I recalled the small universe of our past life when the officials could easily give you a hard time. And all the petty tricks which made us look so humiliated. We easily minded pulled the alarm string if we needed to get down where the train didn't have a stop, we freely used our relatives names if they were in some power position, or if they merely had the same name as someone in power.

My poor father, the poor soul was like this too, struggling to provide in a tragicly- ridiculous manner. Selling hangers involved as much energy and strategies as building up a business empire. All business was hanger-selling. Their movements confined in a small space had to resist pressure cooker conditions . It was like that here; a disproportionately high effort for such insignificant result was the rule.

At a second look at the film I perceived behind the story of a coming-of-age-wanna-be actor, awkward, pampered with cotton in his ears, is the story of adying man trying to teach us that even if we are just flies stuck on fly paper, it's still so good to exist, and you can turn life into a clownish game, for everything can be exciting and fantastic.

The harsh reality of the '50s is veiled in the film in a mist of nostalgia. The song piles even more with words like:

"You seem tired as if you weren't the same,
where vanished your old devouring passion
with which you entered my life
making me love you?
A long journey, you said that this is life,
and we never die
because a heavenly fever makes us go on.
I caught it from you... I almost died...
I almost burnt myself to ashes...
What should I be without you now?
Where should I go without you now?
Our train goes into the night...
The soft bodied night
like an old friend will embrace us."

Unlike many unwatchable art films, that made the average public think that art films should be boring to death,
We Never Die seems to appeal even to them.

I wrote this piece out of love for the film world. It didn't get printed, summer 1994

Usually you have a director who says I want this, I want that. You say to yourself, 'OK I'm an actor, I'm paid to do this, I'm professional,' and you just do it. With Koltai it was different. For example in the "foot" scene, where while my husband sleeps I seduce this young man... well, I thought that she would approach this inexperienced boy with tenderness and sensitivity, so we fought a good couple of hours with the director. The boy went out to cry, I stayed in the train and cried, we didn't want to do this so harshly, both of us wanted a more sensitive, romantic scene. Finally we settled in the middle of the road with all the sexual energy, but not as such an attack for she was also naive and honest open human being, very child like. The result made people say "what a great scene". I had to laugh because this was probably the hardest moment in our shoot.

The last scene for my character was a very difficult one too. How you finish a character in a story, how you begin a film and how you end a film is so important. We say good bye to each other after I've introduced him to the world of love making .

We shot it at a quarter to six in the morning. We had 15 minutes of shooting time left after a 12 hour day. 'Now we have to finish the scene." Koltai gave short directions.

I remember I went home crying, I felt so deeply that it was wrong what we did. Szabados Mihaly, my partner was also unhappy with it, and we suffered for weeks. After much thinking about it we reshot and made the most beautiful scene. Koltai said "you're right, let me come up with something." And he came up with an ending- I think it's beautiful-, where we come out from the bedroom, I say good bye to him and I smile with such a happy joyfulness. It's up I've helped him into this world of love, he's helped me by giving me some sort of freedom that I'm also longing for.

It has a sense of hope, which I think is so important to instill in an audience. They feel uplifted. I'm grateful that we had this problem, very often out of a pile of garbage a rose grows.

We had a great box office success in Hungary. The young ones watch it as many as ten times- even I don't understand this fervor, today people seldom enter the cinemas, maybe in every family there is an uncle Gyuszi- the hero- who has lots of bad habits and faults, but lives his life with passion and wants to instill the lust for life in his successor. You can forgive him his bohemianism.

Also the song of the film, by Laszlo Des and Geza Beremenyi was a gold record. It is played all over the country.

A film is truly good when regardless of the audience's background, it gets to their brains and hearts. Our film doesn't ask for an explanation, its message is that there isn't any particular message... In this quite cold world of "commerce", this film talks about love and human relationships. It can be understood... its humor speaks to every audience. People are everywhere the same, they laugh at the same jokes.