Guiding Stars Who Had Never Acted on Film Before The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has never won an Academy Award, but he is nonetheless part of Oscar history. In 2008, his "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," a drama about an illegal abortion that had won top honors at the Cannes Film Festival the previous spring, was considered a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, but ended up being snubbed by Academy voters. That led to a change in the rules, taking some of the power to choose nominees away from voters and conferring it on a special committee Now Mr. Mungiu, 44, is back and competing with a new film, "Beyond the Hills," that has again scored big at Cannes, with awards for screenplay and the performances of its two lead actresses. Set in an Orthodox monastery, it examines the friendship of two women who grew up together in an orphanage but have taken strikingly different paths as adults. One has become a nun, finding inner peace, while the other has migrated to Germany and is so deeply troubled that when she returns to visit her friend she ends up being subjected to an exorcism. It's based very loosely on a 2005 case in which a Romanian novice died in an exorcism. "Beyond the Hills" was shown at the New York Film Festival this fall, when Mr. Mungiu was in town and sat down for an interview, and it will close the festival Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema at Lincoln Center on Wednesday. Here are edited excerpts from that October conversation: The real-life incident on which your film is based has been amply written about in the press and in two books by Tatiana Niculescu Bran. What compelled you to go back to this episode? I knew about this story for a very long period, because this was in the press a lot, and I was preserving all the clips and I read the books. Eventually I googled to see what the reaction of people was seven years later, only to discover that people were still so concerned and preoccupied and polarized by this that, apart from the books, I couldn't find any balanced position about what happened. For me it was very important to see all the things this story can reveal. And this is why I decided to make a film out of it. Actually, the great difference between the books and what I did is the relationship between the girls, which never existed in reality, but which gave me a reason for everything that happened. For those two vital roles, you chose performers who had never acted in a film before, and they ended up sharing the best actress award at Cannes. How did you achieve that? Well, this is the crucial decision you need to make on a film like this: who are you going to work with? We had the kind of liberty we've never had before to just experiment with them, in the rehearsals and at the shooting. We rehearsed a lot during casting, read a lot, and I acted a lot for them, so I am giving them directly the tone of voice, the energy, the rhythm, the body language that I want. Guidance, but not with words. I'm not telling them what to do, I show them how to do. But it's fair to say that by the end, I had adapted as much to them as they adapted to me. We did what was there in the script, but each time it wasn't possible to get the dialogue exactly right, I was adapting what I wanted to do and editing the scene to what they could do. Because you can't push onto the actors something that does not belong to them. For many foreigners, their main image of Romania, to the extent they have one at all, is of a strange and superstitious place, with Transylvania and vampires and all of that. Are you worried that "Beyond the Hills" could reinforce those stereotypes? I hope the film will not be seen and interpreted like this. I think this is a local story speaking about things that are very general. What people are asked to do in the name of love for God, for example, this is the same in a lot of different religions. It's the same mechanism, the way it works. Sin and the way evil works into the world, the way violence evolves into people. One of the things that really interested me to investigate was how does violence find a place in this community? They are very mild people who start by sitting at the same table with this girl, and somehow a few days later they feel they are not fighting her, but demons inside her, and are entitled to make decisions about her life. How does this happen, practically? Where is this moment? I don't think this belongs to a society that is underdeveloped, I think this can be understood to speak about things in a more general way. Having seen three of your films, I have a sense that certain themes fascinate you, such as women in a situation of duress. Is that fair to say? Yes, but in "Tales From the Golden Age," there were also episodes that involved men in difficult situations. So it's not exclusive. Actually, I am much more interested in the situation than the character. I don't start from characters. I need a situation that is very complex and layered and gives me the possibility to speak about a lot of things at the same time. I can't handle very simple things. I always need to have first of all a strong conflict between some people, and a world behind. At first this was the world of the end of Communism, and now it's this religious world. I also want to ask you about the Oscars. You know, don't you, that you're already famous in Oscar history? (Laughs) Yes, in a very strange sense. But I don't think it's fair to expect too much from the Oscars for the kind of films I do. I hope that people will watch the film and have the patience to understand that there is a kind of cinema that is different but that is also cinema, and there's nothing wrong with that. Are you talking about the general audience or the Academy voters? I'm talking about the Oscar committee and also the Oscar voters. What's important in cinema is to have options and allow spectators to say, "Let's see, I'm going to see this kind," to have this liberty, to be able to choose. But you can't have a film which is going to be appreciated the same everywhere - in Cannes, at the Oscars, in Romania. You just do the kind of cinema you are interested in, and then the film will have its fate, in different contexts with different people. Does winning prizes mean anything to you? Because your films have done very well at Cannes. This has a very precise meaning. It helps the film to be seen, that is the benefit of awards. And the Romanian new wave, this exists just because of Cannes, honestly. We wouldn't represent anything, even in Romania for our spectators, unless there was this kind of appreciation. Actually, in Romania people haven't seen my films a lot. But they appreciate the fact that I'm appreciated. This is it. I'm carrying the banner, like a football team and Nadia Comaneci, stuff like that.