‘Live carefully’: Krzysztof Kieślowski's Daughter Talks About Her Father

kieslowski krzysztof portret en 1_2766894.jpg, small, Krzysztof Kieślowski, photo: Wojciech Druszcz / Reporter / East News

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One has to listen carefully to another human being; he kept repeating that – Krzysztof Kieślowski's daughter, Marta Hryniak, recollects her father’s advice.

Joanna Poros: ‘People imagine that the work of a director is something fantastic. And this is actually hard work,’ said Krzysztof Kieślowski in one of his interviews. What do you think made him devote his life to making films? What fascinated him in cinema and what annoyed him?

Marta Hryniak: He must have liked it, because he chose to become a director, not a carpenter, as he wanted, or a firefighter, although he attended the firefighters’ school. He sure liked telling stories. On the other hand, he was annoyed by certain aspects of functioning in the film world, he felt uncomfortable with all that glam – for example, visiting festivals, giving interviews. He hated interviews for a reason. He was often asked silly – to put it mildly – questions, and nonsense was written. But those were different times and different journalists.

When it comes to hard work: Dad was a person who imposed almost impossible tasks on himself. He would make several films at once. He edited one, shot the other. And so on. Nobody can keep it up long term. What I saw was, above all, hard work every day and success from time to time. He certainly was satisfied with his achievements, but – because he was a secretive man – he did not celebrate his successes out loud.

Photographs by Krzysztof Kieślowski – Image Gallery

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JP: Even in the case of awards from Berlin, Venice, Cannes or two Oscar nominations for ‘Three Colors: Red’?

MH: I could tell that he was happy when he was at ease, when he was being silly, fooling around. That was his way of expressing joy. He was very secretive. Very disciplined. That's how he lived. He did not express emotions over his failures openly either.

JP: What did he enjoy most about his job?

MH: I know he liked editing movies the most. Pictures – less, editing – the most, making various layouts from the footage. Together with the editor of his film, he would prepare several editing versions, discuss and then make a choice. Once I saw two different edits of the same material and ... they were two completely different films. It was also less stressful in the editing room. You could sit back, work on the material, relax a bit.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's Films – Image Gallery

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JP: Speaking of rest: how did your dad rest, in today's language – how would he get his ‘reset’?

MH: Our family has a small house in Masuria. We spent every summer there. Dad was always very active then. I remember, for example, one time he was building a furnace from scratch over the summer. All by himself. He bought an old metal stove, completely dilapidated, rusty – and also mica – and spent the whole summer renovating it.

JP: Is this stove still in your family's house in Masuria?

MH: Yes. We don't use it anymore, but it's still there. I also often think back to how my father organized ‘sports Olympics’ for me and other kids vacationing in Masuria. Friends of my parents had their homes next to our house, we befriended a few families. I played with the children of these friends. Dad invented seven or eight ‘Olympic’ categories for us every day. We had age and gender conversion factors – the boys were older and in some disciplines the girls were unable to beat them because they were better. We won in skipping rope. I was a master in this field. We were also good at cycling downhill as slowly as possible or staying underwater.

Posters for films by Krzysztof Kieślowski – Image Gallery

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JP: Did your dad invent these disciplines, and was also the referee?

MH: Yes, he did everything. He would stand with a stopwatch during our competition. He set the temperatures at which we could go swimming to the river. On the occasion of the competition, we always sang the national anthem first.

JP: Who composed the lyrics of the anthem?

MH: Dad. And as a matter of fact it was a different anthem each time. Dad wrote the lyrics and we wrote the music. I liked these competitions very much. I remember I once broke my finger when we were playing football and I was a goalkeeper, a friend accidentally kicked me in the hand. I walked around like this for a couple of days, hiding my broken finger – so I could continue to compete. I loved it.

JP: Do you remember any of your father's life advice?

MH: Dad used to tell me in conversations: ‘live carefully’. He emphasized it very strongly and taught me that. To pay attention to people, to listen to them, not to show antipathy. To be attentive to the outside world. That's how Dad lived. He had extraordinary eyes. When he looked at someone, they had the impression that he was really listening. And he did listen very carefully. What I remember best was his ‘really listening’ to the other person. This listening translated into the way my father looked at the world, at other people. He repeated hundreds of times: ‘live carefully’. And, though he didn't yell at me, he reacted badly whenever he noticed I was inattentive.

