Biografia

At the time of his death, he was one of only three living directors who have directed two films that have won the Academy Award for best picture. The others are Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood.

His sons, Andrew and James, were named after Andy Kaufman and Jim Carrey. Carrey portrays Kaufman in Forman's film O Mundo de Andy (1999).

He was raised by parents Anna (Svabova), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. They were Protestants, but were arrested by the Nazis during World War II after being accused of participating in the underground anti-Nazi resistance (his father died in Buchenwald and his mother died in Auschwitz). As an adult, Milos was told that his biological father was Otto Kohn, an architect of Jewish heritage (making Milos a biological half-brother of mathematician Joseph J. Kohn).

His top ten films of all time are: Luzes da Cidade (1931), Cidadão Kane (1941), O Boulevard do Crime (1945), Milagre em Milão (1951), Assim Caminha a Humanidade (1956), O Poderoso Chefão (1972), Amarcord (1973), Loucuras de Verão (1973), O Franco Atirador (1978) and Touro Indomável (1980). [Source: "Sight and Sound"].

Was reportedly one of the first directors who considered turning the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, "The Lord of the Rings", into a live action feature.

I know this sounds so little, and not serious enough, but I believe that I have to have fun. We all have to have fun - me, the actors, the cameraman, everybody should feel as if we are making a home movie, because that is the only way to open the film to a certain kind of lightness. If everybody involved feels the seriousness, the heavy weight of money being stamped on movies, it somehow influences the result in a way which is anesthizing to life.

The theatre is different from the movies, which is very right for the theatre, because you know when the curtain goes up, that nothing is real, that everything is stylized. The tree is not a real tree, it's stylized. The language is stylized and must be stylized because you don't have editing. You have to write lines so that you can communicate to the audience everything so they will understand. It's stylized for that purpose. But film is very different because you see that everything is real. The trees are real, the buildings are real, the sky is real, so people better be real too and not stylized like on the stage.

Who doesn't have sympathy for the underdog? Of course, I do. We create institutions, governments and schools to help us live, but every institution has a tendency, after a while, to behave not as if they should be serving you, but that you should be serving them. That's when the individual gets in conflict, because we are paying these institutions with our taxes, we are paying them to serve us and help us live, and not to tell us how to live and dominate us. I wouldn't say it's the underdog but it's always the conflict within the individual and the institutions. Instead of underdogs, let's talk about dogs. If you corner a dog, he's ready to bite you. That's the reality. Otherwise he's a loveable, wonderful creature. If you corner him, he can behave abominably. And so does a human being. When an individual is cornered by society or an institution, well, he can behave abominably and I can't really hide it or glorify it. Neither. It's just a fact of life.

Director is little bit of everything, little bit of the writer, little bit of an actor, little bit of an editor, little bit of a costume designer. Good director is the director who chooses for this profession people who are better than he is. Yes, I can write, but I have to have a writer who is a better writer than I am, I have to have actors who are better actors than I am, I have to have sound engineers who are better sound engineer than I am, you know. It's a strange profession, ....visually it's your vision.

Some scenes have to be done exactly as they are written in the scripts because otherwise the pace would suffer, like that. But then there are scenes which allow a space for improvisation and then I like to encourage improvisation, but you have to always have exact script because 90% of improvisation is usually very boring, unusable. But the 10% or even less, even if you have 1%, you can get such a gem of unrepeatable moments of films that it's worth it to try to improvise. But if improvisation doesn't work you have to have a solid script to go back to.