Ivan Passer(1933-2020)

Emigrated to the U.S. around 1969.

[on L'audition (1964)] There was a small theater called Semaphore in Prague, we had an idea to make a fake audition in this theater. We wrote something like a screenplay, I brought a young cinematographer to Milos [director Milos Forman]: Miroslav Ondrícek, who did later Amadeus (1984) and became one of the top cinematographers in the world. Milos bought an East German 16mm camera and we got film stock left over from a TV production. When we used it, the TV laboratory would develop it for a bottle of wine. For the little money we had, we made about 100 minutes of that film. We showed it to the studios and they said "go ahead we will give you money to finish it." We wrote another short story about a folk band, Ah, s'il n'y avait pas ces guinguettes (1964), and finished the film and to our total surprise the film played even in New York.