MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
When I found a stack of poems, in Hungarian, dating from the 1930s I hoped I had a trove that would yield the secrets of Paul Weidlinger’s teenage years. It turns out that most of them are drivel (sort of what you’d expect from a teenage boy) but there is a particularly dark one that […]
In 1934 a nineteen-year-old adventurer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, crossed Europe from the hook of Holland to Constantinople. He travelled mostly on foot. He was the same age as my father. A passage from his beautiful travel memoir, written years later, inspired this blog post. Fermor wrote, in Between The Woods and The […]
Today I meet actors in the new Restless Hungarian production office in Budapest. To make it official, Máté spells out the words RESTLESS HUNGARIAN with round magnetic buttons on our bulletin board. Sitting around a huge table, at least four people are on their phones talking in a language I do not understand. Among […]
Have you ever had a dream, something you ardently wished for, and experienced the realization of that dream in a way that far exceeded your expectations? That is what happened to me today, on the first day of shooting The Restless Hungarian recreations. Károlyi, the driver, picked me up at 7:30 AM Budapest time. I […]
This letter was written in three parts, separated by several days. It’s about scouting a dubious location…and then filming there. It is also about the man who is the voice of Paul Weidlinger in the film. Lupa beach is the tackiest place in Hungary. According to the PR, “Here you can get a true seaside […]
Yesterday was our sixth day of shooting. Today we are off. Tomorrow begins the final three-day push. I am tired but pleased. I would like to sleep, but I would also like to write about what has transpired since Lupa Beach while the details are fresh in my mind. Each day on the White Light […]