Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.
I never work from the script. I get the script more or less.
I usually make films about what's on my mind at any given time.
I'm not emotionally excited by the power of cinema's tricks anymore.
Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.
It's always a good starting point to tell a story that has many layers.
I'm a pretty chaotic person, but I'm also a perfectionist. It's a very unfortunate mix.
Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.
In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.
It's wonderful that Poland is free again and there's open debate and people can pursue their interests. I'm all for it.
'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal.
I never made films like kind of career moves, like making this film in order to make that film in order to end up in Hollywood.
I don't know what directing actors is all about apart from just casting well and then shaping their performances a bit, you know.
I grew up cinematically in the '70s. I was watching a lot of Godard, Bresson, Dreyer, and all sorts of old films and the Czech New Wave.
With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.
The whole world, it's a problem that there's too much stuff being produced. We don't have time to reflect on the important things in life.
When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
We made a film about the need for silence and withdrawal... and here we are at the epicentre of noise and excitement. Life is full of surprises.
It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.
I actually studied literature and philosophy. So, when I started making films, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was too proud and arrogant to learn.
For me, actors have to have a character, an aura, body language. They're not models. They used to call actors models. But I want them to participate in the film.
I love good TV shows, but it's not what I do. I kind of sculpt my films as I go along. And TV is all about writing, so you just shoot, shoot, shoot what's written.
The most interesting stuff happens when an authoritarian government removes itself a little and gives this margin of freedom. And then art is grabbed with both hands.
I connect with all of the characters in my films. That's what makes you want to make a film, that you can enter the mindset, the situation, the conflict, the contradictions.
To cast Ida, it took ages, and I was a bit desperate. I couldn't find somebody I could believe in. I spent months looking for the lead among young actresses and drama students.
Strangely, you know, my parents, who left Poland separately and, you know, divorced, ended up marrying other people. But then they met again abroad, and they got together again.
I'm so happy when someone does something original, and there's no focus group or planning committee. If the cinema doesn't get an injection of that once in a while, we're in trouble.
It's so difficult to actually come up with ideas that you really fall in love with, you know? That's the most difficult thing about filmmaking - and that's my main challenge in life.
The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
For me, good films and good books are irreducible to a lesson. You can't just kind of translate them into one statement. On the contrary, the more you do that, the less wisdom in art there is.
The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.
The problem with shooting in Paris is, it's been shot to death. When you're in it, you already think you're in a movie, so how do you get away from that feeling, and give some frisson to the viewer?
In 2006, I started making a film called 'Restraint of Beasts.' While I was making it, I had a personal disaster. My wife fell ill, so we stopped shooting halfway through. And then sadly, my wife died.
Every good film is a bit like a dream, when you come away from it. That's what you should aspire to, rather than some social document. I want to create a little world that will stay with the audience.
I always write three or four projects at the same time. They're stories that I want to tell, and usually I dump them unfinished for the next one in order not to get too cornered and depressed about it.
I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism. I was baptised by my mother's family, who were all traditional Catholics. But my mother was the black sheep of the family - she ran away to the ballet at 17.
One of my favorite writers is Chekhov. I love his attitude toward the world. Just accept things for what they are. Don't judge. Be moral as you tell your story, but have no moral at the end. Just look at it.
For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like how do I make this film. That's part of the pleasure and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.
For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like, 'How do I make this film?' That's part of the pleasure, and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.
If you wanted to make a film about British teenagers, it would be... well, it wouldn't interest me; let's put it like that. They'd be listening to music I hate, watching TV all the time, and talking about 'Big Brother.'
I have this theory that if you do a film, those who have not fallen asleep or left the cinema, they will live with the film much longer, and it will really enter their imagination and the subconscious much more profoundly.
From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.
I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.
'The Restraint of Beasts' is a painful subject. We'd shot 60% of the film when I had to stop. The material looks great, like nothing I've ever done or even seen before. It could have been really great, definitely original.
The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.
Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.
I don't think women are that vastly different from men. I'm a bit of a woman myself. But I'm not a feminist filmmaker. I'm not making a feminist thesis to prove that women are important. I just happen to make films with strong characters that are women.
I dread to be compared to all these directors who have a lot of spontaneous emoting and swearing in their films - that is death; it's a cul-de-sac. It doesn't lift the material at all. It's just a cliched reproduction of what we think is normal behaviour.
I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.
'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.