Oficiální web Miloše Formana

“Goya’s Ghosts” gave Forman the opportunity – after working on films about W. A. Mozart, Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt – to make another dramatization of a historical figure´s biography. The film begins in Spain, a country overwhelmed with disorder inspired by the neighbouring French Revolution. The church attempts to strengthen its power through the intensive pursuit of freethinkers and heretics and by re-establishing the right to torture suspects.

 Goya is a popular artist who paints the Queen and even the chief inquisitor himself. When Inés is imprisoned by The Inquisition, and despite her innocence pleads guilty during torture, her father asks the influential Goya for help.

Goya becomes both a mediator and a witness to the hopeless fight between Inés´ father and the inquisitional machine. Eventually Inés’ father tricks Lorenzo into confessing heresy, thereby proving to the Church the absurdity of using the right to torture and the worthlessness of his daughter´s confession. Regardless of this, the girl remains imprisoned.  

Fifteen years later, Napoleon invades the country and abolishes The Inquisition, setting Inés and the rest of the prisoners free. But this is not the end of her struggles because while she was in prison the revolutionary guards killed her family. The desperate woman turns to Goya (who is already deaf) to help find the daughter she gave birth to in prison,

During his search, Goya meets a prosecutor appointed by the French and recognizes him as Lorenzo. Goya learns that Lorenzo is the father of Inés’s child. Lorenzo attempts to kill both Inés and his daughter Alicia, but before he is successful the British Army arrives.

This spectacular parable is a comment on despotism and power, and the blind fanaticism that devours not only its victims, but also its own executors. It reflects the director’s important personal experience with the Nazi and Communist dictatorship. At the same time, the film can also be viewed as a more up to date commentary on of the start of the Iraq war when the American public were hyped up and overwhelmed by political fanaticism.

In addition to this the film outlines the absurd mechanism of historical trials. These trials were set off by a religious inquisitor who started committing bloodshed in the name of God, yet at the same time committing crimes of fornication, murder and even the denial of his faith. We come to see that evil comes dressed up in different guises.

Throughout the film, Goya remains an involuntary witness who is unable to do anything else but paint the horrors around him. The painter’s dilemma is communicated through his sensual sceneries or expressive war scenes. The paradox of Goya’s life is that he was an acute observer of beauty, but because he survived both The Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic wars he became more famous for portraying and reflecting the horrors of his time.

• “It didn’t really start with Goya at all,” Forman recalls. “It started when I was in film school and read a book about The Spanish Inquisition and an incident in which someone had been falsely accused of a crime.“
• “The script was finished months before the Iraq war. There's a line in the film when Napoleon’s general says to his soldiers they´ll  be greeted with flowers as liberators in Spain. It's difficult to explain to people that the line was there before our vice-president (Dick Cheney, editor’s mark) said that. But of course it isn´n surprising that history repeats itself. After every disaster, every war, we scream, "We learned our lesson. Never again." And then it happens again. And we scream again. And then it happens again.“
• “I didn’t want the actor playing Goya to be someone recognizable,” the director says. “For the fictitious characters of Lorenzo and Inés, it didn’t matter to me if a famous face filled the role. But Goya. Goya would come out of nowhere. Unexpectedly. We shouldn’t be able to recognize him from anywhere else.”