KEY POINTS:
He was the biggest coward and the most courageous artist," says director Milos Forman of Francisco Goya - the Spanish painter who is the subject of Forman's new film, Goya's Ghosts.
Goya (1746-1828) lived through some of Spain's most turbulent history.
There was the cruelty of the still
ongoing Spanish Inquisition. There was the French occupation of Spain, which displaced the Spanish royal family Goya had spent so long painting. Then the British came. Wellington defeated the French, the wheel turned again and the old regime was restored.
Throughout all the upheaval Goya continued working. He painted portraits of Spaniards, French and British alike, setting up his easel for whoever happened to be in power.
"One day he painted the Spanish king and his family. Then, when the Spanish king was kicked out by Napoleon, he painted Joseph, Napoleon's brother. When Joseph was kicked out by Wellington, he painted Wellington," Forman says in mock indignation at Goya's opportunism. "He painted everybody!"
But alongside his society portraits, Goya also faithfully recorded the horrors of war in a series of brutal paintings and etchings known as The Disasters of War.
Later in his career, he completed the so-called Black Paintings, a series of grim, allegorical images about madness and destruction.
Forman's film isn't about Goya as such. Instead, the artist (portrayed with magnificent gravitas by Stellan Skarsgaard) is shown as an observer, looking on as war, religious persecution and revolution convulse Spain.
Goya's Ghosts boasts one of the more memorable villains in recent films, Father Lorenzo, a charming but manipulative priest played by Javier Bardem. Natalie Portman also appears, as an ingenue painted by Goya.
Forman refuses to be drawn on the parallels that exist between Goya's era and what he himself experienced growing up in Czechoslovakia under the Nazis and then under the communists. And he doesn't want to talk about the challenges of a Czech director making a movie about a quintessentially Spanish artist.
"I don't speak Spanish," he says gruffly when asked why he shot in English. "Look," he continues in his deep, heavily accented voice, "we tried to make this film as an entertainment that would somehow introduce the treasures of art to the audience."
It is easy to see why Forman is so fascinated by Goya's work. As a film-maker, the Czech shares some of the artist's chameleon-like characteristics. Forman may not be the most prolific director but he has constantly reinvented himself.
In the 1960s, when the Czech film industry was under the heel of the Soviets, he was making intimate, playful films like Black Peter (1963), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967).
Back then he used to say that he disliked "grand manner" and "operatic emotions" and that the best stories for the screen were rooted in ordinary behaviour. When he moved to the United States, the emphasis on the everyday dissipated.
True, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which won a hatful of Oscars, was realistic in tone, even if Jack Nicholson's character was larger than life. But in brash films like Ragtime and Hair you saw little of the quiet observation and understated humour of his early work.
His Czech movies were shot on tiny budgets. Amadeus and Valmont were full-blown epics.
"Give me $100,000 and I will make the film for $100,000. Give me $10 million and I will make the film for $10 million. Give me $100 million and I will spend it," he says.
Like Goya, Forman has lived through tumultuous times. He was born in 1932 in Caslav, not far from Prague. His parents were arrested by the Gestapo and both died in Auschwitz.
He credits his education at the King George College School in Podebrady, a a small spa town 30km east of Prague, with helping to give him the resourcefulness he has needed to survive as a film-maker for 50 years.
The 70 pupils were a mix of problem children, war orphans or the sons of foreign diplomats. Forman's classmates included Vaclav Havel (the playwright who later became president of the Czech Republic) and the Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski.
"Intellectually, it was a jewel among schools," says Forman.
He has mixed feelings about Czech society 18 years after the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule.
"I think it will take another two generations to get to a normal state of mind. But it is becoming clear that the society is heading in the right direction," he says.
Now, at the age of 75, Forman doesn't know if he will make any more features.
"If Goya's Ghosts happens to be my last film I will be very happy," he says. "It really summarises my life experience."
- INDEPENDENT