Shelved Ideas: Films Andrzej Wajda Never Made

wajda_plan_12_forum-0428107917.jpg, default, Andrzej Wajda on the set of ‘Pan Tadeusz’, 1998, photo: Cezary Pecold / Forum

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A Polish version of ‘Apocalypse Now!’ or a communist take on ‘Before Sunrise’? Or perhaps a modern adaptation of ‘The Wedding’ half a century before Smarzowski made his? Let’s take a closer look at the films Andrzej Wajda never got to make – even though he wanted to.

Although he directed an impressive number of films – over fifty – throughout his life, the collection of Andrzej Wajda’s unrealised projects is several times as voluminous. Some of them were stopped by censors, while for others, the time was just never quite right. Summarising Wajda’s life’s work, the prominent film historian Tadeusz Lubelski estimated the number of the director’s unfinished projects to be... around 250.

These include films that would haunt him for his entire life, such as an adaptation of Stefan Żeromski’s This Coming Spring, an idea he started to toy with as early as in 1956. Eventually, though, Filip Bajon beat him to it. Another one was a Japanese version of The Revenge based on the play by Aleksander Fredro. A good number of these projects could have changed the history of Polish cinema forever, while others – such as Nasze Miasto (Our City) conceived in the 1950s, or The Day of Purification, a war film idealising the Polish-Soviet alliance – would have been held against Wajda for years.

‘Sarajevo 1914’: a Serbian ‘Forefathers' Eve’

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Drawing by Achille Beltrame depicting Gavrilo Princip’s attempt at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Habsburg in Sarajevo, 1914, photo: Bianchetti / Leemage / public domain

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One of Wajda’s cinematic projects that regrettably never came to fruition was Sarajevo 1914, a story of the famous attempt at the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand Habsburg, one of the events that triggered the outbreak of World War I. It was Sveta Lukić, the Serbian writer and author of screenplays (e.g. for Siberian Lady Macbeth, which the Polish director had shot a few years prior), who approached Wajda in the mid-1960s, asking him to shoot the film. Tadeusz Lubelski commented on the idea on the pages of Newsweek:

Wajda interpreted the story as that of the characters from Part Three of ‘Forefathers' Eve’, just moved forward in time by one hundred years. In one of the first scenes, Belgrade middle school students – later responsible for the assassination plot – are seen during a lesson, reading a press cutting sent by a friend from Sarajevo under their desk, showing the route along which the Archduke would be travelling. The rest of the film was to take place in Sarajevo over the span of one day and end with the image of the outbreak of World War I.

It's hard to predict what the combination of realist historical detail with Wajda’s weakness for Polish Romanticism would have come out like. If we also throw in Zbigniew Cybulski into it, whom the director envisioned in the role of the Archduke… One can’t help but regret that in the end, the film was made by the Yugoslav director Veljko Bulajić.

‘Vocation’: on spirituality in Silesia

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Andrzej Wajda, Krystyna Janda & Jerzy Radziwiłłowicz on the set of ‘Man of Iron’, 1980, photo: Jerzy Kośnik / Forum

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Among Wajda’s regrettably never-realised projects we have to include a film conceived over a decade later, Powołanie(‘Vocation’), written by Janusz Kijowski and Edward Żebrowski, which Wajda was to adapt for the screen in 1979. What inspired the story was the decision, made by Katowice bishop Herbert Bednorz, to introduce an obligatory year-long period of work in a coal mine for all divinity school students, which they were to undertake upon completing their second year of studies. Such was the starting point for the cinematic story of two young priests (played by Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Olgierd Łukasiewicz), for whom the encounter with the miners becomes a test of faith as well as the beginning of political struggle for labour rights.

What prevented the film from being made this time was a tragic accident that took place in the Dymitrow coal mine in Bytom in 1979. Thirty-four miners died as a result of a coal dust explosion. The communist authorities feared that Żebrowski and Kijowski’s story would turn out to be altogether too relevant. And so, although production was already at an advanced stage, the shooting of the film was cancelled.

