Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam express their admiration for Karel Zeman’s films in the very new documentary Film Adventurer Karel Zeman, which was presented to the first audience worldwide at the Karlovy Vary Festival on Wednesday. How did the filmmakers managed to get through to these famous directors? “Gilliam is a huge fan and agreed immediately, only it took another nine month to find a free date. As for Tim Burton, we took a chance during his visit to Prague last year. He agreed to a single interview for the talkshow “Na plovárně”, so we asked Marek Eben to pose the right questions”, noted producer Ondřej Beránek at the post-screening discussion panel.
Ondřej Beránek also co-founded the Karel Zeman Muzeum, largely specializing on Zeman’s unique special effects, similar to the new documentary. Indeed, the effects were what made the author of The Journey to the Beginning of Time and The Deadly Invention, whose restored version will premiere in Karlovy Vary on Friday, famous. The Film Academy students attempted to reconstruct three Zeman’s film scenes using the then-available technology, which enlivens the standard biographical format. “The audience will thus be able to see the sheer amount of work and time that was required for the special effects at that time”, notes director Tomáš Hodan.
The documentary, otherwise interesting, is mainly composed of teasers and “talking heads”. The director commented on the respondents’ fluent speeches as follows: “Everybody can provide a comprehensive sentence if you help him with some editing. Only with certain people, you have to use images to cover the edited parts”. Zeman himself talks only in the final part of the film, but we can also see him in behind-the-scenes footages. “However, there are false “making of” documentaries, made by Zeman himself only retrospectively”, revealed the authors. Nonetheless, the unique shots of his first animating tests, unknown to anyone to date, are undoubtedly genuine.
