Jan Svankmajer: I did propose a feature film in the 1970s, but the subject-matter was not exactly enticing for the regime. And because the state had a monopoly on film-making, once you became a director of shorts, it wasn't easy to be allowed to make features. But it's really not important whether you make shorts or features, whether you make objects or drawings, because poetry and poetics is all one, and that's all that matters. The tools are inter-changeable.

C: Film wasn't something you studied – how did you come to it?

JS: After I studied drama, I was a theatre director, and worked in the Theatre Of The Masks, the 'Black Theatre', where the actors were dressed all in black, and you only saw the face, and objects moving through the darkness. I started in the 1960s at a famous theatre in Prague called the Semaphore. It was very popular – they had comedy sketches, songs; rock'n'roll was first heard on its stage. I started there, with the Theatre Of The Masks, but I was trying to bring in avant-garde methods, which people weren't used to. They came for rock'n'roll or silly comedy sketches, not avant-garde theatre! So there was a row, and I left, and I went to the Lanterna Magika theatre, which was a great stroke of luck, because that's where I discovered film.

C: Tell me about the Lanterna Magika.

JS: It was a combination of film and theatre, pioneered in Prague. It mixed Black Theatre, actors on the stage, ballet, film, everything together; it was a complex performance. That's where I first had access to film-making, and discovered that film has three major advantages over theatre. One, actors can't spoil it for you once you get it into the editing room. Two, film can wait for its public; theatre can't. Three, film time is so much faster than theatre time. It took ages in the theatre to transform one picture, one composition, into another. The fast, speeded-up time of film made that easy; that was my luck, and I've never returned to theatre.

C: Neverthless, Little Otik and your last film, Conspirators Of Pleasure, are mainly regular actors doing live action work; you're using much less animation than before. Why have you gone this way?

JS: The decision is not made along these lines. I have never considered myself to be a director of animated films, I have not considered myself to be a film director, because I do other things – collages, objects, all that. I've got films which are purely animated and films where there's not a single animation; what dictates the proportion of animation to live action is the subject-matter, the theme, the story. That determines which tools I use, in what proportion.

C: You say you don't consider yourself a film director, or an animated film-maker. What do you consider yourself?

JS: If I should say it in a slightly exaggerated way, I would say I consider myself to be a poet. There's only one poetry, and whichever tools or methods you use, poetics is all one.

C: Let's talk about Little Otik. Tell me about the fairy-tale it's based on. Is that a well known Czech story?

JS: It's very well known. It's considered a fairy-tale for little children, teaching them not be greedy. I looked around at other cultures' folk tales, and couldn't find a similar tale – especially the idea of digging up a tree stump, and bringing it to life through the desire to have a child. But it must be a very old tale, because it uses the tree – the tree, with its roots and branches, it's the classic symbol: the roots going into the dark underworld, into hell if you want; and the branches reaching up into the heavens. It must be a very old tale.

C: There's an interpretation of the story as you've made it that I'd like you to comment on. It seems that the couple want something they can't have. By wanting it so much, they make it happen, in secret. Then it happens, and it turns out to be a disaster, because this thing is a monster that consumes everything. Now, it seems to me that in a country which ten years ago brought capitalism upon itself, there might be quite a political element to this story.

JS: (laughs) I do not disallow any interpretation! This is the beauty of an imaginative film: all interpretations are possible and welcome. This is something a realistic film cannot do. As the world changes, an imaginative film gains new meanings, it changes as well. If it weren't so, the films that were made during the communist regime would not have spoken to anybody, no-one would have understood them anywhere else. Many of my films of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were banned, simply because people interpreted them to themselves as a political statement. They were laughing against the situation they were living in. When the censors saw people laugh, and didn't know why they were laughing, they had to use their own imaginations in order to ban these films, so they came up with fantastic interpretations. The censors were forced to have some imagination!

C: Are you saying that there's no political intention to any of your films?

JS: I was never interested in what I would call the foam of politics; but by definition, if they're true imaginative films, they deal with the world we live in, and the diseases that the world suffers. In that respect, of course my films were political; but they were never intended as a political statement. I was never interested in direct targeting of a particular situation or person, as the dissident writers of the 1970s and 1980s were. I thought, surely even this totalitarian regime is only a boil on the face of civilisation. Surely a civilisation which has in one century produced two such terrible things as Stalinism and Fascism must be deeply sick within. The rot must be in the veins, inside the civilisation, and these things are only boils. If what I was trying to do was only about a specific totalitarian regime, it would be dead, like most of the dissident literature is now completely dead.

C: I'd like to ask about the changes in Prague and the Czech Republic generally since the revolution. How successful do you feel Czech capitalism has been?

JS: I've never had any illusions about what capitalism may or may not bring, because I've had friends abroad who lived in capitalist societies. The best periods in a creator's life are the moments when a regime begins to fall apart, and there is no new regime yet anywhere on the horizon. You don't know what's going to happen, but you see it falling apart – like in the 1960s, when the state was virtually paying for any art that was against it. After a revolution, somebody else will come and put things in order again, and that's not so wonderful. The time when a system falls apart is the best. Pre-revolution, wonderful; after revolution, the shit!

SF Said