Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

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.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

For me, actors have to have a character, an aura, body language. They're not models. They used to call actors models. But I want them to participate in the film.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

I grew up in a secular environment, you know, in the '60s and '70s. My mother's family was Catholic, but you know, just very kind of conventionally Catholic. You know, nothing - there was nothing, you know, extreme about their version of religion. And my father was a free spirit, you know? He had no time for religion at all.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

My stupid ambition is to make a film that's not like any other - one that has its own kind of logic and hooks viewers without making them think too much. It's a film I'd love to see, one in which after 10 minutes the audience isn't able to predict the whole thing.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

I'm not emotionally excited by the power of cinema's tricks anymore.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

For me, good films and good books are irreducible to a lesson. You can't just kind of translate them into one statement. On the contrary, the more you do that, the less wisdom in art there is.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism. I was baptised by my mother's family, who were all traditional Catholics. But my mother was the black sheep of the family - she ran away to the ballet at 17.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

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.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

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.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

I don't know what directing actors is all about apart from just casting well and then shaping their performances a bit, you know.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

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
Pawel Pawlikowski

'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

The whole world, it's a problem that there's too much stuff being produced. We don't have time to reflect on the important things in life.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

It's wonderful that Poland is free again and there's open debate and people can pursue their interests. I'm all for it.

Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski

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.