After debuting in 2017 with the colourful mourning bromance Charleston [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Andrei Creţulescu
scheda film], which was selected in the main competition at Locarno, Romanian director Andrei Creţulescu is now in post-production with his second feature, Ext. Car – Night, which may break new ground in local cinema. The film is being staged by Kinosseur, with Codruţa Creţulescu serving as the producer. Vlad Rădulescu and Claudiu Mitcu co-produce through Avanpost Media and Wearebasca, respectively.

The screenplay, written by Creţulescu, follows a film crew working around the clock to shoot a weird and violent genre period piece up in the mountains. They will find out the hard way that reality will always be stranger than fiction. The four actors, who actually play 12 characters, are Rodica Lazăr, Dorian Boguţă, Şerban Pavlu (who plays God in Radu Potcoavă’s Good Boys Go to Heaven [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] and Andi Vasluianu.

The movie received financial support to the tune of €200,000 from the Romanian National Film Center. A similar amount was added, mainly in equipment and services, to top off the budget. After three months of rehearsals, Ext. Car – Night was shot over three weeks in a studio in Bucharest and in a chalet in the Bucegi National Park.

Creţulescu says that the departure point for the story is the shooting of a bloody thriller (“Agatha Christie does The Twilight Zone,” as he puts it), which “turns into its own ‘making of’, a really talky one – a conversation about film, fear and fiction”. The director says his film is one of those where “the less you know, the better. It has 12 characters, played by only four actors, and it is shot in long, uninterrupted takes, presented in non-chronological order. It was Howard Hawks who said that a good movie needs three good scenes and no bad ones. Well, this movie has only three scenes – so there’s that.”

Interestingly, the picture has been shot in three screen ratios, 2.35, 1.85 and 1.33. “Basically, the screen closes in on the characters scene by scene, thus underscoring the claustrophobia and the feeling of dread that playfully permeates, in style and meaning, the whole endeavour,” the director explains.

Ext. Car - Night will be released domestically this autumn.