I didn’t want to falsify my depiction. I only use the ele- ments that I’m quite certain exist. But I know that I have ten days to shoot, and what if nothing happens? I won’t be able to say what I have to say.
EB: The passive objector that you introduced was beaten
up by the other campers. MŁ: We ran to his rescue, but he nearly refused to go
on filming. I convinced the camp commandant to offer him an official apology so that we could continue.
EB: How did you stage the reenactment of the beating? MŁ: Apart from the morning-exercises scenes, we
shot everything on site, but then I reenacted the beat- ing scene at Studio X [run by Andrzej Wajda]. I think that in the film you don’t necessarily notice that we used dif- ferent people in the reenactment. We had a great set— dogs, lightning, rain, firefighters—but then it turned out that we shot the whole thing with no film in the camera! We had to reshoot on no budget, without the thrills.
EB: You had to have that scene. MŁ: Because it’s believable, even if it’s not “true.” In
the actual moment when my friend was attacked, we were busy rescuing him rather than filming.
EB: Quite a few of your films, including How to Live, are
participatory psychodramas. Where does your interest in psychoanalysis come from?
MŁ: I don’t know. I’ve realized that when people are
themselves but also have roles to reenact, it’s a great way to make them feel absolutely safe. It’s a game of “it’s me,
14
but not me.” I saw it as a trend that I could develop, but I don’t know that I’ve ever managed to do pure psycho- drama. I’ve filmed some actual, real psychodramas, but as assignments. We often did assignment films, since we couldn’t really survive financially just making our films. Some did political assignments; I, along with Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tomasz Zygadło, made institutional, edu- cational films. I never set out to make films about systems; they
were always films about people. But in those days we were all implicated in the system. We couldn’t get toilet paper or gasoline. Making films inevitably meant making films about politics.
EB: Your early film, Front Collision, also explores a social
trauma, in which you staged a farewell fete for a demoted railway worker as a kind of creative intervention. Where did the idea of a fete come from?
MŁ: I was interested in the question of whether the
fete would actually exist, if we just did it on film. There was a fete for the worker, after all. The railway refused to throw one, but the management knew that we would. But on the other hand, there is of course no real fete. The film ends where it began, with the trains passing by. We staged a game with a viewer about what actually hap- pens or doesn’t.
EB: The wronged railway worker didn’t seem to mind
participating in the film, but your most memorable subject, Urszula Flis, at first had a different attitude.
MŁ: The press described Urszula as a socialist role
model, a woman who is a farmer but also a fierce intel- lectual, who reads books, and so on. Urszula was very young, but she realized that she was being used to
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