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Director István Szabó doesn’t like watching his own films
Curious: Award-winning director István Szabó doesn’t like watching his own films. photo
© Hannes P. Albert/dpa
István Szabó won an Oscar for “Mephisto”. The Hungarian director has also received several awards for his life’s work – but he still doesn’t like watching his own films.
The Hungarian director and Oscar winner István Szabó (85) doesn’t like watching his own films. “Firstly, because I always find something that I think is too long, that I should take out. Then I’m angry that I didn’t do it back then,” said Szabó at the Academy of Arts (AdK) in Berlin. He also sees people on the screen, some of whom are no longer alive. “It’s so painful, I don’t want to watch the films again,” the filmmaker continued.
Szabó had handed over parts of his archive to the Academy of Arts, including the script for the drama “A Touch of Sunshine” (1999) with actor Ralph Fiennes. Szabó showed his latest film “Final Report” as a German premiere, which was released in Hungarian cinemas in 2020. Shortly afterwards, the corona pandemic began, as Szabó said. There is only a Hungarian version and the film does not have a German distributor.
“Final Report” is about a professor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who is unexpectedly forced into retirement and moves back to his home village. There he works as a country doctor, but his experiences in the village are not only positive. The director has worked with the Austrian actor Brandauer several times, for example on the drama “Mephisto” (1981). Szabó had the Won Oscar for best foreign language film. According to AdK information, he lives in Budapest and has been a member of the academy since 1984.