Blesk Podcast: Jiří Mádl about the new film Waves. He depicted the journalistic elite

In the 1960s, listeners devoured the broadcasts of experienced foreign correspondents. It was the employees of the foreign editorial office who began to expand the free space in Czechoslovakia. Milan Weiner, played by Stanislav Majer, was at the head of the editorial office. “These people thought they would do journalism in a different and global way. They broke through it step by step and perhaps they didn’t even know that by breaking through gradually they would actually manage to trigger the Prague Spring and the resignation of the president,” Mádl recalled the most famous “notches” of the foreign editorial staff, which included Věra Šťovíčková-Heroldová, Jiří Brunner, Miroslav Čapek, Ludvík Čermák, Jiří Dienstbier, Luboš Dobrovský, Jiří Ruml and many others.

These editors, together with Czech Radio technicians, continued to broadcast when Czechoslovakia was invaded by the five armies of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968. For Jiří Mádl, all these people are heroes. “Věra Šťovíčková knew how to talk about it perfectly. She said it was a dangerous thing to do, but at the time it made sense for them to continue broadcasting,” he interpreted the words of a witness who broadcast in 1968, even when tanks were driving through Prague and the Czech Radio building was being searched by soldiers.

Permission to romance

Šťovíčková also gave Jiří Mádl permission for her film representative to have an affair with a fictional technician, played by Vojtěch Vodochodský. “She said no at first, but then we met a few more times and I had a pretty close relationship with her, I think. Then she said yes, if it’s dignified,” laughed Jiří Mádl.

When casting the actors, Jiří Mádl was not guided so much by the actors’ similarities with historical figures. He admits that we are not in America, where there are almost inexhaustible resources. “My basic criterion was the energy of the editors I met or told me about,” explains the director. Vojta Kotek is said to have a similar joviality to that of Jiří Dienstbier, and Pauhofová abounds in a similar dignity to that of Věra Šťovíčková.

Boss on the set

Actor, screenwriter and director Jiří Mádl thus had to lead a relatively large acting ensemble. Did he have the courage to correct his more experienced colleagues? “Yes, it’s already my third film,” Mádl said in the podcast and continued: “I know almost all the actors as an actor. I’ve worked with them before, it didn’t occur to me at all. I am a man like a mountain, they fear me,” he joked at the end.