22/08/2022 - We talked to the Romanian director about his fourth feature, the lack of professional screenwriters in his country’s film industry and what’s next for him

After premiering his first feature, A Month in Thailand [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paul Negoescu
film profile], at the 2012 Venice Film Festival when he was only 28, Romanian director Paul Negoescu went on to direct Two Lottery Tickets [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paul Negoescu
film profile], one of the few profitable local features. The helmer changes direction with his newest movie, Men of Deeds [+see also:
film review
interview: Paul Negoescu
film profile], which has just been competing for the Heart of Sarajevo at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Here is what the director has to say about the lack of professional screenwriters in the Romanian film industry and about his next feature.

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Cineuropa: Men of Deeds is the first feature you have made where the screenplay is written by someone else. Why did you make this decision, and how did you work with screenwriters Radu Romaniuc and Oana Tudor to finish the screenplay?
Paul Negoescu: The main factor behind this decision was Radu’s persistence. He kept offering me the screenplay, and I kept refusing him simply because the story explores a universe that is so far from my [urban] one. Later on, I realised that the structure of the main character was exactly what had been preoccupying me. I have always been interested in anti-heroes that are disconnected from reality and their own emotions. The only thing that was different in this case was that the character lives in a Northern Romanian village and not a city.

We didn’t change the screenplay too much. I worked with Radu and Oana on some scenes, I proposed some changes, and we switched a few events around between them and added in some details, but the vast majority of what ended up in the finished film was actually there from the very beginning.

Most Romanian directors write their own screenplays, which is quite different from how the bigger film industries work. What does this say about the Romanian film industry, and what may be behind this peculiarity?
The explanation is that there is no money for writing. In serious film industries, developing new projects is of paramount importance. In Romania, although the National Film Center offers grants (the amounts of which are ridiculous, by the way) for writing screenplays, the system does not work properly, because the grant has to be returned in its entirety if the project does not receive production funding in the next four sessions. And, as producing a film is such an uncertain endeavour here, only a few producers are willing to risk [giving back the writing grant]. Developing a project can take years, and no one can ask a screenwriter to work for such a long time without decent pay. This is why we don’t have enough good writers in Romania, and this is why we don’t have good professionals to evaluate the screenplays competing for production funding in the centre’s funding sessions.

Going back to your film, what is your opinion of your protagonist? Do you judge him in any way?
I see him as both good and bad. He is a character that I can understand quite well because I find much of him in myself, so I look at him both with compassion and with a critical eye.

Iulian Postelnicu’s performance is superb. How did you work together?
Iulian is the kind of actor whom a director would always want to cast in his or her feature, as he is so dedicated. He started working on the character the very moment he received the part, and he worked on it continuously, not only when we met for rehearsals. He would shoot himself in character and would send me the videos, trying various versions of Ilie in different situations, some of them not even mentioned in the screenplay. During the shoot, we worked really well together – he knew not only his lines, but also the lines of all the other actors.

Men of Deeds comes with some of the funniest one-liners in recent Romanian cinema. Why was humour so important for the film?
I am in a period of my life when I need humour and detachment to cope with various things, and so I look for humour in every situation I find myself in. Radu and Oana’s screenplay was not lacking in humour; on the contrary. We even removed some of the funny situations from the screenplay so that we could keep everything relevant.

Your film Two Lottery Tickets is one of the very few Romanian films that were actually profitable. You are now in pre-production with its sequel. What will happen to the three protagonists?
Their misadventures will be similar to those in the original: they will get rich overnight, but with no chance of having access to the money. We want to make the film under similar conditions to the original: a small budget, no funding from the Romanian National Film Center, with a small but willing team. Will the planets align to enable us to repeat the success of the first film? We shall see…