"I am a painter first, I sketch every day"

Milorad Krstić, this is your first feature film as a director, and what a fantastic, complex ride through the history of Art and Cinema! How did you conceive Ruben Brandt, Collector?

I had the whole film in my head before we started working on the animation. Alle the ideas came out from my brain, they were all visuals maybe with a little piece of music or dialogue attached to them, that’s how the characters were born, some of them more or less anatomically correct, but I simply did not care if they had four eyes or three breasts! Then, when it came time to put them all together as a story, I conceived the idea of the heist movie, the element of thriller and suspence.

Did being an artist first influence your approach as a filmmaker?

I am a painter first, I sketch every day, but then when I finish a painting I like to finish it myself and never ask for advice. Obviously film is a collaborative effort and I was lucky to have a fantastic team with me on this project.

This is a very international film, yet it has a typical Hungarian, mitteleuropean quality to it.

I feel very much at home in the mitteleuropean tradition of storytelling, I have been living in Hungary for 25 years, and I was glad that I have been working there on this project for the past eight years, and that the Hungarian National Film Fund backed it completely.