Long banned from making movies in his own country, Romanian director Lucian Pintilie came back with a sweet vengeance in 1998 when his beautiful Terminus Paradis  landed a Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The pugnacious and spirited director, whose talent covers a wide artistic range, is competing again at Venice this year with L'Apres Midi d'un Tortionnaire, the chilling story of a father killer who was recruited by the communists in the 50's to torture political prisoners. But before that, Lucian Pintilie looks back on his difficult, but fruitful, career for Filmfestivals.com.

Because of the Romanian authorities, your career has been quite erratic in your own country...

As a filmmaker, I was banned from making movies for 15 years by the Romanian government. Later, I was allowed to work for the stage - but still not for cinema. Then, I directed a play, 'Le Revizor' which was banned by the government - so my theatrical activities were brought to a halt as well. After that, I was told that I had to leave Romania, but I refused to. I was fed up with the wrongdoings of the bureaucracy and opposed to losing my Romanian nationality. I came back regularly to Romania to see my wife, who was a great comedienne. But I could not work again in Romania until 1980, after my 'crimes' were sort of washed away... They saw that I was enjoying a certain success with my theatrical work in Paris, so they decided to call me back. So we agreed to give one another one more shot and I made Scènes de Carnaval, the adaptation of a great 1967 stage play. But this film earned me yet another ban. So everything came to a halt again until the so-called revolution.

Where did you live through this difficult period?

I was pretty much a vagabond in those years. I went to Italy, France, England, the USA... I worked for the Opera and the stage. I worked with the greatest French comedians - Casares, Buisson, Dauphin, Wilson - both the father and the son.

Your films have always shown a fondness for absurd humour...

My taste for absurd humour comes from living in Romania. But I have also directed comic plays in the USA, like 'Tartuffe'. This play contained quite a few scandalous scenes for American bourgeois audiences, but I managed to make them laugh and enjoy the seduction scenes, because I directed them with my feeling for absurd comedy taken from Romania. So I think I've very much been like a crossbreed artist between theatre, television and opera in everything I've done, and I’m quite proud of that.

What is it that you most enjoy in your work as a movie or stage director?

What I'm most fond of in my work is working with comedians. I think every actor hides within himself a bourgeois and a madman. My job is to discover every actor's madman and put this demon in a safety box, for which only I have the opening code. This madman, or devil, is dangerous and might destroy the actor if it weren't controlled. But when it is channeled in the proper directions, it can give rise to wonderful performances.

Terminus Paradis, the film which earned you a Grand Special Jury Prize at Venice 98, seems your most pessimistic one to date...

Terminus Paradis is really a special film for me. The main character, like myself, doesn't want to negotiate with evil people anymore. In my previous films, like The Oak or Too Late, there were characters that had a certain amount of clout, who, in a certain way, belonged to the authorities. The doctor from The Oak is a powerful character, he deals with the secretary's wife's liver... He's someone who can be fussy about things, who can mock the devils. But in Terminus Paradis, the main character has been in prison since he was 16. As a consequence of this, he finds solace in another world, the world of animals. He also discovers something which the characters from my previous films had never discovered: a passage to the sky, through a window. He first sees this window on a photograph and exclaims: "This is where I want to die!" And as he abides by his own word, that's where he goes to die. But that is also the place where his wife takes their child to be baptized. So this place is both a terminus and a paradise... There is a certain pessimism to Terminus Paradis, but also a certain kind of elegance and melancholy. Something really happened to me with that film. Maybe I caught a glance of something through that same window?

In L'Apres Midi d'un Tortionnaire, you explore a strange relationship between a political prisoner and his torturer...

The relationship between the tortured man and the torturer is indeed bizarre in this film. They share a kind of intimacy because they both remember a word that was used in prison to qualify torture. There is a kind of strange friendship between them. Why? Because the tortured man wants to forget everything. He's been threatened with death, but the moment he's allowed to live, his joy is so great that he begins to feel a kind of neurotic optimism. The world starts to be marvelous, extraordinary again, and he wants to have a friendly relationship with his torturers. It's a kind of very ambiguous harmony which, for me, is the most terrible thing about this story. To forget everything is one thing, but to forget everything to be on good terms with a torturer is yet another.

Robin Gatto

L'apres-midi D'un Tortionnaire