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Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski on the Making of Cold War

Pawlikowski discusses the reception of his films and why he doesn’t stick too closely to his own scripts.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Photo: Amazon Studios

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, like his Oscar-winning Ida, highlights a traumatic period in Poland’s recent history, and how a brutal political reality warps people’s lives. In the film, Poland’s totalitarian government and the iron curtain that separates the country from the West is hardly the only thing that keeps doomed lovers Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) apart, but it’s certainly the main one. It also interferes with their ability to do good work. Wiktor is the co-founder a troupe that performs Polish folk music and dances. Zula is the star of the troupe, whose initially artistic performances become steadily more maudlin and nationalistic under the heavy hand of Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), the communist bureaucrat who runs the company.

After the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Pawlikowski spoke to me about the echoes of modern politics that Polish audiences detect in Cold War, how the film eluded the grasp of the propagandists who maligned Ida, and why he doesn’t stick too closely to his scripts.

I’ve seen two of your earliest movies, My Summer of Love and your first documentary, about Russian writer and dissident Benedict Yerofeyev. Ida and Cold War felt to me like they’re operating on a whole different, much deeper level. Did they feel different to you too?

It’s age. Age and experience. A mixture of, you know, calming down, maturing, craft. I never went to film school, so I did all my learning on the job. A lot of these early films are just rescue jobs—a good idea, and they generally work, because there’s something about them. I was usually just gripped by a story. Benedict was a writer I really loved, so I had to make a film about him. He was dying, and there was nothing to film. I had to invent a whole film around his book, so I pieced it together any old how, as poetically as possible.

Regarding My Summer of Love, I had done a few fiction films before that, but the budget was still quite small. Also, I wasn’t quite in control of my methods. There were some shots I worked out that didn’t quite come off. And the two actresses [Natalie Press and Emily Blunt] at some point stopped getting on.

Now I’m calm. I don’t get flustered and stick to my guns. It has something to do with where you are in life and, in some ways, being impatient with cinema. You often make something just to make the kind of film you’d like to see, and not to use the same weapons that everyone else is using, for emotional rhetoric. Also, time is a big factor. I don’t make films too often. So, every time I make a new one, I’m somewhere else than when I was making one before.

Ida and Cold War are also your only two films that are about Poland. Do you think that had something to do with it?

Yeah. I went back to live in Poland, and there are reasons why I’m there. Not just to make films, but [to find] all these stories that were always there.

I read that you said the inspiration for Ida was partly to explore the idea of religion as a spiritual practice rather than a form of identity.

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Both, both. The difference between the two. Is it a thing of identity? Or is it a thing of faith, rather than a sort of tribal marking?

And Cold War was partly inspired by your parents. But those two could also be looked at as a kind of diptych about Poland during and after WWII.

Yes, I suppose. But I didn’t have that vision. It was more like trying to tell a story that means something to me and maybe also to others, and that has layers to it. Ida is about identity, faith, and guilt. Also, it’s about the Poland that I grew up in at a kind of sensuous, sentimental level: poems, songs. And religion was a big deal. But I didn’t realize it would become such a political hot potato. It because very controversial. It was an arthouse film that the kind of people who watch that kind of film went to see and liked. But then when it started winning big awards, it became a public event. So, suddenly the current government, which was then fighting an election campaign, used it as a weapon. They said, “This is a film which blackens our image.” They spoke to people who hadn’t actually seen the film, telling them: “It’s all about Poles killing Jews” and “It’s a conspiracy against our country.” It was a weapon they used to drum up support and create a sense of siege.

We wouldn’t know anything about those kinds of tactics in this country.

Yeah. [laughs] Well, it worked for them. Suddenly there was this big petition against the film, signed by more people than went to see it. With Cold War, it sort of slipped out of their control because it became very popular. Unlike Ida, it was a huge commercial hit, which was very surprising. So, you can’t explain to them what it was about behind their backs. Also, there’s some echoes of today [in the film], and a lot of people picked up on them. The folk ensemble gets kind of coopted into some kind of ideological weapon, which is kind of what’s happening right now, with the folk ensemble I was basing mine on. Suddenly the government pumps money into that kind of art—not that it’s socialist any more, but nationalist—while cutting subsidies to theaters that aren’t to their liking. Of course, it’s not Stalinism. There’s no censorship as such. But they took over the state TV, and the type of person like Kaczmarek, the impresario, that guy exists now and is very dominant.

And someone like that could now work for the state and control the arts in the same way?

