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To put in Tinseltown lingo, Pawel Pawlikowski is on a roll.
You spent most of the 2000s working with British and American actors on English-language films.
What motivated you to return to Poland withIda, and nowCold War?Life, you know?
I did something in Paris, realized Paris is not my world.
I had stories I wanted to tell, and they were all in Poland.
I thought I maybe should live there, too.
Not just the country, but that part of the world.
When I made documentaries have you seen my documentaries?
Fiction films, its another story.
Even when England was my home, I always felt like an outsider.
The films I made there were at an angle, not so English themselves.
I preferred to tell stories about teenagers, or the working class, or foreigners.
But in Eastern Europe, I am among my people.
BothIdaand this one are steeped in that context.
Cold Waris structured like a road movie, going from performance to performance.
We felt more like a traveling circus.
Then, to stand in for Yugoslavia, we went to Croatia.
Between the shoots, wed have little breaks to regroup and maybe take a day trip somewhere.
We werent exiles, busking it.
I felt like, ah, like a ringleader!
All filmmaking is its own journey, but this time, the adventure was of a literal sort.
The national musical revues of the 50s had a very specific style that the film re-creates faithfully.
All I had to do was find the shot.
We borrowed the dancing and the routines, which were already traditional in that way.
They had also done Rock Around the Clock before, with an Italian dance master who lives in Poland.
Integrating them into the film was a fluid process.
I really didnt have to do much work!
Is there something intrinsically romantic about the postwar atmosphere?
People picking themselves back up, restarting their lives, finding love …Id say so.
Crisis always brings feelings that we might bury in our everyday lives to the surface.
I guess I just like good photography?
I think,How do I shoot this?
As much like a photographer as possible.Its not all that intellectual, not symbolic.
But here, a lot of it was less eccentric than that.
Maybe not depth, theres some shallowness of field, but a more complex frame.
Above all, I wish to connect my heroes to the environment which they traverse.
How do you show Poland in the 50s?
There really wasnt much color around.
Everything felt gray, so then what color palette do you apply to that?
I needed more contrast, and black-and-white has a starker, more dramatic look.
Coupling black-and-white photography with the clean, polished look of digital video makes for an unusual combination.
We didnt have a big budget.
But it wasnt a compromise.
Just the right amount of grain, how this color appears in black-and-white versus this color.
That can be done in postproduction when youre working on a digital camera.
This was how I was able to make the film feel large in scale, while keeping it inexpensive.
Some of them were pretty mainstream, but I always prefer to control every aspect my films.
Kore-eda writes his own stuff as well, I believe.
I need to make movies that come from my own stories, on my own terms.
It has to start with something thats on my mind.
All of my films came from somewhere inside me, even the documentaries.
That naturally poses the question of which part of yourself you invested inCold War.Everything.
This time, literally, everything.
My only criterion when making a film is, What do I like?
What gives me a hard-on, artistically and narratively?
I want to feel a film on every level, total cinema.
Youre giving over three years of your life, so there better be a current taking you somewhere.
Filmmaking is not like engineering or plumbing.
At the end, what the audience sees and hears is your responsibility.
Thats sure how theyre going to judge you, as the one in charge of the whole film.
This goes against the industrial process.
Even when Im involving other people, its still very personal.
Ive read that your mother was a ballerina.
I remember seeing her at the firemans ball, dancing, but her scoliosis meant she had to stop.
Incredible things, people doing full costume changes in seconds.
This tradition of entertainment is kind of caught up in Polish history, our social nitty-gritty.
You should look at things against the grain, and in a timeless fashion.
Do not allow yourself to be sucked into whats already known very well, familiar discourse.
Find whats universal and beautiful in the unseen and unsaid.
Thats how you transcend the obvious.
Some of Polish cinema is stuck on the obvious, but by no means all.
Weve got a very prestigious film school in odz.
I didnt formally do film school, I learned to use a camera during filmmakers workshops.
Its my own little film school.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
