'Goya's Ghosts': Spanish artist gets Forman treatment

"He was the biggest coward and the most courageous artist," says the director Milos Forman of Francisco Goya. The Spanish painter is the subject of Forman's new film Goya's Ghosts (his first since Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey more than seven years ago).

Goya (1746-1828) lived through some of Spain's most turbulent history. There was the cruelty of the still ongoing Spanish Inquisition (which Forman sees as directly paralleling the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s). There was the French occupation of Spain - an occupation that dislodged the Spanish royal family that Goya had spent so long painting and led to Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, taking the throne. Then the British came. Wellington defeated the French, the wheel turned again and the old regime was restored.

Throughout all this upheaval, Goya continued working. He painted portraits of Spaniards, French and British alike, setting up his easel for whomever happened to be in power at the time. "One day, he painted the Spanish king and his family. Then, when the Spanish king was kicked out by Napoleon, he painted Joseph, Napoleon's brother. When Joseph was kicked out by Wellington, he painted Wellington," Forman says in mock indignation at Goya's opportunism. "He painted everybody!"

But, alongside his society portraits, Goya also faithfully recorded the horrors of war in a series of brutal paintings and etchings known as The Disasters of War. Later in his career, he completed the so-called Black Paintings, a series of grim, allegorical images about madness and destruction.

Forman's new film isn't really about Goya as such. Instead, the artist (portrayed with magnificent gravitas by Stellan Skarsgaard) is shown as an observer, looking on as war, religious persecution and revolution convulse Spain. "This is not a biography at all. It is a fiction," Forman declares.

Goya's Ghosts boasts one of the more memorable villains in recent film history: Father Lorenzo, a charming but manipulative priest played by Javier Bardem. Natalie Portman also appears, as an ingénue whom Goya has painted. Not that Forman wants to talk about the characters - or indeed the film - in any depth. He bemoans the way that journalists let slip plot elements that audiences should be allowed to discover for themselves. It is a fair point, but not one that makes discussing his movie any easier.

Forman also refuses to be drawn on the parallels that exist between Goya's era and what he himself experienced growing up in Czechoslovakia under the Nazis and then under the Communists. And he doesn't want to talk about the challenges of a Czech director making a movie about a quintessentially Spanish artist. "I don't speak Spanish," he says gruffly when asked why he shot in English. "Look," he continues in his deep, heavily accented voice, "we tried to make this film as an entertainment that would somehow introduce the treasures of art to the audience on the way."

It is easy to see why Forman is so fascinated by Goya's work. As a film-maker, the Czech shares some of the artist's chameleon-like characteristics. Forman may not be the most prolific director, but he has constantly reinvented himself. In the 1960s, when the Czech film industry was under the heel of the Soviets, he was making intimate, playful films like Black Peter (1963), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967). Back then, he used to say that he disliked "grand manner" and "operatic emotions" and that the best stories for the screen were rooted in ordinary behaviour.

When he moved to the US, the emphasis on the everyday soon dissipated. True, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which won a hatful of Oscars, was realist in tone, even though Jack Nicholson's character was larger than life. But in brash films like Ragtime and Hair you saw little of the quiet observation and understated humour that characterised his early work.

Over the years, his patrons have included everybody from communist-era bureaucrats to Hollywood studios. His Czech movies were shot on tiny budgets. Amadeus and Valmont were full-blown epics. "Give me $100,000 and I will make the film for $100,000. Give me $10m and I will make the film for $10m. Give me $100m and I will spend it," he says. "I love to tell several kinds of stories. The stories either interest people or not - they fit the times or they don't fit the times - but I am doing only the same."

Like Goya, Forman has lived through tumultuous times. He was born in 1932 in Caslav, not far from Prague. His parents were arrested by the Gestapo and both died in Auschwitz. He credits his education at the King George College School in Podebrady, a a small spa town 30km east of Prague, with helping to give him the resourcefulness he has needed to survive as a film-maker for 50 years.

Here, a 13th-century fortress was turned into a boarding school in 1945. The founder was Lady Baden-Powell, wife of the founder of the Scouts.The 70 pupils were a mix of problem children, war orphans or the sons of foreign diplomats. Forman's classmates included Vaclav Havel (the playwright who later became president of the Czech Republic), the Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski and the animator Paul Fierlinger - clearly, as Forman says, "intellectually, it was a jewel among schools".

The Czech director is currently back in his homeland rehearsing his jazz opera A Well-Paid Walk. He has mixed feelings about Czech society 18 years after the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule. "I think it will take another two generations to get to a normal state of mind. But it is becoming clear that the society is heading in the right direction," he says.

Now, at the age of 75, Forman doesn't know if he will make any more features."If Goya's Ghosts happens to be my last film, I will be very happy because it really summarises my life experience," he says. He and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have created another screenplay, based on Sandor Marai's novel Embers, but he is beginning to doubt it will ever be made. "The rights are in the hands of a producer. It may take a while... or not at all."

'Goya's Ghosts' opens on 4 May