Milos Forman, haunted by ghosts of the Inquisition

WHEN Milos Forman was a student in Prague in the 1950s, he read a book on the Spanish Inquisition about people confessing under torture to crimes they’d never committed.

“What struck me at the time was that the same thing was happening in Czechoslovakia under the Communists,” the 75-year-old director recalls. “I met one prisoner who had escaped the death penalty but had been tortured through sleep deprivation. After a few months of that, you are ready to confess to anything.”

Forman’s latest film, “Goya’s Ghosts,” picks up the theme of truths shaped by terror in a historical drama set in Spain in 1792.

The story, co-written with longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere (“Taking Off,” “Valmont”), is told through the eyes of the celebrated painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgard), whose young muse, Ines (Natalie Portman), has the face of an angel. Alas, it only gets her in trouble.

Falsely accused of heresy by the High Office of the Inquisition, Ines is imprisoned and falls prey to Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), who fiercely believes the punitive extremes and God-fearing ways of the Inquisition’s early days should be reinstated. The problem is, he can’t resist certain earthly delights attached to youthful beauty. And when the French Revolution brings an accommodating morality with it, he is more than willing to go along.

“He thinks his beliefs are what are best for society, until another totally different philosophy comes along, and that becomes the hope for mankind. It reminds me of my own life experience under a democratic society, then under the Nazis, then the Communists. I’m fascinated by how history repeats itself.”

Unlike Carlos Saura’s 1999 biopic, “Goya in Bordeaux,” in which the focus is almost solely on the painter, Forman uses Goya as a bystander who witnesses Spain’s tumultuous political upheaval.

“Goya was an observer of his times, like a journalist,” Forman explains. “He was also an incredibly courageous coward. He just wanted to be left alone and paint. First, it was the Spanish royalty, then Napoleon’s brother, Joseph. When Joseph was kicked out by Wellington, he painted Wellington. But he also wandered the streets and the taverns, sketching the poor and the desperate, like in ‘Los Caprichos’ and ‘The Disasters of War.’ He made fun of everything that was oppressive.”

Within Forman’s sweeping mix of invented and historical characters (Randy Quaid appears briefly as King Carlos) and a smorgasbord of accents, Goya’s career is convincingly evoked, but what the director has in mind is larger than a biopic.

Like the deafening tolling church bells that resound throughout “Goya’s Ghosts,” which opens July 20, Forman’s message about the dangers of fanaticism, or what he calls “spiritual and cultural terrorism,” resonates through the film. “Tell me what the truth is!” bellows an Inquisitor during a particularly wrenching torture scene.

But when it comes to truth, Forman has no answers. “One person will say that the world is one big loony bin. Another will say that the world is a place full of well-meaning angels. Both are true. And if you’re lucky,” the director adds slyly, “fiction turns out to be more true than reality.”