Paweł Pawlikowski: "The story of my parents has been the matrix of all my stories" | Movie

IIn retrospect, the steps that brought Paweł Pawlikowski back to his homeland, Warsaw, seven years ago, look like a destiny. He had been uprooted from his hometown at age 14 in 1971, when his parents had divorced and his mother had suddenly married an Englishman, dragging Pawlikowski undocumented to London. Although he returned to Poland to visit his family during the years of solidarity and after the fall of the wall, the idea of ​​living near the home of his childhood was a surprise.

Shortly after his 2004 film My summer of love Won the Bafta Award for Best British Film, Pawlikowski experienced a tragedy with the sudden death of his Russian wife. He moved away from the cinema for five years to devote himself to visiting their two teenage children at school in Oxford. He then moved to Paris for a few years, where he worked Wife in the fifth, a story of anxious and sometimes impenetrable obsession with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. "I wanted to make a commercial film and it has become one of the least commercial movies that you can imagine," he says now with a smile. He felt a stranger in Paris, still defeated by grief and all that was happening in the film. "It has become very personal strangely."

Pawlikowski's reaction to this experience was to return home, "on a solid foundation"; but when he thought about it, he discovered that it was Poland and not England. He spent several months driving from a friend's house near his old home in Warsaw, which had not changed much since his childhood. The result of these trips to the interior is one of the most singular and touching films of recent years.

The first, IdaThe story of a young novice Polish nun who uncovered the tragic secrets of her Jewish past earned Pawlikowski the prize of the Academy of Best Foreign Language Film in 2015. The second , Cold War, which partly reflects the tumultuous marriage of his parents, was again selected this year in the category of Oscars, while Pawlikowski is among the nominees for the best director (a distinction he also received for the Cannes film). He is nominated in the same categories – foreign language film and director – at this year's Baftas as well, where Cold War is also in place for the best scenario.

The recognition was unexpected, he says. He did Ida to get as far away as possible from Hollywood and this world carpeted with red carpet. "Back in Poland, no stars, no expectations and a landscape that was really important to me," he says.

I met him at the end of last month during a one – night stay in London, where he was attending another awards ceremony, the Critics Circle Awards. It's an immediately engaging, thoughtfully confessional presence, dressed in black, with a big smile.

We first talked about the means by which he had returned to Poland had released him to carry out the films that he had always wanted to do (when he came to London he found his "homeland" cinematographic "in Italian neo-realist films and the French new wave). The return to Central Europe clarified this. "When I returned to Poland, I was able to tell stories in which history has a real impact on what people do," he says. "It's something I never thought I could do in England. In the UK, the story is so diffuse and people are living so different experiences. "

Pawlikowski's first documentary films – which saw him making a fantastic trip to the Volga with the thirsty Russian novelist Victor Erofeyev, as well as exploring the historical forces that led to the siege of Sarajevo – represented a different response to this. Past: "My real interest was what the Cold War left behind us. The ruins of Marxism. "With Ida, so what Cold Warhe followed these currents to the source.

It seemed logical to him to film this world as he remembered and imagined it, in black and white. He now sees that part of his motivation was to give life to family photo albums that he carries with him wherever he lives. Images containing "worlds with very few objects; two, three things that suggest a lot of things. "

The previous evening, he spoke with Pedro Almodóvar at the awards ceremony. The Spanish director had explained how, in his childhood, his mother was always dressed in black and his world of La Mancha always monochrome. The explosion of garish colors in his film was his reaction to that. "While at home," says Pawlikowski, "I was separated from this black and white world, so I guess I wanted to come back to it."

For "about half a day," he thought of doing Cold War in colour. Because the film presents one of the folk dance groups that were used as communist propaganda by the communists, he thought about filming in this faded technique of the Soviets, but it soon seemed too artificial.

Pawlikowski's mother, Zula, was a ballerina and had some history with these fake folk groups that were a feature of the television and radio of her youth. This memory allowed him to remember the marriage of his parents. The other was a forced exile that his father, Wiktor, doctor, endured for a time after crossing the border from East Germany.

This is by no means a blow-by-blow of their true story. "There has always been drama," says Pawlikowski, an only child. "Mother is gone. So the father left the country. And then my mother took me to meet an English guy whom she had met; I never knew we were staying abroad for good. Then they both left the people they had married, met and resumed living together in Germany. Then, from the mid-80s, they were both very sick and they became that very beautiful couple in love, which made no sense to anyone who had seen the previous 35 years. They were tender, and they knew that they did not have anyone else for each other.

Where is it housed?

"Child, I was perhaps a subject of contention. At the same time, in socialist Poland, you had a street life, I had a group of friends, a group. To come here without speaking a word of English was the real trauma.

Zula and Wiktor "put an end to themselves" in a pact signed in 1989, just before the fall of the wall. Zula had a scoliosis and three operations went wrong. Wiktor had three heart attacks and smoked and drank all the same. "So they peacefully took their leave," says Pawlikowski.

He did not know they would follow this plan, which left him a huge gap, which he partly filled with his film. "We were a trio," he says. "I had not thought about it for a long time as a story as such. But then I realized in my work that this kind of love stories always attracted me. I was offered the chance to make a movie about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at one point and I was very tempted for a while. And I realized that my parents' story was the matrix of all my stories. "

The music becomes the soundtrack of their fight. Folk music is counterbalanced by jazz, which became rebellious music in Poland after Stalinism. Pawlikowski's camera is fascinated by this contrast. "I went to see concerts of this surviving folk ensemble. Which was strange but really exciting. I loved watching backstage. Cloakrooms, everyone rushes. All fake but also no forgery of any kind. "

His two films touched nerves in Poland. The far-right Catholic far right has been trying to get Ida prohibited or disqualified prices due to perceived "anti-Polish" feeling. Pawlikowski was blinded by the intensity of this reaction. "Every prize won made them more angry," he says.

In fact, the film can not be more nuanced in its treatment of the complexity of the history of his country. Pawlikowski is pathologically opposed to didactics: "But the problem is that when you deal with humans and you do not do politics in the foreground, maybe politics gets stronger."

The reaction to Ida has not prevented nearly a million people from seeing Cold War in cinemas in Poland since it opened in June. Although Zula's affair with Wiktor has explored some of the extremes of their historical and political moment, "everyone can identify with a fragment of this story," he suggests.

And what would his parents have done?

"I think they would have liked it," he says. "It's short and it's witty here and there. And they ended up looking pretty glamorous. "