Director Pawel Pawlikowski delivered the annual Colin Young Emeritus Lecture at the NFTS, which was followed by a Q&A in conversation with Colin Young and Lynda Myles, NFTS Head of Directing, he talked openly about the process of making his film Ida.
Ida, set in Poland in 1962, is a stunningly crafted film about Anna, a young novice nun, who is told by her prioress that before her vows can be taken, she must visit her family. Anna visits her aunt Wanda, a judge and former prosecutor associated with the Stalinist regime, who dispassionately reveals that Anna's actual name is Ida Lebenstein, and that her Jewish parents were murdered during the war. Ida decides she wants to find their resting place. She and Wanda embark on a journey that both sheds light on their past, and decides their futures.
The film has won many awards including: 2013 Toronto International Film Festival – Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI Prize) in Special Presentations section; 38th Gdynia Film Festival – Golden Lions for best film, actress (Kulesza), cinematography and production design, October 14, 2013; 29th Warsaw Film Festival – Warsaw Grand Prix in the International Competition, October 19, 2013; 57th BFI London Film Festival – Grand Prix as Best Film, October 19, 2013; The International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage – Golden Frog for the best cinematography, November 23, 2013.
Below is Pawel Pawlikowski's full lecture. [THE FILM CLIPS WILL BE ADDED SHORTLY]
The other day someone from the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy in LA asked my producer Ewa to send them the script of our film Ida so they could deposit it in their Core Library collection. Ewa rang me up worried: what should she send them? She had 23 permutations of the script on her files. Surely she couldn’t send them the official script we raised the money on. It was nothing like the film that ended on the screen. We decided the only thing that made sense was to send the transcript of the finished film. Which would amount to no more than 30 pages, so probably not much use to the Academy either.
The accepted logic of producers and investors is this: you buy a book or an idea, hire a screen-writer – in England usually a converted playwright - who turns it into a three act structure, puts in some twists and lots of dialogue and hands you a 90 page script. Then you hire a director, who brings in his ‘vision’, attracts some cool actors, and breaks scenes into shots; and then you get a cameraman who photographs the thing as artfully as the story will allow. Then comes the editor to speed things up or slow them down, cover up holes and sort out loose ends. The product at the end is more or less what was planned at the start. And with the right promotion, the right cast and sound-track, the thing should make money.
I’ve always had a problem with this way of doing things. As a self-taught film-maker who’d never been to film school, I grew up making documentaries, which I usually shot and moulded as I went along. I started with an idea, a character or a situation - then threw all sorts of things into the mix – scenes, images, some found, others invented. Then I shook it all up, complicated, simplified - until I found the film. These films were neither documentaries nor fictions. They were strange hybrid creatures that felt like the best and the simplest way I could express a complicated truth. How I got away with it is a mystery.
Things became harder when I tried to carry this open-ended, intuitive approach into fiction, where I came up against the inevitable division of labour, and industry people who wanted to know what they were investing in. The worst of it was that you had to have the 90 pages of script to get the process started. And scripts, as far as I was concerned, were some kind of second-rate literature, that seemed to make sense on paper and were very useful to accountants and schedulers - but had nothing to do with the living film. Let alone with art.
There were some scripts – very few - which were actually well written and fun to read, but why would one want to direct one of those? What was there to discover? You could see exactly the sort of film they would become. Of course I could see that scripts were a good idea for genre films, where the mechanics are pretty standard and the audience takes pleasure in the conventions. But those films have never interested me. Not as a film-maker anyway.
What always excited me was the journey into the unknown. To some place you know exists, but you don’t know how to get to. For me, a good film has to have an inner life, which has nothing to do with literature. And the film-maker’s job is to find it or unearth it in the process, using their knowhow, taste, imagination and above all their sense of truth. After all, this is how Art works in every other area and nobody objects. If you’re a novelist, poet, painter or composer you just lock yourself away for a week, for a month, for a year - put the thing aside if you need to - and finish when you think its ready. Film-making is different. It involves money, equipment and other people.
Sadly. Or may be not so sadly. It’s no fun being stuck in your room on your own. And may be external obstacles and practical problems do have a role to play. It seems that I’ve spent all my filming life struggling to reconcile my search for the Film with the mechanics of the industrial process. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a script. It can be a useful tool up to a point. It gives you the general idea, an approximation of the structure and even some good scenes and usable dialogue. But God forbid taking it too seriously and trying to shoot it as written.
