“Day of the Tiger”, written and directed by Andrei Tănase, is one of the most anticipated debuts of the year. The film follows Vera, a veterinarian at a zoo in a small town in Transylvania who is struggling with personal problems. One day a tiger escapes from the zoo.

Coproduced by Domestic Film (Anamaria Antoci, Irena Isbășescu and Adrian Silișteanu), with cinematography signed by Barbu Bălăşoiu, and starring Cătălina Moga, Paul Ipate and Alex Velea, the film had its world premiere in the Bright Future section at IFFR 2023.

For this month’s Emerging Voices, we spoke with Andrei Tănase about his journey so far, the type of cinema he is drawn to, his artistic interests and his experience with making his first feature film, which will come out in cinemas later this year.

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Born on November 16, 1982, in Bucharest, Andrei Tănase became interested in directing in his senior year of high school. “I entered the Gheorghe Lazăr National College in 1997, the Mathematics-Physics class, but I wasn’t cut out for it. I was struggling. After three years, I switched to Social and Human Sciences,” he recalls.

He started looking for a university: “I wanted to study as little as possible for the exam because I was fed up with studying. I stumbled upon UNATC (i.e. the National University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” in Bucharest). I was a movie buff, but I had never thought that it was something I might want to pursue. I didn’t think about it as a profession.”

He got into movies from an early age. “I started going to the cinema when I was 7 or 8 years old. Immediately after the Revolution, when there were still state cinemas. My mother was an Italian teacher and she too was a cinephile. At first, she would take me to animations. But then I started going to whatever was playing. I even remember seeing Terminator 2 at the cinema,” says Andrei Tănase.

Like others in his generation, for whom TV was the main form of entertainment, he watched all the movies and sitcoms aired by the local channels: “I knew all the TV shows – Married… with Children, Seinfeld, Friends.”

“To be honest, it was not until college that I started watching art films. If I caught something different on TV, it was purely by chance, I wasn’t expressly looking for it. For example, Silence of the Lambs, which I thought was really cool. I had no idea about Tarkovsky or Bergman,” he adds.

“I remember that Fight Club was a turning point. It may have been the first movie I went to alone and not with my friends. It was 1999. I was probably in the 11th grade. I saw it at the cinema in my neighbourhood,” says Andrei Tănase, who was deeply impressed by David Fincher’s film.

His parents, especially his father, who worked in the hotel industry, were not so excited about his desire to study film directing: “You can’t do that. That’s not a profession. Do you want to be a starving artist?”

“They eventually convinced me to also apply to another faculty – Geography, the Hydrology section, which you could enter only with the Baccalaureate grade. I had a high grade so I got in automatically. The application was due in the summer. My dad calmed down: ‘Okay, he’s not completely ruined, at least he is going to have a college degree’,” he says.

The UNATC exam was in the fall, in September, and he went to the preparation courses held by the university: “There were two types of preparation programs. A more serious one and the Sunday classes. I ended up on the later. Before finding out about the more serious program, applications were already closed. There were a few of us in the Sunday classes, they would show us a film sequence, we would comment on it and then make a shot list. I found it interesting. They were people with whom I could speak the same language and feel comfortable.”

He didn’t get to watch all the classic films included in the bibliography. At the exam, he got a sequence from one of the unseen films – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Miloš Forman, 1975). Even so, he recognised it. “From the moment I got there, I realised that I was less prepared than many of the other candidates. Some of them were on their second try, so they knew the films by heart. But, all in all, it all worked out fine, I got in. Maybe it was luck too, I have no idea,” says the director. It was immediately after 9/11, so it was the main topic around when they started school in October.

Regarding his college years, he admits he doesn’t have many good things to say about it: “I would have liked to have some more pleasant memories. Of course, I liked being with my colleagues. Then, compared with what was done in other schools, we had it easy – we didn’t have to memorise anything, we only watched films and analysed them. But, unfortunately, I can’t say that I learned directing from the teachers there. I feel that most of the things that I learned, I learned on my own, watching films and asking myself things. What we did, mainly, was to discuss the scripts we were proposing for our exam films. But we were not discussing them from a professional perspective, rather intuitively. And almost nothing about the directing approach. I think we only had the basic theory, which took half a page and half an hour to learn, about framing and camera movements. But there were no insights on how to tell a story, how to cut a scene so that it has suspense or tension. Or, if it came to these things, it was accidental. There was no method.”

