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All Quotes by author - Pawel Pawlikowski
" A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that. "
Good
Work
Voice
" Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message. "
Make
You
Message
" 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. "
Life
Career
I Am
" 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. "
People
Life
Story
" 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. "
Mother
Family
Black
" 'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal. "
Humanity
More
Guilt
" I don't know what directing actors is all about apart from just casting well and then shaping their performances a bit, you know. "
Directing
Then
Know
" 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. "
Strong
Myself
Think
" 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. "
Death
Lift
Normal
" 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.' "
Time
Music
Listening
" I grew up in a secular environment, you know, in the '60s and '70s. My mother's family was Catholic, but you know, just very kind of conventionally Catholic. You know, nothing - there was nothing, you know, extreme about their version of religion. And my father was a free spirit, you know? He had no time for religion at all. "
Religion
Father
Mother
" I'm not emotionally excited by the power of cinema's tricks anymore. "
Tricks
Power
Cinema
" 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. "
Planning
Group
Focus
" 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. "
Think
Parents
My Life
" It's wonderful that Poland is free again and there's open debate and people can pursue their interests. I'm all for it. "
Wonderful
Free
Open
" 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. "
Home
People
Me
" Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify. "
Right
Like
Life
" My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people. "
Father
Habit
Mother
" My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life. "
Reflection
My Life
Life
" 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. "
World
End
Attitude
" 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. "
Parents
You
Up
" 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. "
Thought
Think
Same
" 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. "
Life
Problem
World
" 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. "
Wish
Art
Humanity
" 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. "
Things
Write
Permanent
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