I’m an anti-communist – Ryszard Bugajski

Tuesday, 04 August 2009 00:00

Maciek Drobina, our journalist from ‘TWO RIVERSIDES Voice’, was impressed by Ryszard Bugajski. After one of the festival screenings he talked the director into an interview.

Maciej Drobina: Your book about events accompanying the making of ‘Interrogation’ will soon be published. What will we learn from it?
Ryszard Bugajski: I started from questions asked by the audience. The younger ones usually ask me how it was possible to make an anti-communist movie during the Communism. I explain them how we organized our film crews then, how the process of scripts approval ran. In case of this particular film it was much more complicated. I wanted to show how I came up with some of the ideas, why I chose this subject at all. After the meetings in “Charlie” Cinema in Łódź and discussions with the audience, it took me 1,5 month to write the book. I had almost the whole plot in my mind. Why did I make it, and not one of my colleagues? I guess that was in my genes. I was essentially the worst anti-communist of my time. I was fighting with that system. I was explicit about what I am: “I’m an anti-communist, I don’t want that, I think the whole martial law was a crime”. I thought about the history of my family. One of my mother’s great grandfathers and grandfather fought during the November Uprising in 1831. The first one was sent to Siberia, the other lost his arm. My father’s grandfather was a member of the Polish Socialist Party and together with Józef Piłsudski they blew up trains. My father was in PSP since childhood and was awarded the Gold Cross of the Virtuti Militari for defending Warsaw in 1939. He was decorated twice with Cross of Valour for fighting during the Warsaw Uprising. Such fights were deeply rooted in my family. The courage to oppose. Others were leading a quiet life, calmly ate or baked their bread, which was also very important. But my family was always fighting with something. And I inherited it. Fortunately I didn’t have to rise up in arms.
MD: After ‘Interrogation’ you couldn’t work as a film director in Poland so you emigrated to Canada, where you began to direct TV series. After you came back, you were engaged in some projects of this kind here. What is your opinion about Polish TV series? Will they ever reach the level of their American counterpart?
RB: The fact is that you won’t do anything decent in the cinema or theatre without money. Some people are really surprised when they hear that it costs 5 or 6 million zlotys to make a feature film in Poland. It’s even more expensive in America. TV series are made on a grand scale, like feature films. They don’t limit the expenditures only because they are making it for television. I had a chance to take part in the making of such series like “Alfred Hitchcock presents” or The Twilight Zone”. It was an honor for me, to work with a professional crew and create few episodes, it was like receiving accolade. Another difference is that in Poland we don’t have something like ‘mini series’, i.e. series with a definite number of episodes. There are plenty of them in American TV. Let’s take the American Civil War as an example. They would plan it for 30 episodes, with a beginning and an end. There would be a straight plot and characters that we would observe from episode to episode, and there would be the end. In Poland we like making endless ‘cestodes’. It spoils the dramaturgy. At some point even the people who write them have problems with finding new threads. They can’t just kill the character, who still has something to do, and they can’t disappoint viewers. It’s just killing the point. I don’t like it and I won’t take part in it. Once I managed to produce a ‘mini-series’ in Poland. I was the director and co-scriptwriter of ‘Yes or No’, a crime drama television series with Bogusław Linda and Krzysztof Kolberger. … I also did some of the first episodes of “On Wspólna Street”, but I quitted because it’s not the same as working on a feature film. The producers expect the director to work on the surface, and not care about the quality. When I say: This scene is not lit enough, I want to change the location, we have to work on it, they say: No, no, no, we don’t have time for this, let it be this way. And I just can’t agree on that. Of course even in America a producer is more important than a film director, but still he is not a hyena that grabs at everything, just to make any film. They care about quality. Well, it’s clear that if a director doesn’t agree with the producer’s concept, he can be fired. But if he does it in order to make the film more valuable, then he is respected. It’s not the same in Poland. If you work fast and don’t offend the stars, the producer is happy.
MD: The motto of the festival is ‘The world’s gone crazy’. Why is that?
RB: We can’t assume it’s gone crazy. It has always been crazy. Think of the Medieval times, a mad phenomena in the history of mankind. It doesn’t seem crazier than it was 20 years ago. Some things have become even more normal. Think of the paranoia called People's Republic of Poland. Everyone was exposed to the pressure of the government, censorship, and was wondering: why is it so? Can’t it be like in any normal country? We can say that it has become normal. Such negative events happened and will always happen. That’s just human nature. Marx thought that human nature can be changed and this is how the Communism started. Of course it’s against human nature and they knew that it had to be changed to build the Communist world. That’s why they created the Cheka, NKWD and KGB, where human nature was changed in the camps in the Kolyma region or while uprooting trees in the Arctic Circle. But, as it occurred, it didn’t bring any permanent effects. So we can say human nature is unchangeable. We are built in such way, we have certain features, we have undergone evolution of some kind, but that’s all. The communist system cannot be imposed on us.
Prepared by Maciej Drobina

The book about the making of ‘Interrogation’ will be available in bookstores next year

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