Bound by Film: The Story of Wajda & Cybulski’s Friendship

cybulski_zulawski_wajda_milosc_dwudziestolatkow_1962_fot_j_troszczynski1-f-1854-15-1500x.jpg, full-width, "Love at Twenty" (Miłość dwudziestolatków), reż. Andrzej Wajda, 1962, nz. Zbigniew Cybulski, Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Wajda, fot. Jerzy Troszczyński

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Though cut from different cloth, shaped by contrasting temperaments and backgrounds, they were inextricably bound to one another. Wajda recognised in Cybulski an actor guided by pure intuition, while Cybulski, in turn, claimed that the director of ‘Kanał’ could adapt even the Hail Mary prayer. They made only four films together, yet without them, it is almost impossible to imagine the landscape of Polish cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.

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Cybulski truly brought his lines to life! His glasses restricted him, but his body language enhanced the overall expression: a smile, a twinkle in his voice. Only historical films were not his forte, because Cybulski was a man of his time. Self-irony – an inner chuckle at the fact that he was still alive.

Perhaps no one better than Wajda captured the essence of Zbyszek Cybulski’s acting and articulated what transformed this unassuming artist into a cinema legend and cultural icon. They shaped each other. Completely different, yet deeply connected. They were united by art, mutual acquaintances, and a long-standing friendship. Yet, looking at their relationship, one gets the impression that fate simply had to intertwine their paths.

Schoolmates?

Although they only met while working on A Generation in 1954, Wajda and Cybulski’s paths had crossed many years earlier. They came very close to becoming friends as teenage boys at the elite cadet school in Lviv. Wajda tried to enrol in 1938. He was a young scout, the son of an infantry colonel. However, he was not accepted to the school, unlike the young Zbyszek Cybulski, who was admitted to the cadet ranks.

Years later, Wajda recalled in a conversation with Dorota Karaś, Cybulski’s biographer:

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The Cadet Corps was a highly exclusive institution; it was attended by boys from the best schools. I didn’t stand a chance there. They grilled us thoroughly; the exam was difficult in every respect, and I had dyslexia and was hopeless at writing. That was my first setback. The second: those boys knew foreign languages and belonged to a completely different circle of political life. My father was an officer in a provincial infantry regiment in Radom. He didn’t say a word about my failure; he took me to the Racławice Panorama. I have no hard feelings about failing those exams, because I could see they knew their stuff and I didn’t. Zbyszek was accepted, which means he must have been well-rounded.

But Cybulski, too, was never destined to don a uniform. The outbreak of war meant that his educational and formative plans had to be put on hold.

Cybulski cut out by the censors

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'Love at Twenty', directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1962; in the photograph: Zbigniew Cybulski and Andrzej Wajda; photo: Jerzy Troszczyński / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute / fototeka.fn.org.pl

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It was more than a decade before their paths crossed again. This time, it was not by chance but through the artistic community. They met on the set of A Generation. It was 1954, and Wajda, having already worked as an assistant to Aleksander Ford, was directing his feature-length debut. The film was based on a novel by Bohdan Czeszka – socrealistic enough to win the approval of the party censors and original enough for Wajda to see in it a portrait of his generation and its wartime experiences. He looked for actors among those who were ‘right at his fingertips’: from Piątka z Ulicy Barskiej (Ford’s Five from Barska Street), he ‘borrowed’ Tadeusz Łomnicki and Tadeusz Janczar. When asked why he had chosen Cybulski, he had no answer. ‘We knew one thing: that we were turning our backs on pre-war cinema. That was our guiding principle,’ he told Dorota Karaś. Cybulski fitted perfectly into Wajda’s vision of modern cinema for a young audience.

In A Generation, Cybulski played the minor role of Kostek. The film included just a few shots featuring the actor: playing with a knife, running after a train from which his character and his friends try to steal coal… That was all. The most important parts were lost forever, destroyed by the censors. The reason was accusations of anti-Semitism levelled by Aleksander Ford, then the undisputed king of Polish cinema, in connection with a scene in which Cybulski’s character carried a sack full of severed Jewish heads (to subsequently pull out their gold teeth). Wajda did not show the contents of the sack, but officials from the political bureau still ordered the episode to be removed.

What’s more, the cut-out sections have not survived to this day. In the 1950s, every metre of film not used in the final cut was recycled – the silver particles were recovered, and the plastic film was melted down to make combs. Several decades later, Piotr Śmiałowski ‘tracked it down’; he is the author of the fascinating book Proszę to Wyciąć (Please Cut This Out), which describes the most significant shots removed from Polish films by the censors of the Polish People’s Republic. In the stills from the set, he found evidence of a scene that has become legendary.

A diamond hidden in the ashes

Four years later, Wajda returned to Cybulski, though not entirely convinced. As he prepared to shoot Ashes and Diamonds, he regarded him as just one of many candidates. In his notebooks, he ranked him fourth among prospective actors for the role of Maciek Chełmicki. He rated the chances and potential of Tadeusz Janczar, with whom he had worked on Kanał, as well as Stanisław Mikulski and Bogusz Bilewski, higher. The latter would go on to become the star of Janosik a dozen or so years later.

