Krzysztof Zanussi
published in Cineaste (New York) XI:2 (1981)
Labeled the moralist among the Second Wave of contemporary Polish filmmakers, Krzysztof Zanussi studied physics and philosophy before attending the prestigious film school at Lodz. By the time of this interview, he had made more than a dozen feature-length films, winning prizes in Chicago, Tehran, Gdansk, Ravenna, Cannes, and elsewhere; and he had been vice-president of the Union of Polish Filmmakers for seven years.
Zanussi has made a number of films outside of Poland, particularly for West German television. Among his earlier successes, Illumination (1973) first brought him significant international recognition: overwhelmed by a friend’s death, a young doctor suddenly sees the tenuousness of his studies and certainties, and sets out to discover life directly, by way of the heart. In Camouflage (1977), Zanussi launched a strong social criticism, set in a university linguists’ retreat, against the corruption of the intelligence which, without a pure heart, cannot hope to know the truth.
Zanussi set Roads in the Night (1979) in the Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943 to greater emphasize the importance of individual and social responsibility. In The Constant Factor (1980), which won the 1980 Cannes Jury Prize for directing, the protagonist finds himself faced with a society that not only assumes the corruption of everyone, but that is also incapable of accepting the existence of death. And, in Zanussi’s latest television feature, The Contract (1980), presented at the Venice and Gdansk film festivals, Leslie Caron plays an extravagant American ex-dancer who comes to Poland, and who is, in the end, a kleptomaniac.
The following interview took place in Paris in October 1980.
How has it been possible for you to make such strongly ethical films for a popular audience?
Well, to use two examples with quite different backgrounds, it is, in a way, easier in Europe. The Constant Factor was made in Poland, a socialist country, and the state’s subsidy was granted to me on the basis of my reputation. It is doing fairly well, and it was very expensive, but it ought to be able to break even. So, I’m free of any debt, in moral terms. And the Polish government wouldn’t complain; they give the subsidy rather generously, as a basic policy of the country, even if the film is not all that flattering to the people who are in power in Poland.
Roads in the Night was made in West Germany. It was sponsored by West German television and it also had a rather generous budget. I had the freedom to choose the subject, I was offered a sort of carte blanche, also on the basis of my reputation with my previous film. So, I chose something which is quite controversial for Germans, but I always thought if I have such a carte blanche I should take advantage of it. At any rate, the film was accepted, and it has been repeated on national television in Germany twice. It has been considered rather a successful film in Germany, and, because of this, I’ve been offered new possibilities now. In the spring, German television will sponsor a film I will direct, which will be made for theatrical release, and, later, television.
Is there a structure for censorship in Poland? Do you have a free reign because of your reputation?
It’s very hard to describe, especially to the American public, how filmmaking in Poland functions. There is a Ministry of Culture, which makes all decisions. And there is a pre-censorship “script” which is offered to the censors. But I always hope that what I propose will be approved, because I know the rules of the game as well as the people who accept and approve my scripts. On the one hand, I’m not trying to please the authorities; on the other, I’m not willing to insult them, either. I try to comply with a certain dignity. And I understand that troubles are a natural part of my profession. I calculate them, I include them.
Do you have to do everything through official Polish channels?
Well, Polish authorities have to approve all my foreign contacts. They have the right to read whatever is being considered, be it a film or a play, and whenever I want to render my services elsewhere they have the right to know what is involved. In most cases they don’t object, but, of course, they don’t find me these contacts. I, or my agent, have to make the contacts. I have signed with William Morris, and I sometimes get some offers via the agency.
In most cases, I make the offers and I bring in the producers, I seek them. But now, since my prize at Cannes, there is some sort of acceleration. All my older projects find producers more easily. I have, I think, too much to do; I’m overworked. But, on the other hand, at least such a moment in life has happened this once, so I can’t complain. I have to work like mad, and maybe in two or three years I can slow down.
You are working on a film about the Pope now. Are you using actual footage of the Pope himself, or is the film entirely fictional?