‘Stachura’: Wajda meets musicals

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Edward Stachura, Ciechocinek, c. 1968, photo: Museum of Literature collection / East News

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Whereas Sarajevo 14 and Powołanie would have fit perfectly within Wajda’s directorial DNA, another one of these abandoned projects could have been one of the most bizarre and at the same time most interesting films in his career—namely, Stachura, a musical (!) about the life and work of the famous Polish poet, Edward Stachura. While working on the film, Wajda decided to use fragments of the poet’s original lyrics. As Ewa Korzeniowska writes on the National Film Archive website: ‘The director selected the poems, songs, fragments of stories and novels in such a way so as to preserve and immortalise Stachura’s writing method – that of life-writing’. In Wajda’s screenplay, the journey of the protagonist Michał Kątny, the poet’s alter ego, becomes a metaphor for the life of an artist condemned to never being fulfilled.

Wajda started the preparations for the film in the early 1980s, collaborating with Andrzej Brzozowski, a scholar researching the works of Stachura. With time, however, he began to take on some distance from the subject, partly influenced by Ryszard Kapuściński, who told Wajda about Stachura’s dark side (‘A monster emerges from his story, an alcoholic, a slob, a twisted person whether sober or drunk’). On 12^th April 1984, the director wrote in his notebook (published in Polish as Notesy):

I’ve changed my mind about the likelihood of completing ‘Stachura’. After a sleepless night, I ask to talk to Barbara. I write a letter to the team: I’m not ready with the script. What I have been doing so far worked well as bait, or rather a bare hook that helped catch their approval but it isn’t enough to make a film out of. Now it’s necessary to conceive a script, which currently lacks: a) dramaturgy, i.e. plot, b) remarkable scenes, i.e. cinema!

The film, whose overall cost was estimated at 45 million PLN, was never made in the end, and all that remains of the poetic musical is Andrzej Brzozowski’s 1990 documentary Wszystko Jest Poezją… (All Is Poetry…).

Andrzej Wajda’s non-existent adaptations

Of Wajda’s never-completed films, the most numerous are adaptations of literary works. The plans for some of them came into existence as a result of fleeting enthusiasm for brand-new releases; others were born from Wajda’s great literary fascinations and, like This Coming Spring, would accompany him for his entire life.

1. ‘The Wedding’ (1963): speaking the language of Smarzowski?

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Fragment of the screenplay for ‘The Wedding’ (1963), Wajda’s never-completed film, photo: National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute

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Some of Wajda’s beloved projects would undergo significant changes over the decades, one of them being The Wedding. In a parallel universe, Stanisław Wyspiański’s grand play, which Wajda brilliantly adapted to the big screen in 1973, would’ve been released a whole decade earlier – and would’ve looked completely different.

The idea for the film adaptation of The Wedding was born out of a theatre adaptation prepared by Wajda in the early 1960s for the Stary Theatre in Kraków. Immediately after the premiere, the director began to search for a way to shoot a contemporary take on Wyspiański’s play: with the Bride being a dancer of the Mazowsze Ensemble and a daughter of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and the Groom as a dentist from a noble family (changed in a later screenplay to be an actor with peasant roots); and with Rachela working for the Israeli embassy. The screenplay, the writing of which was entrusted to Andrzej Kijowski, had the characters discuss 1960s’ politics, the divided Polish society, and class dichotomies. On the National Audiovisual Institute website, Agnieszka Polanowska writes:

The fun and the alcohol reveal the artifice of the ideological stances they perform. Order transforms into chaos, sacrum into profanum, pathos into parody. The ‘golden horn’ is a vodka bottle, the Strawman – a Newsreel camera, around which ‘The couples begin to hover sleepily against the background of sooty walls, stepping into puddles and rubbish scattered all around’.

