František Váša interview (2020)

František Váša working on B. Pojar's Hiroshi

After a long pause, I'm today finally showing you something very interesting: my interview with František Váša!

What? How? When did this happen? Quite a long time from now, actually, August 21st, 2020. Some months before, I was able to reach Mr Váša by email (big thanks to Dan cz for help) and introduce him to the blog, which he very much enjoyed. He is often difficult to reach by email, though, so I was especially pleased to hear he would be visiting Split, my hometown! This was, in fact, nothing unusual. Dalmatia is often a summer destination for Czechs and his family is no exception. I had a chance to meet him and ask him what I wanted.

Our meeting took place almost in transit. Mr Váša had just arrived to Split and had a ferry to catch to the island of Vis, so we were able to talk only for less than an hour in Split’s center. Our exchanges were a bit comical; Mr Váša speaks little English – I understand Czech well but can only speak half-broken sentences with intrusive Croatian vocabulary. However, I came prepared with translated questions and they quickly set us off. I spent the next 50 or so minutes getting to talk about most of the stuff which went on in the aiF Studio with one of its leaders! In Czech, of course. It was, as you can imagine, an exhilarating experience, only compounded when I accompanied Mr Váša to the ferry, met his lovely wife (who speaks perfect English!) and then got to chat with an even bigger name in Czech stop motion animation, director Jiří Barta, who was also going to Vis! It was wonderful to meet all of them and, hopefully, this was just the first of our encounters. Very much a day to remember!

Still, the interview! I must apologize to my faithful readers for posting it very late, but the delay was caused by multiple factors, from troubles with faithfully translating certain remarks to lack of time, but also not being able to reach Mr Váša afterwards for months at a time. I should also mention that, per his request, I will not be sharing certain small portions of the interview. As you can imagine, aiF’s break-up was not the most idyllic of splits (on the contrary, lawsuits sprung up) and there is no point in possibly opening old wounds with certain people through my blog. I hope you can respect that, as I have. The majority of the story is still here, I can assure you.

Before continuing, I must again thank František Váša not only for agreeing to meet with me and answer my questions, but also for providing some images which have further enriched this post!

 

The interview

MP: How did you react when you first saw that there is a blog devoted to Pat and Mat?

FV: [laughs] Ha, I thought to myself, and forgive me, is it possible that somebody can show this much interest in Pat and Mat, is everything fine with that person? 

MP: Hahaha, well somebody must exist somewhere!

FV: Yeah, you got me when you commented how that gulaš can on the shelf in Karty was the same old can animated by Vlasta Pospíšilová. [FV is referencing his previous email acknowledgment of the detailed analysis of the episode posted on the blog.] Of course, I wasn’t there in the beginning, but I know from the stories that it all started with the film Kuťáci, where they were different and deal with some sort of egg. Jan Klos told me how they were doing it at the time. They did terribly small movements which would not be possible with fingers that are so big. So, they made new hands, which they had on slats about 3 meters long and the slats were finally phased to create that micro movement, which is normally not animated with those hands. 

MP: How did it feel to work with Klos on Motýlí čas (a.k.a. The Flying Sneakers)?

Good! Of course, Klos is one of the best animators we had.

MP: Definitely. He’s the best animator on Pat and Mat. Sorry, I can't save that honor for you!

FV: There were Pojar and Šrámek from the old guard of animators, but he’s definitely one of the best.

MP: I have to show you something. I watched your part of the movie Autopohádky a few days ago and noticed this. The characters in the film live in books with various names and titles. One of them says “Jan Karel Klos”. Were you aware of how Klos changed his name on the credits of some of the episodes?

FV: Yes, I know of it. He was very displeased with one of the episodes and changed his name. I got along with him because he worked in the S+H puppet theater beforehand and we knew of each other in that small world that is puppet theater. When I was studying, there were only five of us enrolled in the same year, so everybody knew everybody. It’s like a small family.

MP: Tell us something about your beginnings.

