6 Filmmaking Tips from Pawel

Pawlikowski
https://filmschoolrejects.com/filmmaking-tips-pawel-pawlikowski/

Oscar-nominated director Pawel Pawlikowski’s thoughts on choosing projects,

the limits of a screenplay, and why you should never explain your film.

The Polish-born filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski left his home country for the UK as a
teenager, ultimately attending Oxford University to study literature and philosophy. In
the 1980s he started dabbling in documentaries, and in 1998 he transitioned to fiction
with the 50-minute Twockers. After putting several thought-provoking films through
the festival circuit including My Summer of Love (2004) and The Woman in the Fifth
(2011), it was Pawlikowski’s first Polish film, Ida (2013), that made him a major name
in the international film scene. It took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Langauge Film,
the first Polish film to do so. He returned to Poland for his next film, Cold War (2018), a
decades-spanning tumultuous romance between two musicians, received three Oscar
nominations. Pawlikowski took a winding road toward becoming a filmmaker, and he
learned plenty along the way. Here are six of his best filmmaking tips:

Be Flexible with Your Screenplay

When it comes to screenplays, Pawlikowski is arguably a financier’s worst nightmare.
His scripts are minimalist, and the director considers significant rewrites and
modifications throughout filming a standard part of his process. He does what he has
to in order to get financing—for instance, putting together a 64-page script for Ida that
“dotted the Is and crossed the Ts”—but, as far as he’s concerned, the standard
detailed screenplay is more of a hoop to jump through than anything. It’s best, he told
The Guardian in a November 2014 interview, not to take a script too seriously:

“A script can be a useful thing, of course. It gives you the general idea; an
approximation of the structure; maybe even some good scenes and usable dialogue.
But God forbid taking it too seriously and trying to shoot it as written. I’d much rather
work from a 25-page outline that doesn’t narrow down the possibilities or lock you
into a self-serving filming schedule. As far as I’m concerned, all you really need is a
story, with two or three interesting characters, interestingly entangled in an interesting
space. You also need some transcendent idea, emotion or urge to carry you through
the whole process. The reason why you are doing it in the first place.”

Filmmaking is a Sculpting Process

Okay. So don’t lock yourself into sticking with the script. So what should you do
instead? What happens next? More or less continuing on from the last featured quote,
Pawlikowski detailed how he lets his films evolve naturally over time when speaking at
the 92Y community center in New York City in 2014:

“A lot of stuff comes out in the process when you’re [making a film], when you expose
yourself to the reality of the film, to the actors—and even looking for actors makes you
realize stuff that you didn’t quite think of when writing—, looking for locations […]
driving around looking for locations makes you relive your film differently, things that
occur to you while you’re preparing, it all impacts on the film. Even rehearsals are a
kind of thinking time and shaping time.

You can watch the entire interview below (quote begins at 9:35):

Audiences Don’t Need to Understand to be Compelled

Pawlikowski’s two most recent films, Ida and Cold War, have both been period pieces.
However, as the filmmaker told the Museum of the Moving Image publication Reverse
Shot in a February 2015 interview, a historical setting doesn’t mean you should turn
your film into a history lesson:

“Very often when you make a film about history, a lot of the dialogue, or scenes even,
are devoted to explaining to audiences that haven’t got a clue about history. And I
didn’t want to do that. This is the historical moment, these are the characters, a lot is
touched upon, and if you make sense of it, great, and if you don’t make sense of it, it
still kind of works in a universal way. I’m not going to try to explain, because there’s no
one explanation of history anyway, and it’s not the job of cinema to explain. Cinema is
some kind of magical exercise that creates a world and draws the audience in, and
they have to experience something emotionally, rather than something for journalists
to discuss.”

Consider Academy Ratio

In addition to being in black-and-white, both Ida and Cold War are notable for using
Academy ratio instead of a widescreen format. While the former standard has largely
fallen out of fashion, Pawlikowski made a good case for bringing it back when doing a
Q&A at the Hammer Museum in December 2018:

“But what it helps me [do], already in Ida and here, is to limit the field of vision, to
guide exactly where the viewer is looking, and to work by not showing too much, by
suggesting what’s out of frame. […] It’s a great format for portraits and double
portraits. It gives me more control over what I show. What we lose on the sides very
often we compensate in depth.”

You can watch the full Q&A below (the quote begins at 13:27):

Explanations Kill The Poetry

Pawlikowski’s latest film Cold War depicts the mercurial love of Wiktor (Tomasz Kot)
and Zula (Joanna Kulig) over 15 years and several countries, depicting the evolution of
their relationship in vignettes separated by cuts to black. Inspired by the story of his
own parents, the filmmaker explained to RogerEbert.com in December 2018 why he
very consciously chose a more fragmented narrative style, and in doing so also gave
some useful advice:

“I wasn’t going to make a biopic-type of film where you show how A leads to B leads to
C and so on. The whole ’cause and effect’ structure in biopics that span a long period
of time is incredibly irritating to me. It seems to suggest that everything in the subject’s
life has a clear cause and consequence, when in fact there are so many different
causes and consequences that I’d rather just show the tableau through these chunks of
time and not explain exactly how we got from here to there. Most people can imagine
it for themselves, and if I begin to explain what is left unseen, it would reduce
everything. When you start explaining a film, you kill all the poetry, so never explain.
Never apologize.”

Get Pulled into a (Psychological) Current

One of the most fundamental filmmaking questions of all is why, as in, why make a
film? How should a filmmaker pick the project to which he or she will be dedicating all
their time and energy? Pawlikowski addressed a guiding principle of his selection
process in a December 2018 interview with Vulture that also doubles as good advice
for any other filmmaker pondering the same question:

“When you’re directing, half the time you’re depressed and just trying to make this
work in spite of practical issues that keep cropping up. But I need to know that I’m
carried by some greater current, something to do with what I know or feel about the
world. You’re giving over three years of your life, so there better be a current taking
you somewhere. Filmmaking is not like engineering or plumbing. It’s not industrial. It’s
psychological.”

What We Learned
Pawel Pawlikowski did not take the usual film school path to end up behind the
camera, and in many regards, he’s not a usual filmmaker. He knowingly makes creative
choices that alienate potential viewers. As he mentioned in the February 2015 Reverse
Shot interview referenced earlier in this piece, “I don’t try to seduce the audience too
much, so you know you’re going to lose a lot of them. But those who stay might
benefit, or like it more.” Considering how Pawlikowski’s reputation as a filmmaker has
only grown with the release of Cold War, this gambit seems to have worked out
remarkably well, illustrating what might perhaps be the key lesson that ties together
all of the featured filmmaking tips: being successful does not have to mean drawing
the biggest crowd. No matter how many viewers you lose, so long as “those who stay”
are fans, you can go to some pretty great places.