Hungarian composer, actor and screenwriter Mihaly Vig, who has been Béla Tarr’s closest creative partner for more than 40 years, held court at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, speaking at a masterclass following the screening of The Horses of Turin.
Vig and Tarr’s bond began in 1984. The director, who was already an up-and-coming figure in the Hungarian film industry, spotted Vig in a friend’s concert footage and tracked him down. Their first meeting was brief. Tarr asked Vig to compose “Almanac of Fall,” and the collaboration was concluded over champagne. Vig had no experience in composing for film, and the project relied heavily on documentary aesthetics and improvised performance, creating a steep learning curve.
As the partnership developed across works such as “Sátántangó,” “Werckmeister Harmonies,” “Damnation,” and “The Turin Horse,” an unconventional workflow solidified. Vig completes all of the songs before principal photography begins, working from the script rather than the finished cut. His starting point is the overall emotional impression the script leaves on him. “I listen deep within myself and wait for inspiration and serenity to descend upon me,” he said, taking a break from the behind-the-scenes documentary about “The Horses of Turin.”
The process works, Vig explained, because he, Tarr, and screenwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai share a fundamental creative belief: that humans habitually avoid confronting the true nature of existence. The consensus of the three on this philosophical premise means that Vig’s score requires little revision over time. Tarr said he completely trusts the composer’s intuition. However, Vig typically creates several iterations, from which the director chooses the version that best suits the film.
For Vig, sound includes much more than musical scores. He noted that the relentless rain of “Sátántangó” and the howling wind of “The Turin Horse” were essential sonic elements. “If you quiet your mind and truly listen, you can call them beautiful music,” he said.
Vig and Tarr’s relationship with film extends to performance. He had one of his most notable film roles as a con man in “Satan Tango.” He was only able to accept the role after he had memorized over 30 pages of script and promised about 12 minutes of uninterrupted dialogue. He said the experience gave him a first-hand understanding of how directors approach casting. In other words, rather than trying to match an actor to a written character, it’s about finding someone who embodies that character at its core. Tarr mixes professional and amateur performers, but demands the same unrehearsed naturalism from each.
Asked about the public perception outside that Tarr was a “tyrant” on set, Vig presented a very different picture. He recalled that the director always had a calm personality during filming, never raised his voice, and dealt with his grievances with the staff privately rather than publicly. I felt that director Tarr’s signature long takes were similar to filming in a theater. Once the camera rolled, the director remained silent and waited until the full shot was finished before giving feedback. He gave his actors wide latitude to interpret their roles and had full trust in the entire cast.
Vig traces the lineage of the long-take aesthetic that characterizes Tarr’s work to Tarr’s personal mentor, Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janso. In the director’s view, fragmentary editing destroys emotional continuity. The uninterrupted takes reflect the uninterrupted flow of lived experience.
Vig reflected on the dark minimalism of The Horses of Turin, with its sparse dialogue and repeated domestic rituals, and objected to interpretations of the film as purely nihilistic. He distinguishes between the “lightness” of Milan Kundera’s writing and the “heaviness” of Tarr’s paintings, arguing that they are not diametrically opposed, and that even unrelenting tragedy contains threads of comedy. “It’s like catharsis,” he said. “In the end, everything feels cleansed. The audience looks into the heart of things, and the whole world suddenly becomes clear. Life is undeniably harsh, but it also has profound beauty.”
Among the behind-the-scenes details Vig revealed was that Krasznahorkai left a discussion with Tarr during a dispute over the script, only to return two days later with a 60-page short story that became the basis for The Turin Horse. The production team also spent a considerable amount of time finding a horse with sufficiently sad eyes to ensure that, after filming, the horse would be placed in a comfortable home for the rest of its life.
When asked what music he treasures most, Vig cited Damnation and The Horses of Turin as his personal favorites, aside from the widely praised Werckmeister Harmony soundtrack. Among the features of Tarl, in his estimation “Satan tango” is better than others. He had some playful advice for those feeling daunted by the seven-hour runtime. “Push through the first hour and the rest will take care of itself,” he said.
To conclude the masterclass, Vig shared a phrase derived from Tarr’s teaching philosophy. “Life is a gift, and it would be rude to ignore that gift.”
