The Son of Saul director recalls how getting his first job as assistant to the austere master was a hard but inspiring lesson in the most ambitious kind of movie-making

News: Hungarian director Béla Tarr dies aged 70

The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate.

I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to find a boy for one of the main parts. I spent months in the casting process, for a part that eventually was cut from the shooting script. But for Béla, every effort put into a given movie was never lost – it was integrated into the energy field of the enterprise. The final outcome had to be the product of difficult processes. The harder the task, the better quality one could expect. He wanted to film life, and its constant dance. The choreography was a revelation for me: 10-minute, uninterrupted takes, unifying space, characters and time. All in black and white.