about working with a non-professional, elderly actor and about the relativity of altruism.

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Cineuropa: Could you pinpoint an exact moment when you realised the potential of a film about altruism? Could you describe the context?
Radu Muntean: I don’t recall exactly when the idea came to me, but it was probably about 11 years ago. At some point, the story of these people was told to me – these off-road aficionados who come together to help people in isolated communities – and then I wondered how much of what they do is actually relevant for the locals and how much is relevant for them, the initiators of this altruistic act.

You said that this film had been in development for almost a decade. How did the idea (or the thesis) of the film evolve during this period?
After my first location-scouting session, which I did together with Alex Baciu and Răzvan Rădulescu, I tried to come up with a synopsis. From the start, we had the idea of the senile elderly person who tests the limits of the other characters’ generosity, but we didn’t manage to push the story to a satisfactory outcome for all three of us. Nevertheless, the topic sort of stuck with us; we did another location scouting, and then we managed to get out of our writer’s block. And I guess we had some help from an event that occurred during this second scouting session, as Alex, Răzvan and Andrei, my former assistant, got stuck for a few hours at night in a very inaccessible area.

While in the first draft of the script, which was later abandoned, the main character was the elder’s neighbour, in the later drafts, the story was told from the point of view of Maria, one of the off-road crew members. Afterwards, right before filming, I realised that Maria was more of a pivotal point in the story, and we accommodated everything with this in mind. She leads the action but does not own the narrative perspective. Unlike other films I have made, this one contains an external incident that makes everything seem relative.

This is your first film in which two very different worlds are placed face to face, commenting on each other. What challenges did this conflict pose? Did you “root” for either of the two in particular?
When you face a moral dilemma, the greatest challenge is to avoid judging the characters involved. This also makes the process interesting, in my opinion. I try to understand my characters as much as possible and give them a chance. In this particular case, everybody has mitigating circumstances for what they do. None of them is a hero – I think heroes are very boring in cinema. They are a fascinating mix of courage, hypocrisy, altruism and histrionics.

You also said that the village of Întregalde, your interactions with the villagers, and even your time spent there filming gave the movie a different feel.
Well, for example, look at the meeting with Luca Sabin, the local who ended up playing Kente, the senile elderly person. It was clear to me that the part was going to be very complex, and therefore I constructed it from a few lines and some very simple actions. It served the purpose of triggering the plot and putting the three main characters to the test. I was very lucky to discover that Luca Sabin, other than being strong, reliable and endowed with a surprising amount of cinematic intuition, is a former woodcutter, exactly the same as our character. So we were able to build a more complex character from the stories of our good, old Luca, a character with a biography that has a pretty heavy influence on how the film turned out.

How did you work with him, and what directorial guidance did you give him?
The first and most important thing that I wanted him to internalise and come back to during the shoot was that he was not to perform as himself, but as Kente, a former lumberjack who went crazy after ending up alone. So, his former occupation was the only common denominator between the character and the actor, a man who actually has a big family and is highly respected in his community. I explained what he had to focus on, insisting less on the big picture and more on what we had to do in the next scene. We didn’t rehearse a lot; I just used a tiny earpiece to guide him, to give him directions and lines. Sometimes, I even let him improvise and riff on his own life stories. And I must say one more thing: Maria [Popistaşu], Alex [Bogdan] and Ilona [Brezoianu], the three main actors, were a huge help: they really worked hard on integrating Luca into the team and into the atmosphere of the moment being shot.

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