This week at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the 10 participants of Future Frames, the program for young European directors, were joined by Greek director Christos Nikou as a mentor. Variety sat down for their discussion.

Nikou, who directed “Apples” and “Fingernails,” began by underscoring the importance for filmmakers to “find their voice.” He said: “The best praise I’ve heard about the things I do is that they have a unique tone and identity. It’s not what I’m trying to do, but what somehow comes from my heart, from my soul.”

“How can you find your voice?” he asked, adding that he feels “that a lot of filmmakers are trying to follow what film funds need and also what festivals need.”

He continued, “I never call myself a director, I call myself a movie buff, and the reason I do this is because I love watching movies.”

Nikou, who likes to watch three movies a day, said that even if he doesn’t know who the director of a movie is before watching it, he will know within the first five to ten minutes, and he loves discovering “really unique voices and identities.” And he added: “That is our goal: to create unique voices.”

He said “Apples,” which opened the Horizons section in Venice in 2020, before screening in Toronto and Telluride, had been rejected by festival funds and workshops in several countries because they did not understand the tone of the film. “It’s a subtle film. You might understand the idea, but the tone is very difficult to describe in the script, so sometimes you need to make a short film first,” he said.

He noted that while young filmmakers often told him that their favorite directors were people like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, what they presented was more like “poverty porn,” which he said he found “very, very, very boring.” He continued, “I mean, come on, we can tell more interesting stories. We can tell stories that are not just about what we see, but also about what we love. So, for me, it’s very important that a filmmaker is making films that are very close to his heart and what exactly he loves to see in films.”

Nikou did not attend film school and is self-taught. His three favorite filmmakers were also self-taught, “so I said, if they can do it, I can do it too. My school was the films I watched.” He says that although his film tastes range from “The Murder of a Chinese Bookie” to “Lovers on the Bridge,” the movie that made him want to be a filmmaker was “The Truman Show,” which is “the movie that I think has the perfect balance of comedy and drama, and how you can make something that’s conceptual but also very grounded, and that’s an amazing prophecy about our lives. I mean, it still works perfectly, and it’s a movie that I really love.”

Nikou added that in the last 15 or 20 years, cinema has suffered from a lack of originality. “The reason is that all these stupid executives think they know what they’re doing, but in reality they have no idea and are just trying to play it safe. And the thing is, we don’t have to listen to them; we have to keep what we have in our hearts, and that’s the hardest thing.”

He continued: “You always get typecast. When I did ‘Apples,’ I signed with a manager in the US, and then with an agency, and the first scripts I got were about memory, and I thought, ‘What the fuck? I’ve already made a movie about memory, I don’t want to make another one.'”

Nikou stressed the primacy of the public. “I’m not a big fan of filmmakers who make things for themselves and their friends; they’re very self-centered. I feel like you have to think about the audience and put yourself in the audience’s position. You have to have yourself as a filmmaker and yourself as an audience, and combine both.”

“There are filmmakers who just want to challenge the audience and feel very provocative, but to be honest, what I’m missing in cinema is tender cinema and cinema that comes from the heart. It’s the easiest thing to provoke in the world. The thing is to figure out how to make something that is authentic and tender, and avoid all these pretentious things that often happen in cinema.”

On the sci-fi romantic drama “Fingernails,” starring Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, Nikou had the final cut. He recommended young filmmakers strive for that as well, although he acknowledged that it was rare for them to be granted that, especially in projects filmed for American studios and broadcasters. “Fingernails,” which was co-produced with Dirty Films and Cate Blanchett’s FilmNation Entertainment, was picked up by Apple TV.

On “Apples,” Nikou worked with a budget of only $250,000, but for “Fingernails” he had between $10 and $12 million. The additional costs associated with complying with union rules in the U.S. mean the money goes further in Europe, he said. “In Europe we are making films in a much more efficient way,” he said.

“In ‘Fingernails,’ for example, there were scenes where we had three makeup artists and three hairstylists for two people in a house, and they were sitting there. We had 120 people on the crew, 10 people on the grip, 10 people on the electrical, the lighting, and you were like, ‘What the fuck, all these people, why are they here?'” he said.

“It’s the union rules that have to be followed there. So the problem is that a lot of the money doesn’t go to the screen.” [in the U.S.]and that is something good about Europe.”

Nikou found it easier to shift her attention from Greece to North America before the release of “Apples,” after signing with manager Jerome Duboz, with CAA as her agency and Blanchett as executive producer.

“When you have an agent and a manager, and all these things happen, they always set you up with meetings with producers in the US, they ask you what you want to do next, you have a lot of Zoom meetings, you meet people in person, you hear a lot of things that you don’t believe, but at the same time you try to figure out how to stay true to your vision, how you want to tell a story and who are the people that you can become your family in some way. continue working with them.”

Nikou confessed that he was not a fan of film awards, although the money he earned from awards for “Apples” allowed him to continue as a filmmaker. “I think there’s nothing stupider than awards. There’s no point in us competing with each other in any way, because we all love movies. The first awards I started receiving made me feel very uncomfortable and not happy in a way, because I was trying to figure out if my ego is happy, or why they’re giving me an award right now, and why they chose it. I’ve been on juries many times, and juries don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. They party late, and watch movies very early, and half of them sleep during the screenings,” he said, with a smile.

“A lot of times, they come with an agenda about who they want to give the award to, so it’s very complicated to be honest. There are some people who really decide with their hearts, but there are also others who don’t decide with that, so please don’t be sad if you ever lose an award. It doesn’t mean anything at all. You just have to enjoy the ride. We’re the luckiest motherfuckers in the world.”

Future Frames is organized by European Film Promotion, in collaboration with the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Variety is the main media partner of the program.