Ashes And Diamonds directed by Andrzej Wajda - Image Gallery

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Wajda held Cybulski in high regard, but the actor did not fit his vision for the protagonist in Ashes and Diamonds, who was to be an icon of the romantic hero, with a Słowacki-style collar and noble elegance. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, the artistic director of the Kadr Film Studio, also opposed casting Cybulski, believing the actor was simply unsuitable for the role.

It was the persistence of Janusz Morgenstern, Wajda’s assistant director and friend, that ultimately secured Cybulski a place in the cast. Years later, the director of Jowita recalled:

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However, I told Wajda: let them choose – either Zbyszek plays the role of Maciek, or I’ll withdraw from further collaboration. Wajda agreed, on condition that I would run the rehearsals and work with Zbyszek on the script, as there were already rumours that he wasn’t learning his lines and was turning up to shoots unprepared. I accepted these terms.

James Dean consigned to the dustbin of history

By casting Cybulski as Maciek, Wajda tried to rein him in, to force him into a cinematic mould and into his own vision. Meanwhile, as he wrote in his Notesy (Notebooks):

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Cybulski turned up for the film fully prepared. I saw him in the morning, at seven; it was a quarter past eight, and we were about to start shooting – and there he was, wearing exactly the same clothes in which he’d arrived in Wrocław. The same ‘pepegi’ – the shoes people wore back then – tight-fitting jeans, a green jacket. Of course, I could have argued with him, but I knew he probably understood that generation better than I did.

It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Wajda’s cinematic genius – which lay in drawing on his collaborators’ best ideas, trusting their intuition and letting them do their own thing – proved victorious. Years later, in an interview with Dorota Karaś, when asked about Cybulski’s performance, the director said:

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You should really be asking me how I ended up letting him act like that. To that, I’ll say: because I was a good director. When Cybulski turned up for the shoot of Ashes and Diamonds dressed in his own style, I should have told him: ‘Zbysiu, have you gone mad? Put on a costume, because we’re shooting a historical film.’ But I let him act as he wished, and that saved me. By then, he was already a hero of the next generation, not of the generation in long boots that we knew from the films of older directors. Before playing Maciek, while in Paris, Zbyszek had seen a single film starring James Dean. We didn’t need lengthy studies at the time. We saw something once, and that was enough.

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Andrzej Wajda ogląda „Popiół i diament” po 50 latach (część 1) 🎬

The trust Wajda placed in the actor was mutual. Cybulski quickly realised he was dealing with an artist whose knowledge, imagination and intellectual horizons extended far beyond his own experience. He called him a ‘luminous mind’, beside whom he himself was merely an emotion. He also appreciated that the director recognised his otherness. He said:

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Wajda was the only one who took a gamble on my face, mannerisms, and contemporary self in a film set in the past. He knew I couldn’t act any differently from who I am.

For both of them, Ashes and Diamonds became a springboard to subsequent films and to the world of great cinema. The FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival was a testament to European acclaim, while the Golden Duck, awarded by the readers of Film magazine, showed that Polish audiences, too, recognised a piece of their own lives in Wajda’s film and Cybulski’s performance.

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Soon, they moved to the theatre together. At the Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk, Wajda staged A Hatful of Rain. They performed the play 135 times, touring it in Toruń, Kraków, Katowice, Wrocław, Łódź and Warsaw.

A Hatful enjoyed immense popularity, largely thanks to Cybulski, who, after his role in Ashes and Diamonds, had already become an icon of his generation. Władysław Kowalski, an actor who appeared alongside him in Wajda’s production, recalled years later that on one occasion Cybulski was running late for the performance. The auditorium was packed, yet the star was nowhere to be seen. When the theatre director, Zygmunt Hübner, stepped out to ask the audience whether they were willing to wait for the late actor, not a single person left the auditorium.

Wajda forgave him for that as well. Years later, he told Dorota Karaś about their time working together at the theatre:

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Zbyszek had cue cards scattered around the set. Sometimes he’d lean over and read something, other times he’d speak off the cuff. It wasn’t that he couldn’t learn his lines. He wanted more freedom: in his costume, in the script, in how he approached the scenes, and in his own character. I, on the other hand, believed that film or theatre was like a potluck dinner, where everyone brings something of their own. Not all the actors liked working with him. He’d turn up for rehearsals or not; he’d fall asleep because he’d got drunk the day before. It was hard to put up with that. Apparently, you could sometimes hear the roar of his motorbike pulling up outside the building from the auditorium. The audience glanced at their watches: Will he be late or not?

The director knew exactly where the key to Cybulski lay. He realised that his beloved actor harboured a fear that he was not experienced, smart or sensitive enough to create sufficiently interesting and captivating characters. Wajda fed off this insecurity and infused it into the subsequent characters he created with Zbyszek in mind.