Personally, I’d much rather work from a 20-page outline, that doesn’t narrow down the possibilities or lock you into a self-serving schedule. All you need is a story with layers and two or three good characters, interestingly entangled, in an interesting space. Of course, I’m being disingenuous here saying ‘all you need is these things’. ‘These things’, the nucleus of your film, is actually the most difficult and important thing to come up with. Much more difficult that churning out 90 pages of script. Be that as it may, the sad truth is that you can’t get financed on 20 pages.
In the case Ida, after a year of writing and re-writing, my co-writer Rebecca and I ended up with 64 pages, which felt like a film and more or less satisfied the financiers. They thought the script a bit scanty at 64 pages, but it gave them information about the times, the characters and their back-stories. It dotted all the I’s and crossed most of the Ts, and even had some poetic flourishes and touchy feely adjectives and adverbs to make them feel intelligent and moved. The glaring plot weaknesses in the middle were covered up by some nifty dialogue scenes and a convenient character or two, whose job was to supply information. I knew this wasn’t the film I wanted to make. And not just because of our dodgy plotting and dramatic wishful thinking.
Basically, I had a different film in mind, but didn’t quite know how to get there. Not on paper anyway. The film I wanted to make was less a story and more of a meditation. A film of graphic images and sounds that would work by suggestion, in which most scenes would be done from one angle, in one continuous take, without informational shots or dialogue or the usual emotional rhetoric of cinema. I know myself. I know there’s only so much I can do at the desk. I love inventing stories, characters and places, but to bring these things to life, to become really inventive, I have to be on the move, out of the comfort zone, I need to be scouting, casting rehearsing, shooting. I work best under pressure, when I’m up against it. That’s when I start to see more clearly and come up with original stuff.
This is why I always ask producers for a 5-day week, so I can tweak during the shoot. And also for a break in the middle, to edit and re-write, in terms of the film that is emerging. In the case of “Ida” I made the editing break and the five-day week a contractual stipulation. My British producer who was also the financier, agreed. Even with the break and the 5-day week, the whole budget was 1,4 million euros, so my request was not exactly ruinous. We made a deal and I went to Poland to start casting and scouting for locations. Then it all changed.
The producer’s people went to Cannes and discovered that the prospects of selling a black and white Polish-speaking movie on a grim subject with unknown actors were hopeless. The producer panicked and pulled the plug. Thankfully my Polish producer Ewa refused to give in and decided to keep going with the soft money we’d been promised from the Polish film Institute. She undertook to find the remaining budget in the process. The British producer agreed to her plan and to cash-flow things for a while. The upshot of it all was that I could do my film, as long as I agreed to one week’s less filming and gave up on my break in the middle. There was no room to wriggle. It was take it or leave it… I took it. I was too involved with the story, with Poland - to let it drop. I took the plunge knowing full well that there was no way I could shoot the script as written and scheduled, and that only a miracle could save me. And a miracle did occur. But of that later.
First CLIP: OPENING SCENE. 1.40” Opening scene. Jesus painted and carried out into the snow.
In the original script the film opened with a scene of three nuns making a scarecrow in the field and then some generic dialogue scenes between them, setting up the situation and their characters. During the prep in the monastery I observed my art director Jagna, a woman with an angelic disposition, touching up Christ’s face with her brush. There was such tension and love in her face as she was doing that - I knew I had a much better scene in front of me. In fact I had a whole sequence of shots. The sculpture of Christ, which started out as one of several props, became a key image. It was much better for Ida and for the film than the business with the scare-crow we’d contrived in the script.
The unexpected snow was another bonus. It gave me an idea for two graphic top shots and the quiet moment of prayer around the fountain. This way a string of dialogue scenes were replaced by a series of shots, which were much stronger and set up the tone of the whole film. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against good dialogue. I just can’t bring myself to shoot dialogue that merely gives information or illustrates characters. And has no music. There are some characters that I find easy to write. I know them; they’re like me or like people I’ve known. Others are much more elusive and difficult to write, though I know they must exist.
Ida was one of those. We gave her some temporary dialogue in the script, to have something down on paper, but I knew that it wouldn’t be until I cast the right actress that the character would thicken out. The problem was I couldn’t find the right actress. For months we looked high and low, all over Poland, in theatres, drama schools, but there was no Ida anywhere.