It’s a fictional film, but there will be some actual footage of the Pope intercut with the footage I am shooting with actors. There are three actors who play the Pope. I was approached with a proposition to make a film about the Pope, but what sort of film it would be was entirely my problem. I was supposed to find a way to make a film about a man, relatively young, a head of state and head of a church. The problem was how he was to be represented. My solution was that I would show his surroundings, his background, etc., in a way that will permit people to better understand not only where he comes from, but what sort of attitudes and beliefs he represents, what sort of human experience, or existential experience, he has. Because he does not belong to Western Europe (Western Europe, for years, considered the Catholic Church as its own property), it was worthwhile to present how different his outlook on life is, which I will do by contrasting the destinies of other people whose lives parallel his. So, the Pope appears almost as a marginal figure, in several episodes, but he influences a lot of other people. He is reflected as in a mirror. And it is a dramatic story.
In Roads in the Night you had a generation like your own in mind, growing up during the war.
Yes, I think that the war in this film is sort of a decor; it might have been the First World War as well as the Second World War. The war is only the pretext for me to contrast vividly a problem which is probably universal, a problem which is mine as well as everyone’s. It is the tension between individual responsibility and collective responsibility, societal responsibility, and the fact that my most passionate disagreement with society cannot be expressed by total rebellion. In other words, in a case of real political controversy, the individual must either pay for the mistakes of his/her compatriots, or oppose them totally.
Did the fact that Roads in the Night put the Polish resistance in a very positive light work in your favor in terms of working with authorities on the film?
No, no, no. I was not showing the Communist resistance; I was showing an aspect, in fact, which was not Communist. Just Polish people—in other words, the major resistance, which was not politically oriented, and certainly not pro-Soviet. I just took this stand, which makes the situation exceptionally dramatic, but, at least, true to the history.
Was The Constant Factor basically up to you, other than the pre-censorship approval?
Well, of course, I had to get this approval, and the subject matter is sort of unpleasant, and very critical of the society. But I managed to get this approval, and the prize in Cannes helped me enormously in the distribution of the film.
Although the film is set in Poland, the problems it confronts are very real in most societies.
The discrepancy between our ideals and our reality, between despising corruption and living passively in its grip, is a universal problem.
On the one hand, you posed a society that doesn’t accept death, and, on the other, an ethical man whose co-workers don’t accept his ethical stance.
True. The co-workers are already corrupt, and they don’t want anyone to point out their corruptions. It’s always very unpleasant to have one just person, one moral person; we hate the people who are more just than we are. We all have this reaction. As surely as we are imperfect, we don’t like to have our imperfection pointed out. We want to see people who are more evil than we are, who are weaker—it makes us feel better.
Why did you question society’s ability to deal with death in The Constant Factor?
Well, I rank death as a very important criterion of our life values. I think about it a lot, and I feel that the society that hasn’t established a realistic attitude toward death is, in a way, culturally condemned. There is no inner strength, and that’s frightening, because such civilizations don’t survive very long. There must be something bigger in our life than death. In Hellenistic society, death is unacceptable, because it is too strong, too big; it destroys the ultimate values. Death has to be treated in a way that the ultimate values would be bigger and stronger than death itself. So, I confront death, and I think the catalytic point for my protagonist is when he discovers the physical presence of death, now very close to him because of his mother, which puts him in a more vitally extreme position. It is a consequence he has taken.
The irony, of course, is that this position he finally finds himself in inadvertently causes a death.
Yes, that’s the whole connection. First you see him approaching the death of a stranger in India. Later, an important person, his mother, dies. And, then, he becomes the reason for somebody else’s death—a child’s death. So there is that chain in this argument. There is one point that might be relevant to this, one observation that must be made. The protagonist in The Constant Factor is the rebel, rebellious against society, because of the influence of his father’s legend, of the mother whom you see, of the grandfather who died in the Warsaw insurrection. And you get a strong sensation that the tradition obliges people to be rebellious, which is, very evidently, a strong Polish characteristic. My society has survived due to rebellion, because rebellion is an ultimate value.
Because the country’s been occupied so long?
