Top 35 Pawel Pawlikowski Quotes

I don’t know what directing actors is all about apart from just casting well and then shaping their performances a bit, you know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I lived a pretty chaotic life. I went to England, and I moved around, and there were a lot of things that I was interested in. I wrote poetry. I took photographs. I was a musician and all sorts of things. Nothing brilliant, but I did all these different things.

I’m a pretty chaotic person, but I’m also a perfectionist. It’s a very unfortunate mix.

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.

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 love films that are many things at the same time while being simple.

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.

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.

‘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.

‘Ida’ is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It’s not a film that deals with an issue as such. It’s more universal.

‘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.

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 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.

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.

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.

For me, filmmaking is not exactly a career. I was never in it for Hollywood or anything. My films are markers of where I am in life, where I am in my head. So that’s what I’m working on, and I try to keep things in proportion – life and filmmaking. One feeds into the other.

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.

I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.

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.

I like to control my films from beginning to end, to write them the way I want.

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.

It’s wonderful that Poland is free again and there’s open debate and people can pursue their interests. I’m all for it.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don’t make it to convey a message.

My stupid ambition is to make a film that’s not like any other – one that has its own kind of logic and hooks viewers without making them think too much. It’s a film I’d love to see, one in which after 10 minutes the audience isn’t able to predict the whole thing.

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.

What’s been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what’s transcendent.

I’m not emotionally excited by the power of cinema’s tricks anymore.

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.

I think – you know, the big trauma in my life, personally, was the fact that at 14, I was taken out of Poland unwittingly because my parents were divorced. Left the country – my mother left for England with her new husband. I wasn’t even aware that she’d married him.

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.

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.