FV: I always wanted to do animated films, but when I finished secondary school, it could not be studied, only drawn film on UMPRUM, but I’m totally not [interested] in drawn films, so after various developments, I ended up at the Puppet Department, where I studied puppet theatre, which I was interested in at the time. So, I studied puppet theatre and worked for eight years in Plzeň in the puppet theatre. However, I still wanted to work in animation, but they were never hiring at Krátký film. They even did not take my classmate Jirka (Jiří) Látal, who was the son of Stanislav Látal, first an animator under Trnka and then a director himself, because they had enough people. 

After some time, one of my friends, an artist from the puppet theatre, started working with Jiří Barta on one of his films, one about thieves and vampires [Poslední lup, 1987], so I got acquainted with that world a bit. Eventually, there was a big festival in Plzeň, the biggest puppet festival in Czechia and Jiří Kubíček, who was associated with puppets, films and the theater, was in the jury. He suggested that I meet with Milan Svatoš, Barta, and that they are looking for people. So, I started an audition for the position of an animator. That was going on in an endless fashion – they were giving me trials, but in those days, there were no digital formats and 35 mm film was expensive, so I did these tests on some prehistoric Ampex machines, which meant that when they were crumpled, the tapes backed up for about 2 minutes, then they broke, clicked, passed, returned, so each frame lasted for about 3 minutes, it was endless. In the meantime, my son was born, we got an apartment in Prague (I am originally from Prague, but I worked in Plzeň in the theater) and this was before the Revolution, so I wrote to them requesting that this audition finally come to an end. I said or wrote that I need to feed a family and that, if I were not to get picked as an animator, I already have an agreement to join a puppet theatre in Kladno near Prague and that they need to tell me whether they have accepted me or not by the beginning of August. 

Finally, they sent me a telegram notifying me that they accepted me and I joined Krátký film's Barrandov studio in the beginning of September 1989 as an assistant animator to Klos, where that Motýlí čas was being shot. I animated my first scene on December 20. 

the first and last shot of FV's first scene

It was an interesting film, but the problem was that the script was made around 1960, while the film was being shot in 1989. At that time, stuff like Jurassic Park was coming to the fore and this was something similar to the things Karel Zeman had done – it was a journey to prehistory, a combination of animation and live action. So, I did Motýlí čas, then I did a couple of scenes in Až opadá listí z dubu by Vlasta Pospíšilová, something by Katarina Lillqvist, various things. I started working with Barta on the rehearsals for Golem, first tests, and this film hasn’t been made in the 30 years since due to a lack of money.

MP: I saw a picture from Animation People, it is being filmed now?

FV: No, tests for Golem are being done there, small tryouts. 

FV: So, the Revolution came, KF started to crumble, we started the new studio with Luboš that summer, Aif.

MP: … short for Aim For Vision…

FV: Yes, Aim For Vision, Aif, A-I-F. I was asked by Luboš and Michal Podhradský to join and I accepted. I became a co-owner of the company (there were ten of us and we were an s.r.o. - company with limited liability) and started animating at Ženské domovy (Women’s homes) in Prague’s Smíchov. We were making this contracted series Čertík Lucifuk, then we started making Pat and Mat. We made it basically for ourselves because we didn’t pay any money. There weren’t many commercials to do at the time. There was an effort to make the episodes because some of the older episodes were owned by Slovak Television, some by KF and so on and we needed all those episodes, not necessarily to buy them, but to distribute them. The television stations were not interested in one episode, they needed to fill up the whole year. 

[At that time, FV kept a detailed record of every film he had animated on. He wrote down his day's work in "animation notebooks", which were just for himself. This is one of those "raw" pages, with notes about his first work on Pat & Mat, done in 1991. Surprisingly, the episode in question is Okap, still under the working title with the same meaning Roura. Here you can see how the work unfolded: the first scene on the page is the first scene in the episode, while the last one is of Mat opening the door and watching Pat. Scenes which appear later in the episode were filmed in between, as shown by sequence numbers, e.g. 58, 41 and 26.]

It was the 1990s and there was chaos – in Slovakia, a half-authoritarian regime came to power and their television was relatively keenly watched over, so the directors changed rapidly. It was not possible to agree any contracts because you would agree something and two weeks later, the person who agreed it would not be there anymore, so everybody was scared to sign something. As such, it was not possible to acquire the whole package of Pat and Mat episodes, which would have worked out greatly, we would have had 49 episodes and people would have bought them. So, we made our 14 episodes and then Luboš Beneš, who was suffering from lung cancer (he smoked a lot), died. 

