Pekos, who had gotten his check two days ago, was still lying in bed, drunk. He was completely disoriented. He did not even walk normally. It turned out that he had suffered a stroke and was partly paralyzed. He had lost power in his hands, they looked like crooked claws. He also had amnesia. We took him to a bar, found him a table, and bought a chess set, but he did not know how to play.
I was determined that Pekosiński had to play himself.
I had to show people like him who had been derailed by the war. I used my apartment partly as my office, and we would get Pekos washed, bring him there, set up a chess set, and remind him how to play. When he was too drunk, I put him to bed. When he woke, we ate breakfast and played again. Meanwhile my cameraman, Ryszard Lenczewski, observed Pekos, getting a feel for how to capture his disability, his eyes, hands, his stuttering. My knowledge of chess goes back to when I was maybe ten. When Pekos began to lose to me decisively and was pained by it, we were ready [to film]. But we knew that we could not push him, or hurt his dignity. We did not want Pekos to have to do bar scenes in an environ- ment in which he was known, so we moved to Łódź. By the time we were close to leaving for Łódź, Pekos had already beat me three times. I then turned to a former chess champion who had known Pekos from childhood. One day, I learned that the champion left Łódź, because he had lost to Pekos. After the film ended, Pekos played against a computer program. At first the computer won,
but after two weeks, Pekos gained the upper hand. We thought of the film as an opportunity to help Pekos, and turned to the local authorities to get him a two-bedroom apartment and live-in help. We got Pekos a pension for war victims.
EB: The fact that Pekosiński plays himself as a child
makes the contrast between his being patronized and his tremendous suffering staggering. You have said elsewhere that communism infantilized men, taking away human agency.
GK: Precisely. We were all slaves [under communism].
Pekos accepted his enslavement because it suited him, up to a point. And so we witness the drama of his trying to set himself free.
EB: Did you write a screenplay? GK: We had a screenplay describing Pekos’s remote
past. We lifted some things from his biography, such as the tensions between the Church and the Party that wanted to use him as its marionette. But we had to alter the screenplay, because Pekos could not walk or speak clearly. I did not dictate what he was supposed to say, or how. For example, he shows real passion defending himself in the scene where he says, “I am innocent.” All I told him was, “Speak up so that the crew in the back can hear you.”
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