The following Q&A is an excerpt from an interview with filmmaker Agnieszka Holland originally published at Director Talk. In this section of the interview Holland talks about the Czechs’ response to the Soviet invasion in 1968, the subject of Burning Bush, a three-part HBO miniseries directed by Holland.
DT: You experienced firsthand the period portrayed in Burning Bush. Do you remember your feelings at the time?
AH: I remember them very well. That’s why it was so fascinating for me to do the film, because it was still present in me.
DT: I read you spent six months in jail?
AH: No, only one month, but I had problems with the police for quite a long time. It was a very painful experience but interesting as well. I was twenty, and everything was for the first time. I was extremely curious, not only about what this experience looked like but also if I would be strong enough to survive it in an honest way. This was a lot of pressure, of course. But for me the most interesting and important experience was the feeling of powerlessness of the nation, of the people. I understood what Jan Palach understood—what he thought he could fight with his sacrifice—that people are very easily broken. That they resign so quickly and so easily.
The explosion of freedom before the invasion [i.e., the Prague Spring of 1968] was really powerful, and the resignation came a few months after. For me that was a very big lesson about human nature. I realized that I cannot ever rely on mass movements; that if I really believe in something, I have to fight for it by myself even if it’s totally hopeless.
DT: As my husband and I watched the footage of the Soviet tanks invading Prague, we just looked at each other and said, “Can you imagine watching Soviet tanks just rolling down your street?”
AH: It was completely surreal, especially because we didn’t expect it. We’d been in a carnival of freedom, and we thought it was so beautiful, and so light, and so interesting; then came the vision of thousands of soldiers and tanks in the streets, in Wenceslas Square, everywhere. People were watching them, and some tried to talk to the Soviets, some made Molotov cocktails, but it was more like a picnic or something. It was really surreal.
DT: As if people didn’t really believe it was happening?
AH: They saw that it was happening, but they didn’t believe it. Before it happened, no one expected it. People didn’t believe it was possible. It’s different from how it is in Ukraine now, when everyone’s expecting the Russians to do something. At that time, inside Czechoslovakia, people were extremely innocent and naïve.
DT: Do you think that Dubček fostered that naivete?
AH: Oh, yeah. I think that Dubček was not very bright, and he really loved the Soviets. He studied there, and he was an honest guy in some way, and he thought that if he would explain to them that he wanted only what was good, that he would not leave the Warsaw Pact, they would believe him and not do something so terrible to him. But it was also ’68, and it was a strange year everywhere. People had hope that the impossible was possible and that you could change the world and that the old world was dead and now something new would come, and the Communists with the human face, and the hippies’ make love not war, and May in Paris. Now we are living some kind of counterrevolution, like hope has disappeared from people’s lives. When you speak to young people today, they want to live like their parents, and they’re afraid that their lives will be worse, not the opposite.
DT: How do you transform your firsthand feelings from that period into a film?
AH: Step by step, like usual. You have to find the locations, and of course you pick ones that awaken something in you. You have to find the costumes, and you watch old films and photographs and talk to the characters’ friends. The actors need to find the truth of those characters, who are not so different from contemporary characters but are slightly different, so it’s a normal process. I’ve done so many movies from different realities, not only period movies like Secret Garden or Washington Square but also important TV series like The Wire or Treme, which was for me like going to a world that is completely not mine. I did the pilot for Treme, and I’ve never been to New Orleans, so I needed to do much more work to enter this world than to come back to Czechoslovakia in ’69.
DT: From your position in the film industry, you have an international perspective on filmmaking and film schools. Briefly, what is your view of the industry today?
AH: I think it’s not the best period of cinema, for sure. I think that’s also why TV series became so good, because they took the place of something that critics in the ’60s and ’70s called “the cinema of the middle.” It means intelligent, innovative cinema that speaks about complex and complicated issues but in an attractive and entertaining enough way to attract wider audiences. Today this cinema practically doesn’t exist. You have commercial stuff, which is childish and not very original except for special effects innovation, and you have niche cinema, which attracts the festival or arthouse audience but not as much as it used to. You have the impression that cinema is slightly tired and doesn’t really touch the deep problems of modernity. I think that it needs to be shaken up, that something needs to happen. I’m afraid that it will be something like war. Also filmmakers are not very interesting people. Writers are a little more, because they need to invent something, but filmmakers, directors, no. They’re mostly nice people—maybe too nice. They’re not angry enough. They’re not brave enough. They are a little bourgeois.