In the end we a found a young woman, sitting in my local café, reading a book. She wasn’t an actress, but a student of philosophy at Warsaw University. Not only was she not an actress, she was one of these very few young people these days, who had absolutely no desire go into acting. Perfect for Ida. The English producer and his sales people didn’t share my enthusiasm. Why not get a proper actress? Did she have the emotional range? Implying they thought she didn’t. First weeks’ rushes didn’t seem to reassure them. They wanted tears, passion, proper emoting. The static camera didn’t help them either. And then there were all these scenes that were not in their script.
The following scene came about because I needed something at this point in the film to warm up the relations between the two heroines. I wrote it during rehearsals and perfected it during the lunch break just before we shot it. Young Agata’s natural dimples helped to get the dialogue rolling.
THE DRIVING SCENE IN THE WARTBURG CAR. – WANDA TALKS OF IDA’S DIMPLES AND THE NEED TO EXPERIENCE PLEASURES FOR THE SACRIFICE TO COUNT.
I was really happy with the rushes and felt we were onto something. The film I had in mind was emerging and the text was receding. In the financier script there were five scenes showing Ida’s first encounter with the big city. They included her getting lost; talking to a policeman, going into a shop, listening to music; seeing hip young people; couples kissing. These three or four pages of script shrank into these two shots.
TWO TRAM SHOTS WITH IDA LOOKING OUT THROUGH THE WINDOW.
With each day of filming I was more and more convinced the story could tell itself without coverage and exposition. Putting strong moments in strong shots side by side and leaving things to the imagination, was the key. The trick was to choose one angle, the most effective shot, and then to work and re-work all the elements: framing, light, dialogue, movement, gesture... Adding, taking away, improving, from take to take, until the thing had the right life and rhythm. This meant forgetting the script and treating each scene and each shot as a thing in its own right.
My producer Ewa kept started joking that I was writing the script with the camera. She didn’t seem to mind. She liked what we were getting. I felt that this way we would make the viewer enter the film in a different way and experience it not as a story you’re being guided through, but a kind of permanent present that unfolds in front of you. I was quite aware, of course, that most viewers might not enter this kind of film at all.
CLIP: WANDA IN COURT. IDA AT THE BUS STATION.
We shot these scenes on the second day of filming. It was then that the method really clicked and I knew we were onto something. In retrospect, I know this approach owed something to my favourite Godard film “Vivre sa Vie”, its rejection of continuity and use of stark, seemingly random compositions. What also really helped was having next to me an excitable and, it turned out, talented young DoP – Lukasz Zal – who’d never shot a feature film in his life and had no reputation to protect or ego. He wasn’t afraid of taking risks. On the contrary. Putting static shots side by side, and stripping things down, wasn’t just a stylistic affectation. It forced the viewer to watch and listen differently, it trained him to fill in the gaps and not expect to have things explained. Which allowed me to drop dud scenes and exposition without damaging the story. On the contrary, the method actually helped me find the story. Or rather its best shape.
CLIP: Wanda and Ida in the hotel restaurant, talk to the waitress while Lis’s band rehearses; they go to Szymon’s flat in the dark tenement house…
Between the scene of the two women chatting at the table with the waitress, and the shot of them going into the dark tenement house there was another scene, where Wanda quizzes a man called Marek about there whereabouts of the supposed killer Szymon. While Wanda talks to this Marek, he recognizes in her the notorious Stalinist prosecutor with blood on her hands, which was to have serious repercussions later on in the script. The scene was lifeless, it was just there to get us from A to B, but it was in the schedule, the actor was hired, so we shot it. It was painful. It wasn’t the fault of the actor or the director. It was just a bad scene, a scene about information.
The whole character of Marek had no life and was just there to tell us stuff, and however drunk and bitter we made him, there was no way of making him fly. Getting rid of the Marek scene in the restaurant gave more weight to Ida’s look to the rehearsing saxophonist. This was a much better punch-line for the scene and also helped us set up something important between the young couple for later on. The film had already taken a life of it’s own. It rejected stuff that didn’t suit it and suggested better solutions. I was re-writing as I went along, weeding out what didn’t work and shooting new scenes. But there was still a major problem ahead.
There was a whole section in the film from here on - roughly 30 minutes – which didn’t really add up and where the plot was held together by static scenes where information was being dispensed in dialogue and emotions were stirred up at the drop of a hat. Some radical changes were needed here, involving completely new scenes in new locations. I could see now what I had to do, what the Film was and how I could get there, but I needed time. This was clearly the moment to break off and retire for my customary editing and re-writing break. But there was no way of stopping now, the schedule was the schedule. I had a knife on my throat. This is when the Miracle occurred.