At the wedding in Bronowice, political opportunism was to be discussed, with one of the specific subjects being the trauma of the Holocaust. The Wedding, thus formulated, foreshadowing The Wedding (two, in fact) made half a century later by Wojciech Smarzowski, didn’t satisfy Wajda. He requested Jerzy Andrzejewski, the author of the book Ashes and Diamonds, to rewrite the screenplay. However, the new script was never completed, and the modernised take on The Wedding was thrown into a drawer. This was for the better, because the adaptation of Wyspiański that Wajda shot a decade later, devoid of banal references to contemporary politics and history, became a timeless masterpiece.

2. ‘The Heart of Darkness’: Wajda before Coppola

Among the great unfinished adaptations of literary masterpieces, one other project deserves special attention – The Heart of Darkness, based on the novel by Joseph Conrad.

Geoffrey Selznick, the son of David Selznick, one of the most famous producers in the history of Hollywood, approached Wajda with the idea to adapt the novel for the big screen. In October 1967, he came to Poland to invite Wajda to make a film about Charlie Marlowe travelling to the depths of Africa in search for Kurtz. Wajda took interest in the project and spent a dozen or so months working on the screenplay together with fellow director Andrzej Żuławski. However, they never managed to come up with a satisfactory version.

Portraits of Joseph Conrad – Image Gallery

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It was only once the project came to nothing that a new idea for an adaptation of The Heart of Darkness germinated in Wajda’s head. This is how he conveyed it to Stanisław Janicki:

World War II is underway, Nazi Germany is at the height of its power. A university town, preferably Heidelberg. The protagonist, a humanities scholar, has a friend, an officer of the SS, who is somewhere in the heart of darkness – Poland or Russia. He’s a real golden boy, shrouded in legend, considered an example to others… The narrator, who works as a professor at the university, lost in a world of his own, unaware of what Nazi Germany really is, sets out to look for his friend at the request of that friend’s fiancée. He departs for the heart of darkness. And he sees an occupied country that looks nothing like he imagined it back in Heidelberg. People use vodka as a currency, there are gallows everywhere… He strives forward to meet this ideal of a man, who’s carrying the torch of German culture and civilisations to the east. When he reaches him, the man turns out to be the commander of a death camp…

This version of The Heart of Darkness was never made, and the idea itself ended up in Wajda’s expansive drawer of non-existent films.

3. ‘An Interview with Ballmeyer’: Wajda shooting Nuremberg

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Gustaw Holoubek as Daves in one of the scenes from the play ‘Wywiad z Ballmeyerem’ (An Interview with Ballmeyer), directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1962, Teatr Telewizji (TV Theatre), photo: Teatr Telewizji / media-press.tv

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In the never-made, ‘wartime’ version of The Heart of Darkness, Wajda returned to motifs that he had earlier wanted to explore in another unfinished project – Wywiad z Ballmeyerem (An Interview with Ballmeyer), based on a short story by Kazimierz Brandys. Although he had already adapted it for the small screen in 1962, directing a play for Teatr Telewizji (TV Theatre on Polish national television), he was nevertheless haunted by the sense that the story deserved the silver screen. In mid-April 1964, he submitted a project for a film about an encounter between an American scientist and SS General Wolfgang Joachim Ballmeyer, war criminal tried in Nuremberg for initiating a massacre of 120 thousand people living on the island of Barnum on the Ionian Sea to Jan Rybkowski’s ‘Rytm’ Film Group (a state-owned film company).

However, the film, which used war history as a starting point for a conversation on the nature of evil and the limits of human responsibility, was never made – one of the reasons being that in 1964, Wajda was already preoccupied with the making of The Ashes.

