JP: What do you think about the big production concerning Polish history that the new government has announced. A film of Hollywood proportions is being talked about.
AW: Polish cinema has proven that it exists and can speak to other nations while speaking about Polish history. The best proof are the awards, the prizes won at festivals, an Oscar for Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida for instance. We are Polish cinematography. This is the right path for us, not infamous onscreen disasters such as The Day of the Siege: September Eleven 1683 (Polish title: Bitwa pod Wiedniem).
But I think that films that warn us about certain mistakes from the past are also important. It’s also a role of cinema.
JP: Are there any figures or events from our history that you would like to make a film about, but haven’t yet?
AW: I’ve been alive for a long time, I’ve made many films, some of them synchronised with the expectations of the audience. I want to work as long as I am physically capable. To work with a film crew, a large group of people, to answer their questions, to project my energy onto them.
I’ve made more or less fifty films. For each of them, there were three or four unexecuted projects. It wasn’t always the censorship, sometimes my script just wasn’t good enough, or sometimes I wanted to film abroad but didn’t get a passport. This way probably 200-300 unfinished film projects have gathered in my archive. Sometimes I reach into my past. I look around the archive to see if there is something that might be of interest to the audience.
I need to stress that my reflecting over particular projects has always been connected with the reality in which the project was developing, the times in which we lived, in which we protested, when we showed our reality as critically as was possible.
I met with Lech Wałęsa at the beginning of the strike in 1980. Soon a camera arrived and the documentary Robotnicy ’80 (editor’s translation: The Workers of 1980) started to be made [editor’s note: a report from the strike and August negotiations between the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee and the representatives of the Communist Party, dir. A. Chodakowski, A. Zajączkowski]. Why Robotnicy ’80? Because earlier we had Workers 1971: Nothing About Us Without Us by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tomasz Zygadło.
At that time, cinematography went hand in hand with events. This is what I’m proud of. The child of that time is the Cinema of Moral Anxiety. It’s a slogan that was created in a film crew I led. I’m very happy that together with the ‘film youth,’ I managed to create the bases for the further development of Polish cinema.
JP: You mentioned being 30 and feeling as if there was no new knowledge ahead of you. Now 60 years later, if you were to assess yourself and the changes that you’ve undergone, how have you changed over those six decades in terms of your worldview?
AW: I’ve become a bit bitter. I thought that the victory I witnessed and in some sense took part in – I’m taking about the victory of the Solidarity movement and Poland becoming a free country – would take a slightly different course. I thought that the process would go more smoothly. That it wouldn’t be so difficult. That we all wanted the same thing. After all, why was it all going on?
JP: Do you consider the 26 years of Polish freedom well-spent?
AW: Under the communist regime, we blamed our dependence on the Soviets for our weaknesses, all our mistakes. We said, ‘they don’t allow us to’. We also weren’t aware that our shipbuilding industry, mining, steel plants, agriculture, weaving mills were all producing for the Soviet market, which disappeared overnight. While making The Promised Land, I had to wait until the Łódź machinery had finished making the next batch of military jackets for the Soviet army.
Today, this excuse doesn’t work anymore. I still have the enthusiasm of Solidarity in my heart, when the movement was developing and operating, when a new hope for freedom was arising… Then we felt much more mature. And that we were still on our way to Europe.
JP: What is your first association with the word Solidarity?
AW: Lech Wałęsa. Regardless of all the mistakes and political weaknesses he is not free of. Without Wałęsa, one cannot imagine the creation of Solidarity or this whole situation which happened at the Gdańsk Shipyard.
Wałęsa could talk with people better than Professor Geremek for one simple reason: everything he was talking about he had ‘carved on his back’.
Right now I’m remembering the shooting of The Promised Land in the Łódź production halls, where I saw the mill girls and their unimaginable ordeal. How could those women work in such conditions for years? When we entered those halls to shoot there for half an hour or fifteen minutes, it was too loud to tell the cast what to do. First, we had to leave, slam the door shut and talk outside.
JP: On 6th March you will be celebrating your 90th birthday. Do you have any specific plans for the jubilee?
AW: I’m going to meet with my friends with whom I made films, which is the initiative of Jacek Bromski, the chairman of the Polish Filmmakers Association. Jacek Majchrowski, the President of Kraków, is preparing a surprise for me and the President of Gdańsk is going to make me an honorary citizen of the city.
Source: interview by Joanna Poros, PAP; originally written in Polish and compiled by MŚ, March 2016, translated by KF, 6 Oct 2017