Cannes Film Festival/European Pressphoto Agency A scene from “Beyond the Hills,” which won for screenplay and its lead performances at Cannes. The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has never won an Academy Award, but he is nonetheless part of Oscar history. In 2008, his “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a drama about an illegal abortion that had won top honors at the Cannes Film Festival the previous spring, was considered a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, but ended up being snubbed by Academy voters. That led to a change in the rules, taking some of the power to choose nominees away from voters and conferring it on a special committee.
Sundance Selects The director Cristian Mungiu. Now Mr. Mungiu, 44, is back and competing with a new film, “Beyond the Hills,” that has again scored big at Cannes, with awards for screenplay and the performances of its two lead actresses. Set in an Orthodox monastery, it examines the friendship of two women who grew up together in an orphanage but have taken strikingly different paths as adults. One has become a nun, finding inner peace, while the other has migrated to Germany and is so deeply troubled that when she returns to visit her friend that she ends up being subjected to an exorcism. (It’s based very loosely on a 2005 case in which a Romanian novice died in an exorcism.)
“Beyond the Hills” was shown at the New York Film Festival this fall, when Mr. Mungiu was in town and sat down for an interview, and it will close the festival Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema at Lincoln Center on Wednesday. Here are edited excerpts from that October conversation:
Q.
The real-life incident on which your film is based has been amply written about in the press and in two books by Tatiana Niculescu Bran. What compelled you to go back to this episode?
A.
I knew about this story for a very long period, because this was in the press a lot, and I was preserving all the clips and I read the books. Eventually I googled to see what the reaction of people was seven years later, only to discover that people were still so concerned and preoccupied and polarized by this that, apart from the books, I couldn’t find any balanced position about what happened.
For me it was very important to see all the things this story can reveal. And this is why I decided to make a film out of it. Actually, the great difference between the books and what I did is the relationship between the girls, which never existed in reality but which gave me a reason for everything that happened.
Q.
For those two vital roles, you chose performers who had never acted in a film before, and they ended up sharing the best actress award at Cannes. How did you achieve that?
A.
Well, this is the crucial decision you need to make on a film like this: Who are you going to work with? We had the kind of liberty we’ve never had before to just experiment with them, in the rehearsals and at the shooting. We rehearsed a lot during casting, read a lot, and I acted a lot for them, so I am giving them directly the tone of voice, the energy, the rhythm, the body language that I want. Guidance, but not with words. I’m not telling them what to do, I show them how to do.
But it’s fair to say that by the end, I had adapted as much to them as they adapted to me. We did what was there in the script, but each time it wasn’t possible to get the dialogue exactly right, I was adapting what I wanted to do and editing the scene to what they could do. Because you can’t push onto the actors something that does not belong to them.
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