Oscars 2015: Pawel Pawlikowski on Oscar winner Ida

The Oscar-winning director talks about his 'harmless arthouse film' that has caused a storm in Poland

Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska in 'Ida'
Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska in 'Ida' Credit: Photo: Everett Collection/REX

In this sterling year for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, you could have imagined the trophy going virtually any which way. State-of-a-nation statements abound, from the heavy-hitting Russian corruption parable Leviathan, to fragments of a broken Argentina in the episodic black comedy Wild Tales, to long-shot nominees from Mali (the wonderful Timbuktu) and Estonia (Tangerines).

But the winner at the 87th Academy Awards was rightfully Ida, a shivery reckoning with Poland’s past, about a young novitiate nun in the Sixties being forced unexpectly to confront her Jewish heritage and all that it means. One clue to this film’s front-runner status before the triumph was the fact that it was the only contender with a second nomination – for the eerie black-and-white cinematography, with its sculptural use of looming space in the frame. That award went to Birdman.

Among other secrets Ida’s director Pawel Pawlikowski has to impart, he confides that this strikingly original look was discovered through trial and error – with no “intellectual design”, as he puts it. “It started innocently, almost childishly.” Now hailed as a highly-wrought masterwork by critics globally, and an emotional wipeout for the audiences who’ve found it, Ida is a big deal for Polish-language cinema. A Polish film has never won the Oscar; this could, and should, be the film to clinch it.

How, then, did Ida become so bitterly controversial? Pawlikowski has been fending off attacks in Poland’s national press at the very moment when most countries would be poised to crack out the champagne.

Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski celebrates with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman after winning the Academy Award for foreign language film AP

His film has opened old wounds, with his critics accusing the director of blaming Poles for the genocide of their own people during the Second World War. No Germans appear in Ida - there are no flashbacks - and it’s never explicitly stated that Poland was under occupation by the Nazis during the war (a fact that might seem so screamingly obvious as to negate the need for its inclusion).

The Polish-British filmmaker, acclaimed on our shores for two Bafta-winning films, the immigrant drama Last Resort (2000) and class-conscious lesbian romance My Summer of Love (2004), returned to his homeland to shoot Ida. He had initially modest ambitions for the project. Tall, soft-spoken and a man of wiry intelligence, he claims the subsequent broadsides – mainly, if not exclusively, from Right-wing columnists calling the film a calumny on Poland’s national character – have been as unexpected as they are upsetting.

“It was a harmless little arthouse film when it first came out,” the 57-year-old explains. “It was only when it started winning awards – not just the Oscar nominations, but the European film awards, and then the Globe nomination – that it became a public phenomenon. Suddenly there was a spate of nasty articles, about how unpatriotic and disgraceful it was, and how it was designed for an Oscar. If there was one film that wasn’t designed for an Oscar, it was this one!”

Pawel Pawlikowski, whose 'Ida' won a nomination for the Best Foreign Film at the 2015 Oscars

The upsetter: Pawel Pawlikowski (Reuters/Gus Ruelas)

On top of the newspaper diatribes, a nationalist group calling itself the Polish Anti-Defamation League, founded in 2012, decided to launch a petition against the film, addressed to the Polish Film Institute, which partially funded it. Their argument, which has attracted upwards of 40,000 signatures, was that the film “failed to acknowledge the German occupation” and thereby put the blame for the Holocaust on Poles.

“In their head, the film has some kind of ideological intention,” Pawlikowski shrugs. “It’s very funny, the Polish name of the league [‘Reduta Dobrego Imienia’] – a very old-fashioned word, ‘reduta’, it’s like ‘redoubt’ or in French ‘redoubte’, like a defensive bulwark. So it hints at a state of siege, you know, which is so disproportionate to the film. Suddenly, Poland’s good name is under attack!”

The even-tempered Pawlikowski bristles, naturally, at seeing his film tossed about like a political hot potato, when he intended something cool and artful. What upsets his critics most is the pitting of the film's non-Jewish characters against its sympathetic Jewish heroines – the nun Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) and her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a former judge for the post-war Communist show trials, both of whom strike out into the countryside to investigate the fates of their shared family. These are Polish Jews. More importantly, they are rich, nuanced and complementary characters. They’re not symbolic victims or survivors. They’re people.