Well, no, but he can make a career. I don’t mean anyone specific, but this type now is very prevalent: the guy who can master the right lingo. At the time it was Marxist, but now it’s kind of patriotic. [laughs] You can make a huge career. These patriots are on the make now. They’re taking over the institutions and the businesses—state businesses. It’s terrible. So, when a certain type of audience watches it, of course it feels familiar.

In Cold War, the love song that becomes a kind of signature piece for Zula gets corrupted in Poland, when the apparatchik in charge of the troupe forces them to turn what starts out as a beautiful folk song into something saccharine and false. But Zula also hates what happens to the song in Paris, where a poet translates the lyrics in a preciously literary way. Are you saying that non-totalitarian societies are just as hard on artistic self-expression as totalitarian ones, just in different ways?

No, no. I wouldn’t be theoretical about it. It’s just, in life, that’s how it happens. There’s the extra problem that the lyrics were written by this ex-lover of Wiktor, and they are pretentious, but it’s more that all social life is a form of coercion, you know? In Stalinist Poland it was really manifest and dangerous, and in French salons it’s oppressive in a different way. But nobody forced them to sing that song in French. People say to me that I would make a lot of money if I made films in English with English-speaking stars, and I think, “Do I succumb to that kind of pressure or do I stick to black-and-white Polish films?” Of course, if you’re an exile, you don’t have an alternative. Then you go with whatever works locally.

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What movies did you watch when you were young?

When I was a boy I watched a lot of cowboy movies, because they were released in Poland under socialism. So, John Ford films, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And I loved the big historical epics, like The Fall of the Roman Empire. I used to escape from school to see these with friends, because they were running from 10 in the morning, for workers on night shifts. That was escapism into other worlds. And then in my late teens I discovered cinema as an art, but also I discovered poetry and music. I just became aware of art. That was a good time, the moment of American independent cinema. I caught up on neorealism, French New Wave and so on mainly in the ’70s, after it had come and gone. I saw it was a very free form of filmmaking in the ’70s, you know. It was a different time. The films were kind of made by amateurs. They weren’t professional filmmakers.

Which is how you see yourself still, no?

Yeah, yeah. I keep that dilettante quality. [laughs] I’m not sure how to make films. I just find out about it as I think about it and make it.

You’ve said that you work by keeping everything in flux as you shoot, adding new things as you work, taking things out in the editing, which you do as you go, and then repeating the process until you discover the film. Do you encourage your actors to improvise and then decide what to use?

It’s not a type of improvisation. It’s basically using time creatively, trying to shoot more or less chronologically in five-day shooting weeks, so you can rest on the sixth day and write on the seventh, so you have time to go to the cutting room and tweak it a bit. The interaction with actors always inspires something, but it’s not like they come up with stuff, necessarily. Some of them can come up with a good line, and that’s great, but it’s just basically not taking script too literally, too seriously. Some actors are quite good at improvisation if you give them a little more room, and actually their strength is these little moments where something sparks. Meanwhile, other actors are very precise, like the actress [Agata Kulesza] who plays Irena, and who played Ida’s aunt in Ida. She likes to stick to the script, and she’s really great.

Yes, I was glad to see her again. She didn’t have much to do here, but she was so good.

Yeah. She disappears early. She has very good disappearances. [laughs]

So you don’t take your own scripts too seriously?

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Most scripts aren’t very good, and directors that stick to them end up making films that the scripts deserve. I know that story is the important thing. I invent my story, and then I spend quite a lot of time fluffing up the story, finding scenes. Some of them are very good. Others are dysfunctional and I know I’ll have to deal with tehm later. I know that I’m not going to crack it with my laptop, so I leave some space for filmmaking, you know? There are some elements of My Summer of Love and Cold War and Ida that I toyed with for some time until it suddenly became clear what they should be.

My scripts are like 60 pages, tops. My Summer of Love was just 22. To get the money to make a movie, you have to have something that looks like a script. [laughs] I have to explain how they’ll get from here to there, what this or that means. But I know that when I make it I won’t have these explanatory things. We’ll have to find a film that’s made of good units—scenes that work with plasticity, visually, and with dialogue that doesn’t have to carry information, that hints at stuff but has its own grace. I try to treat the film as a kind of documentary. The film has a life of its own, and I’m not bothered that some lines are dropped or scenes have been dropped. I’m trying, as I’m shooting it, to put it together and look at it all the time, so it’s growing as a film.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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