How hard was it shooting this movie in Bucharest in terms of finding locations?
Mungiu: It’s a little bit harder than it used to be, because of all the foreign films that were shot there, and because of this, the Mayor’s Office at some point had this idea that he could make a lot of money from filmmaking, so they invented some big taxes and although they try to make a difference between the Romanian films and the foreign films, still these taxes are quite big. There was a debate about this, and we’re trying all the time to look for locations if possible apart from Bucharest, but this is not possible, you know? It’s so expensive to move a crew out of Bucharest that you have to handle this somehow, but it became quite expensive, and it shows you how this idea of having this flourishing industry is not necessarily helping the local filmmaking. CS: When you were writing the script, did you get to speak to a few women who had been through this? What was the research process like? Mungiu: Well, there were two things. First of all, I started from a real story, which is t
