Radu Jude flashes on the screen with an AI-generated background of a machine gun-wielding Donald Trump riding a giant kitten. What one is meant to make of this is unclear, but as ever, cinema’s greatest shit-poster starts our conversation off the only way he knows how. By far Romania’s most important filmmaker of the last two, Jude has documented the country’s emergence from the Ceaușescu dictatorship into a different kind of hell: neoliberal capitalism. With a clear eye and acidic wit, Jude’s films not only confront the reality of being fucked no matter your circumstances, but he does so with a love for his people like no other.
It’s this aspect that undermines the limiting label of “shitposter.” Radu Jude isn’t merely a provocateur. He’s a chronicler of the ways our world, and more specifically his home of Romania, has become so deeply stupid and untenable, while centering the people being pushed out to the margins. His latest films, Dracula and Kontinental ‘25, couldn’t be more different in size and scope, but the intention remains the same: a document of a place and its people.
Jude’s take on Dracula is perhaps the most Radu Jude a movie could ever be. Following up on Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’s scathing, hysterical, and depressing takedown of the film industry through the eyes of a PA, Dracula goes all in on the rot eating away at cinema. Nominally centered on a filmmaker tasked with rebooting Dracula and immediately falling prey to the pull of AI, Dracula intersperses over a dozen short films showing the various paths the filmmaker could go. One short, a mockery of Coppola’s Dracula, is fully created from hilariously bad generative AI. Another follows Vlad the Impaler, resurrected in modern times and played by a child, angrily confronting a cornball tour in Transylvania about how it’s bastardizing his image. Wrapped around all of this is our primary narrative, a nightly Dracula live show put up by a stage troupe in a bar. The show is interactive, which means the audience gets to chase Dracula and his lover out into the Transylvanian streets, “killing” them to close the show. One night, stars of the show, played by Gabriel Spahiu and Oana Maria Zaharia, decide they’re tired of being exploited for cheap entertainment and take off for real.
Clocking in at almost three hours, Jude’s Dracula is a behemoth that packs in seemingly every idea he’s ever had. A riff on Nosferatu is interrupted by pop-up banners for porno sites, and another sees a different take on modern Vlad, feeding on the elderly in a retirement home. Taking his home country’s most dominant myth, Jude pulls apart the ways in which other countries have cashed in on it with little regard for its history and how his own country has struggled to control the narrative, living in a post-dictatorship neo-liberal nightmare.
While the intention behind his use of AI within the text of the film couldn’t be clearer––like a vampire, it sucks the life from creativity––Jude’s own views are surprising. Or are they? Much like his work, speaking with Radu Jude is a swirl of contradiction and emotion. One minute you’re mourning the death of cinema, the next you’re overcome by a sense of hope as he paints a picture of TikTok as our new folklore.
Ahead of the release of Dracula, I sat down with Jude to unpack the thorny conversations around AI, not chasing an aesthetic, and the limitations of film as a revolutionary medium.
The Film Stage: Your Zoom background leads right into my first question. You fully embraced generative AI for Dracula; it’s the first shot of the film. There have been many contentious debates around its use, and though you’re making an obvious point by using it, especially in the context of the Dracula myth, you’ve still used it. How do you contextualize or reckon with that? I’m fascinated because I can’t deny that you found the first interesting and funny way in with it, but I don’t love that I didn’t immediately reject it.
Radu Jude: Well, thank you, first of all. I think it’s a personal curiosity, and maybe a desire to save ourselves somehow, because we are now in a time when… I think it was always the case, but in the last 10, 20 years, you hear it from all directions, this kind of crying over the death of cinema. “Cinema is dying!” Cinema is already dead. Cinema died 20 years ago, in the ’90s or whenever. It’s like a prolonged funeral around filmmaking. There’s always a new reason invoked for that. There’s no celluloid anymore, or there are no great cinema halls. There is too much streaming, too much this, too much that, too much social network, and I consider all this to be true. I agree with everybody who says cinema is dead, but at the same time, something in me asks, “What if this is not true?”
It’s also a bit of… not laziness, but a fear about what’s new. A fear of the new. We all have it, I think. I discovered that you can tame a little bit of this fear if you are using the tools you’re afraid of. Then the moment you use it, you discover, actually, this is not so uncinematic. Maybe the end of cinema is not true, or at least not in the way we expect it to be. So all of a sudden you discover that actually, no, cinema can be bigger. Cinema can be a bigger umbrella, and under it you can bring in a lot of other things which were not considered properly until now as being cinema, et cetera, et cetera.