This was relatively fatal for the studio because he was the one who directed all the episodes of Pat & Mat and Lucifuk, but also mediated all contacts with the Czech and Slovak televisions. Also at that time, as a cost-saving measure, the televisions limited the output of original animated evening shorts. After Luboš's death, five episodes of Jája & Pája were left hanging in the air. I was asked by ČT to direct these five episodes and I managed to complete my first directorial work in animation in collaboration with Břetislav Pojar. The animation continued in November 1995 and I was left to finish those five episodes. I hadn’t directed until then, I was just animating and didn’t do my own films. I had some attempts on the eight [millimeter] with plasticine, but sadly, those films have deteriorated. Podhradský got Pojar to work on the series. The stories were there in the form of a synopsis, while Pojar and I worked together on the screenplays.

MP: You know, I like your J+P episodes more than the 1995 ones. In the original, Krkovička, his stinginess and the way he would get fooled were in the center of attention. On the other hand, the 1995 episodes are a bit boring to me as they focus mostly on adventures.

MP: So, we finally get to probably the biggest story in the history of Pat and Mat, Playing Cards. Does a Czech dubbing of it exist? 

FV: No. Just the English.

MP: And there’s no silent version?

FV: No. We tried to make Cards a bit differently than the previous episodes, so we did them in the 16:9 format. I went to Jiránek’s after writing the script so he could read it and say if it was in the spirit of the series and so on. He said he didn’t really care and I could do what I want. He was to be paid because he had artistic rights, but otherwise, he wasn’t really interested. At the time, he was very busy doing caricatures for the newspapers every single day and he was one of our best caricaturists.

After the script was finished, filming of Karty started practically on the knees in my corner of the studio. The wallpapers were designed by my colleague Bára Dlouhá. With each order for an advertisement, the set had to be dismantled and the studio vacated. 

[Here's the animation sheet for the first scenes filmed for Playing Cards, done in February-March 1997. The first shots were those in front of the door, including #3, Pat showing the cards at the door, and #81, Pat doing the "A je to" gesture. A sketch of the table's layout can be seen on the left.]

FV: After I completed the 8-minute version, Vladimir Rott, who was a co-owner of aiF, showed up. A friend of cameraman Ivan Vít, he had escaped to Switzerland and lived there. He is the grandson of the owner of the largest ironworks factory during the time of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, “at Rott”. He thought that he could take hold of that company after the Revolution. It would have been an ideal combination: the largest ironworks factory “Pat and Mat”. The perfect DIY. 

MP: Haha, you would have material for some episodes.

FV: Yeah. Unfortunately, it failed to come to fruition. So, Rott came with this idea to distribute the episode to the United States and said that over there they want a 12-minute version and the characters have to speak. I was against it. Somewhere at home, I still have the 8-minute version on VHS, which already had the music mixed in and everything completed. But they convinced me to extend it, so I inserted the parts of the episode taking place in the basement and connected them so the whole doesn’t look stupidly grafted.

MP: I think it turned out pretty well.

FV: I think it did, yes.

MP: It’s strange that you mention Rott was Vít’s friend – Rott basically said that Vít and Podhradský are thieves, no?

FV: Oh, they had a terrible row. I believe the error was made by Rott and that he sold the rights for South Korea to two different people! It simply doesn’t work that way.

MP: Ouch!

FV: Yes, then it went to some courts and so on. However, in the meantime, there was another conflict back home regarding VHS distribution which got terribly messy. Consequently, it was decided to close down aiF and start a new studio. I was not there, however. My wife got a job offer from EBU in Geneva, the Eurovision Television. For a long time, we hesitated (I had the theater and everything in Prague, for one thing), but we decided that such an offer is not to be rejected. We thought it would last for three years but, eventually, we were there for fifteen. As such, I was not involved.

MP: Nykl and Alton. One was Pat and the other Mat, right?

FV: Right. Very simple English dialogues were written by my wife Anna.

MP: Were you planning on doing a full-length movie, as the old aiF website says?

