Biography

Teacher at the Directing Department at The Polish National Film School in Lódz, Poland.

You can divide directors into three essential categories: Those who whisper to their actors, those who talk to them, and those who scream at them. You can tell which method a director uses from the results he gets. Those who scream should not make films, period. I'm one of those who whisper.

I write my screenplays as novellas, paying attention to the text's literary quality. I set a quota of at least four pages a day. I always write at night, while chain-smoking. I have written all my screenplays on a typewriter.

When today we speak of directors like Quentin Tarantino whose form shocks us, we must remember that Godard did it all some fifty years earlier. He wasn't as bloody, but Tarantino pales next to the last few scenes of Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965).

When I write a screenplay, I never know how it will turn out. I often joke to my students that writing is literally a "pain in the butt". You must sit down for long enough to dig into your material.

All filmmakers end up channeling their fears. 8½ (1963) certainly contains Fellini's personal anxieties. So does Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), which poses an important question: to what extent we are all insane.