Right! Yes, for one hundred fifty years. And, even before that, there was a great tradition of individualism.
Does this tradition of individualism survive despite the government’s structure?
Oh, definitely. The socialist government influences people to be more collective and, perhaps, more uniform, but the society is far less conformist than many Western European societies. I’m not talking about America, which is structurally and ideologically motivated toward the individual. You know, I compare how diversity and original opinions are praised in my country, and why these are hardly tolerated in so many Western European countries where a certain social position restricts people to a certain social circle, in which they are obliged to have only certain opinions, a particular interest, a certain style.
Do you have a sense of who sees your films?
Well, you know, any Polish filmmaker has immediate access to government statistics which assesses this sort of thing. These are sometimes deceiving, because you can’t tell how many people will remember your film two years later, or how your film influenced them, or if it influenced them at all. So, I have no scientific instruments to measure audiences, but I know for sure that if, let us say, Camouflage had far more than one million spectators, they weren’t all intellectuals.
Meeting this audience has made me very hopeful; it’s very tiring, but a great thrill. I know that I have a loyal audience wherever there is some sort of social migration. When people are coming and going, unstabilized, seeking, trying to find a new place in society—and these regions can be geographically defined in Poland—they go to the cinema in order to confront their life. They compare their lives with what they’re shown in the cinema, because they are trying to find themselves again. These are people who came from the countryside to become workers, workers who are becoming students, etc. These people are all looking around, they are curious, they want to find models in life, and they go to see my films.
Do you feel a certain duty in this sense?
Oh, yes. I think that it is a very important audience because it is an open audience. I am less successful, say, among the intellectuals who are very stabilized, who have their strictly fixed political positions, who are not besieged with doubts, who do not question the world or themselves.
Are there any particular directors who might use the 1980 strikes as material for a film?
Probably—which is, in a way, opportunistic. It is interesting to make a film about a strike before strikes happen. There were one or two films like that, sometimes in historical disguise, as in the case of Izro Kutz, who made a film about strikes three years ago when he was making a film about the strikes before the war, showing their importance and the sense of liberation that came from organizing a working-class movement. I think this shows that our cinema is not detached from life, even when we’re using a language which is not always quite direct. Wajda’s Man of Marble, which is about the condition of the working class in the Fifites, is relevant now. Camouflage met with popular success not because people wanted to know what happens at the university, but because they recognized some diagnosis in the film that applied to the rest of the society. So, I think our cinema has been fulfilling its cultural duties and its social duties in the last several years, and the big successes we’ve had with our audience while touching on contemporary subjects during the last five years shows that the cinema is not abstract.
Are there specific foreign influences in your films?
Well, they’re not prevalent, but they are noticeable. There was a strong influence of the French New Wave some time ago. I would definitely be able to recognize the influence of Bergman in my films. There are some Soviet directors, mainly Tarkovsky, who have influenced us somewhat. He’s probably the most important of the directors after the war; he made a very special kind of cinema. I, personally, would invoke the names of Eric Rohmer and of Olmi, whom I like a lot. But I also like François Truffaut and Louis Malle, even if some of their films are disappointing. I love Fellini, because he’s so amazing—he does things you’d never think about. And I was quite influenced in the late Fifties and the early Sixties by what I call the realistic American cinema, including people such as Elia Kazan. Now I am interested in the new wave of Hollywood directors, most of whom I know personally. I met Francis Ford Coppola when he was editing Godfather I. He had, of course, already made some films, but this was the beginning of his great career. Or in meeting Lucas, Spielberg, Cimino, and others, I recognize something very original and true in their work, which I respect.
