Otakar Ryšavý

“Then the filming came about in that apartment at my place. There was a sound engineer, a certain Jirka Mergl, a certain Zdeněk Novák, Michal Hýbek, who did the camera work, and me. I did the service and sandwiches on Letná. Mr Havel polished it off - the whole bowl, he must have been hungry. And it was done in that hidden way, that's why I call it The Wages of Fear, it reminds me of this movie. Because he actually had to go around the block once, then the second time around the block, and only the third time he went to my apartment where it was filmed. It was shot in the form of questions, that he was sitting on the sofa, it is also there written in those letters, he is sitting on the sofa and his friend, Zdeněk Novák, asks him questions and he answers. It's in that movie, isn't it? They had to be careful, they had a spyhole, if you remember, and we had that too on the door, a kind of peephole. Well, strangely enough, it passed without any canaries coming to me. That didn't happen, luckily.”

“In 1969, I went to the cinema on Wenceslas Square. And in that cinema, they were showing Death in the Red Jaguar. That was Jerry Cotton, that was an American agent. That movie - I'll tell you what it was about. I said: 'I have to go see it.' Well, I went to see it, I was fourteen. I should not have gone to it yet, because there was an age limit - from 15, but I got there. I took a tall fur hat and somehow sneaked in there. I said to myself, ‘I have to go see Jerry Cotton.’ Well, now I was getting out of that movie theatre, it was the anniversary of August 21, 1969. Well, and I'm leaving Yalta (it was in Yalta, I don't know if that movie theatre is still there today. It actually is, it still works), I come out of the passage, and I see a large gathering of crowds around the Statue of Saint Wenceslas. ‘Gestapo! Gestapo!’ people shouted, and all sorts of things, at the policemen who were there, the militiamen were there too, and I just happened to be there, out of curiosity, I wanted to know what was happening there... And suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, I got hit in the back of the head with a baton. I knelt on my knees, the pain was simply terrible, now I started to cry and scream because I was small, no one had ever beaten me or anything like that before. When I recovered from that, my aunt lived on Vlkova street in Žižkov, so I somehow made my way through the crowd, and when I got out of it, I went to my aunt. My aunt kept me at hers for two days. Because when I explained it to her, she said, ‘You're not going anywhere now, you're going to stay here,’ and then my parents picked me up, they got me from there, from my aunt. But I was there for two days. And that was the first time I thought, ‘Why? What's happening? Why are they beating me?’”