“For me, everybody in the film is Polish,” says Pawlikowski. “I wanted to cut across all the kind of sterile arguments that have been around. What cinema’s good for, what art is good for, is to be specific in order to be universal. And not to have another of these films that try to explain a version of history.”

I mention the controversies surrounding quite a few of this year’s Oscar nominees, from Selma to The Imitation Game and American Sniper, which have been picked apart for the bending of historical truths in one direction or another. He must be, and is, inclined to defend his film as a plausible fiction – against critiques like that of Richard Brody in the New Yorker, who has accused Ida of a “distasteful vagueness”, of trafficking in ciphers and thumbnail characterisation, of being “a history lesson in editorial form”.

“I tried to make characters who are not a replica of anyone who has existed,” Pawlikowski rebuts. “And not have them illustrate anything. I imagine they have a political point they’re trying to make. The kind of films I like show life in all its complexity, and steer clear of oversimplifications. In 2012, for instance, they made a film about Polish guilt, a film called Aftermath. For me it was just too on the nose.”

Does he think these criticisms in Poland come from a place of sincere grievance, or is it a case of opportunistically making hay with Ida now that everyone needs to have an opinion on it?

“The elections are approaching. At the moment, the right is not in power, but they are heating up the kind of patriotic nationalist arguments, against Europe, against openness to the world. The current government isn’t fantastic, but it’s a liberal government. A lot of heat is being created.”

In 2006, Pawlikowski’s Russian wife died after a sudden illness. He broke off production on The Restraint of Beasts, an adaptation of Magnus Mills’s Booker-shortlisted debut novel, to concentrate on raising two teenagers and teaching in Oxford. In the years since, he's admitted "a midlife crisis" saw him move to Paris, where he made his one botched film, the 2011 mystery-doodle The Woman in the Fifth, with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. Airless and compromised, it was a mess, but an understandable one.

Ida is a near-magical reboot of his artistic energy. Now that his son and daughter are in their twenties, he has moved back to Warsaw, where he has an honest and rather despairing view of Polish film culture. “There’s no widespread cinephilia left, you know. The last 25 years have not been good, Kieślowski aside. What’s been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what’s transcendent.”

He has a special genius for casting, especially finding new faces and propelling them into vital film work. Think of Dina Korzun, who played the Russian single mother seeking asylum in Last Resort, and also the breakthrough performances of Natalie Press and Emily Blunt in My Summer of Love. And now there’s the 22-year-old Trzebuchowska, who had no thespian training or ambitions whatsoever, but was merely spotted by a friend of Pawlikowski’s, reading in a Warsaw café. With her serene, sad beauty and air of mystery, she’s entirely perfect for the role.

Agata Trzebuchowska in the Oscar-nominated 'Ida'

Agata Trzebuchowska in the Oscar-nominated 'Ida' (AP Photo/Music Box Films)

“I don’t want to start work on the film unless I’m really hooked into the actor, and I totally believe, looking through the viewfinder, that this is the character I more or less imagined. It took months to cast young Agata. With 40-year-old actresses like older Agata, you kind of know who they are, but looking for young ones is a problem. I met hundreds and hundreds of contenders. Same with My Summer of Love, it took ages – we looked at professionals, non-professionals. In fact, the two actresses who came right after Emily Blunt, who were up for that part, one was Felicity Jones, who was great, but wasn’t quite Tamsin, and the other one was Rebecca Hall.”

Ida’s shoot was tightly scheduled, cash-strapped, and didn’t allow for the hiatus in production Pawlikowski usually likes two-thirds of the way in, to take stock. The weather came to his rescue instead. “Snow fell, much too early. It was a kind of disaster for the production, but great for me, because I went away and wrote some completely new scenes, rewrote some of the old ones, reshot a couple. It didn’t change what it was, but I was able to weed out all sorts of functional stuff. And to really hone in on this kind of lapidary but forward-moving approach. With the crew and actors, it became an ideal, documentary situation, in a way.

“With documentaries, what’s beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself. And I tried to do that with Ida. Each moment is unique, even though we had 27 takes sometimes. Massaging it, cutting stuff out, adding things, reframing it. I didn’t want people to watch it just as a story, but to hypnotise the audience, or rather to make them meditate the film – to imagine every moment as a kind of permanent present.”

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