Veteran Cinematographer Koltai Makes Directorial Debut
by Ky N. Nguyen and Mia Faith
Acclaimed Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai is best known for his 26-year collaboration with renowned director István Szabó on 14 films, including the 1981 Academy Award-winning “Mephisto.” Moving readily between Europe and the United States, Koltai considers Szabó’s “Being Julia” (2004) to be his latest Hollywood movie, although it’s a European co-production for which both Koltai and Szabó received European Film Award nominations. Ironically, Koltai earned his Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography on the Italian production of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000).
After more than three decades of making movies, Koltai makes his long-awaited directorial debut with “Fateless,” a film that follows the story of Gyorgy Koves, a young Jewish boy from Budapest whose life is torn apart by the tragic events of World War II. After premiering in competition at the Berlin Fil
m Festival last spring, “Fateless” garnered commercial success in Hungary, becoming not only the highest grossing independent film in the country but also the highest grossing Hungarian film. At December’s Washington Jewish Film Festival, Koltai discussed his epic with a captive sold-out audience, including the ambassador from Hungary.
In an interview with The Washington Diplomat, Koltai explained his foray into directing. “After 35 years in the business, you always have the feeling: maybe I can start. It’s a long time happening, a long time behind me.... And I have to show my face, my other face. But I’ve never been very crazy about it. I was always waiting for the right thing. And I almost did another film as director, but I just gave it back at the end. Because even if I have the casting, I had money, location, everything—I just decided not to direct. I was very lucky. And the moment I decided not to do it, this came into my life. That’s how these things are happening. That’s how your fate is working.”
Co-screenwriter Imre Kertész adapted his own book, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Koltai found himself inspired and emboldened by the novel, which he hails as a contemporary classic. “The moment that somebody gave it to me, this book, I just fell in love with this literature. They never read anything like this in Hungarian, and I just thought something happened which is something different. They didn’t ask anybody yet to direct this film. I just read it like a possible cinematographer. I just found out this is a wonderful book, and I just kept it so close to me. I just feel maybe I can do this thing because I start to see the images of the film. I start to see these images so precisely—even the boy’s face, even all the locations, all the camps, and every important scene. So I said, ‘Jesus Christ, maybe I can do this film and direct.’ But nobody asked me yet.”
Unaware of Koltai’s interest in adapting the novel to the screen, Kertesz requested a meeting with him to seek his advice on the first draft of a script that he had co-written with another Hungarian writer. He insisted that the story be told in a linear fashion. As Koltai explained, “[Kertész] said, ‘What do you think about linearity? Because this kind of story cannot happen any other way—just step by step, forward, and goes to the end. There’s no other possibility, so you can’t really jump in and out with the time. You can’t play with the time.’”
However, Koltai was not discouraged by these constraints, and he found that Kertész shared his vision for the film. He told Kertesz, “You know what? Finally, we are going inside of people—finally find a human being, to go inside him and to try to look out of him. This little boy opens a very little gap to see this world, totally an un-understandable world, but he wants to understand…. That’s totally what I like to do because it’s a totally new point of view to make of the Holocaust.”
Critics have lauded “Fateless” as one of the best fictional films about the Holocaust, comparing it to Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist,” Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir. According to Koltai, however, “Fateless” is not a Holocaust film. “It’s about a human being, about this boy.... It’s not just the Holocaust—it’s following the story.”
Bypassing casting directors, Koltai and his assistant looked at more than 4,000 photographs of young boys before they settled on Marcell Nagy to play the lead role of Gyorgy. One of the biggest challenges for Koltai was finding the right actors to play each of the 144 named roles. It was essential that Koltai find exactly the right faces to give life to his vision of the story. “I have to find all of them because this film is not just following one fate. I think this film is following a hundred fates.
“It’s not just [Gyorgy’s] story. Everybody else is behind him. And the second, third, and fourth role, even the tenth, count for the same importance. Everybody’s carrying his fate to the end, to the same way. I made a tapestry behind him of all these faces, so I have to find those faces.”
Ky N. Nguyen is the film reviewer for The Washington Diplomat.
