I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the transformation of real places into emotional landscapes within film, using repetition of locations to enhance the storytelling.
Pawel Pawlikowski discusses his artistic approach to filmmaking, where he aims to evoke specific mental states through the use of recurring locations. He believes that by stylizing these landscapes within the context of subjective storytelling, the films gain a mythic quality, allowing viewers to connect more deeply with the characters' experiences.
In practice
A filmmaker could use this quote when discussing their artistic choices at a film festival.
Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don't have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.
The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.
In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
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