4. ‘The Card Index’: Cybulski’s reckoning with myth

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Gustaw Holoubek in the play ‘The Card Index’ directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1979, Teatr Telewizji, photo: vod.tvp.pl / Polish Television (TVP)

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Another one of Wajda’s unfulfilled cinematic dreams also had a theatrical pedigree – namely, The Card Index, based on the play by Tadeusz Różewicz, a film adaptation of which was an idea that would come to haunt Wajda for years. He discussed it in Stanisław Janicki’s TV documentary Dreams Are More Interesting. In one of the scenes, he hovers around a nicely made bed placed on the snow-covered junction of Jerozolimskie Avenue and Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, and eventually lies down on it.

In an article for Newsweek, Tadeusz Lubelski wrote:

It was Cybulski who was meant to be lying down on that bed; it was he who was made for playing the character of a Polish Everyman. One only has to take any random line spoken by the Hero and imagine it uttered by the actor: ‘All the emptiness, all the fear that consumes modern-day humanity I carry in my stomach. Do you think the stomach of a normal man can handle this?’ What’s there to add? For such an opportunity to go to waste!

Sadly, the film version of The Card Index, with Cybulski entering into a dialogue with Maciek Chełmicki, his own character from Ashes and Diamonds, was never made. One of the reasons was that in 1963, the play by Różewicz was adapted for Teatr Telewizji by Konrad Swinarski. Another TV adaptation came in 1979 with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s excellent staging with Gustaw Holoubek in the role of the Hero, a former guerilla fighter coming to terms with the recent war and the new, post-war reality.

5. ‘Demons’: a theatrical legend

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Andrzej Wajda at a rehearsal for the performance of ‘Demons’, based on the work by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1971, Stary Theatre in Kraków, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum

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The list of regrettably never-made projects would be incomplete without one other text that Wajda successfully adapted for theatre and that he dreamed of one day turning into a film. Demons, based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – directed by Wajda at the Stary Theatre in Kraków – was performed on the legendary stage for thirteen years, beginning with the premiere in 1971. Riding the wave of that success, soon after the premiere the director wrote a 166-page-long screenplay. Ewa Korzeniowska of National Film Archive wrote:

He wished to give the film adaptation of ‘Demons’ a modest form, to convey the essence of the novel through dialogues between the protagonists, without creating elaborate scenography or costumes. He believed that the power of ‘Demons’ lies in the book’s philosophical and political layers as well as in the asking of questions which demand to be answered and reflected upon regardless of the times or circumstances.

Wajda also talked about his work on Demons in an interview with Culture.pl.

Andrzej Wajda on love

Although the majority of Wajda’s unfinished projects focused on the weighty subjects tackled by great literature, attempting to talk about Polish history, the nature of evil, on freedom and the legacy of war, among the films that he had to abandon were also some that dealt with ‘lighter’ matters, too.

1. ‘Armelle’: Wajda’s take on blind love

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Fragment of the screenplay for ‘Armelle’, Wajda’s never-completed film, photo: National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute

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One such ‘small-scale’ production was Armelle, an adaptation of a short story by Ireneusz Iredyński. It’s a story of a 21-year-old boy, who falls in love with a girl he met on the train at first sight. A short conversation on the platform concludes with a visit to her house. The lovers plan to meet again the next day, but the young man can’t find his beloved Armelle’s house.

Telling the story of the lovelorn boy who searches for the ‘lost’ girl with increasingly great determination, Wajda, like Iredyński before him, discusses the hunger for love and how an imagined feeling can overshadow all that’s real and tangible in life. As the excellent scholar of Polish cinema Piotr Śmiałowski tells us, Andrzej Seweryn was intended to star as Piotr, the protagonist, whereas Małgorzata Braunek was meant to play the role of Armelle. Unfortunately, Polish Television, which was supposed to produce the film, kept postponing the decision, and having the choice between multiple film scripts by Wajda, they eventually opted for The Birch Wood, based the novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz.

2. ‘Blokowisko’ (The Projects): a much older sibling of ‘Before Sunrise’?

