With the ever prolific Romanian auteur delivering banger after banger at breakneck speed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that 2025 is another hallmark year for Radu Jude. Hot off the heels of the Berlinale premiere of what you might call his riff on social realism in the form of Kontinental ’25, Jude returned to this years’ Main Competition of Locarno Film Festival with the much zanier genre fare of Dracula, a delightfully experimental exegesis of the Dracula myth.
After throwing the legend of Vlad the Impaler as the vampiric overlord in the postmodern blender, the gooey concoction that comes out revels in its ingenious distastefulness by employing amateurish iPhone cinematography, outrageously pornographic AI imagery, and an avant-gardist mise-en-scène that recalls the theatre of the absurd. Clocking in at almost three hours, Dracula preys on almost anything and everything that has to do with the iconic bloodsucker: Stoker, Dreyer, Herzog, and Coppola all get resurrected, alongside a surprisingly faithful, yet completely kooky adaptation of Vampirul, the first Romanian vampire novel by G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu from 1938.
As a native of Transylvania, Jude employs all of these forays into the vampire genre for his fanged commentary on fascism, Romanian nationalism, and the global extraction of capitalism, making it another essayistic cinema trip by the ever-playful and always subversive Romanian auteur behind earlier experimental delights like Golden Bear-winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). Prior to Dracula’s world premiere, I sat down with Jude for an animated conversation about the myriad influences that feed into his delirious take on the vampire film. (An earlier, more condensed version of this interview also appeared in Locarno’s Pardo daily festival publication.)
Hugo Emmerzael: After its world premiere at Berlinale, you described Kontinental ’25 as your Lumière brothers film and Dracula as your take on George Méliès. Where did this need to explore the spaces between realism and genre come from?
Radu Jude: We usually classify the Lumières as documentary realism and Méliès as fantastic and fictional, but Godard once said that we can actually state the opposite. We can say that the Lumières were completely fantastical when they shot their films; giving you the sensation of watching Proust on screen. Meanwhile Méliès at some point was staging newsreels and actualities. This raises many questions about what is documentary, fiction, and fantastic in cinema. But apart from this joke of sorts, I acknowledge that I felt the need to make both of these films at the same time, as the one needed the other.
HE: Why did you feel that way?
RJ: While I was working on Dracula, I needed some kind of counterbalance. The production of that film was psychologically straining, and even two months prior to shooting, we ran into so many problems. You can see that in what ended up being the form of the film. Fortunately, when I set out to make Kontinental ’25, things quickly became much easier. I acutely felt like I could have both elements in life: fiction and documentary, humor and seriousness, avant-garde and classical cinema — all of which made me feel more fulfilled.
Additionally, if the Lumières are at the core of Kontinental ’25, there are many other foundational texts for Dracula. One can discern my love for Ed Wood here, and the so-called “bad movies.” There’s a great essay by J. Hoberman titled “Bad Movies,” which also functioned as a certain inspiration for the film. You can spot a kind of avant-gardist ethos in those films. In general, over the course of the last five years, I’ve become increasingly more interested in the historical avant-garde and the Romanian historical avant-garde in particular, which is not so well known. Actually, many Romanians, including many Romanian Jews, were at the forefront of what we think of as the avant-garde. Tristan Tzara, who spearheaded the Dadaist movement, is from Romania, just like Eugène Ionesco, one of the creators of the Theatre of the Absurd. An additional source of inspiration that the film takes as a point of departure is pre-modern literature. For instance, traces of the writing of Boccaccio and, of course, Pasolini’s The Decameron [1971] can be discerned in Dracula.
HE: I have a somewhat frank meta-reading of the film, and I’m curious what you think about this. Since vampire films are so closely related to the carnal, the libidinal, and the satiation of desire, I’m wondering if you somehow wanted to punish audiences for their expectations going into this film. It feels like you take these genre elements and consciously subvert them in a transgressively Brechtian way, going against the grain of what we believe a vampire film should be like.
RJ: I think that’s a very interesting and accurate observation, save for one thing, which I totally disagree with: the film isn’t working against the audience at all. On the contrary, it tries to offer the audience something different, another way of conceptualizing or engaging with these tropes. I consider it to be a very audience-friendly film, exactly because it offers you things you don’t expect. See it like this: when you go to a restaurant, surely it’s nice to get served what you expect. However, the experience of receiving some novel experience might be much more gratifying.
Meanwhile, the film is called Dracula because that’s exactly what it is: a Dracula, as the cinematic apparatus itself is vampiric. And if you look carefully at the film, I believe the theme of vampirism that floats in our subconscious around that concept is extremely prevalent. Ultimately, I tried to offer a little bit of something for everyone here. To stick to the gastronomic metaphors: shawarma has become very popular in Romania. In major cities you could even call it our national dish. In all those shops, they serve a dish called “Shawarma with Everything.” And that’s exactly how I think of this film. If you like meat, there’s meat; if you like vampires, there are vampires; if you like sex, there’s sex; If you like bad jokes, there they are; and if you like serious cinema, we also have it. It’s a huge shawarma with everything.
