Marek Epstein studied screenwriting and dramaturgy at FAMU, but for a long time he was not clear on what he actually wanted to do. “I wasn’t the kid who knew at ten years old that he was going to be a doctor and went for it.”
The trauma of acting and the proverbial happiness
Thanks to his parents, he played a lot of sports. His domain was running, but the racing times did not suggest that he could make a living at it. “Suddenly I reached the end of my graduation and had to move on again. In addition to jogging, I also enjoyed going to the cinema. So I went to ask FAMU what and how, but at that time they didn’t take eighteen-year-olds, rather older ones. I was supposed to come in three years. So I aged three years at acting school. Private because acting was a trauma for me. I wouldn’t be able to go on stage every night. But it was definitely a great experience for me. Until then, I didn’t even know anything about the theater.”
He considers the advantage of acting school to be that whatever he writes, he immediately tries to say it out loud. “I can evaluate how it sounds, if it’s believable, and that’s valuable to me. If necessary, I will rewrite it a bit, edit it.’
After three years, he tried FAMU and got there the first time. “It was luck. If I hadn’t been taken, I certainly wouldn’t have tried again.”
Before the first flap is the fight phase
He collaborated with the directors Jiří Strach, Jiří Vejdělek and the Polish director Agnieszka Hollandová. “That was also luck. We had a text on Charlatan and just tried to send it to her. The probability that she would respond was small, because she was currently filming in America. But in just 14 days, the answer came that she liked it and that she wanted to film it.”
Before filming, the director meets with the screenwriter and they discuss the text. “Before the first curtain, there is a phase of struggle, tug-of-war and haggling, when the director comes up with a new vision or his own way of directing it. He will mostly bring new ideas to it, which means changes in the text. And not all the changes have to be liked by the screenwriter. So before the shooting starts, there is such a friction between what the director will assert and what the screenwriter will defend.”
According to him, a good director can sense where the boundaries are when the text starts to spoil. And a good screenwriter will sense when a director brings good ideas and swallows his vanity. “I think an experienced person is willing to accept the other person’s good ideas.”
Together with Jiří Strach, they wrote the script for the film Angel of the Lord 2. “He approached me and I was very worried. But my children are to blame. When Mikuláš came to us with the devil, it was an impulse and I started to get ideas.”
How do you write a script in two? What does the author feel when his story suddenly comes to life? Did writing the screenplay for Brothers give him an answer to the question of whether the Machines are heroes or murderers? Why is the planned children’s book called Toothless? Listen to Alex and guest on the show.
