Krzysztof Kieślowski QUOTES

1 " Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

2 " [on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

3 " Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

4 " We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

5 " Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

6 " You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

7 " But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

8 " It's an obsession of mine, that different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing, but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

9 " I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn't really know why they were living. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

10 " In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

11 " That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

12 " Do you think Western Civilization has come to an end?
"We are clearly going through a cultural crisis at the moment. It's a phase where we are trying to distinguish values of life. People are looking for a solution and perhaps they will find it. But the radicality of the search will change their view of life."
So there is a cultural crises?
"There is a general crisis, but it's not the end of the world.
But the crisis it total?
"And so what? The crisis means that now the world is at the bottom of a sinus curve. In the nature of things, it will now rise and fall again later. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

13 " 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. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

14 " I don’t like myself very much, so i try not to observe myself too often. I made a documentary once entitled Talking Heads. I asked people two questions: “Who are you” and “What do you want?” Afterwards, I asked myself those questions. I realized that I didn’t have any answers. I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know what I want. If anything, I’d like some peace and quiet, but I’ve never achieved it, and I probably never will. So I will never have what I really want. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

15 " Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

16 " I'm not really sure who I am but I love reading books. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski

17 " This, among other things, is where the magic of the screen lies: that suddenly, as an audience, you find yourself in a state of tension because you're in a world shown to you by the director. That world is so coherent, so comprehensive, so succinct that you're transported into it and experience tension because you sense the tension between the characters. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

18 " Ale tak naprawdę robię filmy, bo nie umiem nic innego. To był zły wybór, którego kiedyś dokonałem. Wtedy prawdopodobnie nie mógł być inny. Dzisiaj wiem, że był zły. To jest zawód, który jest bardzo trudny. Jest bardzo stresujący, bardzo męczący a daje nieproporcjonalnie mało satysfakcji w stosunku do tego wysiłku, który mu się poświęca. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Autobiografia

19 " I'm not someone who remembers dreams for long. I forget them as soon as I wake up- if I've had any, that is. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

20 " The children would beat me up, that's true. Or rather, they wanted to beat me up, but somehow or other I usually managed to escape. "

― Krzysztof Kieślowski , Kieslowski on Kieslowski

1
2