FV: No, no, we weren’t planning one at all. The plan was to continue shooting more episodes in the 16:9 format. Whether they were to last 8 or 12 minutes, and whether Pat and Mat were to speak or remain classically mute was not decided at that time. I spent about two years filming Cards because in the meantime, there were commercialss, and every time there was a commercial, everything had to be demolished, we would work on it for about two months and then I would continue. And so, I completed the 8-minute version, added the rest to make it 12-and-a-half minutes and that version was picked for the Annecy festival. In the meantime, aiF was shut down…

At the time, there was also a project that Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly was shooting with Honza Balej, who then founded his own studio, Hafan film. It was a project that Luboš Beneš originally started, and so Balej took it over or Podhradský offered it to Balej. O Českém Honzovi (Czech Honza). It was being filmed, but Balej was very temperamental, and one time he quarreled with somebody, left the studio, left everything there as it was, and never came back. Thus, maybe about half of an episode of Honza was filmed and nothing else. There were various commercials we did at that time, for instance one with Michal Žabka for Scotch Whiskey Famous Grouse, which is one of the best.

MP: On that 1999 aiF DVD, it is implied that some kind of behind-the-scenes video had been made. Had it?

FV: No, it wasn’t made.

MP: Aside from Karty, there was no animation with Pat and Mat created in aiF at the time?

FV: Correct, no.

MP: What kind of director was Luboš Beneš? I ask you because Klos told me that the old phasors at the studio said that “he was a good guy, but co-operation with him was absolutely impossible”, which he mostly agreed with.

FV: Not really. He was just totally practical. He wanted things to be done quickly and not completely badly. So, some of the films were not that good. There was sometimes no time to fix or improve anything, but things had to move forward. There was no time to do things precisely, with proper preparation, so he wasn’t very thoughtful about some details.

Luboš Beneš in the 1990s

He was originally employed by KF as a cartoonist and did some work with sound. He managed to work out how to do some other things and, as the guys there always wanted to have fun, they suggested he take on directing. Just like that, he started directing. He was great. Luboš, wherever he would go, he was immediately the center of the universe. He would say, “Let’s have a drink here, look at that nice girl there”, things like that, really a very outgoing gentleman. 

A complete contrast is Jiří Barta, who is really like a Beatles artist, a completely spherical (dreamy) person *goes on to mumblingly imitate how Barta is always thinking the process over in his mercurial way*. I filmed Toys in the Attic with him as he asked me to animate on it. I lived in Geneva at the time and so I flew to Prague here and there and then at the end, I was actually in Prague for two months, flying back to Geneva to my family at the weekends. It was a completely different experience.

MP: And Pojar? A legend.

FV: Pojar was something in between. He was also very practical, he was very experienced working with Trnka. He got his start somewhere in Zlín in cartoons and he went through it all, and he was there when it was all starting. The whole business was invented, it didn't exist before and he was there as it progressed. Jiří Trnka had unbelievable talent, his work was really beautiful. Pojar was more practical, though definitely a great as well. 

MP: Which Pat & Mat episode had to be reshot?

FV: I don’t know at the moment, I would have to look at them again, but the car is in that episode.

MP: Kabriolet?

FV: Probably Kabriolet. I would need to ask Alfons, though.

MP: Do some props from the series still exist?

FV: Some do, some don’t, because many of them were taken to the Patmat studio, some were left at aiF/Animation People.

Photo source: チェコ・チェコランド A puppet of Mat which, along with one of Pat, still stands at what is now the Animation People studio. The box and the matchboxes (for episode #48, of course) were made by FV. A peak of more of this lovely surrounding, which I would love to visit one day, can be seen on M. Žabka's page here.

MP: Do you know who came up with the name Pat and Mat?

FV: I believe it was Luboš. When we started doing them, everybody liked the names because they were international, short, memorable, familiar from chess, everybody could recognize them.

MP: There’s characterization in Karty. Practically, Mat is like an older brother, calmer, while Pat is impulsive. Was that your idea even before the dubbing? Because Pat and Mat are usually the same.

FV: Basically, they’re the same. I don’t like it in new films either and it terribly bothered me with some of Luboš’s episodes that sometimes he made complete fools out of them. In some episodes, they are excited, enthusiastic and hasty, so they inadvertently get certain things wrong, while in others, they are completely and utterly stupid.

MP: Like the ending of the episode Okap, if you remember it.

