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.
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.
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 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.
'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.
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.