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Housing estate, Warsaw, photo: Paweł Szadkowski / Forum

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Around the same time, another similar idea germinated in Wajda’s head under the working title Blokowisko (The Projects). On the National Film Archive website, we read:

The idea for the script of ‘Blokowisko’ (or ‘Blok Mieszkalny’, i.e. ‘Residential Block’) was born in 1971, at the time when Wajda was working at the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre, directing a performance of ‘Sticks and Bones’ based on David Rabe’s play about the Vietnam War. It was then that a Russian co-worker told him a supposedly real story of an actor who had once met a woman living in one of the enormous housing projects. After spending the night with her, the man slipped out to go get groceries without waking his partner. When he wanted to come back, he realised he couldn’t recognise the right building. For some time, he tried to find the woman, but to no avail…

As he was working on the film about chasing perfect love, Wajda recognised the great potential of the story. Interestingly, the director wanted the French actress Marina Vlady and the Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky to star in the main roles. Nowadays, the story in which trajectories of two characters’ lives change completely after they spend a night together obviously brings to mind Richard Linklater’s brilliant trilogy initiated by the 1995 film Before Sunrise.

For many years, Wajda intended to carry on with the idea, repeatedly returning to the script (written together with Jerzy Gruza, the master of ‘residential block’ stories) and preparing to rewrite it. However, his efforts and dreams were brought to an end by Vysotsky’s death in 1980.

Wajda: a chronicler of ‘Solidarity’

Ever since Wajda made Canal, a film in which he talks about war on behalf of those who lost their lives in it, his mission was to use film as a medium through which to discuss Polish history. With time, he was labelled a national bard, struggling with Polishness and attempting to uncover its mystery. It was Man of Marble in particular – coming to terms with post-war history and political propaganda of People’s Republic of Poland – that caused many viewers to expect that Wajda would become a man of the people, taking a stand against the authorities with his subsequent works.

He was well aware of that, and, talking about some of his films, he would explicitly admit that he had made them ‘on the public’s request’. Such was the genesis, for instance, of his film projects connected to the period of the ‘Solidarity carnival’ in the early 1980s.

1. ‘August Days, August Nights’: Janusz Głowacki’s report from the Shipyard

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Andrzej Wajda and Janusz Głowacki during the 70^th Venice International Film Festival, 2013, photo: David Azia / AP / East News

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The idea behind Sierpniowe Dni, Sierpniowe Noce (August Days, August Nights), written by Janusz Głowacki and Kultura journalist Michał Mońko in the heat of the year 1980 and the heyday of ‘Solidarity’, was born out of Wajda’s meeting with the striking workers. Years later, it became the subject of one of the best-known anecdotes about the director. During his visit to the shipyard, one of the workers asked him to film a story about a ‘man of iron’. Wajda delegated the task to Głowacki, who drafted, in the span of a few weeks, a story of the August strike, the dissidents, and the wife of one of them, who has an affair with a communist politician.

Wajda didn’t like the text, but the energy of the ‘Solidarity’ strikes fuelled his yearning to make a film that would serve as a continuation of the story initiated by Man of Marble. And, although in 1981 he used a screenplay written by Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski to make Man of Iron, Wajda didn’t yet consider the subject of the strikes and the ‘Solidarity’ movement closed.

2. ‘After the Break’: holding ‘Solidarity’ to account

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Lech Wałęsa and Andrzej Wajda, 1989, photo: Jerzy Kośnik / Forum

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Just a few years later that he made his first attempt at a ‘return’ to the events of 1980 and 1981 – in the form of the film Po Przerwie (After the Break), made in collaboration with Włodzimierz Bolecki. The script, inspired by the works of Stanisław Iwaszkiewicz, told the story of a teacher and dissident who, after having been interned, returns to his family home, where he encounters the workers’ criticism of ‘Solidarity’ and his own activism.

