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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
It’s wonderful that Poland is free again and there’s open debate and people can pursue their interests. I’m all for it. – Pawel Pawlikowski
‘Ida’ is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It’s not a film that deals with an issue as such. It’s more universal. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
I think people crave those meaningful situations, stuff about faith, identity, dilemmas of live paradoxes in our souls. It’s going back to a time where lives were really defined by history, and also how you behave in the face of history. It’s kind of interesting to go back to that simpler humanity, simpler but deeper. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski
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. – Pawel Pawlikowski