- Born
- Height6′ 1″ (1.85 m)
- László Nemes was born on 18th Feb. 1977 in Budapest, Hungary. He moved to France at 12 with his mother. He grew up in Paris, where he studied History, International Relations and Political Science at the Institut d'Études Politiques, because he couldn't go to film school. After that he started working as an assistant director on short films. With 26 he moved again to Budapest, Hungary and worked on short films there, where he met cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and sound designer Tamás Zányi. Together with them he finished his own 35mm short With a Little Patience (2007) in 2006. He subsequently studied from September 2006 on in a 'Film Directing' post-graduate program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He quit after less than a year, because he "did not like it", but met the poet Géza Röhrig during his time in New York. Frustrated with film school, he called director Béla Tarr: "I speak French and English, and I offered my services," said Nemes. He worked for two years as Tarr's assistant director, mostly on The Man from London (2007). In September 2007 his first short was presented at the Venice International Film Festival in competition and in Dec. 2008 it was nominated at the European Film Awards as 'Best Short Film'. Nemes shot his second short The Counterpart (2008) in Romania and after that The Gentleman Takes His Leave (2010) again in Hungary, finishing it in January 2010. The 3 short films have won more than 30 awards at more than 100 international film festivals. Nemes' first feature film project "S.K." was selected for the Résidence program which is overseen by the Cannes Cinéfondation. The resulting feature film Son of Saul (2015), with Géza Röhrig in the lead role, was surprisingly invited into the main competition and won the 'Grand Prix' at the 68th Cannes International Film Festival in 2015. Since then the film has become an international art house sensation and is Hungary's official submission for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category at the 88th Academy Awards.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
- Parents
- Has no degree from a film school. In September 2006 Nemes started to study film directing in a post-graduate program at New York University's 'Tisch School of the Arts', but quit after less than a year because he "didn't like it". Nemes further complained in an interview that the education there was too "conventional". Other famous drop-outs from NYU's 'Tisch School' include the later Academy Award winner Steve McQueen, who quit after only one semester for similar reasons, and director Paul Thomas Anderson, who famously quit after only two days.
- His first feature film Son of Saul (2015) is probably the most awarded debut film in the history of world cinema.
- Studied History, International Relations and Political Science.
- Speaks French, English and Hungarian fluently.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 69th Cannes International Film Festival in 2016.
- I don't think any subject matter is off the table when it comes to art. I think it can be done. I hope it was done by us.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We tried to be very restrained. Cinema seems more and more keen on giving more and more. I think less is more and the right way was to rely on the imagination of viewers to reconstruct something that cannot be reconstructed. For them to create in the mind the experience of the extermination camp.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We wanted to maintain logic at all costs: logic of space, logic of work, the work processes, the hierarchy. So everything that could be preserved in its logic was very important. So I think you can feel this logic in the way the work was organized. Those are the rules of the game. We had testimonies from the survivors of the Holocaust. We read those in several books. There was one direct source, which was the "Scrolls of Auschwitz," the written diaries by the members of the Sonderkommando, that they buried before they revolted in 1944. So a lot of elements were given to us by these testimonies and then we consulted with historians. We had the constant supervision of a Hungarian historian specializing in the Holocaust, from checking the places where the numbers were to constructing the sets, how the paint would look, where the lighting would be, what were the bulbs and those kind of things. We had a Yiddish adviser who helped us with this vernacular, with a special vocabulary recreated that had been lost. It gave us these many levels of realism, although the normal viewer cannot comprehend all these things. But we wanted to keep the authenticity as much as possible and make it believable.[2015]
- When I was working for Béla Tarr, I learned about his extreme attention to detail - controlling the creative process to the point of involving a team to do that, and also having the technical crew as much as a creative crew. He knows who his focus should be on.[2015]
- I saw Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah (1985) at one screening and started talking to him. Afterward, four different people posted pictures about it. He said that my film was good, which is apparently kind of revolutionary, but for me it wasn't that surprising. I don't mean to be pretentious, but I think he's been frustrated by representations and visual strategies associated with the Holocaust, which I have also questioned.[2015]
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