You’ve Never Seen A ‘Dracula’ Quite This: Radu Jude Interview

The phrase “the first Dracula film from Romania” conjures the idea of something like a regionally-minded Robert Eggers film, reclaiming the character from what it has devolved into — a reheated slab of Big Hollywood I.P. — by restoring the obscurer historical and cultural particulars specific to his Transylvanian homeland. The poster for Radu Jude’s new vampiric remix Dracula, emblazoned with a portrait of Vlad the Impaler in the traditional lynx-fur hat worn by the Wallachian cavalrymen known as călărași, suggests as much. A verisimilitudinous take on Bram Stoker’s novel buttressed with local detail, however, could not be further from the reality of Jude’s ambitions for rambunctious, obscene deconstruction.

Spanning nearly three hours, the outrageous comedy could best be described as variations on a national theme, with Dracula as we know him exploded into a conceptual register that casts him as the bloodthirsty societal id forming a throughline from Romania’s past to its present. “What does any of that actually mean?” would be a fair question coming from a prospective viewer at this point, so here’s the closest one can get to a plot synopsis: A Romanian filmmaker consults with a conversational AI agent in the hopes of generating his most broadly appealing film yet by tackling the iconic figure, each iterative prompt presented to us as self-contained segments within the framing device. 

In one, modern-day performers act out scenes, do some misbegotten geriatric sex-for-pay, and take to the town streets to roleplay an angry-villager chase for tourists who turn it gorily real. In another, the beleaguered employees of a gamer sweatshop selling leveled-up accounts stage a strike, with a-hole manager Dracula leading the violent anti-union countermeasures. There’s a protracted adaptation of Romania’s first vampire novella, a riotous detour that sees Dracula fact-checking a lecture about his legacy, and oodles of horrifying AI-generated imagery (some of it pornographic!) putting a fine point on the parasitic subtext of vampirism.

Though the reception at Dracula’s festival dates through the fall has been mixed — its detractors have written it off as a waggish troll job, an understandable charge for a film that opens with a series of crudely-rendered gen-AI Vlad the Impalers repeating a fellatio-related mantra best unprinted here — its creative motivations are in earnest. Jude has married the seamy, lovable incompetence of schlock like Plan 9 from Outer Space (per Jude, the sort of thing J. Hoberman classified as a “bad movie” in his seminal 1980 Film Comment essay “Bad Movies”) with caustic political commentary addressing a dire moment in Romania’s turbulent trajectory. The national vibes are not good these days, just about as bad as they are in America; last fall, the far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the Presidential election with help from Russian meddlers, leading the Constitutional Court to annul the results and hold a re-election, which succeeded in evading a Georgescu win at the cost of widespread unrest, eroded trust in governmental processes, and an even more rapidly ascendant fascist party. It’s a bleak time, which is to say the ideal moment for Jude’s brand of blithe, knowing, happily idiotic nose-thumbing.

The combination of low tastes with high-minded concerns comes to erase the distinction completely, or at least posit them as complementary rather than oppositional forces. From the insubordinate rutting of the dissenter pair in Nineteen Eighty-Four to Randle Patrick MacMurphy ripping open Nurse Ratched’s top in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, sex and nudity have always been crucial bulwarks against the authoritarian compulsion to absolute control, the last ungovernable, unextinguishable urge held by the human soul. Dracula‘s constant, gleeful torrents of questionable taste don’t just keep things lively during the headier bits; they’re an essential facet of the film’s subversive spirit, a simple and bracing reminder that the people can and will not be told what to do. Or, as Tracy Jordan says on 30 Rock: “I like the foreign films, especially the political ones where you think there won’t be any boobies, and then BAM! Boobies!”

Backed by an AI image of Donald Trump brandishing a machine gun while riding a giant kitty-cat, Jude spoke to DECIDER over Zoom about the usefulness of vulgarity, the trouble with trying to make Mission: Impossible in Romania, whether AI porn will catch on, and making the enemies list of a very powerful man.

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DECIDER: Hello, and th-

RADU JUDE: Sorry, I’m curious—your name, Bramesco, is this somehow Romanian?

That’s right, yes, my father’s father’s family was Romanian. Which actually brings me to my first question. My father is always telling me I should visit Romania and get in touch with our heritage, except that I watch a lot of Romanian films, and they’re all about how life in Romania is bad. Should I still come?