Bolecki and Wajda offer a bitter diagnosis of the Polish society after martial law, creating, to quote Barbara Giza, ‘a pessimistic analysis of the reasons behind the failure of ‘Solidarity’ as a mass movement’.

The project was submitted to the ‘Perspektywa’ Film Group on 19th December 1986. Jerzy Bajdor, the Vice-Minister of Culture and Art at the time, was ready to approve the script on the condition that changes would be introduced that would temper the political message of the film. Eventually, however, the screenplay ended up on a shelf, from which it wasn’t retrieved until 2015. Thanks to Polish Radio Second Programme and the National Film Archive, a radio play based on Bolecki’s text was produced, directed by Janusz Zaorski.

3. ‘Men of…’: disappointed with freedom

The failure of After the Break didn’t put an end to Wajda’s effort to make a film that would hold to account the national myth and conclude the trilogy initiated by Man of Marble. Another chance to tackle the subject came up right after the system change, in 1993, owing to Maciej Ślesicki and his screenplay Ludzie z… (Men of…). However, it turned out to be one of Wajda’s most famous uncompleted films instead.

The character of Agnieszka, played by Krystyna Janda, returned in Ślesicki’s text, a story which combined all the most urgent issues of the period: lustration, abortion, decommunisation, and neoliberal economic transformation of the Balcerowicz era. The script, pessimistic and saturated with didacticism, was never made into a film. In 1993, Wajda noted:

Ścibor’s screenplay for ‘Man of Marble’ was wonderfully written, everything from the overall idea to minute details was simply brilliant. ‘Man of Iron’ depicted a breakthrough moment in the history of Europe – the ‘Solidarity’ revolt. That’s what people wanted to watch! What could part three possibly show? Either the decay of what was beautiful or a disastrous ridicule of everything. The lustration scandal is interesting in itself, but it has nothing to do with the social and artistic success of those two films.

Wałęsa: Man of Hope directed by Andrzej Wajda – Image Gallery

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For another Man of…, we had to wait until 2013, when Wajda made Wałęsa: Man of Hope. In an interview with Culture.pl conducted on the occasion of his 90^th birthday, the director said:

I’ve been alive for a long time, I’ve made many films, some of them synchronised with the expectations of the audience. (...) 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.

[Trans. KF]

***

Today, ten years after the Master’s death, a review of his uncompleted films could serve as a goldmine of ideas for present-day creators. After all, what testifies to his (finished and unfinished) works’ extraordinary relevance and vitality is the fact that among his projects from half a century ago, we find a progenitor of Smarzowski’s The Wedding; a communist version of Linklater’s Before Sunrise; and even a story twin similar to the Czarna Śmierć (Black Death) series about a smallpox epidemic in 1960s’ Wrocław (which Wajda also tackled in his project Zaraza [The Plague]).

Acknowledgments:

The article couldn’t have been if not for the research conducted by the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, whose results have been published on the institution’s website.
https://www.fina.gov.pl/badania

Sources:

A. Wajda, Autobiografia, Kraków

A. Wajda, ‘Filmy, Których Nie Zrobiłem’ (Films I Didn’t Make), Film na Świecie (World Cinema) 1985, issue 320-321, p. 121.

A. Wajda, ‘Moje Projekty Filmowe’ (My Film Projects), Film na Świecie 1986, issue 329-330, p. 110.

A. Wajda, Notesy 1942-2016: Wybór, Tom 1-4 (Notebooks 1942-2016: Selected Fragments, Volumes 1-4), Kraków 2025.

T. Lubelski, Historia Niebyła Kina PRL (The Nonexistent History of Cinema in People’s Republic of Poland), Kraków 2012.

T. Lubelski, Wajda: Portret Mistrza w Kilku Odsłonach (Wajda: Portrait of the Master in Different Guises), Wrocław 2006.

Documentary film titled Marzenia Są Ciekawsze (Dreams Are More Interesting), dir. Stanisław Janicki, 1999.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English