Andrzej Wajda Quotations

There is no filmmaking legislation because distributors are not interested in sharing their money with the film industry - for instance, by giving a percentage of ticket sales back to filmmakers.

When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it.

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

One might have thought that the most significant change in the film industry that would come about with a transition from the communist economy to capitalism would fundamentally concern the sources of funding.

As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.

Cinemas gained new young audiences who wanted films made for them.

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.

Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.

Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.

On the one hand, we had great filmic spectacles that brought in big audiences, adults as well as primary and secondary school students. On the other hand, there were attempts to create contemporary Polish film.

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking.

Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.

However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared.

Television theatre, as is implied in its name, should rely on adaptations of scripts written for the theatre.

In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries.

On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.

At the same time, television theatre became more visibly active.

Even better, there were established two separate committees deciding on state film funding.

Films made in the spirit of the past continued to be made.

It turned out that the country was helpless in the face of a new reality.

It was progressively more difficult to find work in the theatre, as well.

Eventually, the state's funding covered only the stages leading to presenting a film project to potential funding bodies. It was enough to produce a script, indicate casting and put together a budget to present it all, but nothing beyond that.

In the first years after the systemic transition, our screens showed American entertainment that had not been available before, or had been available only sporadically.

Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.

I think that adult Polish audiences, while observing what was happening in Poland, started to give in to a particular kind of anxiety.

In Europe, there is no television filmmaking legislation that could assist film production because private broadcasters are not interested in supporting Polish film.

A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.

By dint of that concern and because that society was willing to examine its particular reality, Solidarity could come into existence.

Previously the same Polish audiences would have been pressured into seeing cinema made for adults, films made by us about those spheres of life that were significant for us and which should be significant for our society.

With it adult political audiences abandoned cinemas. In their place appeared a void. That previous political audience migrated to the seats in front of their TV.

We knew from the very beginning that this was a Soviet crime. There were letters (from the detention camp) that people received, including from my own father. All of a sudden the letters stopped coming. We were aware that something happened in the spring of 1940. There was no doubt.

Young directors had no choice but to throw themselves into writing scripts. That did not have a positive effect on the quality of Polish cinema.

In the first years after 1989, films were partly financed from the state's budget as well as by public television. Still, except for a few special cases, most films are made this way.

A great artist has died, a man with the hallmarks of a genius.