Endre hules biography channel

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Interview with Endre Hules (Director, screenwriter and actor)

How did you come up with the idea of the film?
I was asked to do a dance film by a production company in Hungary. I did write a script for them but the production company stopped producing films for a while and the script came back to me. Then I started thinking "what would I like to do with it?" So I came up with the idea of the two brothers and the idea of what does it mean to be danced to death.

Why to film it in different countries instead of doing it in America and finding similar locations?
This was a Hungarian, Canadian, Slovenian co-production. Also, I believe that locations are very powerful images and you can't give the same impact in a studio than in the actual location. Locations have a history and a myth and it translates into the film and the story.

Isn't it too much work to be the director, screenwriter and star of a film? How did you deal with it?
Being the director and the screenwriter is not very hard. It is something you do almost at the same time before the film actually gets made; one feeds into the other. What was very difficult was to play in the film because you're acting and directing at the same time. And not only that, you're doing two opposite jobs. That almost killed me… It's an impossible thing and I'm not going to do it for a long time. But it's also very rewarding.

How did you get Academy Award winner cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to work in the film?
This was the second time I was working with him. Most people know he is an Academy award winning man but few people know that he came from Hungary. He was one of the chroniclers of the revolution against the Russians in the country. He and his friends were at film school and they took the cameras to the streets to film the Russian tanks fighting the students in the streets. They smuggled the material out of the country in their backpacks so the world could see what was happening.

So when I was doing a documentary about the revolution, he and László Kovács (Easy Rider) became the producers and were very important for the success of the documentary. It was the first time we worked together and from there it was a natural progression to work on The Maiden Danced to Death.  

What would you say is the difference between American productions and European ones?
I would say that the approach is different in terms that in Europe, the film producer asks: "What is the story about? How does it relate to our lives? What is it going to look like?" In an American situation the first question is: "how is it going to bring the money back?" It is a very pragmatic and not artistic starting point, but at the same time is keeping in mind that filmmaking is an industry that actually has to bring money back.

In Europe films are based on charities and funding so one has to check boxes. In co-productions, they need to have a certain number of actors, crews, locations or cultural points related to the country that puts the money. So suddenly sometimes the story is gone and sometimes you see a scene in a place that has nothing to do with the film.

I think that is why American movies are taking over Europeans; they focus on what the people want.

Did the film have some support in terms of funding?
Yes, we were funded by Hungary, Canada and Slovenia. We also got funded by European Media and other organizations. It was a hard work but it was all public funding.

Do you have a special memory from the filming days?
There is one I will never forget. We were shooting in Montreal's airport from a hotel in there. We were supposed to do it from the hotel we were staying at but did not realize that the rooms had double glassed windows and we couldn't shoot anything because of the dirt between the two glasses. So we had to go out and shoot there.

This was a few months after the and of course nobody was able to film in airports but Vilmos said: "just let's go and shoot it!" We went to a parking garage and filmed with a very large lens form the roof and it looked like a cannon! When we looked down we say the security guards playing cards. I was thinking that if they saw the lens pointing at the airport they might shot back!

How did you get into LA and the mainstream US series and TV productions?
I got into the union because they needed an actor who spoke several languages. I had an agent that got me in. Things went from there but one has to be at the right time in the right place. But people have to be ready… Everybody gets their chance but when the time comes, one has to be ready.

Are you working on any projects at the moment?
I'm in preparation of another film about the story of the first hijacking in history. I was actually approached by an old man in a screening of The Maiden Danced to Death, who said that had just finished his memories and thought they could make a good film.

When I read it I couldn't put it down! The beauty of the story is that there were a bunch of kids that wanted to get out of a labor camp and the country. One of them was a former fighter pilot and in order to get to a plane they had to form a boxing team to board a plane to the finals, which were going to be held in a bordering town.

It's a marvelous story of heroism with humor that only desperation can create. We have the script, the locations and we're finalizing the finances.

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