HE: This also manifests itself in the cheeky ways you use AI-generated imagery, as AI is understood as this vampiric entity that sucks up existing material to generate its own uncanny output. What was it like for you to align this technology with the themes of Dracula?
RJ: This film actually started as a joke, when I was unsuccessfully pitching another project and said, “maybe my Dracula project will interest you, since I’m originally from Transylvania.” So many people reacted so positively to it, that I decided to actually pursue this idea. Production, however, was long and arduous, as we faced many budget issues. Even though we lacked half the budget needed, I still decided to go ahead and shoot. For those economic reasons, we initially shot on an iPhone, which turned out to be a great aesthetic choice. Similarly, when I encountered AI, I thought, “That’s it!” I would simply take everything that was too expensive to film and do it with AI. I wanted it to generate the worst possible images, because these bad AI images contain a peculiar kind of poetry. And as I began working with the technology, I realized that AI itself is exactly like Dracula — the principle of sucking up everything without asking permission. Of course, there are many ethical and economic implications. I’m aware of those issues, while reminding myself that Godard once stated you can use all technology available to make films.
HE: Partially through this brazen use of AI, Dracula also comments on the relentless exploitation of neoliberal capitalism, and explores the ways it manifests itself in the nationalist fervor of Romania. which seems to be a recurring theme in your work. Here, it seems like you’ve found the ultimate national symbol to illustrate this.
RJ: It’s true that a lot of exploitation exists in our neoliberal world, especially in contemporary Romania. And, indeed, this economic situation feeds into Dracula. I even include that obvious quote from Marx, where he compares capital to a vampire that feeds on the work of people. Meanwhile, I also liked the idea of mixing the Dracula myth with the character of Vlad the Impaler. This is something that other filmmakers with their big budgets, including Francis Ford Coppola on Stoker’s book, cannot match, because I am from Transylvania and I know what this symbolism means in our country. Interestingly, shortly after we made the film, the iconography of Vlad the Impaler was appropriated by a fascist party for their political campaign. I was shocked to see that what I initially considered a cruel joke became a certain reality.
HE: It struck me how you filled a historical gap by being the first director hailing from Transylvania to make a film about this subject matter, allowing you to approach this mythology from a Romanian perspective. And there are so many intricate and interlinked ways in which you tackle the totality of this mythological character. Can you talk about the process of accumulating all these ideas and finding the formal approaches to incorporating them in Dracula?
RJ: To be honest, I don’t even know how I did it. While conceiving and shooting the film — considering it was shot so quickly — it was difficult to keep track of it all. Our initial schedule was supposed to have 45 days of shooting, yet we ended up making it in just 28 days. Considering it’s a three-hour-long film with numerous characters and locations, it was quite intense. It feels like I made it in a sort of trance, and now I am wondering: how the hell did I even do this? One particular aspect, however, quickly solidified itself as the centerpiece of the film: a 50-minute adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novella titled Vampirul (1938) by G. M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu. Its initial reception in the 1930s was less than favorable, but due to its rediscovery by literary historian Anca Simina Martin and this film, there’s a new edition of that novella now. When I came across that novella, I immediately figured I should include it in the film. To be honest, I was quite open to all sorts of influences I encountered, trying to include bits and pieces of everything. I felt a bit like a vampire myself in that way — trying to absorb all these cinematic influences and other elements.
HE: Just like Kontinental ’25, Dracula is shot on an iPhone. It results in consciously amateurish and occasionally baffling, but always inspired cinematography that gleefully doubles down on the DIY nature of this production. In that sense, it’s fitting that you shared your admiration for Ed Wood. Can you talk a little about this cinematic tool and how you enjoy working with its limitations?
RJ: I’m quite proud of this, despite many reservations from my crew and production team. I believe cinema has to learn from other art disciplines like painting. For over 100 years, painters have embraced every tool available to their disposal and nobody seems to question that. Cinema should also be able to utilize every kind of tool in order to express itself. If those tools are cheaper, even better. The key is to know how to use them. You cannot use an iPhone like a 70mm camera — that would be ridiculous. You have to use it correctly, fitting it to what you’re doing. Just as you wouldn’t use a pencil to make it look like an oil painting. That would be equally foolish. I want to be very clear though: this doesn’t mean I’m against celluloid cinematography of any sorts. On the contrary, I’m in favor of including everything. I just believe that small cameras, especially mobile phones, are great tools to democratize cinema, as cinema is still not democratic enough.
Radu Jude’s Dracula is currently playing as part of the Currents program at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
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