"When it turned out that the socialist management and planning was worthless, that it was a decline, it was suggested that the reopening of private companies, which would produce better, cheaper and better quality in competition, would be progressive. That principle of privatization was generally accepted as the only correct one. But when the film monopoly was abolished, when the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Film as the umbrella body of the entire film industry was abolished, and when Barrandov and Krátký film were also falling apart because they suddenly had no resources, and when things looked bad even with the Zlín studio, Dad lent a helping hand. What he nationalized before, he then privatized again. It's such a paradox, such an irony.'
"I experienced that for the first time in my life. We're going and suddenly bullets whizzed by. We jumped into the passage and there was indeed shooting. Shooting from machine guns. Can you imagine it? I didn't experience it in my life, I only knew it from movies. But when the bullets are really flying, there's a little soul in you. I have to admit that. We were sneaking around walls, it was scary. Really scary and most of all a terrible psychological shock that the blackest scenario had happened and we lost all hope and perspective. That was the most terrible shock. We were risking our lives." - "Were there any victims in Bratislava?" - "There were about five of them. For example, they shot a girl in front of the Faculty of Philosophy. There were flowers and candles, we experienced all that there."
"So my dad, an intellectual, not much physically, went digging with a pickaxe. Within a few days, the calluses were bleeding. He collapsed physically and it seemed tragic. It was a family disaster, basically we had nothing to eat. It was after the war, everything was rationed, on tickets. We ate bread soups, garlic soups, I remember that as a boy. We were at the bottom, economically. The director of the film Macháček took pity on my father when he was in the worst situation. He turned out to be a fair guy after all. He managed to pull dad back from the bridge construction. Kadár was doing his best so that he could enter the creative process and they could finish the script of the movie Únos. In the end, it was successful and they, as the first director duo, started shooting in 1951, first in Bratislava and then in the vicinity of Prague. They started shooting scenes for the movie Únos.'
"In 1948, the Bolsheviks came and Barrandov began to transform according to their image. Creative groups were formed, so dad, who was the director of Short Film, was transferred for organizational reasons to Barrandov as the head of one of the dramaturgical groups, of which there were about eight. Werich also had one, Galušek, Vávra, Fáber, Hatter and others. But the Bolsheviks had big goals, they thought they would make fifty films a year. All those who had experience and practice, such as Ladislav Kolda, smiled quietly. They hired perhaps a hundred screenwriters at once who had no experience, it was just a flash in the pan. A hundred screenwriters to start making movies. No one knew what it was supposed to look like, such a socialist film. Everyone fumbled. Party pressures were great. So constant reorganization. First, Kolda was the director, then he was fired and there was collective management. Then Vávra was also in it and so on.'
"During the occupation, my dad together with others - Kolda, Sirotek and Elble, and initially also Vančura - began to think and work on the idea of nationalizing the film. Back then, production companies were fragmented and lacked concept and were purely commercial. And they had ambitions for film to be an artistic discipline. So that it would not only be a B-movies or C-movies. So, such an intellectual group started working, they were meeting in Mánes."
Elmar Kloss (born Klos) was born on October 12, 1942 in Zlín. He is the son of Anna Klosová and Elmar Klos, a director who together with Ján Kadár won the Oscar for the best foreign language film in 1965 - the war drama Obchod na korze. Important figures from his family include, for example, great-grandfather Ignát Hořica, an officer, writer and journalist, or great-grandmother Marie Laudová-Hořicová, an acting diva of the National Theatre. His step-grandfather, whom he loved very much and whose fate was infamously influenced by the totalitarian regime, was Josef Januštík, the First Republic governor of the Uherské Hradiště district, later the Zlín region. Elmar‘s father‘s film career was constantly hampered by various regime restrictions – twice he was banned from films completely, once he was banned from making feature films for five years. Son Elmar graduated in film direction in 1965. In 1968, he experienced the dramatic events during the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Bratislava, where he was a member of the film crew during the filming of the film Touha zvaná Anada. It was his father‘s last film, after which he was fired from Barrandov for political reasons. He was not allowed to continue filming, publishing or teaching at FAMU. His son Elmar was not allowed to direct independently due to personnel reasons (he did not agree with the entry of Soviet troops into the republic and refused to condemn his father for the same), and therefore he could only work at Barrandov as an assistant director. From 1981 he was a director in the dubbing studio of the Barrandov Film Studio, where he created dozens of Czech versions of foreign films. After leaving Barrandov in 1991, he became a permanent employee of Czech Television, where he made a number of other dubbings. In 2012, he received the František Filipovský Award for a lifetime of extraordinary dubbing work.
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