I miss you, buddy

One bright summer morning...

solitude.
Bandstand, Bandra, Bombay in the last of the monsoon rain.

F

ilm-making doesn’t mean audiences, festivals, reviews, interviews. It means getting up every day at six o’clock in the morning. It means the cold, the rain. The mud and having to carry heavy lights. It’s a nerve-wracking biusiness, and, at a certain point, everything else has to come second, including your family, emotions, and private life. Of course, engineers, businessmen or bankers would say the same thing about their jobs. No doubt they’d be right, but I do my job and I’m writing about mine. Perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this job any more. I’m coming to the end of something essential to a film-maker – namely, patience. I’ve got no patience for actors, lighting cameramen, the weather, for waiting around, for the fact that nothing turns out how I’d like it to. At the same time, I mustn’t let it show. It takes a lot out of me, hiding my lack of patience from the crew. I think that the more sensitive ones know that I’m not happy with this aspect of my personality.

Film-making is the same all over the world: I’m given the corner of a small studio stage; there’s a stray sofa there, a table, a chair. In this make-believe interior, my instructions sound grotesque: Silence! Camera! Action! Once again I’m tortured by the thought that I’m doing an insignificant job. A few years ago, the French newspaper Liberation asked various directors why they made films. I answered at the time: ‘Because I don’t know how to do anything else.’ It was the shortest reply and maybe that’s why it got noticed. Or maybe because all of us film-makers with the faces we pull, with the money we spend on films and the amounts we earn, our pretensions to high society, so often have the feeling of how absurd our work is. I can understand Fellini and most of the others who build streets, houses and artificial seas in the middle of the studio: in this way not so many people get to see the shameful and insignificant job of directing.

As so often happens when filming, something occurs which – for a while at least – causes this feeling of idiocy to disappear. This time it’s four young French actresses. In a chance place, in inappropriate clothes, pretending that they’ve got props and partners, they act so beautifully that everything becomes real. They speak fragments of dialogue, they smile, they worry and at that moment I can understand what it’s all for.

-- Krzysztof Kieslowski