Polish - Director | September 15, 1957 -
For me, filmmaking is not exactly a career. I was never in it for Hollywood or anything. My films are markers of where I am in life, where I am in my head. So that's what I'm working on, and I try to keep things in proportion - life and filmmaking. One feeds into the other.
Pawel Pawlikowski
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My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.
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If you wanted to make a film about British teenagers, it would be... well, it wouldn't interest me; let's put it like that. They'd be listening to music I hate, watching TV all the time, and talking about 'Big Brother.'
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I don't think women are that vastly different from men. I'm a bit of a woman myself. But I'm not a feminist filmmaker. I'm not making a feminist thesis to prove that women are important. I just happen to make films with strong characters that are women.
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It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.
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Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.
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Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.
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I think - you know, the big trauma in my life, personally, was the fact that at 14, I was taken out of Poland unwittingly because my parents were divorced. Left the country - my mother left for England with her new husband. I wasn't even aware that she'd married him.
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A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that.
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I actually studied literature and philosophy. So, when I started making films, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was too proud and arrogant to learn.
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I'm so happy when someone does something original, and there's no focus group or planning committee. If the cinema doesn't get an injection of that once in a while, we're in trouble.
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My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.
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