History is scary in Milos Forman's 'Goya's Ghosts'
Even though he is regularly offered high-profile scripts other filmmakers would kill for, Milos Forman has made only seven films in the three decades since he took home his first Academy Award for his 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The notoriously choosy director admits that the more than 50 years it's taken for his new historical epic "Goya's Ghosts" to make it to the screen is slow even by his unhurried standard.
"I know it's a long time," Forman said recently by phone from New York. As he remembers it, his infatuation with the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya dates back to when Forman was a student in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. "I remember reading a book about the Spanish Inquisition and I couldn't believe that all the same things I was reading about in Goya's 18th century Spain -- false arrests, confessions to crimes never committed, torture and even executions -- were happening in my country in the 20th century."
Jump ahead to 1984 and Forman was in Madrid with Berkeley producer Saul Zaentz to promote "Amadeus" (for which Forman earned his second Oscar as best director). At the Prado Museum, Forman says, "When I saw Goya's paintings I was overwhelmed by the feeling I was seeing illustrations of what I had read 30 years before: the prisons, torture chambers and Inquisition trials. I thought, If I could create a drama combining Goya and his work with that revolutionary period of change in Spain, that would be a wonderful movie. Goya is the world's first modern painter, more courageous than any artist of his time."
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"I know it's a long time," Forman said recently by phone from New York. As he remembers it, his infatuation with the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya dates back to when Forman was a student in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. "I remember reading a book about the Spanish Inquisition and I couldn't believe that all the same things I was reading about in Goya's 18th century Spain -- false arrests, confessions to crimes never committed, torture and even executions -- were happening in my country in the 20th century."
Jump ahead to 1984 and Forman was in Madrid with Berkeley producer Saul Zaentz to promote "Amadeus" (for which Forman earned his second Oscar as best director). At the Prado Museum, Forman says, "When I saw Goya's paintings I was overwhelmed by the feeling I was seeing illustrations of what I had read 30 years before: the prisons, torture chambers and Inquisition trials. I thought, If I could create a drama combining Goya and his work with that revolutionary period of change in Spain, that would be a wonderful movie. Goya is the world's first modern painter, more courageous than any artist of his time."