Strangely, you know, my parents, who left Poland separately and, you know, divorced, ended up marrying other people. But then they met again abroad, and they got together again.
One of my favorite writers is Chekhov. I love his attitude toward the world. Just accept things for what they are. Don't judge. Be moral as you tell your story, but have no moral at the end. Just look at it.
The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.
I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.
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.
I dread to be compared to all these directors who have a lot of spontaneous emoting and swearing in their films - that is death; it's a cul-de-sac. It doesn't lift the material at all. It's just a cliched reproduction of what we think is normal behaviour.
When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like, 'How do I make this film?' That's part of the pleasure, and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.
I lived a pretty chaotic life. I went to England, and I moved around, and there were a lot of things that I was interested in. I wrote poetry. I took photographs. I was a musician and all sorts of things. Nothing brilliant, but I did all these different things.
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.
I like to control my films from beginning to end, to write them the way I want.
I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.
I love good TV shows, but it's not what I do. I kind of sculpt my films as I go along. And TV is all about writing, so you just shoot, shoot, shoot what's written.
The problem with shooting in Paris is, it's been shot to death. When you're in it, you already think you're in a movie, so how do you get away from that feeling, and give some frisson to the viewer?
I think people crave those meaningful situations, stuff about faith, identity, dilemmas of live paradoxes in our souls. It's going back to a time where lives were really defined by history, and also how you behave in the face of history. It's kind of interesting to go back to that simpler humanity, simpler but deeper.
I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
In 2006, I started making a film called 'Restraint of Beasts.' While I was making it, I had a personal disaster. My wife fell ill, so we stopped shooting halfway through. And then sadly, my wife died.
I connect with all of the characters in my films. That's what makes you want to make a film, that you can enter the mindset, the situation, the conflict, the contradictions.
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.
I love films that are many things at the same time while being simple.