Quite a few of the best Hollywood films are seen in Poland every year, which means that we see what is very deeply connected with the evolution of American society. Of course, these are only a small fraction of the Hollywood world, which also produces enormous amounts of garbage. But I think we look to this part of America, to Hollywood and independent production, with great admiration. The fact is, America is able to produce something and is able to digest it, which is, in a way, optimistic, and which shows there is more vitality in American cinema than in French cinema at the moment, or even in European cinema, with the possible exception of Italy.
published in Cineaste (New York) XI:2 (1981)
Labeled the moralist among the Second Wave of contemporary Polish filmmakers, Krzysztof Zanussi studied physics and philosophy before attending the prestigious film school at Lodz. By the time of this interview, he had made more than a dozen feature-length films, winning prizes in Chicago, Tehran, Gdansk, Ravenna, Cannes, and elsewhere; and he had been vice-president of the Union of Polish Filmmakers for seven years.
Zanussi has made a number of films outside of Poland, particularly for West German television. Among his earlier successes, Illumination (1973) first brought him significant international recognition: overwhelmed by a friend’s death, a young doctor suddenly sees the tenuousness of his studies and certainties, and sets out to discover life directly, by way of the heart. In Camouflage (1977), Zanussi launched a strong social criticism, set in a university linguists’ retreat, against the corruption of the intelligence which, without a pure heart, cannot hope to know the truth.
Zanussi set Roads in the Night (1979) in the Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943 to greater emphasize the importance of individual and social responsibility. In The Constant Factor (1980), which won the 1980 Cannes Jury Prize for directing, the protagonist finds himself faced with a society that not only assumes the corruption of everyone, but that is also incapable of accepting the existence of death. And, in Zanussi’s latest television feature, The Contract (1980), presented at the Venice and Gdansk film festivals, Leslie Caron plays an extravagant American ex-dancer who comes to Poland, and who is, in the end, a kleptomaniac.
The following interview took place in Paris in October 1980.
How has it been possible for you to make such strongly ethical films for a popular audience?
Well, to use two examples with quite different backgrounds, it is, in a way, easier in Europe. The Constant Factor was made in Poland, a socialist country, and the state’s subsidy was granted to me on the basis of my reputation. It is doing fairly well, and it was very expensive, but it ought to be able to break even. So, I’m free of any debt, in moral terms. And the Polish government wouldn’t complain; they give the subsidy rather generously, as a basic policy of the country, even if the film is not all that flattering to the people who are in power in Poland.
Roads in the Night was made in West Germany. It was sponsored by West German television and it also had a rather generous budget. I had the freedom to choose the subject, I was offered a sort of carte blanche, also on the basis of my reputation with my previous film. So, I chose something which is quite controversial for Germans, but I always thought if I have such a carte blanche I should take advantage of it. At any rate, the film was accepted, and it has been repeated on national television in Germany twice. It has been considered rather a successful film in Germany, and, because of this, I’ve been offered new possibilities now. In the spring, German television will sponsor a film I will direct, which will be made for theatrical release, and, later, television.
Is there a structure for censorship in Poland? Do you have a free reign because of your reputation?
It’s very hard to describe, especially to the American public, how filmmaking in Poland functions. There is a Ministry of Culture, which makes all decisions. And there is a pre-censorship “script” which is offered to the censors. But I always hope that what I propose will be approved, because I know the rules of the game as well as the people who accept and approve my scripts. On the one hand, I’m not trying to please the authorities; on the other, I’m not willing to insult them, either. I try to comply with a certain dignity. And I understand that troubles are a natural part of my profession. I calculate them, I include them.
Do you have to do everything through official Polish channels?
Well, Polish authorities have to approve all my foreign contacts. They have the right to read whatever is being considered, be it a film or a play, and whenever I want to render my services elsewhere they have the right to know what is involved. In most cases they don’t object, but, of course, they don’t find me these contacts. I, or my agent, have to make the contacts. I have signed with William Morris, and I sometimes get some offers via the agency.
In most cases, I make the offers and I bring in the producers, I seek them. But now, since my prize at Cannes, there is some sort of acceleration. All my older projects find producers more easily. I have, I think, too much to do; I’m overworked. But, on the other hand, at least such a moment in life has happened this once, so I can’t complain. I have to work like mad, and maybe in two or three years I can slow down.
You are working on a film about the Pope now. Are you using actual footage of the Pope himself, or is the film entirely fictional?