A week before the end of filming the snows came. It was only the end of November, but the temperatures dropped to minus 15 and thick snow paralyzed Poland. The conditions were impossible and, more importantly, continuity was all over the place, as three quarters of the film was shot without snow. We had to break up until the snows melted. A catastrophe for the production. But what a relief for me! I’d live to see another day. I had my re-writing break after all. The problem was that in order to shoot my new scenes, I needed ten more days, five more than were officially left in the schedule.
My producer Ewa was stressed out, but supportive. She was there with me in the trenches, understood how I work and loved where the film was going. Our British producer, on the other hand, was not a happy man. He wasn’t sure about the film anyway and now I’d also showed myself incompetent. The film had gaps, I’d gone off-piste and now I was asking for more shooting days. However much I’d tried to explain, he’d never got the hang of my process, why I’d asked for a break in the filming, how I made films and - indeed - why my films were the way they were.
Like most financiers he was convinced that films are professional affairs, made by professionals who know what they’re doing, and those who don’t - get the sack. Thank God he couldn’t sack me, as mine was the only recognizable name in the film and sadly its only selling point. But the film had holes, didn’t add up; it was stuck between two stools. Grudgingly, the producer agreed to the five more filming days. And this is how I ended up with my filming break and exactly the number of filming days we shook hands on initially. To put me in my place the producer insisted I storyboard all the remaining scenes, which I did, as a gesture of good will.
The break lasted as long as the snow. Which was much longer than expected. It turned to be the winter of the century in Poland. This gave young Agata the chance to go back to uni and catch up on her courses, and me the chance to write out the new scenes properly and find the new locations.
CLIP: The band strikes up “VENTI QUATTRO MILLE BACI” in the hotel restaurant.
Wanda makes out with some man. Wanda comes back to the room, the two women quarrel and fight over the Bible, Ida goes downstairs, hears Coltrane, chats to the saxophonist on the window sill. Scenes such as these replaced a whole sequence of events that didn’t work. In the financier script there’d been so many events crammed into a single night and so much exposition that the scenes cancelled each other out and all psychological truth and poetry went out of the window.
No amount of emoting or jerky camera-work could have covered the faulty stitching. As far as I remember, the financier script went as follows here: the two women go down to the restaurant. Wanda makes some lewd comments to Ida and goes to chat up a man. Ida sits and watches. The saxophonist joins her at the table. They chat about something or other and get attracted. Wanda dances with another man. The saxophonist goes back on stage. The ill-fated Marek, the carrier of the bad news, approaches Ida to tell her about her aunt’s Stalinist crimes. Ida is shocked to hear this and leaves the dance.
Back in the room, later, the women quarrel about Wanda’s crimes and their different belief systems. Ida packs her suitcase and wants to leave, but the old man Szymon, the supposed murderer they were looking for, turns up and interrupts their quarrel. He admits his guilt and asks for forgiveness.
Wanda collapses and this way Ida finds out about Wanda’s personal tragedy and her murdered son. Ida feels pity for Wanda and forgives her, comforts her. Then she goes to chat a little more with the saxophonist about something or other, before the two women set off in their car again to seek out Szymon’s son, Felix, in order to force him to reveal where the corpses were buried. All this happens on one night and morning. It was roughly a third of the film and I didn’t believe any of it.
There was no way of making this work. So what I did was this: I made Wanda reveal her Stalinist past in a completely new scene, which I put much earlier during their journey. And I spaced the events in the hotel over two nights, freeing space for the scenes to breathe and for each beat to play out in its own rhythm. Rather than having the supposed murderer Szymon turn up at the hotel conveniently, like some character out of Dostoevsky, I turned him into a pitiable old man on his death-bed and made the two heroines visit him in a hospital.
Clip: Hospital. Ida and Wanda visit Szymon.
Then I invented a whole string of new scenes, which were about rhythm, image and emotion, rather than information, plot and emoting. Among other things, I needed a scene that would bring the two women together in a single gesture or action. Ideally, something wild and transgressive.
They had a lot of anger and pent up aggression they didn’t know what to do with. So let me end with this sacrilegious scene, where a desperate Marxist and a catholic nun break into a deserted Jewish cemetery to bury the bones of their relatives in a derelict family grave. Jewish cemetery. Ida and Wanda digging like crazy. They drive in silence in Wanda’s car.
[ends]
