This is the extended remix of an interview that originally appeared at Stop Smiling Online.

Milos Forman answers the phone, and the hectoring cadence of MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is audible in the background of his Connecticut home. He briefly says hello and turns down the volume.

I see you’re hooked on the political channel.

Yes.

What did you make of the elections?

Well, it was entertaining to watch, it was very interesting. It made me feel good about the whole democratic process here. Hearing so many opinions from so many sides. It was really entertaining.

How do you feel about Obama?

Let’s see, so far I’m giving anybody the benefit of the doubt. So far, I must tell you, it’s very impressive. But he’s not even functioning as president yet, so we’ll find out.

The occasion for our conversation is the revival of Fireman’s Ball  at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinematek, so I thought I would ask you to go back and talk about the circumstances behind the making of the film.

The film was made in 1967, a time of relative relaxation of the Communist grip on control of culture and censorship. It was not that suddenly everyone could do whatever they wanted. When we wrote a screenplay, there were certain things I knew I wanted in the film that we didn’t put in the screenplay at all so we didn’t irritate those who would be deciding if the film would be put into production or not. Then we shoot it later and we see what will happen. I was encouraged bu the fact I arranged the co-production of the film with the Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who invested $65,000, which was not much. Still, he had the rights for the film for outside. If there were problems in Czechoslovakia releasing the film, the film could be released aborad. I thought I was very clever  arranging this, but obviously I was not. Because when Carlo Ponti saw the film he had the same argument that as the Communist censors: That the film is showing the hardworking Czech firemen in an unflattering light and that that will turn off the audience. He refused to take the film. Francois Truffaut and Claude Berri saw the film and bought it from Carlo Ponti. When Ponti asked for his money back, I got a letter from the government saying I would be sued for economic sabotage of socialist economy. In those times, this meant 10 years in prison! I was panicking. But then Claude Berri paid back Ponti, and the Communist government didn’t have to give Ponti back $65,000, and I was off the hook.

And then the tanks rolled in …

The irony is, the film was released in the second half of July in 1968, was in the theaters for two weeks, when the Russian tanks occupied Czechoslovakia, immediately the film was banned officially forever. So what in Communist terminology means forever is 20 years. So the film was re-released in 1989.

You happened to be out of the country at the time, which seems very fortunate for your subsequent career.

I was preparing my first American film, and when I finished the film and was supposed to go back, I knew that after they had banned Fireman’s Ball forever, I would not be able to work anymore in the Czech studios. So I decided to stay in America.

Your cast was mostly non-professional, right?

As a matter of fact except for two guys who were also amateurs who had acted in my previous Czech films, there are no professional actrors. And most of them are really local firemen from that little town where we shot the film.

How did you convince them to do the movie?

By playing cards and drinking beer with them. For three months, I spent when we were working on the script and every night I was in the firehouse drinking beer them and gaining their confidence and learning anything about them, their personalities, to make it comfortable for me to cast them in the film.

Did you then write dialogue for those individuals, or did you find people to match characters that you already had in mind?

When we started, I had certain ideas I wanted to write about, but then you meet these people and start to spend time with them, then I started to fashion the script more or less on these personalities.

They’re pretty remarkable. They seem like naturals. Did you have to coach them a lot?

No, no, no, no, not at all. Once you realize what kind of personalities they are, and pick what you want them to say, then you just let them go. Once they feel confident in front of the camera, and not intimidated by the camera, then they just went on as individuals.

It seems like such a gentle and affectionate comedy, watching it now. How did the cast and the village react when they saw it?

That’s very interesting. When the film was shown to the censors, they didn’t know what to do. They decided they would screen the film in the little town where we shot the filmed. And they will provoke discussion where they were sure the firemen would be upset by being portrayed like this in the film, and they will judge the film severely, and that will give them the pretext to say the people don’t like it, and we won’t show it. So they arranged a lscreening in that little town and it was overwhelmingly received with enthusiasm. People loved it. The firemen who were in it loved it.

They thought they were all great comedians, I bet.

Because … No, I think it was a human-type reaction. They suddenly saw themselves not as people but as actors and they will be for eternity being seen in this film by their children and grandchildren.

That’s proven true.

Yeah, absolutely!

The film also is an archetypal “village comedy,” and that travels very well from one culture to another.

Well, look, comedy – I’ll tell you – survives much longer than dramas. Look at the films from the beginning of the last century. The drama, with I don’t know, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, like that, you look at it and it doesn’t really work. But look at Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. Laurel and Hardy. It lives, and you can laugh at it today. So, you know, comedy has this longer survival rate.

And for you, it’s allowed the possibility to take on some dark topics in several films in a way that is very subversive.

To look at the dark side and the tragic side of our lives with a sense of humor is really helping us to go through. It’s helping us to digest the sad parts of our existence.

Given all the circumstances, it must not have been easy to cultivate that sensibility growing up.

Well, as a matter of fact, the other way around is true. I remember as a child during World War II,  when Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis, lots of tragedies were around. But, the resilience of the Czech people demonstrated itself in humor. That was the only way the Czech people could fight the misery, to laugh at it. I guess I developed, or understood, the power of humor in those tragic times. When for the people, it was the only weapon to fight their misery. I’m sure that formed my look at life.

This is a little bit off-topic but it relates to your situation as a sort of artistic exile from the Eastern Bloc. The last time you appeared at BAM, it was for a rare screening of an experimental film collaboration called I Miss Sonia Henie. (The film was born of several impromptu shorts more or less improvised during the 1971 during the Belgrade Film Festival, shot Forman, Frederic Wiseman Tinto Brass, Paul Morrissey, Buck Henry and Dusan Makavejev.) You told a very funny, and kind of scary, story about that. Would you recount the event?