Oh, I don’t know, that’s difficult to say. [Beat.] Actually, no.

You were absent from the New York Film Festival this year; it’s my understanding that you prefer not to go to America. Is there a reason in specific for this?

Oh, no, it’s not really a refusal to come. First of all, for a while, it was about anxiety over flying. I had this very badly. But then, different reasons: I think it’s still quite difficult to get a visa, and in my case, when I had just written “FUCK TRUMP” on my portrait at the Berlin Film Festival, some lawyer told me, “I think it’s better not to go right now to the United States.” So I agreed that it was a good idea not to force my luck. It becomes news, people alert the embassy, whatever.

The other reason is a matter of time. I am always working. I am currently shooting a new movie,  this is my day off. And I always say to myself that if I’m going to New York, I want to stay for at least one month, to really be in the city. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to me. And I’ve just never had the month in money or time, so I’m always postponing. But, in the end, I think it’s probably fine to live without going to the United States.

As much as Americans like to insist otherwise, we’re not really the center of the world.

Oh, I think America is! I just don’t need to go there.

I’m noticing now that you have a very distinct manner of speaking, which mirrors the way the narrator of Dracula delivers his lines. Did you direct him to talk like you?

No, no. I didn’t have to. In Dracula, the guy who plays the author, a wonderful actor named Adonis Tanta, he’s making fun of me. He’s imitating me. It’s the other way around! I thought about stopping him, I felt some irritation, but I thought that I would come off as too self-important. He said, “What, you don’t like seeing yourself?” So I left it.

I’ve been trying to run an interview with you for your last few features, but it’s been difficult to get publications interested until now, with Dracula. You’ve described this as your most commercial film. To what extent is that ironic? Is mass entertainment compatible with your more esoteric interests?

Ironic sounds too superior, I’m not considering it like that. It comes from the fact that in Romania, there’s—well, not a backlash exactly, but annoying accusations, questions about why I won’t make a more commercial film that’s for everybody. And I asked the crowd during some Q&A, “What is a commercial film? I don’t know.” They tell me it has jokes, action scenes, nudity, genre, maybe some vampires. And I say, okay, now I’m offering that!

The problem is that if you don’t belong to a certain culture, it’s wrong to believe you can make things in the same way as that original culture did them, and have a similar impact. If you imagine a big Hollywood production, let’s say Mission: Impossible, being made in Romania by a bunch of Romanians, this would not be the hit we know it as today. Some people in the industry want us to act like Americans. But we can only make the Romanian version of a commercial film. And I swear to god, I think it’s truly entertaining! People who say it’s rude, or repetitious, or vulgar—which should be a value, by the way, in commercial cinema—I don’t know what to say to them. It’s my mix of Dumb and Dumber with Dracula. 

You work a lot, you just mentioned that you’re working right now. So much of this movie is about capital, labor, profit; do you ever feel like one of the workers in the video game sweatshop? Is filmmaking a job for you?

This is an important question. I do also teach film classes at the university in Cluj, here in Romania. But I have the feeling that what’s wrong with cinema, contrary to arts like painting or theatre or others, is that the focus is too much on personal needs, which just translates to what you like and don’t like. People who say, “I won’t make a film, because I don’t like any of my ideas, or I don’t have ideas.” People who, when you invite them to work on a project, they don’t like it or aren’t interested in it because it’s not personal. Now, personal art has great qualities, but it has a tendency to make people neurotic. In theater, in music, you don’t hear about a great violinist who comes to a conservatory and refuses to play Mozart because they don’t like Mozart. 

I’ve staged a bit of theater, and I found that people with their point of view are more healthy, because they understand this as a job. A director is asked to stage a Shakespeare or Ibsen, and they take the work. Very rarely, in Romania, do they object because it doesn’t fit their personality. They say yes, and then find a way to make it personal. The history of art is like that, doing what was asked of you by your patrons. Sculptors were not saying, “Fuck you, let me think on it for two years.” In cinema, it’s great when someone can pursue their obsessions, but sometimes it’s not to your benefit. I try to embody both ways of making art, both reactions, personal without putting too much emphasis on what I’m doing. 

I apologize if this is a stupid question, but this form of entertainment we see in the film that combines live theater, walking tours, and sex work—is this a real thing in Romania? 

