Krzysztof Kieslowski Overview

Kieślowski remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works included in the study of film classes at universities throughout the world. The 1993 book Kieślowski on Kieślowski describes his life and work in his own words, based on interviews by... [more]

Kieślowski remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works included in the study of film classes at universities throughout the world. The 1993 book Kieślowski on Kieślowski describes his life and work in his own words, based on interviews by Danusia Stok. He is also the subject of a biographical film, Krzysztof Kieślowski: I'm So-So (1995), directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki. After Kieślowski's death, Harvey Weinstein (then head of Miramax Films, which distributed the last four Kieślowski films in the US) wrote a eulogy for him in Premiere magazine. In it he said that Quentin Tarantino saw The Double Life of Véronique at the Cannes Film Festival and took note of its star, Irène Jacob. He apparently wrote the part of Bruce Willis's wife in Pulp Fiction for her, but she was unavailable for the shoot. She was working on Kieślowski's Three Colors: Red at the time. According to the same article, Tarantino saw Red at Cannes and declared that it would win the Palme d'Or.[1] Instead his own Pulp Fiction received the top prize at the festival. Though he had claimed to be retiring after Three Colors, at the time of his death Kieślowski was working on a new trilogy co-written with Piesiewicz, consisting of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy. As was originally intended for the Decalogue, the scripts were ostensibly intended to be given to other directors for filming, but Kieślowski's untimely death means it is unknown whether he might have broken his self-imposed retirement to direct the trilogy himself. The only completed screenplay, Heaven, was filmed by Tom Tykwer and released in 2002 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other two scripts existed only as thirty-page treatments at the time of Kieślowski's death; Piesiewicz has since completed these screenplays, with Hell — directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanović and starring Emmanuelle Béart — released in 2005, and the third part released as Nadzieja in 2007. The Polish actor-director Jerzy Stuhr, who starred in several Kieślowski films and co-wrote the script for Camera Buff, filmed his own adaptation of an unfilmed Kieślowski script as Big Animal (Duże zwierzę) in 2000. Kieślowski said the following in an interview: It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word 'love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or 'fear', or 'suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.[2] Stanley Kubrick wrote the foreword to Kieślowski & Piesiewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, London: Faber & Faber, 1991: “ I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart. Stanley Kubrick January 1991 [1] [show less]