Oh, that was in Belgrade! I was invited to the Belgrade Film Festival. Yugoslavia was a renegade but still Communist country, right? I was not very keen to go there, but my friend Dusan Makavejev said, ‘No, don’t worry! Everything will be fine! We’ll take care of everything and nothing will happen to you.” In those times, there were cases where Czech secret police would grab somebody and take them back to be put on trial – from Vienna, from Budpest. So I was afraid to go there. But everything was fine. I’m going to the screenings. And suddenly one day it was probably 2 a.m., there was bang-bang at my door and Dusan was there. He said, “Don’t ask me anything. Pack your bags but leave them here. We’ll take care of them later. At 5 a,m, you must leave the hotel through the back door, and I’ll be waiting there for you and I’ll take you.”

I said, “Why?”

“Look out of the window.”

And I looked out of the window and in front of the hotel I see parked three cars which only secret police is using. So I knew that they were not there to watch the architecture. So I had to leave the hotel at five in the morning through the back door, get in the car with my friend Dusan to take me to the railway station. He didn’t even dare to take me to the airport to fly out. I got on the train with one of his friends, and his friend stayed with me all the way until we crossed the border.

A narrow escape!

Yes. Thank God. He told me, “They are here to take care of you.”

You were at the festival with Taking Off?

Yes … that was my first American movie. When I came here it was exactly the time when the phenomenon of Easy Rider happened. Film which was made by this strange individual, you know, Dennis Hopper. Film was made for peanuts and made millions. So suddenly some studios like Universal said OK, we’llmake a division where we’ll let these suspicious characters like Dennis Hopper make their films if they can make them very cheap – on a one million dollar budget. And I was here, and I got to make Taking Off this way. Exactly the way I wanted to make it. Nobody interfered with anything. I was free to make the script however I wanted, to edit it the way I wanted, to cast who I wanted, and it was wonderful to work this way.

It’s interesting to look at the span of your career, that you went from that to having a string of very successful commercial films that won a lot of Oscars. Did you feel like you just got lucky?

Oh, yeah, I tell you, in show business 80 percent of your success is luck. Good luck that you get the right subject to make the film at the right time and open the right door in Hollywood.

Were you living in California?

Since I came to the United States I live on the East Coast, in New York and Connecticut. But you know, when I came for the first time to Los Angeles and I’m supposed to work, for me someone who was born and lived half of his life in Central Europe, Los Angeles is not a place to go do work. It’s a place to go for vacation. For me, the ocean, the palm trees, the swimming pools, the tennis courts, the golf courses … I almost felt guilty to lock myself in a room and work. So that’s why I decided I will stay and live on the East Coast, in New York, in the middle way between my country and Los Angeles.

How do you feel about New York these days?

I love New York. It’s a big cosmopolitan city where everybody can arrange his own personal life the way he was used to in his old country or whatever he wants.

I recently saw Abel Ferrara’s documentary about the Chelsea Hotel, which leads to the other funny story I heard you tell. I wonder if you can recount the anecdote about your time as a resident there.

I was living there for two years after I finished Taking Off and was penniless. I moved into the Chelsea Hotel because Stanley Bard when I told him I don’t know if I can pay the rent, he said ‘That’s alright, you’ll pay me when you make money.’ It was a wonderful oasis for me. I met Janis Joplin in the hotel. Andy Warhol. Sex Pistols. All these kinds of people.

And one night when you were living there, which kind of thematically brings us back to The Fireman’s Ball, there was a fire alarm.

Oh yes, at the Chelsea Hotel! I was staying there on the 8^th floor and one day at 2 o’clock in the morning, fire alarm. And I panicked, because about two weeks before we saw on television a hotel in Tokyo that was on fire and people were jumping to their death. I run out frm my room and didn’t close my door and I sleep only in a T-shirt and I was naked except for the T-shirt. And suddenly I hear the bang, because the draft closed my door. I didn’t have my key with me. So I am standing there naked and suddenly people are coming out of the other rooms. And I am going to this lady who came out, ‘Oh, please, don’t you have any pants?’ And she said no. So she gave me a skirt. And I put on the skirt. And now we are watching from the railing, how on the 5^th floor the firemen are pouring tons of water into the door of a room. and this smoke is coming out. A lot of people gathered by the railing and it was like a party, almost. Some bottles, wine, went from hand to hand and some joints were passed. And suddenly, we see how they are carrying out a dead body of an old lady out of the room. In that moment, everything stops. Silence. And we watch them waiting with the body in their arms by the elevator, and finally the elevator came open. They took the body in, elevator closed and the party started to continue! It was a strange, strange incident but, well, that’s what happens sometimes.

And the lady died of a heart attack?

No. What happened was the firemen who broke in couldn’t see anything for the thick smoke. So they started to pour in a lot of watrr. This old lady, she was over 80 years old, was asleep on this little bed or couch, but they couldn’t see her. And when they started pouring all this water in, she really drowned. There was not even a fire there. She had a pot on the stove and was cooking some boiled meat, and fell asleep. Meanwhile, the water evaporated, and the meat started to burn. But it was in the pot so the flames could not get out. But there was a thick, thick smoke. When the people in the street saw the smoke coming out through the window, someone called the firemen. That was what happened.

Did you enjoy modeling your skirt?

No, no, no Finally when they liquidated the smoke and everything was fine I got a key to my room from downstairs. The doorman came up and let me in the room and I could change. But I was standing among the people on the gallery in a skirt.