“Still, there was a buzz. Filmmakers such as Mitulescu, Porumboiu and Nemescu were just making their debut when we were in our first years of school. They showed their films at the CineMAiubit festival. It was something new, you finally had something to see. In that sense, those were good times, there was hope for the future. Stuff and Dough had also come out that autumn. I saw it at the Cinematheque, it had a modest premiere. Cristi Puiu appeared on stage and began to talk about how difficult it was to make it. I didn’t understand. Then I saw the film and I was amazed. It was completely different, as from another planet. Very cool. I felt that things could be done here too,” recalls Andrei Tănase.

Regarding the type of cinema he likes, he is rather drawn to Hollywood productions by authors such as Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson. “Something that can be understood by a wide audience, but which also has a level for hardcore cinephiles,” he explains, adding that he also has a soft spot for genre films, such as thrillers and crime films. “I’ve always liked them. So that’s what I’m leaning towards, that’s what I’d like to do.”

Short films

After graduating, in order to support himself, he worked for a while in another field. He spent several summers as a tourist guide for foreigners, especially Italians, in Bucharest and in Transylvania. “At the same time, I went to masterclasses and workshops. As part of the NISI MASA program, I made a trans-Siberian documentary. I also worked on some small projects in Turkey. I had started to develop my own scripts but was writing only every now and then, not struggling very much. I went on like this for a few years.”

He worked as a script supervisor on one of the episodes of the omnibus Tales from the Golden Age. It was the episode directed by Răzvan Mărculescu about literacy in villages during communism: “It was the hardest filming experience of my life: waking up at 5 am every day, 18 hours on the set, shooting in cold weather.”

He also made some commercials and music videos, but it wasn’t a direction that interested him. “For me it was only about filmmaking, that’s all I was interested in. I was living, somehow, in a dream, namely that at some point I would make a film. When you are young, you don’t realise how quickly time passes. Suddenly you’re not so young anymore and you start to wonder what happened. Once it hits you, you know you have to pull yourself together,” explains Andrei Tănase.

“Now, looking back, maybe I should have tried harder,” he confesses.

In 2013, he made his first short film, Claudiu and the Fish, about a supermarket employee (played by Paul Ipate) who decides to take action after noticing that one of the live carps crammed into the far too small aquarium starts coughing and wheezing like a human. Two years later, he released his second short film, for which he obtained funding from the Romanian Film Center (CNC), Summer Break (2015), about a mysterious event that two cousins experience in their grandparents’ village.

His third short film, First Night (2016), about a teenager whose father prepares him a very special birthday surprise – his first time with a girl, had its world premiere in Venice and was selected in many other festivals.

“With First Night, I felt that things finally started to come together. That’s the path – you make some short films, and by the third one, something happens, and then a feature film will follow. But, looking back, even that sounds a bit idealistic. For some it works, for others it’s more difficult,” says the director.

He admits that he had a rather slow path since graduating and making his feature film debut, but he generally doesn’t like to rush: “I spent a long time working on the script for Day of the Tiger. Not on the first draft, but on rewriting it. There was always something bothering me, some small detail, and maybe it wasn’t the case. Now, after seeing what it means to make a feature film, some things seem silly, simple whims. A fuss of a person who lives in an ivory tower and doesn’t really know what awaits them. For example, reversing two lines. Completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. That probably came from a lack of experience. But you won’t learn otherwise.”

Day of the Tiger

The inspiration for the script came from a news story from 2011 about a tigress that escaped from the zoo in Sibiu. The animal was eventually shot by hunters after being tranquillized.

“The incident had a great impact on me. It disturbed me. I am a big animal lover. I am curious about and fascinated by their world. I think that by observing animals, you actually understand a lot about humans. We think that we are these special creatures made in the image of God, but we are much closer to animals than we like to admit,” says Andrei Tănase.

He found the absurdity of the whole situation appealing, which he tried to capture in the film: “In the news, they showed images of the tiger in a Romanian forest. Then you saw some policemen and some bystanders. There was an incredible dissonance. After that, the dead tiger. You learn its story, that it escaped from a cage and roamed free, like a wild animal. After they killed it, they put it in a van.”

“It was a rather long process to put this story in a context and create some characters with substance. For that, I was inspired by something personal, an event that some friends of mine, a couple, went through. She lost a pregnancy and I was interested in their couple dynamics and how their relationship changed after such a moment,” he adds.

