Filmmaker Radu Jude: It’s Disgusting to Be Interested in Posterity
Ahead of the release of his new film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Romanian film director Radu Jude spoke to Jacobin about political art, why TikTok is cinema, and the problem with making films aimed at everyone.
Romanian film director Radu Jude attends the Opening Gala of the Berlinale in Berlin, Germany, on February 16, 2023. (Ronny Hartmann / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Zsofia Paulikovics
Depicting the complexities of twenty-first-century living with a signature dark humor, Radu Jude’s films often probe the process of filmmaking and the life of a filmed product itself.
His last feature, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, tells the story of a what happens when a schoolteacher’s private sex tape goes viral. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, his tenth and most recent film, follows an overworked production assistant, Angela Raducanu, as she drives around Bucharest to cast a lead for an Austrian company’s workplace safety videos.
In her brief moments of downtime, Angela films short videos as an Andrew Tate–esque imaginary character, Bobita (based on a real-life Tik Tok series by actress Ilinca Manolache, who plays Angela). Part road movie, part process film, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is collaged with parts of Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Goes On, whose quietly radical and matter-of-fact depiction of Elena Ceaușescu–era Romania managed to evade censorship.
In an interview with Jacobin, Jude discusses the evolution of image production, the particulars of working in a postcommunist vacuum, and why this film is “even more amateurish than [his] last.” The transcript of this interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
You have an uneasy relationship to the idea of making “films for everyone.” When asked about this in a previous interview, you said that when you made advertisements, the idea was to treat the audience like cattle. Could you explain how you think about your relationship to your audience? Why do you think it’s important to not treat your audience like cattle?
I had this experience working not only in advertising but in television. I directed soap operas and TV shows when I was young, and officially, the discourse was always “Oh, we care so much about the audience. We offer them entertainment. We offer them what they want.” And then, in the meetings all of a sudden they’d say, “Don’t forget that these morons only want to see some tits and ass, and their wives only want to see muscled men and makeup products. Don’t try to feed them anything else.” So now, whenever I hear “We care about our audience” or “I made an audience-friendly film,” what I really hear is, “I could have made more complex things, but I didn’t because I didn’t think my audience would be able to grasp it.” I find that much more insulting. And if certain audiences reject it, I can accept that.
If people don’t like the film, at least you’re giving them the agency to react.
Yes. And I think whenever you encounter something that you are not used to, the first reaction is rejection. This is true for me as well.
You have said before that you believe that TikTok is cinema. And as a lot of your films are about the process of filmmaking, I was wondering what you think about the fact that everyone is an image-maker now, in some way. Does this conflict with the actual process of filmmaking?
Recently, I read an interview with a Romanian filmmaker who is older than me. He was asked, “What advice would you give to a young person who wants to get into filmmaking?’ And he said, “I would advise them not to do it.” When he was asked why, he said, “because the magic is gone. Now, everybody can make a film with their phone or their small camera. Forty years ago, a film crew in the street was like seeing demigods. Now, a filmmaker is equal to a kid in sixth grade.”
I respect his point of view, but I find this exciting rather than depressing. If image creation becomes exactly like drawing or writing, I don’t think it’s a loss. What happens with [these images], how good they are, how original they are — if that’s even relevant still — is something else. Of course, having a pen and paper didn’t make everybody into [William] Faulkner or James Joyce. But the possibility is there. I see TikTok or Instagram — despite the problems that these platforms create; I don’t want to idealize them — as a kind of vernacular cinema. Often, it’s not interesting. But sometimes, not all the time, you find things that you don’t see in the cinema.
In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, you use many different kinds of footage, including black-and-white, 16 mm montage from a Romanian film from the ’80s and a TikTok-like filter. When I first saw the film, though it felt timeless, it also felt like it really captured the now. There was a likeness to the images that we consume every day. Are you ever worried about the fact that the aesthetic of your films really positions them in a certain time?
No. I like that. Many filmmakers try to give their films a kind of timeless quality. Even if it’s about a contemporary situation, they should look like they are in a kind of “eternal contemporary.” I like the particularities of a time and a place. It’s the same thing with a film having “local” references, even if they may be obscure for most of the viewers. I believe that the path to so-called “universality” is being topical and local and encapsulating time in a way. The future’s not ours to see, as the song goes. I think sometimes it seems like something will be relevant forever, and in five days you realize how obsolete it is, and vice versa. Either way, I find it disgusting and stupid to be interested in posterity.
