Milos Forman

NEW YORK—Milos Forman is at once one of Hollywood’s most successful and most thought-provoking directors. Instrumental in establishing the 1960s New Wave cinema of his native Czechoslovakia, Forman was in Paris when the Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet forces in 1968 and then emigrated to the U.S. His first feature movie in this country, Taking Off (1971), was probably his least successful, but thereafter, Forman established one of the most remarkable records in mainstream cinema: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which was the first film to win all five main Oscars (best picture, best actor, best actress, best director, and best screenplay) since 1934, Hair (1979), Ragtime (1981), Amadeus (1984), which won eight Oscars, Valmont (1989), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and Man on the Moon (1999).

Constant in Forman’s oeuvre is an iconoclastic spirit pitched against repressive authority, and the iconoclast in question is often an artist, whether Mozart or Andy Kaufman. His most recent picture, Goya’s Ghosts, which stars Natalie Portman and Javier Bardem and opened last year, is an enthralling and horrific exploration of the darkness of the human spirit during the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars, as seen through the eyes of another artist, Francisco Goya.

Last week, just as New York’s Museum of Modern Art was winding up a retrospective of his career, and on the day that Goya’s Ghosts was released on DVD, ARTINFO spoke to Forman about his work at his Connecticut home.

Milos, I'm intrigued by the contrast between your Mozart in Amadeus, who was a true iconoclast, and your Goya in Goya’s Ghosts, who seems much more compromised. Does this reflect a shift in how you see the role of the artist?

I treated them the way I understand them. From what we know about him, Goya was very careful not to antagonize anybody, to be on good terms with everybody. But in his work, he was as audacious and outrageous as any other artist. Nobody saw The Disasters of War until about 30 years after his death, and his famous black paintings—which everybody is rightly crazy about nowadays because they were really the first modern paintings—were not painted for public viewing. I call Goya the most courageous coward in art.

There’s a scene in Goya’s Ghosts where Napoleon tells his troops, “The Spanish will greet you with flowers.” Was that intended as a deliberate parallel with what U.S. troops were told before they invaded Iraq?

It’s purely coincidental. When we were doing the research we found that Napoleon said it verbatim. It was in the script months before the Iraq war started.

Do you find it dispiriting when history repeats itself so obviously?

For me it’s not a historical film. I have witnessed everything in the film in my lifetime, happening to people among whom I lived. I remember the Nazi regime and the Communist regime. I was there. The original stimulus to do this film was when as a young kid in Czechoslovakia in the ’50s I read a book about the Spanish Inquisition. I couldn’t believe that I was reading about something that was happening in exactly the same way all around me.

The parallels are so direct?

I’ll tell you, the methods of torture used by the Nazis and the Communists were even more insidious and cruel than what the Inquisition was doing.

Do you think of yourself as a political artist?

I don’t consider myself a political artist, but I am aware of one thing: Whatever story you tell—because you are discussing people’s lives—you always touch on politics. In art anything you do is political.

Is yours a politics of the individual, then?

One of the reasons I left Czechoslovakia was because I always refused to belong to any political party. The moment you join a party you unconsciously feel obliged to follow some ideological recipe, and I don’t want that. I want to be outside of political categorization and be as objective as I can.

Does being a maker of commercial cinema either aid or inhibit your freedom to create political films?

Commercial cinema? What is that? As long as you are doing what you honestly feel you should be doing, and going where your instincts take you, it doesn’t make any difference whether a film is regarded as commercial or not. When I worked in a Communist country, there was ideological pressure. Here it’s commercial pressure. With ideological pressure, you’re at the mercy of one idiot, and with commercial pressure you’re at the mercy of the audience. I’d rather be at the mercy of the audience than have some idiot telling me what to think and what to say.