Růžena Černá

“When Karel brought home a screenplay, he had to read it to find out what sets he will be building. Interiors and exteriors and so on… He had to think a lot about it before sitting down at the drawing board. Today, it’s all done on a computer, but back in the day it was all done on paper. What’s going to be where, what furniture and all that… So every time he was in the thinking process he cleaned up my food pantry. Every time. I told him: ‘Oh Jesus, you have a screenplay, you’re going to clean up my pantry again.’ So he reorganized everything while he thought about his project and later sat down to draw everything and that was it.”

“We lived in Vinohrady and we were overjoyed to see the bombers overhead, they were flying to Dresden it was said. We had a good view of the sky as we lived at the end of the block by the park and we also always heard the noise, the tremendous noise. We rushed to the window and watched with dad how high the planes were. They looked like small silver stars, but the noise was very loud. We said: ‘They’re flying to Dresden again, that’s great.’ One time we looked away because my two-year-old sister was there. Mom wasn’t at home and dad looked after her. All of a sudden we heard the bombs hit and dad said: ‘Jesus Christ, we’re being bombed, take mom’s fur coat and we will run to the cellar.’ Her coat was in the entrance hall. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time and really upset. So instead of the coat I grabbed dad’s sweat pants he wore to haul coal.”

Since I had access to Austrian and German TV channels I theoretically could have watched the Oscars ceremony live, but the TV wasn’t working just then. No matter. With the time difference it was 4am in Prague and someone, I forget who, called me that Miloš Forman‘s Amadeus won eight Oscars. I was very excited and ran around and repeated over and over that we won an Oscar. Of course I didn’t know if Karel won, but since there were 8 Oscars for the film, I expected that we did. Six thirty in the morning Karel called and confirmed by saying ‘Yes, I won the Oscar, I won.’”

“Karel taught at FAMU. So they told him: ‘Since you did not teach your daughter proper values – you will not teach students.’ So they took that away from him.”

“At the time he would have accepted the Artist of Merit title. He was constantly saying: ‘Everyone else got one…’ He never got one and, later, he was glad that he did not get one so he would not have to explain why.”