He regretted not casting him as watchmeister Latoń in Lotna, and in the years that followed, he made plans for joint films and productions. He saw Cybulski in Kartoteka (The Card Index), which he was ultimately unable to make; in Przedwiośnie (The Spring to Come), his unfulfilled life’s project; and as Archduke Ferdinand in a planned film about the outbreak of the First World War.

Wajda is making a documentary about Cybulski

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'Everything for Sale', directed by Andrzej Wajda, photo: Renata Pajchel / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute / fototeka.fn.org.pl

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His fascination with the ‘Polish James Dean’ led Wajda to plan a documentary about Cybulski. In 1964, he drafted an outline for a film with the working title Zbyszek. In Notesy, we find a detailed record of this idea:

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In this short film, I would like to show my friend as he really is today, which, of course, is only possible if we see what he was like in the past. It will be a film about growing old.

It is an obvious process, natural to everyone, though more or less unpleasant. But my protagonist is a man who lends his face, his eyes and his figure to someone else, the character he plays on screen. And he still wants to do so today, even though much has changed in him. Mentally, apart from a few quirks, he has remained the same enthusiastic boy in glasses, the unbearable boss of the student theatre ‘Bim-Bom’. The wonderful Maciek Chełmicki. But… and this is where my film begins.

From Wajda’s further descriptions, a picture emerges of a creative documentary in which staged shots engage in a dialogue with Cybulski’s on-screen legend, with the roles he created in A Generation, Love of the Twenties and the stage play Two for the Seesaw.

‘He’ll miss me yet’

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'Everything for Sale', directed by Andrzej Wajda, photo: Renata Pajchel / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute / fototeka.fn.org.pl

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However, the film will never be made. Wajda will turn his attention to The Ashes, while Cybulski will soon be taken up with other film and theatre commitments. They were, in fact, due to work together on the adaptation of Żeromski’s novel. Wajda wanted Cybulski to play Krzysztof Cedra, a soldier who, alongside Napoleon (and Rafał Olbromski, who wanted to join the army), sets out to conquer Moscow. However, their collaboration was thwarted by conflicting schedules and the actor’s commitments, as he had accepted an offer from the Swedish director Jörn Donner. In a letter to Wajda on 2 December 1963, Cybulski wrote:

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I was, and still am, in a rather dire financial situation (as you know!) – I’m about 30,000 in debt, I don’t have a steady job, and my only hope lies in the film. In this situation – being in a tight corner because of the instalments and letters from guarantors – waiting was out of the question – especially as I am not alone, after all. On top of that, there was the following matter: they did not approve the rates in Szczecin – which the Director had promised me. The Swedish director arrived in Warsaw for just one day. I came for literally five hours. Since he had set a final deadline for the film’s completion – 25 February 1964, with substantial penalties if the deadline was missed – I decided to go for it, especially as the project seemed serious to me.

I never thought it would clash with The Ashes production – which, I don’t suppose I need to tell you, is very important to me. Working with you has always been productive and has yielded good and very good results – I don’t want to go into detail here about what this work and you mean to me, and how important it is. I still believe that, with goodwill on both sides, the 25th of February deadline shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, because it would be a great shame and a chance to do such things together happens once in a lifetime. […] If I were to be dropped from The Ashes – which would be a disaster for me – I’d have to decide on something. Life is brutal.

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'Love at Twenty', directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1962; in the photograph: Jerzy Lipman, Andrzej Wajda, and Zbigniew Cybulski, photo: Jerzy Troszczyński / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute / fototeka.fn.org.pl

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However, nothing came of his involvement in The Ashes. Wajda cast the young Bogusław Kierc as Cedra, and his performance was widely praised. Cybulski never appeared in another of Wajda’s films, although the two artists had several joint projects in the pipeline. A tragic accident, however, stood in the way of their realisation.

On 8 January 1967, the actor was killed by a train on a platform in Wrocław. It was almost as if the cinema had foreseen his death – after all, he had jumped onto moving trains in A Generation and Salto…

For Wajda, who was in London at the time, this was a terrible blow. It was all the more devastating because a year earlier, at Rome airport, as he was saying goodbye to the director’s then-wife, Beata Tyszkiewicz, Cybulski had spoken the prophetic words: ‘Tell him he’ll miss me yet’. When, on the night of 8 January, Roman Polanski delivered the tragic news to Wajda, the director wrote in his Notesy:

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I suddenly felt like an author who had lost his protagonist. I thought that, despite everything, a film had to be made about a man just like him, so fascinating, even though he was no longer with us.

In 1969, Wajda made a film about Cybulski and himself, about friendship and longing, and about grief and hypocrisy. It was Everything for Sale, one of the most extraordinary films in the director’s oeuvre and a posthumous tribute to his friend and a cinema icon. But for that story, read the article: Everything for Sale – Andrzej Wajda.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

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andrzej wajda

zbigniew cybulski

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