It’s not a real thing as we portray it in the film. But we have all these attractions individually. Around Romania, you see lots of themed Dracula things, including restaurants, theme parks organized for foreign tourists. And then around the side of these things, unacknowledged officially, you’ll always find some sex work. In the film, we mix them together, and push them a bit higher. 

Tell us about your process for using AI. Which models did you use to generate the pornographic material? What sort of prompts? Was there a trial-and-error process of iteration?

I worked with Vlaicu Golcea, who’s a jazz musician, composer, and experimental music lover. He’s also very into technical things, including AI. He showed me some demos, and this first gave me the desire to use it. Before that, I had never thought about it. For the pornographic images, he said, “You know, it won’t really work. The programs are set up to refuse requests for pornographic material.” So using some I don’t-know-what, he found a shortcut in a piece of Chinese software that would allow for this, but with very many errors. It could not make genitals correctly, no matter what we tried. And Vlaicu showed me this, thinking he had failed, but I couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. “Perfect! I’ll just make a montage using all of these.”

Do you think AI porn will catch on? It strikes me as too creepy and unsettling to masturbate to, no matter how sophisticated the technology gets. You’ve still got that uncanny valley.

Well, that’s not even a question. It has caught on! People can masturbate to anything. They’ll masturbate to a drawing, a painting, whatever’s around. 

Life finds a way.

Life finds a way. But you can see, on amateur porn web sites, a lot of advertisements telling you that you can find your AI girlfriend and have sex with her. It’s here.

Switching from sex to politics—how did your production process overlap with the annulled election and resulting period of unrest last year? I understand that you were done shooting by then, but did this have any influence on your edit?

It was a very striking thing to see, after making this film, that Vlad the Impaler was used in a non-ironic way by the fascist party as an icon. But yes, we were one hair away from having a fascist for President, [Călin] Georgescu, and suddenly I could not think of cinema with all this incertitude. I was just wondering if we should get ready to leave the country. You know, the new fascist party leader [George Simion] said that he likes Romanian cinema, with the exception of my films.

That must have been a great honor.

This is true. But at the same time, my partner was telling me, “We need to move faster than they can.” And then my other thought was that, talking with my producer, we maybe shouldn’t release Dracula if Georgescu takes office. But in the end, we were lucky—for a while. The way things are looking, though, it’s obvious that it’s only a matter of time until the government ends up fascist anyway. We’re just waiting for the right moment now, and hoping. I don’t think that the government we have carry bad intentions, not necessarily incompetence. But I think the way they try to solve problems like budget deficits by cutting everything from health to education, culture, this will have a terrible effect long-term. They are guilty of that. Even if they’re correct from an economical point of view, which I’m not even sure they are, this is not correct from a political point of view. I think there are dark years ahead, and I hope I’m wrong.

It feels like a similar political shift is happening in so many countries. 

To be honest, I didn’t realize how much the election of Trump and his friendliness toward Putin would be felt even far away, here in Romania, immediately. Though it makes sense, because Romania felt that it needed role models in other nations after the [Nicolae Ceaușescu] dictatorship fell. It was always, “Look at the United States!” We scolded ourselves, always comparing ourselves to this great democracy which accidentally bombed Vietnam over nothing. All of a sudden, look at America now! People say, with some justification, “Weren’t we told for thirty-five years to be following their example? And now we shouldn’t?” 

We’ve, uh, been freer.

So who do we turn to for a model? 

How do you see the relationship between obscenity or vulgarity and anti-fascism?

Nowadays, it’s more complicated. I was just talking about this AI video of Trump dropping shit on the American protesters. And, I’ll tell you, if he wasn’t the President of the United States, this kind of dumb humor is something I’d appreciate.

Oh, if he didn’t control our lives, he’d be the funniest man in the world.

But you see how vulgarity plays a different role than it used to, politically. In Romania, it still has a somewhat subversive quality, which is a term I don’t like because it’s overused. Even so, we can still piss people off a little, remind them where their values are. But this is a new phenomenon, the mixture of vulgarity with fascism. The ideology used to be so clean and prudish. I don’t know where we’ll go.

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Radu Jude’s Dracula will be released theatrically on October 29, 2025. To find a screening near you, head to the film’s official website.

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Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.