Krzysztof Kieslowski.

If I Have a Goal, Then It Is to Escape from This Literalism. I’ll Never Achieve It; in the Same Way That I’ll Never Manage to Describe What Really Dwells Within My Character, Although I Keep on Trying.

What Do I Want? Calmness. You Can Only Aspire to It. the Path Is Interesting. Who Am I? a Retired Film Director. That’s the Truth Now.

Different People in Different Parts of the World Can Be Thinking the Same Thoughts at the Same Time. 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.

I Like Chance Meetings – Life Is Full of Them. Every Day, Without Realising It, I Pass People Whom I Should Know. at This Moment, in This Café, We’re Sitting Next to Strangers. Everyone Will Get Up, Leave, and Go on Their Own Way. and They’ll Never Meet Again. and If They Do, They Won’t Realise That It’s Not for the First Time.

I Was Happy When I Got in to Film School. I’d Simply Satisfied My Ambition to Show Them That I Could Get in – Nothing Else – Although I Do Believe They Shouldn’t Have Accepted Me. I Was a Complete Idiot. I Can’t Understand Why They Took Me. Probably Because I’d Tried Three Times

Classes at the Lodz Film School Are Much Like Those at Any Other Film School. You Learn the History of Films, the History of Aesthetics, Photography, How to Work with Actors. You Learn Everything, One Step at a Time. of Course, You Can’t Learn Any of These Things from Theory Alone, Apart from the History. You Simply Have to Experience Them for Yourself. There’s No Other Way.

Nor Do I Think That There’s Anything Wrong in Stealing. If Somebody’s Gone That Way Before and It’s Proved to Be Good, Then You Have to Steal It Immediately. If I Steal from Good Films, and If This Later Becomes Part of My Own World, Then I Steal Without Qualms. This Often Happens Completely Without My Being Aware of It, but That Doesn’t Mean That I Don’t Do It – It Did Happen but It Wasn’t Calculated, or Premeditated. It’s Not Straight Plagiarism. to Put It Another Way, Films Are Simply Part of Our Lives. We Get up in the Morning, We Go to Work or We Don’t Got to Work. We Go to Sleep. We Make Love. We Hate. We Watch Films. We Talk to Our Friends, to Our Families. We Experience Our Children’s Problems or the Problems of Our Children’s Friends. and the Films Are There Somewhere, Too. They Also Stay Somewhere Within Us. They Become Part of Our Own Lives, of Our Own Inner Selves. They Stay with Us Just as Much as All Those Things Which Really Happened. I Don’t Think They’re Any Different from Real Events, Apart from the Fact That They’re Invented. but That Doesn’t Matter. They Stay with Us. I Steal Takes from Films, Scenes, or Solutions, Just as I Steal Stories and Afterwards I Can’t Even Remember Where I Stole Them From.

I Never Really Think Where I Put the Camera. It Comes Naturally to Me. I Don’t Analyze and I Don’t Contrive. If You Haven’t Got Your Own Compass Within Yourself Which Clearly Points You in a Certain Direction Then You Won’t Find It. and It Doesn’t Depend on Any Film School or Anything You Might Learn in a Film School.

Everyone Has Some Kind of Compass Inside Them. a Clock That Is Closely Connected with Their Instinct – Not so Much with Their Head. This Clock Tells Every Single Person What Is Allowed and What Is Not Allowed. When We Should Stop and When We Can Go On. We Have to Listen to It Unconditionally. If You Betray It, You Betray Yourself.