FV: Yes, Pat goes down the drain.

MP: I noticed that in that episode, a different puppet of Mat is used for the final scene and different puppets are used throughout the 1990s.

FV: There were about six pairs of puppets used at the time. I know where one pair ended up! We already had a form that was made of modurite which we would drill and spray with new paint. Before making Karty, I was worried a bit by their lack of expression, so, just for moments, they laugh and frown in that episode.

MP: Which stories were planned after Karty?

FV: There were various ideas and synopses of what the episodes could be about, but after Karty I let most of them pass. I found some papers a month or so ago when cleaning the drawers and I have to see what’s on them.

FV: The photo that's the banner on your blog was photographed by Ivan Vít. It was part of a calendar we did. Ivan Vít made all those photos, and I arranged them.

MP: Are you glad that people, apart from other things, still know you as a person who worked on Pat and Mat?

FV: Well, yes. I think it is a phenomenon, the do-it-yourself, that stems from times past, when I was a boy. In our country, it was not possible to do anything under communism, so the chalupářstvi (cottaging) came about. I don't know if this phenomenon still exists. When they expelled the Germans after the war from Czechia (in the Sudetenland and so on), there were simply thousands of empty houses where there was work to do and people started buying cottages that were empty and repaired them. All of a sudden, they had a house. There were no available materials, there were no craftsmen or privateers who would be able to do work, state-owned enterprises weren’t interested, people did not have money, so everyone bought a couple of planks and did what was needed themselves. From that, the DIY phenomenon came about.

MP: Are you sad that nobody could see Karty?

FV: I’m sorry, yes, but we could just not get along at the time.

MP: You didn’t know it was published on VHS in South Korea?

FV: I didn’t know that before I discovered it on YouTube. The beginning sequence from the second Korean video originally preceded the short opening titles of the finished episode. After that first Korean VHS video ends, the credits start. There is only a small piece of animation missing on the tapes, when the fly briefly returns to the food after the credits have rolled out.

After aiF disintegrated, Ivan Vít and Michal Podhradský, and the three of us were basically the only people in the studio when we did Karty, founded Animation People. Alfons was with us for some time as well, but he quickly stopped working as he didn't have the strength for those commercials. The commercials were mostly done for American companies and therefore they would be shot 20 hours a day for 14 days. Alfons was used to working 8 hours and then going home.

MP: But, he’s a very quick animator, faster than yourself. What more can you tell us about the different animators you worked with?

FV: That he is, faster, and always easy to follow to me. When I was living in Switzerland, I used to go to Annecy regularly for the festival, so I was present on a lot of the screenings there. Once, I was watching some film and I thought to myself: this was animated by Alfons! Alfons had to have animated this! Then it turned out it was a film by K. Lillqvist, a gruesome film about some Finnish general who was gay and copulated with some suitcases. She made this film in Czechia and, of course, Alfons animated it. [FV is talking about 2008’s Far Away From Ural, which can be seen here – warning: not for kids!]

When we were doing Jája a Pája, we couldn’t keep up with everything so there was also Martin Kublák from Zlín. I mentioned Jiří Látal. He animated very, very precisely. I like to think I was somewhere in-between when it comes to precision and expression.

When I came to Krátký film, Klos and Vlasta Pospíšilová were the best animators, Vlasta maybe even better. She was still animating a little at that time. Klos, thanks to his puppet theater experience, could do some masterful works, like Až opadá listí z dubu. Again, it is also true that the director would sometimes simply need to moderate him because he could “fly away” to somewhere completely else.

MP: What have you been working on recently?

FV: On the biggest, most expensive Czech animated film to date: Even Mice Belong in Heaven, Myši patří do nebe. A co-production with Slovaks, Poles, Belgians, the French… 

It should have had its premiere in Annecy last year. One of our producers brought in equipment (cameras and everything) which famous director Wes Anderson uses and I worked on it as a lead animator. The animation should have been completed in October, but we finished it in February, just before the corona crisis hit. Of course, the crisis slowed down things significantly and we are hopeful the film will have its premiere in 2021 [Update: October 7].

poster

MP: Thank you so much! I wish you a good holiday and all the best in your future work!

Mr Váša and me, not quite believing it!