AI, in the end it’s also just another tool. I think I also take advantage of the periphery in a way because I’m from Romania. I met an Australian filmmaker at a film festival recently––very nice young man––and after half an hour of talking about it he said, “No, don’t get me wrong. But can you tell me, what is Romania? I only know the name, but I don’t have any idea about it.” I understood him. It’s like: you’re from a tiny place in the periphery of eastern Europe, and there’s no real film industry. There’s no real financial stake. You cannot make a film and then imagine that you will win $20 million or $30 million. It’s nothing. If you can make it and have a decent salary and a little bit of extra money, then you’re a big success. So I feel it gives me a kind of freedom to engage with everything, even with the tools that scare people from real film industries, like America. They say, “Oh, this will ruin cinema. This will ruin our industry. This will ruin us,” basically, but we are already in ruins anyway in Romania. So you feel, well, what’s to lose?
So your outlook on using it is “the only way to go is up” in a sense?
Exactly, exactly. So when I heard the film was screened first in the New York Film Festival, there were a lot of reactions from people saying, “I don’t want to see the film because it uses AI. How dare he use AI?” And I was not even aware that it’s such a big thing. They say, “Wow, are you crazy?” Well, of course! I use whatever is at hand to make the movies. And then to see people saying, “It’s such a big issue.” Yeah, of course. Maybe for America this is a big issue because there are big stakes.
Radu Jude at Berlinale 2025
To your point about trying to save cinema from ruin runs through these two recent projects, Dracula and Kontinental ‘25, because they’re both centered on disappearance: they zero in on people on the margins and the places they used to occupy. How important has that been to you, documenting who or what once was? You say cinema is dead, but I think that’s the purest form of it.
Well, it’s not only important, but also it’s another chance, in a certain way. Trying to compare, and keeping the proportions in mind, myself with Balzac, the French writer… he said something like, “I want to be the Secretary of French Society.” And I read that and said, “Wow, that’s an interesting perspective to have.” Because Romania, even as a tiny country at the periphery of eastern Europe, with its geographical position and because of its history with all the dictatorships and now with a neoliberal, corrupted regime, and because there’s so little cinema, it’s not necessarily virgin territory but it’s not a big tradition historically in Romanian cinema.
Even countries in our region, like Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic, have a huge tradition. We didn’t have that. We have some personalities here and there and some great films here and there, but not many. So this gives another sense of freedom because you don’t have a legacy; you don’t have something to follow. There are so many things happening in our society in such a huge dynamic from all points of view: human, economic, political, and social. So I think we need to be exactly like Balzac said: to be the secretary of what happens around us.
I agree with you. I feel cinema can be, if not important, at least it could offer a good perspective on what happens. Cinema can always show things in a different light, in a different way. We should take advantage of that. That’s why I try to experiment a bit, try to mix budgets. I do films with bigger budgets, films with very low budgets, films with almost nothing at all. It’s not a great time for living in Romania today, maybe, but it’s a great time to experiment with cinema. In the U.S., it’s weird to see that One Battle After Another is seen as a big anti-Trump statement, in a way, because, to me, it shows how little people are actually making about what happens around them––in cinema at least––if that film can be perceived like that.
I think I agree because, while I like that movie quite a bit…
I do too!
No, for sure, but as much as we both like it, I think there’s only so much you can do from a revolutionary standpoint, as silly as that is to say, with a massive film made by a major studio. I think I get what you’re saying. How much are we really doing if that’s our call to action? You yourself have often pushed back on your work being labeled as such. I think that’s interesting because it’s hard not to leave your films feeling pissed-off at the structures designed to hold us in place. How do you view your work in relation to that, then?
Well, first of all, I think it’s always difficult for me to classify, you know? Maybe others are better at classifying or describing your own work. So if it’s seen as a “call to action” in some cases, why not? I wouldn’t have anything against that in general. It’s just that the way I perceive cinema as a tool for thinking and a tool for reflecting, and a tool for seeing, for watching the world, the people, their problems. If this creates an action or not, that’s another level. But I think I’m a bit reluctant to say, “It’s a call to action” because I think then you put too much pressure on the shoulders of artworks, in a way.
I’m not saying there’s no great, engaged cinema or works of art. But I’m always thinking of what Hannah Arendt sort of said in The Human Condition: “If you really want to change the world, then to go into politics could be a much faster and more efficient way than to write poems or to paint paintings or to make films, even.” So that’s why I think that people who are doing social media are more effective, in a way, than a work of art. That’s why I’m a bit reluctant to see it as a call to action. Of course, a dimension of my films has this for sure. But I prefer––maybe it’s my limitation, even––to concentrate on what I consider something else as being important.
Is this why you’ve embraced TikTok? Because it’s not only present in your work as a joke, you held a great talk with Andrei Rus at NYFF on a compilation of Romanian TikToks. There’s such an immediacy to that, Romanians documenting their history in ways they weren’t always allowed to.
TikTok is used a lot in Romania. Not only TikTok, but smartphones and smartphone images as well. Because there are a lot of people who have gone abroad for work. It’s, I think, the biggest country in Europe in terms of migration, of people who go to work in other countries. That creates a desire to communicate with the ones back home. So that’s why everybody, even in villages––even very poor people sometimes––have a good smartphone so they can communicate with their people.
