Waves received one of the longest standing ovations in the history of the Karlovy Vary IFF at its world premiere. How did that make you feel? 

The atmosphere was amazing. The big cinema hall at the Thermal Hotel is really powerful, with a panoramic screen that you just can’t take your eyes off of. You’re totally immersed in the film, and the sound is huge. It’s an “experience” cinema, where the emotions really get to you, and that’s what Waves is all about—through the sound, the editing, and, of course, the photography. I think that also contributed to the audience’s reaction.

Waves combines archival footage from the ’60s with new 16mm and 35mm footage, as well as digital imagery. This meant you could evoke the era without the use of heavy equipment in the scenes of the Soviet invasion in August 1968. How did you combine the formats?

It was both challenging and fun. Producer Monika Kristl had experience from another project that scenes with tanks don’t work unless you have a huge number of extras and close down the whole street. Besides, Prague today looks very different from the way it did in the ’60s. But at the same time we needed to give the film—which is mostly set in the newsroom, indoors at microphones—a certain grandeur, so the viewer could “take a breath.” The best way to do that was to use archival footage, but in such a way that the transitions wouldn’t disturb the viewer. So about two and a half years before shooting, we did a test where, in the scene where the editors come out of the radio building and see the tanks, we combined the new material with archival footage that we colored in. And it worked. We shot most of the film digitally, and filmed most of the exteriors on 35mm, which gave the image a period patina and grain. At the same time, I used the film stock as a reference for color-grading the digital shots. And we used the 16mm film for the transitions to the archival footage, so it wasn’t such a big jump. The idea was to blur the difference between the archival footage and our own shots as much as possible, so when the audience watches it, they don’t think about which shots are contemporary and which are archival.

You’ve made films and TV series set in various decades of the last century: The Auschwitz Report during World War II, Actor in the ’50s, Nineties in the ’90s. I’ve heard that you like to create the illusion of a time that you may not have experienced, even from old photographs. How did you do that with Waves?

I was very inspired by Josef Koudelka’s photographs, which captured the moment of the occupation really well. The big Koudelka retrospective for the 50th anniversary [of the Soviet invasion] in 2018 was a great experience for me. We also drew inspiration from a huge amount of archival material. One valuable resource was a quarter-hour of footage of the occupation shot by a Spanish embassy employee on 16mm color film. It was recently returned to the Czech Republic. We were particularly interested in the colors and clothes of the time, and we drew on those too in the editing. Jiří Mádl and I often used the American film Argo as a reference. Even though it’s set in the 1970s, it inspired us with its visual narration and the dynamics of changing environments. 

In the spring you filmed the TV series Bora. How was that different or new for you?

It’s got a great script, a comedy-mystery, which reminded me a little bit of The White Lotus or Agatha Christie. A group of people head to a lighthouse on a small island in Croatia for a spiritual workshop and get caught in a bora, a strong Adriatic wind. While they’re trapped in the lighthouse, some of them start dying in mysterious ways. The exteriors were filmed in Croatia, while the lighthouse interiors were shot in a studio in Bratislava. The biggest challenge for me was to connect the environments and find a way to make the interiors as visually interesting and realistic as possible, since it would be impossible to shoot in a real lighthouse. The architect Ema Teren designed the interior perfectly, and I think we took full advantage of the studio.  

What other projects do you have coming up?

I’m working with Peter Bebjak on a film about Karel Duchoň, a singer from the ’70s and ’80s, often called the Slovak Tom Jones. He was a world-class talent with an incredible voice, but just happened to live in the wrong time: communist Czechoslovakia. It’s a fascinating story of a hugely talented, sensitive man, who was also a bohemian—his meteoric rise and even faster fall, accelerated by alcohol. With director Jan Hřebejk and screenwriter Petr Kolečko, we hope to develop a film called Hearts of Ice (S ledem v srdci), about the fate of the Czechoslovak players who won the 1949 world ice hockey championships. And director Marek Najbrt and I have a mystery thriller in the works called Wild Hunt, a dark, raw, balladic story set during the Thirty Years’ War.

What are your memories of Marie Dvořáková’s short Who’s Who in Mycology, which won the student Oscar?

I really enjoyed the film. The script was excellent, too, and Marie had a very clear vision of how she wanted it to look. Because of the special effects sequences, which were a combination of filmed action and postproduction, it had to be broken down into shots with great precision in advance. The studio was then designed and built on this basis. I often think back to that shoot, because I learned a lot from it. For example, about lighting in the studio. The Oscars in Los Angeles were a great reward. I got invited to a meeting at the American Society of Cinematographers, where I was complimented by some of the top cinematographers in the US, who had seen all the nominated films. It was a pretty surreal experience.

When did you decide to become a cinematographer?

The first time I got the idea was in high school. I was attracted to filmmaking, but didn’t know if I could do it. I thought I’d try the camera, even though I didn’t really know what the job entailed. Intuitively, though, I was drawn to it, since I thought about stories in images. My parents supported the idea, but they wanted me to have a plan B in case it didn’t work out. So I started studying German in Bratislava, but meanwhile I got in touch with people in film and theater and started making short films with them. After that, I joined Slovak Television as a camera assistant. It was only after I had some work experience that I applied to the Academy of Performing Arts, where I was accepted. Then I left television for freelance work and got into film.