László Nemes is brushing off his dinner jacket and shining his shoes. In a few days his fourth film, Moulin, will make its premiere in the main competition at Cannes. The picture’s arrival there was a tad unexpected. It was only last September that his twisty Orphan, a family drama in minor key, premiered at Venice International Film Festival.
Still, he is royalty at Cannes. It was there, in 2015, that Son of Saul, his debut feature, came within a whisker of winning the Palme d’Or. Following a Sonderkommando – one of the prisoners forced into Auschwitz work units – as he sought to bury his son, the film remains branded on the minds of all who saw it.
Moulin sounds like a departure for the Hungarian film-maker. His first film in French stars Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin, the French Resistance hero who, dropped into occupied France to help rally support for Charles de Gaulle, ended up captured by the notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie.
That codes a tad more mainstream than his earlier work.
“It is a French movie,” Nemes confirms. “It is a shock of the titans. It is about two worlds colliding when Klaus Barbie, the infamous butcher of the Gestapo, catches the head of the French Resistance. It really is two world views that are clashing. I think that’s something that’s very interesting. I’m very excited about this widescreen cinema experience.”
The unexpectedly speedy arrival of Moulin at the French film festival is all the more notable for the occasional slowness of Nemes’ work rate to this point. There was a full seven years between Sunset, his fascinating, puzzling second film, and the touching, troubling Orphan.
“Well, there were delays,” he says. “I also wanted to make a film in English first, and I battled the Anglo-Saxon world of film, trying to get my first English-speaking movie off the ground. So that hasn’t happened. It may still at some point. And then Covid happened. I also had the idea of making a third Hungarian movie.”
There seems to be a lot of family history in Orphan. The picture, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the second World War, has Klára, a Holocaust survivor, meeting up with Andor, her infant son, in a ravaged Budapest.
A decade later, Mihály, the man who sheltered her during the conflict, possibly for sexual favours, turns up and attempts to restart the relationship. Andor, eager to locate his missing father, doesn’t much fancy the idea of this burly brute as stand-in parent.
“The foundational story is that my father had to change his name when he was 12,” Nemes says. “He had to embrace an entirely new reality. He thought that his father died in the Holocaust, and he found out, at the age of 12, that it was all a lie – that his real father was someone who was hiding his mother during the Holocaust. And he was a very, very abusive, brutish man.
“Just coming to terms with that reality left its mark on his life, very deeply. But it also traumatised me when I was growing up. This was a burden I had to carry.”
That is a fascinating hunk of personal lore. It is the sort of story that families often suppress. Was it talked about when he was growing up?
“He did talk about it,” he says. “And my grandmother also talked about it, although she didn’t give the most intimate and most difficult details. She didn’t disclose them. But she did talk about the tragedy of her life. So I guess it was a two-fold origin.”
Orphan is remarkable for soupy colours that powerfully convey a country in uncertain transition. It is chilling on the communist regime’s intolerance of dissent. What really sets the film apart, however, is Grégory Gadebois’s chilling performance as Mihály. A father? A father figure? Either way, the actor’s hulking charisma is unforgettable. How did Nemes settle on a French performer?
I guess he was a master to me. I was inspired by his approach to film-making, his uncompromising directorial style
— László Nemes on Hungarian director Béla Tarr
“I was looking for someone who had a potential for violence and aggression and power but was still lovable in a way,” the director says. “And that is not so easy to find, especially in Hungary. It wasn’t easy. I had to look elsewhere. I looked at all the countries in Europe and came up with a solution of using Gregory, who immediately said that he would learn his lines in Hungarian.”
Nemes freely volunteers that, when treating Gadebois’s dialogue, they “used different AI models to help us”. He was comfortable with that?
“Yes. If you use AI just to push a button and then get a result I don’t believe in it. But I think AI is completely overestimated. I really believe that. I was completely comfortable because it actually made us work 10 times more.”
Born in Budapest 49 years ago, son of the Hungarian director and writer András Jeles, Nemes moved with his family to Paris at the age of 12. Later he studied film directing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. But he has always remained connected to the culture of his home nation. For two years he worked as assistant to the great (possibly the greatest) Hungarian director Béla Tarr, who died earlier this year.
“Well, I guess he was a master to me,” Nemes says. “I was inspired by his approach to film-making, his uncompromising directorial style. Space is so important. Without good casting your film will fail. It has to be believable. The attention to the craft. These are all things I got from working for him. I owe him this very particular approach where you have to stick to your dream.”
I wonder what possibilities Son of Saul opened up for him. After securing the Grand Prix at Cannes (to everyone’s bafflement, the Palme d’Or was handed to Jacques Audiard’s so-so Dheepan), the picture went on to win the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, as the prize was then still called, at an unstoppable gallop. Did mad offers come the way of this unforgiving director?
“They did,” he says. “I was offered projects I didn’t want. So the Oscar does open doors in a way. But people also want to put you in a box. They think you’re a certain type of film-maker. People think I’m so very serious all the time. That I only think about death and things like that. And you have to think about death, but maybe not all the time, you know.
Bojtorján Barabas as Andor in László Nemes’ Orphan
“The industry, how it works, is treacherous. People say they want to work with you, but they don’t. I have a very uncompromising way of making films.”
Nemes is, for good or ill, not afraid of provoking outrage. We saw that in 2024 when he criticised Jonathan Glazer’s speech condemning the Israeli campaign in Gaza – as well as honouring the victims of the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023 – while accepting his Oscar for The Zone of Interest.
Nemes said Glazer “should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history”. He then got stuck into Glazer’s film (which had also won the Grand Prix at Cannes). “There is absolutely no Jewish presence on screen in The Zone of Interest,” he said. “Let us all be shocked by the Holocaust, safely in the past, and not see how the world might eventually, one day, finish Hitler’s job.”
He is a bit more diplomatic today.
“I did like the film,” he says. “I thought, when you win an Oscar for a film that takes place in the middle of the extermination machine of Auschwitz, you have to have some kind of responsibility for what kind of things you say. I really believe that you have to bear a responsibility.”
After Son of Saul, Nemes embarked on a misunderstood work that seems ripe for reappraisal. Sunset, released in 2018, follows a young milliner about Budapest as Europe unwittingly blunders towards the first World War. It has the rigour and resistance of a great modernist novel.
Andrea Waskovics as Klára and Grégory Gadebois as Mihály in Orphan
As we wind down our chat about that film – noting sources in FW Murnau’s Sunrise, from 1927 – Nemes seeks to win favour with his Irish audience.
“I wanted to add, in Sunset, my biggest inspiration, in a way, apart from Murnau’s movie, was Joyce’s Ulysses,” he says. “Joyce was talking about a Hungarian Jew at the beginning of the century. The heroine of Sunset was from Trieste, and Joyce partly wrote Ulysses in Trieste. I am very much connected to that book. And I just wanted to point that out.”
Duly noted.
Orphan is in cinemas from Friday, May 15th