It’s a fictional film, but there will be some actual footage of the Pope intercut with the footage I am shooting with actors. There are three actors who play the Pope. I was approached with a proposition to make a film about the Pope, but what sort of film it would be was entirely my problem. I was supposed to find a way to make a film about a man, relatively young, a head of state and head of a church. The problem was how he was to be represented. My solution was that I would show his surroundings, his background, etc., in a way that will permit people to better understand not only where he comes from, but what sort of attitudes and beliefs he represents, what sort of human experience, or existential experience, he has. Because he does not belong to Western Europe (Western Europe, for years, considered the Catholic Church as its own property), it was worthwhile to present how different his outlook on life is, which I will do by contrasting the destinies of other people whose lives parallel his. So, the Pope appears almost as a marginal figure, in several episodes, but he influences a lot of other people. He is reflected as in a mirror. And it is a dramatic story.
In Roads in the Night you had a generation like your own in mind, growing up during the war.
Yes, I think that the war in this film is sort of a decor; it might have been the First World War as well as the Second World War. The war is only the pretext for me to contrast vividly a problem which is probably universal, a problem which is mine as well as everyone’s. It is the tension between individual responsibility and collective responsibility, societal responsibility, and the fact that my most passionate disagreement with society cannot be expressed by total rebellion. In other words, in a case of real political controversy, the individual must either pay for the mistakes of his/her compatriots, or oppose them totally.
Did the fact that Roads in the Night put the Polish resistance in a very positive light work in your favor in terms of working with authorities on the film?
No, no, no. I was not showing the Communist resistance; I was showing an aspect, in fact, which was not Communist. Just Polish people—in other words, the major resistance, which was not politically oriented, and certainly not pro-Soviet. I just took this stand, which makes the situation exceptionally dramatic, but, at least, true to the history.
Was The Constant Factor basically up to you, other than the pre-censorship approval?
Well, of course, I had to get this approval, and the subject matter is sort of unpleasant, and very critical of the society. But I managed to get this approval, and the prize in Cannes helped me enormously in the distribution of the film.
Although the film is set in Poland, the problems it confronts are very real in most societies.
The discrepancy between our ideals and our reality, between despising corruption and living passively in its grip, is a universal problem.
On the one hand, you posed a society that doesn’t accept death, and, on the other, an ethical man whose co-workers don’t accept his ethical stance.
True. The co-workers are already corrupt, and they don’t want anyone to point out their corruptions. It’s always very unpleasant to have one just person, one moral person; we hate the people who are more just than we are. We all have this reaction. As surely as we are imperfect, we don’t like to have our imperfection pointed out. We want to see people who are more evil than we are, who are weaker—it makes us feel better.
Why did you question society’s ability to deal with death in The Constant Factor?
Well, I rank death as a very important criterion of our life values. I think about it a lot, and I feel that the society that hasn’t established a realistic attitude toward death is, in a way, culturally condemned. There is no inner strength, and that’s frightening, because such civilizations don’t survive very long. There must be something bigger in our life than death. In Hellenistic society, death is unacceptable, because it is too strong, too big; it destroys the ultimate values. Death has to be treated in a way that the ultimate values would be bigger and stronger than death itself. So, I confront death, and I think the catalytic point for my protagonist is when he discovers the physical presence of death, now very close to him because of his mother, which puts him in a more vitally extreme position. It is a consequence he has taken.
The irony, of course, is that this position he finally finds himself in inadvertently causes a death.
Yes, that’s the whole connection. First you see him approaching the death of a stranger in India. Later, an important person, his mother, dies. And, then, he becomes the reason for somebody else’s death—a child’s death. So there is that chain in this argument. There is one point that might be relevant to this, one observation that must be made. The protagonist in The Constant Factor is the rebel, rebellious against society, because of the influence of his father’s legend, of the mother whom you see, of the grandfather who died in the Warsaw insurrection. And you get a strong sensation that the tradition obliges people to be rebellious, which is, very evidently, a strong Polish characteristic. My society has survived due to rebellion, because rebellion is an ultimate value.
Because the country’s been occupied so long?
