• How was it to play again with Cosmina Stratan, what challenges did this new role bring to you? 

Every time I start working on a new character, I try to take it from scratch, it’s the only honest challenge with myself. The first condition is to get rid of `the corpses`, of the roles played up till then. It sounds morbid, but I cannot find another comparison. It is ideal to succeed in taking off the clothes of the characters in your CV, it would be genius to be able to leave on the skin, like the snake. In the rush we live in nowadays, we often try to put on the undershirt over the coat and this can be seen, especially on screen. It is also good to ignore your partners’ biographies, their professional `antecedents`, etc., if not you risk pushing the creation process towards a personal area, dull, where magic disappears immediately. The working process is different for every role and there are a lot of factors that condition us – the secret is how to manage not to deviate from what you initially intended. I speak here about an ideal situation, because unfortunately, reality isn’t always so.

• If you would make Simion climb down the mountain, what would he do and how would his life be? What if he would work in an office? 

It’s the only thing I wouldn’t do even if I was obliged to – make Simion climb down the mountain! There are already a lot of `Simions` in the modern forests of offices in the glass and concrete mountains. The idea would be for them to escape out of there, which is not that easy to do. Sometimes, the only way is the imaginary.  

• Could you tell me about the experiences during the rehearsals or the filming that challanged you / got you closer to Simion’s character? 

I could talk about this for hours, from the first meeting I had with director Florin Șerban, up to Simion’s world with which I fell in love head over heels like a child. His house, his dog, his donkey, the mountain, the forest, the woman he found. The few elements carefully chosen by Florin, cancel even the well-known minimalism, taking things rather towards cinematographic asceticism. Florin also brings in a shepherd, a sales woman, an aggressor and the world becomes complete. From this moment on, the viewer gets the freedom to imagine for himself his own story. And then, Florin’s way or working with the actor, during rehearsals but also during filming, like a creative therapy, like an energizer that makes you forget everything, even the cold at the top of the mountain, are experiences for which it is worth struggling in this job. 

• What do you like the most about this movie? 

Disregarding the fact that I play a character here, I can also say that I vibrate to this kind of movies. I like it because it’a about a human, because it has a sincere poetry, because it’s not talkative. I would even do a parallel between Florin’s movie and Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre scattered with elements from Artaud’s cruelty one, who says violent images should shake the viewer’s sensibility.