I remember this situation: I was in high school and, as it is at that age, I answered my parents in half words, I would get bored with everything quickly. Mom and Dad, of course, were asking ‘How’s school?’." I would answer briefly, ‘good’, etc. One day my father and I had a fight over a trifle – I remember it was about a spoon. I spoke rudely to my father. He then said, ‘You talk like that again, and I'll stop talking to you.’ In fact, he did almost stop talking to me. It lasted about two months, I think. He was saying something to me, of course, but casually; I felt that it wasn't the same, that they weren’t the same questions, the way they used to be. That something is missing.

No End directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski – Image Gallery

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JP: Dad showed you how we can feel, what we miss when someone doesn’t show this ‘care#’ for us?

MH: Yes. I remember how strongly I felt it. I didn't know how to deal with it, what to do. Of course, things gradually got back to normal and we talked again as before. But I remembered it forever. The second situation concerns drugs. I wasn’t particularly attracted to that myself, but some of my friends smoked weed. Dad called me into the room one day and said, ‘If you ever try serious drugs, remember – our relationship is going to end.’ I knew it wouldn't, of course, but I also knew how serious those words were. Dad was always firm and confident in what he was talking about. And I knew that if he says something, he’s certain of it.

I, in turn, told him to quit smoking cigarettes. And he did, right then.

JP: So he listened carefully to his child?

MH: My father and I had very high trust in each other, a strong emotional bond. With mom too – but now we're talking about dad. I remember, for example, the notes we wrote to each other and left on the table in the days before cell phones and text messages. There were notes like ‘Heat up your dinner’, ‘Buy...’, but also notes with the words: ‘I'll be back late today, don't be upset.’ It is very evident in these letters just how strong our relationship was.

JP: Did your father like music?

MH: Not really. But of course he listened to it. With me. I played him the stuff I liked – The Cure, Limahl. He listened and he liked it too. Usually the most intelligent songs. I made him music compilations on cassettes and gave him to listen to in the car. He also liked to sing loudly in the car, but those were different songs.

JP: What songs were they?

MH: For example, I remember the words: ‘There is a border over the mountain, there is a watchtower at the border, and in the watchtower, a soldier wrote a letter to his beloved.’ The soldier included all the content of this letter in his song, and this song was created, the chorus of which is: ‘There, far away behind the fog is your family home. There your girl sleeps in her native village. The stars extinguish their glow, because the dawn is already awakening. When you sleep, someone here guards the country so that no one wakes you from sleep.’ Or the song ‘Boatswain’: 'On the deck you can hear the boatswain all morning, he bloody screams for no reason all day. Even if your hands get, the boatswain will sulk and say: do that once more. Clean again the guns, what's the matter with you boys? If there’s food you’re all energized. It's no German junk, you need to know from the start that it's a Polish warship. But sometimes it happens that the boatswain gets dreamy, every boatswain knows this feeling. If you ask him right, he plays his harmonium alright. He talks about the oceans and skies, and of the fiery fights.’ Bout the girls of Bombay who love with passion and kiss till you bleed. And if you ask him what he was dreaming of a moment ago, why’d his eyes go aglow, he would say says: in Orłowo, in Gdynia port, I’ll make walking on my head an art, such a special a place it has in my heart.’

JP: Coming back to the movies: what was your father's opinion about the tasks of a filmmaker, his role?

MH: Please bear in mind that I can't speak for him, it's just my opinion. I think that this role, mission – let's call it that – has been changing over time in terms of his approach to his own work. Dad started with documentary films. In one of these films, he accidentally recorded a person who was wanted with his camera. And he got scared. With the fact that as a director–documentarist he can contribute to something bad as much as to something good. Dad would go to political trials with his camera. He'd learned that when someone walked into a courtroom with a camera, sentences tended to be more lenient. He then started going to these trials specifically – he's been to many – with a camera but no tape. He just pretended to be filming.

Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieślowski – Image Gallery

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JP: Did he think that if he did that, he might contribute to a more lenient sentence?

MH: Yes. But I emphasize that these were political trials. He thought he could do some good this way.

JP: He wanted to help another human being?

MH: Yes, definitely. But overall, I think the vision of him being a documentary maker who affects other people's lives ultimately scared him. He then turned to feature films.

JP: Didn't want to influence the lives of others? I guess most people want that?

MH: He did not want to. He has also repeatedly said – about his feature films – that he asks questions, but does not want to ‘give answers’, impose anything on the audience.

Interviewer: Joanna Poros, source: PAP.

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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