Pawel Pawlikowski

I'm not a professional filmmaker, it's just a little part of my life and it's not how I define myself. It's not really important whether I make the film in Poland, England or wherever. The films are always the result of where I am, what I've discovered and what's in my head. Show less «

I don't see filmmaking as a career, in that I've never tried to "graduate" to big commercial movies. I always just made films about what interested me at the time - for better and worse, because sometimes that really didn't interest anybody else! Show less «

[on his process] 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. I wanted to make the kind of film which is like a meditation more than a story, which has these kinds of faces that convey the mood of Poland at that moment, but is also a bigger parable about stuff. I wanted a film that was musical, not that it's got a lot of music in it, but that has a kind of musical shape to it, and that's not prosaically narrative but has its own rhythm. It's exactly the kind of film that I wanted to make but not in details. It's more like I know where I'm going.[2014] Show less «

[on his career] When I watch my early documentaries, they're very eclectic. They don't follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn't [follow any pattern]. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant. Now, I look at them and they're just so uneven. I like them all because they're about something and they're kind of original, but they're pretty uneven. 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'm a pretty chaotic person, but I'm also a perfectionist. (...) 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. It was more like what's on my mind now. It was more like where is my brain now, or my heart, or whatever. They're all part of some kind of, for better or for worse, journey. Even the bad ones, or the less successful ones let's say, I know exactly why they happened like this and why they are like they are. I stayed an amateur who needed to live a bit in order to make films. I don't need to be on the set and just keep churning out films. I definitely don't want to shoot some scripts that are given me. 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.[2014] Show less «

[on future projects] Now I'm going to make three other films, but like I always do. I'll jump between them and wait for the moment where one of them will have these elements like three characters and landscape and some kind of gut feeling that this is worth spending a year and a half or two years of my life on. Just like when I was doing Ida, I was doing three different projects and waiting for this moment when the critical mass came together.[2014] Show less «

[on winning the 1st 'Best Foreign Language Film' Academy Award for Poland with Ida (2013)] It's really fantastic. We have a great tradition of films but no Oscars so this feels really great. I hope it encourages the world to look at Polish cinema again and other filmmakers to take risks and do something that's a bit original and brave. I hope this is [an] encouragement. For the film is about different versions of Polishness. But it's about all sorts of things. Faith, identity, sense of guilt, Stalinism too, lost ideals, and it's about jazz and rock 'n' roll. I didn't want to make a film for one reason.[2015] Show less «

[on his biography] 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. Usually, when you say that you did all these different things, it's quite good when you can synthesize them in cinema, because cinema uses all these things. Also, it's also knowledge about photography, about human psychology, and other things. But, to be more specific, I never went to film school. 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.[2014] Show less «

Let's be honest: Ida (2013) had no commercial prospects, even in festivals, because I know how hard it is for Polish films to break into Cannes, Venice and Berlin. When I said that I was doing the film in Poland - in Polish and in black and white - my friends decided that I was committing professional hara-kiri. [2015] Show less «