You touched on the idea of locality. While your films are often universal in their surrealism and humor, they are also usually hyperlocal. Are you interested in making films that are not set in Romania at all?
I have two projects, one is connected to France and one to Germany, but they are still somehow placed between Romania and the other country. It’s something that I’m trying to open up, especially as I’m interested in the filmmaking process for everybody involved. But would I be able to go to Seoul or the Philippines or Los Angeles and make a relevant film there? I’m not sure. I would like to try. I would have liked to make Barbie. I saw it and said, “Oh my god, this one!” I could have done it beautifully, but nobody asked me.
In your director’s statement you say this is your “most amateurish film yet.” I’m interested in what that means for the process, but also whether you think this amateurishness is an antidote to commercial filmmaking in a way?
I have the feeling that cinema is plagued with — or organized along, if you want — more systems of rules than other art forms. And I ask myself: Why is that? Of course, one of the answers is that there’s a lot of money involved, which needs to be controlled, so you cannot take the risk of doing something that’s not good. It’s also because of the technical aspects; a film has to be put together in a certain format in order to be screened.
So there’s a uniformization that comes from both of these things, and when you try to become a filmmaker you train yourself along these rules — or at least I did. I tried to become as professional as possible, and I’m not regretting that. I think there’s a lot to learn through this process. But now I’m trying to do the reverse because I think you risk becoming stiff.
Is working with both professional and nonprofessional actors a part of this as well?
No. I work with both professional and nonprofessional actors, but I try to work with them in the same way. For instance, I don’t have this obsession with extracting amazing performances. Or maybe I’m not able to. Some things can come from when you’re not capable of doing something, so you have to adapt to survive.
I think that Ilinca Manolache’s performance is very good, because she is very good. But I didn’t do anything special to extract it from her. We didn’t rehearse for months, we just did it. Sometimes in two or three takes, not more.
A lot of the film is about work and the gig economy. The work that people want to do versus what they have to do for a living; the work they do to distract themselves from that work (like the Bobita videos). Could you talk a little bit about your ideas around work in the film?
The film is inspired by experiences that I had while starting out in this business. Much of the film industry in Romania was (and is) a service industry. A lot of foreign productions were shot in Romania because of cheap locations and cheap labor, and the way the work was organized by the Romanian companies doing the service production was kind of exploitative.
What I discovered when speaking about these experiences is that these were not only small anecdotes; they represented the new system that we “embraced” in Romania after the communist dictatorship ended in 1989. The worst kind of capitalistic society with no social protection. This change, from one system to another created a situation that can generate the kind of stories that you saw in the film.
I’m interested in this switch between systems, the transition out of communism and then, really badly, into whatever it is we have now. There are so many similarities between the two Angelas, which, when they meet, emphasize the differences in their situations. But sometimes it felt like there was a nostalgia, or even just an understanding, toward the older Angela’s time — I wonder if that was on purpose.
So yes, I do think that through the older Angela, there’s a little bit of nostalgia for youth and old times gone, but at the same time, there’s something more. The bad things during the dictatorship were because of the dictatorship. The end of the dictatorship brought basic political freedoms that are hugely important to exist. But when things still go horribly wrong now, who’s to blame?
Bucharest is kind of a character in both of my last two films, and we are always complaining that Ceaușescu destroyed huge parts of historic Bucharest, beautiful houses and churches with important paintings. They were all razed to the ground to make his great palace. Then the revolution came, freedom came. And guess what? In the political freedom of today, more historical monuments were put down and destroyed in order to build huge new buildings. Does this mean that the dictatorship was better? No, of course not. But the question is, why did the destruction go on once the dictatorship was gone?
In your director’s statement you say that the film works at a surface level. Why is that? It seemed to me one of the most layered things I’ve seen in recent times.
I think that some things are not impossible but very difficult to touch in cinema. Cinema starts with a recording of what is around. It’s looking at the surface of the world. And it doesn’t matter if you put two surfaces together, it still remains like that — but I think that’s the power that it has.