Right! Yes, for one hundred fifty years. And, even before that, there was a great tradition of individualism.
Does this tradition of individualism survive despite the government’s structure?
Oh, definitely. The socialist government influences people to be more collective and, perhaps, more uniform, but the society is far less conformist than many Western European societies. I’m not talking about America, which is structurally and ideologically motivated toward the individual. You know, I compare how diversity and original opinions are praised in my country, and why these are hardly tolerated in so many Western European countries where a certain social position restricts people to a certain social circle, in which they are obliged to have only certain opinions, a particular interest, a certain style.
Do you have a sense of who sees your films?
Well, you know, any Polish filmmaker has immediate access to government statistics which assesses this sort of thing. These are sometimes deceiving, because you can’t tell how many people will remember your film two years later, or how your film influenced them, or if it influenced them at all. So, I have no scientific instruments to measure audiences, but I know for sure that if, let us say, Camouflage had far more than one million spectators, they weren’t all intellectuals.
Meeting this audience has made me very hopeful; it’s very tiring, but a great thrill. I know that I have a loyal audience wherever there is some sort of social migration. When people are coming and going, unstabilized, seeking, trying to find a new place in society—and these regions can be geographically defined in Poland—they go to the cinema in order to confront their life. They compare their lives with what they’re shown in the cinema, because they are trying to find themselves again. These are people who came from the countryside to become workers, workers who are becoming students, etc. These people are all looking around, they are curious, they want to find models in life, and they go to see my films.
Do you feel a certain duty in this sense?
Oh, yes. I think that it is a very important audience because it is an open audience. I am less successful, say, among the intellectuals who are very stabilized, who have their strictly fixed political positions, who are not besieged with doubts, who do not question the world or themselves.
Are there any particular directors who might use the 1980 strikes as material for a film?
Probably—which is, in a way, opportunistic. It is interesting to make a film about a strike before strikes happen. There were one or two films like that, sometimes in historical disguise, as in the case of Izro Kutz, who made a film about strikes three years ago when he was making a film about the strikes before the war, showing their importance and the sense of liberation that came from organizing a working-class movement. I think this shows that our cinema is not detached from life, even when we’re using a language which is not always quite direct. Wajda’s Man of Marble, which is about the condition of the working class in the Fifites, is relevant now. Camouflage met with popular success not because people wanted to know what happens at the university, but because they recognized some diagnosis in the film that applied to the rest of the society. So, I think our cinema has been fulfilling its cultural duties and its social duties in the last several years, and the big successes we’ve had with our audience while touching on contemporary subjects during the last five years shows that the cinema is not abstract.
Are there specific foreign influences in your films?
Well, they’re not prevalent, but they are noticeable. There was a strong influence of the French New Wave some time ago. I would definitely be able to recognize the influence of Bergman in my films. There are some Soviet directors, mainly Tarkovsky, who have influenced us somewhat. He’s probably the most important of the directors after the war; he made a very special kind of cinema. I, personally, would invoke the names of Eric Rohmer and of Olmi, whom I like a lot. But I also like François Truffaut and Louis Malle, even if some of their films are disappointing. I love Fellini, because he’s so amazing—he does things you’d never think about. And I was quite influenced in the late Fifties and the early Sixties by what I call the realistic American cinema, including people such as Elia Kazan. Now I am interested in the new wave of Hollywood directors, most of whom I know personally. I met Francis Ford Coppola when he was editing Godfather I. He had, of course, already made some films, but this was the beginning of his great career. Or in meeting Lucas, Spielberg, Cimino, and others, I recognize something very original and true in their work, which I respect.
Quite a few of the best Hollywood films are seen in Poland every year, which means that we see what is very deeply connected with the evolution of American society. Of course, these are only a small fraction of the Hollywood world, which also produces enormous amounts of garbage. But I think we look to this part of America, to Hollywood and independent production, with great admiration. The fact is, America is able to produce something and is able to digest it, which is, in a way, optimistic, and which shows there is more vitality in American cinema than in French cinema at the moment, or even in European cinema, with the possible exception of Italy.