Slawomir Idziak on Kieslowski and the documentary

from the Criterion DVD od Krystof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, cinematographer Slawomir Idziak on Kieslowski.


at 1:15 of the interview

...since he [Kieslowski] only made documentaries. He actually despised the world of feature films. He clearly stressed this point in all his early manifestos, that this was a world of artifice and deception, and that the true cinema was documentary film. He wrote a screenplay whose action took place in one night called Pedestrian Subway, about a girl who escapes from a small town and works as a window dresser. We were shooting by the book like a regular feature film, shot, countershot, master shot, etc. Film labs in Poland then functioned very poorly, so the rushes for the shoot, which took a week, arrived just a day before the end of filming. He completely broke up when he saw them, saying they were terrible. Then I suggested, "Let's do it the way documentaries are made. let's redo it from the beginning but without any setup. I'll just keep changing film cassettes and following the actors around, filming everything." Later, in the editing room, he didn't use the documentary version exclusively. He combined both versions and I think that was the beginning of transferring his documentary experience to a feature film and an attempt at his own language, his own way of expression