Andrzej Wajda - 'Young Girls of Wilko': An enigmatic story worth filming (146/222) скачать в хорошем качестве

Andrzej Wajda - 'Young Girls of Wilko': An enigmatic story worth filming (146/222)

To listen to more of Andrzej Wajda’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Andrzej Wajda (Film director)   Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki] TRANSCRIPT: Since I'd always liked Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz's story, 'Young Girls of Wilko', and the idea was somewhere in the back of my head, the initial idea was to produce it for theatre and for TV. I already had a screenplay that I wasn't happy with. I came to the conclusion that I needed to find a young screenwriter who would look with an eye... Besides, I wanted our crew to bond. This would happen if these young people took part in my undertakings. I'd very much wanted Agnieszka Holland to be my assistant on 'Man of Marble', but the political authorities hadn't accepted this. The minister had said, 'No, no, she won't advise you well. She's your evil spirit. No.' As it turned it, this didn't affect 'Man of Marble' but she wrote the screenplay to 'Rough Treatment', and here Zbigniew Kamiński, who was in our crew and had begun work on his own independent film, I thought that he would make a good, sensitive screenwriter for a film like 'Young Girls of Wilko'. And it's true, I wasn't disappointed. He interpreted this story beautifully, a story that's enigmatic and hard to grasp. He turned this into material for a film very successfully, only I wasn't ready to make it and I have to say that initially, I had to really struggle with this film. I was ready to call in someone else to make it because I hadn't realised, after the political films which had required so much energy and immediacy and also needed the director to impose his point of view on the cinema audience, because that's what makes political films. Suddenly, I had to make a film like 'Young Girls of Wilko' which is so delicately put together. They sit, they eat, occasionally one of them says something, they look out of the window. Nothing happens. I have to say that by the end of the first week, I felt like killing myself. It wasn't until Krystyna Zachwatowicz, my wife, who plays one of these women in the film very beautifully and effectively took me to one side and said, 'Stop getting so worked up, what is it that you want? You're not making that other film any more. That film's already in the cinemas. Forget it - you're making a different film now.' I have to say, that brought me around. Suddenly, I understood and I began to observe these women with more interest. Edward Kłosiński took beautiful shots, Allan Starski had picked the house. It was good that he'd picked a house because the intial idea had been to film in a studio. But Alan Starski had convinced me to do it in natural surroundings because it would make combining the outdoor scenes with those in the house a lot better. In addition, there was still a hint of the life that the occupants of the house had lived long ago and so it would be good to make the film in a natural interior. He altered the house making it grander and I have to say he made some fundamental changes which turned that ordinary house into something that was very authentic. This is fascinating because Alan Starski was a young man at the time and yet here he showed his maturity. He made me, a much older and more mature person, realise that if I want the truth I could find it where a spark of authenticity still remained rather than by building sets. Perhaps just as in 'The Promised Land' we were able to do everything because that promised land still existed. Here, we were able to film the lives of these women because this house still had a trace and there were still people living there, whose lives were probably as they had been in the the Thirties.