Sometimes you find that these small videos contain more cinematic quality or anthropological documentary quality, or more artistic innovation than the whole cinema industry sometimes. For the New York Film Festival, with Andrei Rus, who’s a film scholar from Romania, we did a 35-minute film called Little Poems in Prose, which was screened there and is composed only of Romanian TikTok videos. Then we had a virtual discussion with some people in the audience. It was great because you would see that some people really respond to that and say, “Well, I never knew that someone, an amateur or a peasant from Romania, a worker, a housewife, an old granny in her countryside house, can engage with or create films.” I think the fact that it’s so new is why it might be puzzling. Because if someone says, “I heard my neighbor singing” or “I saw an old woman peasant singing,” nobody has a problem because they know about the tradition of folk arts and folk music. But in cinema, we don’t really have, until now, a folk cinema.
You’ve embraced the use of smartphones for these last two, shooting both on iPhones. What kind of freedom did that give you?
The most obvious one would be economic freedom––the fact that the equipment in cinema was always prohibitive, even if it was a 16mm or whatever. Then, even very good digital cameras were expensive. Now you have this tool like a smartphone, like an iPhone, which costs less, and it can be used as a tool for recording images. It’s only the reluctance of the industry that tells you you can’t use it. We tested these cameras; my DP, who’s great and quite open to exploration, says, “I’m not sure. I think you need a lot of people around. You need this and you need that. The real cinema is made with a big camera, good lenses, two or three people around, et cetera.”
All of a sudden we discover that actually, for some things, you have to adapt yourself to the material. Then you can make a film with this tool. It’s a small tool, and the quality, even for cinematic projection, is not that low. It’s quite striking to see how good it is from a technical point of view. So there’s the economics. Then, it’s two films that have a lot of shots outside in the streets––one in a touristic, medieval city, and the other one in a big Transylvanian city. With an iPhone like that, it’s so easy not to pay any permits and to shoot like a tourist. You’re like a tourist making a film, and nobody pays any attention.
I always felt very embarrassed when we were shooting films. All of a sudden, you have to put a big camera there and some lights. And people stop and look at you. And you look like the most idiotic guy telling someone, “Open the door. Get out of the house, look left, and go.” And then you do it again and again and people look at you with disdain, thinking, “Is this how you make a movie?” But now, with these tools, you are in the flow of life and nobody pays attention to you. It really felt liberating.
Dracula and Kontinental ‘25, despite circling similar themes, couldn’t be more different. You’ve said in the past that once you stopped chasing a vision or a singular aesthetic, you felt freer as a filmmaker. It’s obviously great for some filmmakers, like a Wes Anderson, to have an identifiable look or feel, but you’ve found your own lane in not chasing that. Do you feel it’s made you a better filmmaker?
I don’t think I’m a better filmmaker because of that. Sometimes I would like to have a distinct method or a distinct style or a distinct this or that because I think that makes something very, very easy to do. In the case of Wes Anderson, I think it was correct that the AI machines could very, very easily make a Wes Anderson-type of composition because I think, even for him, it must be very easy after you discover your style. I think he’s a great filmmaker, no question about that, but I envy how, if you see one second of Wes Anderson, you say, “Oh, that’s a Wes Anderson movie. Of course.” I’m not able to do that.
It’s true that for a while I felt, and I still feel somehow, like a crippled filmmaker in a way. I used an aphorism in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World from Stanislav Jerzy Lec, a Polish guy who said something like, “Even with one leg you can still walk,” or something like that. So maybe that’s a good metaphor for what I do. Of course, like in all things in life, I think when you give up the desire or give up the ambition of something, you find your life somehow easier to manage. It’s easier when you give up; somehow things become easier. You discover new things, or even get what you wanted. It is like being in love: someone who’s terribly in love can make the mistake of chasing the person he or she loves too much that the other person feels the need to push back, to push against. While, if you just relax, all of a sudden you might discover that the other person comes to you.
So it’s all these things that I discovered––that giving up ambition to find a style made me not a better filmmaker, as you said in a very kind way, but at least much more open, because I don’t feel an obligation to my own perspective. So it’s not like when I have an idea or I want to pursue a topic or a direction or a tool in film, I never say, “But this is not my style, so I won’t do it” or “this doesn’t belong to me.” For me, everything belongs to me. For Kontinental ’25, there were a lot of reviews saying, “The film is not as flamboyant or as spectacular as Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.” I never wanted to do it in the same light, so I don’t understand. Why compare them? And then Dracula, people say, “It’s not like the previous one.” So it’s always these kinds of annoying comparisons, which are justified because, of course, you expect a filmmaker to have a consistent style. And I don’t have one, so maybe that is a bit confusing to people. For me, it’s just one less obligation.
Dracula opens in theaters on Wednesday, October 29 and Kontinental ’25 opens in 2026.
The post “Cinema Can Be Bigger”: Radu Jude on Dracula, AI, and One Battle After Another first appeared on The Film Stage.
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