Czech filmmaker Petr Jančárek is not apologetic about his huge admiration for former President Václav Havel (1936-2011), the subject of his new feature documentary, Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me?, the opening film at this year’s Ji.hlava Festival.
Jančárek knew Havel well and worked closely with him during the last decade of the ex-President’s life.
“It’s actually true that Havel is perceived differently abroad than at home. Czech society is quite sharply divided between his admirers and those who actually hate him – literally,” the director acknowledges that the playwright, poet and politician continues to divide Czech opinion more than a decade after his death.
To those who share his values, Havel remains a true hero. He stood up for democracy and against the Soviet authorities during the communist era, and provided inspirational leadership to the country during the years after the Iron Curtain fell.
Jančárek shot more than 200 hours with Havel. This has been whittled down into a 90 minute feature. “It was extremely difficult to give up certain scenes,” Jančárek admits of what was a very lengthy editing process. Many different cuts of the film that were made. ”I can only say that we ended up with version 68…”
During post-production, one editor left the project. “We somehow lost alignment,” the director says of the former collaborator. “The new editor [Josef Krajbich] helped me a lot to put together the material.”
Jančárek wanted Havel to speak in his own words wherever possible and therefore hasn’t used commentary or voice-over. “We have nobody to explain his thoughts,” the director insists.
How did Jančárek win the trust of his subject? “My first meeting with Havel was quite a funny situation. It was in the first days of the Velvet Revolution [in 1989]. At this time, I was a student at the film faculty,” he reminisces. He was invited to become one of the first members of Havel’s “safeguard,” acting briefly as security for the politician.
The director didn’t meet with Havel again until several years later, in 2004, after Havel had left the Presidency. Jančárek and his friends asked him to record a short video greeting for some Cuban dissidents who had just been arrested during a political crackdown by the Cuban government. Havel agreed.
Jančárek went to Havel’s office to shoot the video. “Of course, I came ahead of time.” The filmmaker and the politician got on famously. A week later, Jančárek received a call from the ex-President’s office asking him to work on future video assignments. When Havel wasn’t able to attend events in person, he would record video addresses – and Jančárek would shoot them.
“I did this until the end of his life,” Jančárek notes. During this period, he also worked on a trilogy of TV documentaries about Havel’s extraordinary political career. Havel was a fan of this work and approached Jančárek again in 2009, asking him to film during the final years of his life.
“I think we had a very open and friendly relationship…I feel honoured by the trust the President had in me. With a few exceptions, I could shoot everything he was doing. If there were any limits in what could be shot, they were determined by other people,” the director says of the complete creative freedom Havel gave him.
One of the great fascinations of Havel’s career is that he was a major writer as well as a major politician. Jančárek says that his real passion, however, was for cinema. “Definitely, he is more famous for his plays than as a filmmaker [but] actually, since his childhood, he was surrounded by people in the film industry.” Havel’s uncle Miloš Havel was a pioneering figure in Czech cinema, founding the legendary Barrandov Studios. As a kid, Vaclav used to “sit on the knees” of international movie stars. Jančárek says that Havel’s play writing was a “substitute” for the movie career that he had longed to have.
In the 1940s, after the war, Havel had been at school with Miloš Forman, later to become one of the country’s greatest movie directors. Jančárek tells a comic story about Havel trying to ride a bicycle. He did know how to operate the brakes and so Forman and the other boys had to run behind him and pull him off the saddle before he crashed.
Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me? had its world premiere October 24. The director pays tribute to his producer, Jiří Konečný , who is already planning for the film’s distribution in the Czech Republic in February. The doc will also soon be seen on Czech TV and on VOD platforms.
It is often said of Havel that he was exactly the same in his ordinary, private life as when he was strutting the global political stage. He had no airs and graces. Jančárek agrees that this was one of the “really fascinating” aspects of Havel’s personality. “Thanks to him, I met two American presidents, one Soviet one and a range of politicians…and I can confirm that the President’s behaviour was always the same.”
Sometimes, those close to Havel suffered because he didn’t have enough time to give to everyone – but Jančárek says he was kind and generous.
As for the suffering Havel endured through illness and bereavement at the end of his life, the director sums up his attitude toward these afflictions with one word: “dignity!” Jančárek last saw Havel a week or so before his death, when the Dalai Lama came to Prague to visit him.
“He did his best not to bother [others] with the way that he felt. He didn’t like to admit that he was losing physical power.” His mental faculties remained as sharp as ever until the end.
The filmmaker describes his subject as a truly inspirational figure who showed as much grace and stoicism at the end of his life as at any other time. “I would be happy if I could do it the way he did,” Jančárek says of how Havel faced his final days.
