“It was the story of someone who should travel somewhere and a directive arrived that the person should not appear on TV or in a film. It was fake news but when it spread, the others were more wary and said, ‘No, he can’t get to TV, he can’t get to the screen.’ So we made a fun of it, we invented a character who was to go somewhere but always somebody comes and says, ‘Look, that important person over there said something about him, he should not go anywhere.’ But the person concerned was already on his way on the airport, so they sent a car after him and before he boarded the plane, they caught him and brought him back. And this was repeated several times. It was a farce, really. I found great actors for the piece, Zdeněk Dítě, Vlastimil Brodský, Miloš Kopecký, Jiřina Bohdalová and others. But when I was about to graduate, there was the uprising in Hungary. Franky put, it was so serious that they started hanging communists on lampposts, it was really serious. And the teachers who were on the commission, mostly communists, were very wary. And I almost failed with the film which was successful. It was a really harsh satire on what happened at that time.”
“I got a ring from my friend on August 21, 1968, at night and he asked me what was it that was happening at the airport. I lived nearby. I looked from my balcony, I saw a huge dark plane, then another huge dark plane… they didn’t have their lights on… and then the third plane. I ran to my telephone and told my friend that it looked as if the planes carried trucks. I had a feeling I knew them from airplane fairs and that these were Russian Antonovs. I saw the silhouettes of these planes against the lighter sky. Something was happening. I hang up my phone, threw an overcoat over my pyjamas and walked out. I walked as far as the Lenin Avenue, today the European Avenue, and suddenly there was a single car approaching from the airport, besides that no one else. It was a taxi Volga and when the driver spotted me on the pavement, he put down his window and shouted, ‘We are being occupied by the Russians’ and drove on to spread the news around Prague.”
“As students we were frustrated that we were locked in the country and could not go anywhere. This was terrible. We met Polish students from a Polish film school and other film schools, they traveled around the world and we were stuck at home. Exceptionally we could go to Hungary and East Germany. We could not go even to Yugoslavia, you needed a special permit for it, you needed to get a passport. Just to be sure, for Yugoslavia they invented a grey passport instead of a green one. It was terribly complicated. We were frustrated because, as I say, other students traveled around the world, they even went to Hollywood. And they were much more free. Perhaps this was because the Polish are more numerous and they didn’t mind when some people fled and the number of the population decreased- This would have been a problem with us, if a half of ten, fifteen million had fled, the republic would have been empty. And since we were frustrated, we started to write a story on this topic, named Directive.”
“When I learned that we were being occupied by the Russians, my first impulse was to get into my car and drove to Barrandov, since I thought there could be a problem. At that time the American film The Bridge at Remagen was beings shot in Prague and they brought three or four Shermans, the U. S. tanks, which they needed for the scene that was shot on the bridge in Davle. The bridge in Davle was identical to that of Remagen and it was cheaper for them to shoot it here than in Germany. So they moved with us and I knew that the tanks were there and if someone learned, the Russians would not understand it. And of course, the Soviet propaganda immediately took a hold of it. They spread the word that the contra-revolution was under way and that the socialist Czechoslovakia was being occupied by the U. S. Army. Moreover, in the Barrandov basement they found the weapons of the People’s Militia. They had their rifles there, which the Soviets, too, used for their propaganda. That they were hidden storerooms full of weapons. And the U. S. tanks to top it all.“
“This was in 1939. Our Vlčata [Wolf Puppies] unit had a camp in Brdy range. There was this German military car, an officer stepped out, pointed to the pole and we had to take our flag down and evacuate the camp in twenty-four hours. We ran to telephones to call fathers who had cars to come to fetch us and drive us home, as it was a matter of hours. This was the first dissolution of the Boy Scout organisation, the second came in 1948 when they told us that there were no longer any Boy Scouts and they gave us applications forms for the SČM, the Association of Czech Youth (sic) or what it was called then.”
“I encountered censorship just once, this was in the film Mister, You’re a Widow, where I put – beyond of the script – one scene, in which Sovák and Janžurová played ping-pong. As all the Czechs who had been to the communist holidays, they were very apt at playing ping-ping. While playing, Sovák pondered possibilities of a democratic government, what a government should look like. This was at the time when democracy was out of the question. Well, we bore, for some time, the name People’s Democratic Czechoslovak Republic but we really had no clue about democracy. They played ping-pong effortlessly and invented thi dialogue. Sovák, who was the king, spoke about democratic countries where there is a kingdom but the king is subjected to the Parliament. Or, rather, the Parliament controls and prevents the King from going wild. And they managed to keep their ball over the table all this time. I had to cut the whole scene. I didn’t want to, I claimed that it was quite appropriate, that Sovák was speaking about monarchy in Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Holland, they all had kings and these were all democratic regimes. But the bosses didn’t like it and told me to cut it out. I objected that there was no reason, that it was just fun. Sovák was very witty and Janžurová answered in a witty way as well. But they told me, ‘It just won’t be in that film’. And that was the end of it.”
Václav Vorlíček was born on March 6, 1930, in Prague, into a family of Pension Institute’s director. The parents educated Václav and his older sister in democratic traditions and culture. Before the war Václav frequented the Boy Scout unit “Vlčata” and was witness, in 1939, of the Boy Scout camp dissolution due to the nazi order. During the war he attended the primary school in Botičská street and the grammar school in Dušní street. He witnessed the air raid on Prague on February 14, 1945, the May liberation and the resurrection of the Boy Scout organisation shortly after the war. In October 1945 his mother succumbed to throat cancer and Václav had difficult times to come to terms with her death. In 1947 he had his first contact with the film, when Jiří Mach shot the movie On Good Track with their Boy Scout organisation. After his college graduation in 1950 he applied for FAMU, the film university, where he was accepted on the second try, after a one-year practice in Film Studio Barrandov. He graduated in 1957 by the political satire Directive, which was so provocative that he almost failed the exam. Then he returned to the Barrandov studios where he specialised as the director of films for children. His first international achievement was the film Who wants to kill Jessie, shot in 1966 in partnership with Miloš Macourek. The director of the film studio let him pass the checks in 1970 so that he could continue in his work. He always saw his Communist Party membership (since the late 1950s) as formal, a condition necessary for his work. He specialised mainly in comedies with no ideological message. During the normalisation he belonged among the most busy directors and in the 1980s he was demanded also by the West German TV production for which he did three successful series for children. He married the artist Sofia Vukolová, a daughter of Russian exiles, in 1952 and had two daughters with her.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
