Milo Forman is an American and Czech film director and screenwriter.
Background
Forman, Milo was born on February 18, 1932 in Caslav, Czechoslovakia. Formans own parents were taken to die in concentration camps when he was a child—as were Polanskis, a director unable to look on people as warmly as Forman. (But, years later, Forman learned that the man he called father was not his real father.)
Education
He went to the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts and graduated from there in 1957. His first work was as scriptwriter on Declecek Automobil (56, Alfred Radok), and he was with Radok for several years in magic lantern theatre.
Career
Without in any way dispelling or questioning the genuineness of Formans sympathy for people, Taking Off showed the mannered comedian more clearly and raised serious questions about his style. That moment when Buck Henry almost swallows his wineglass on hearing that his daughter has fallen into the company, not of a layabout but of a pop music composer who made $290,000 last year, before taxes, is as predictable and accomplished a double take as anything in 1930s comedy. The central pose of baffled parents abandoning their own inhibitions is a mild version of Feiffer cartoons. Above all, the exhilarating editing of the audition—especially when Forman has a song sung by dozens of girls, phrase cut into phrase—is no more than playful. The skill of execution and the wit of the motion only emphasize his withdrawal from the central characters.
Cuckoo’s Nest, by contrast, was (nil of risk, pain, and inventive courage. Whatever the project owed to Ken Kesey’s novel and the cohesive presence of Jack Nicholson, Forman deserves great credit for the sudden but controlled movements from hilarity to tragedy. The metaphor of the insane institution works in terms of challenging entertainment, largely because of Formans very balanced awareness that oddity, madness, and acting are overlapping conditions. The asylum may be the more sinister because of Kafka and 1968.
Forman made three films in the eighties, all literary adaptations and all period pictures. One may wish, or hope, that his very shrewd observation of the world around him will return to the America he lives in. But that is not to scorn the adaptations. Ragtime was an underrated film, true to Doctorow, complex and challenging, a movie about a time and its ideas—just as the title supposes. Amadeus repeated the Cuckoo’s Nest triumph, winning Oscars for best picture and best director. It is a rich, smart entertainment, lustrous yet eccentric in its period re-creation, luminous and satanic in its Salieri, and so entirely assured that its final impersonality comes as a surprise. In Valmont, Forman was scooped. Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons (88) came out first, with a starrier cast, and took all the praise. Yet Valmont is the better film, the one that grasps tragedy as well as irony in the Laclos story.
Forman is committed to America and New York (he chaired the film program at Columbia for a while), an engaging storyteller— surely he should have acted: imagine him as the man in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yet he works too sparingly—and with too much smart, worldly distance, finally—to be a major artist. But he is searching for material, and he is good enough to find it yet. The People vs. Larry Flynt w'as an intriguing view of American rights as seen from outside, and Man on the Moon w as a study of comedian Andy Kaufman. Neither film worked well (especially with audiences), but they reaffirmed how far Forman is an outsider, devoted to Americana.
Membership
Fellow: American Academy Arts and Sciences.
Personality
His Czech films showed a new vitality and relaxation for that country, and a very interesting set of influences. The Italian neo-realists, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson may have affected his liking for casual, ordinary stories and his affection for nonprofessional players.
Equally, Forman was intrigued by the possibilities of candid camera, telephoto filming of amateurs in some formal situation that made them try to be professional. But Forman was not a grainy realist so much as a man able to fit spontaneity into a disguised and rather artful, old-fashioned narrative. He has confessed a liking for silent American comedy, and A Blonde in Love and Firemen 's Ball could be the sort of romantic/ironic short story beloved of Maupassant and D. W. Griffith. Certainly, they are more frank, more inventive, and charged by the generally withdrawn recording of parts' scenes where Forman show's a sharp skill at catching people in the moment of revelation. And although his stories endeavor to like all the characters, he does not go too ters or the environment.