He says he chose to structure the narrative around a female protagonist because, on the one hand, the character played by Cătălina Moga is inspired by his real friend, and on the other hand, “a female veterinarian at the zoo is much more interesting as a character because the job is quite demanding and she faces a lot more challenges than a man.” “As a screenwriter, it is more appealing to have a woman in the world of those animals,” the filmmaker explains.

At the same time, he wanted to take the film into a more playful and even surreal area: “The zoo is a world separated from the real world. It shelters animals that come from different places, they have no connection to each other, but they create a closed community. I was interested in these animals brought together and their relationship with people. This kind of space, like a fortress where parents and children come during the day to admire the animals, and at night all the lights go out and no one really knows what’s happening there. It’s interesting. It’s a space open to infinite possibilities.”

He was aware that the real presence of a tiger would be strong enough to not need to place emphasis on the symbolism of such an exotic animal.

At the same time, he confesses that he was limited by the practicalities of how long a tiger can be on the set for shooting and how much it can be trained to do on command.

“There were two tigers, but only one of them performed. The other was used as a stand-in, for the tranquillizing scene, because it was a younger tiger. Tranquillizing an animal is a fairly sensitive process, it’s not very comfortable. The main tiger, which is actually a tigress, starred in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and, as a cub, in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Deux frères. She’s a star. But Day of the Tiger was probably its last film. The trainer came to the Rotterdam Film Festival and told us that he would retire her from cinema,” says the director, also stating that using a tiger is very expensive.

“Felines are difficult animals to train. They are not like dogs or horses, to lift a leg and hold it up as long as you want. It’s much more complicated. Anyway, what the trainer does with the tiger is amazing – how he manages to bring it to the camera, to the mark. Nevertheless, there are some very clear limits. For example, if you want it to look in a certain direction, you probably won’t be able to get it to do so for more than two seconds. At some point, it loses concentration and looks in another direction. It is a difficult animal to control. Having no choice, I relied a lot on editing to build the scenes with the tiger. There was a fair share of criticism for having too little of the tiger in the film. They wanted to see more of it. Which I understand, but those are the limits you face,” explains Andrei Tănase.

“At the same time, I made sure to write the script in such a way that it could be filmed. We had an early discussion with the trainer on Zoom about what we could do with the tiger. I also roughly set the shots and actions with Barbu. The trainer assured me that most of the things I wanted could be done. However, we filmed in August, in the heat, when the tiger gets tired quickly and needs to rest. You manage to shoot a take or two, but by the third one, it’s not paying attention anymore. It wants to go back to its cage, in the shade. There are scenes when the tiger appears in the same frame with the characters, but it is combined footage. The trainer said he was confident enough in the tiger for an actor to be in the same frame with it, three meters away. However, the production team objected to the idea and asked us to find other options. So we resorted to combined shots. Even so, I insisted on having a real tiger, not a 3D one,” he elaborates.

Directing

When it comes to working with actors, Andrei Tănase states that he is not a fan of intensive rehearsals: “I think that if you rehearse too much and everything becomes very well-rehearsed, it will feel choreographed.”

“In general, I don’t like to do too many takes. Direction-wise, I try to keep it simple. I find that very complex directions rather confuse the actors instead of leading to the right outcome. I care a lot about lines, but not down to every comma. Still, certain lines I want to be said exactly as they are written. Also, casting is very important, who you choose from the start. It’s either a win or a miss, no matter how skilled you are as a director and psychologist,” explains Andrei Tanase.

He confesses that he didn’t want to employ a very rigid style and that he sought for Day of the Tiger to be something of a festival film with elements of genre cinema, visible through editing or the use of music or by introducing action movie-like scenes.

“At this point, it may not work in the film’s favour. Being difficult to place, it’s not popular with either big crowds or festivals. But this middle ground, where things cannot be clearly defined, I find it the most interesting. It may sound precious, but life is like that, a big mix of tragedy, comedy, and absurd. That’s why I like to offer myself the freedom not to conform to a very clear style. I don’t think it’s a great virtue to hold onto a particular style. We knew we wouldn’t be able to do everything we wanted when it came to the scenes with the tiger. It was clear that we would need a bigger variety of shots and angles because there was no other way, so we gave ourselves a lot more freedom. There are probably some things I would have done differently, nevertheless, I think the element of surprise is more important than stylistic unity,” says the director.

Andrei Tănase adds that a constant in his films is that drama is always deflated at some point by comedy, by the absurd: “I like this kind of dynamic. I find it more in line with reality. We all want to tell some truths about the world we live in, beyond offering entertainment to the audience. And I think that, in this way, you are closer to the truth than if you say things in black and white.”

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.