“Christ, are we in The Woman in the Fifth?” Paweł Pawlikowski asks, staring around. We are lost in a private member’s club in central London, striding up and down stairwells, through doors and down dead ends. He sighs. “I didn’t think this would happen again.”
The Polish director is joking about his last film, in which Ethan Hawke played an unstable writer adrift on the outskirts of Paris. “A solipsistic trip into madness,” Pawlikowski says, when we finally locate the bar. “I followed my nose into some kind of cul-de-sac and then I didn’t know how to get out. I think I had a midlife crisis.”
The Woman in the Fifth was, he admits, a commercial disaster. “By the time I finished the film,” he says, “I had changed it so much the producers didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t even know what game I was playing. And then I thought, ‘Why am I in Paris? I’m living among other people’s furniture. Everyone’s so well-dressed, so well-read, so well‑spoken, but it’s not my city. What am I doing?”
Pawlikowski says this with a self‑deprecating smile, a long arm cradling his coffee cup. He is best known for 2004’s Yorkshire-based romance My Summer of Love, which starred a then-unheard-of Emily Blunt. Yet he has been working for decades, his early career comprising a series of “oblique” BBC-funded documentaries like Serbian Epics, in which he travelled to Bosnia during the 1994 civil war to film Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader later accused of ordering the Srebrenica massacre, as he read garish poetry on the hills above the besieged shell of Sarajevo. His first feature, 2000’s The Last Resort, depicted a loose family of refugees scratching out an existence in the seaside town of Margate. Sandy Ezekiel, the local Tory councillor, denounced the film as “derogatory”.
Pawlikowski has a reputation for doing things his own way. “The script was bland, American money got involved, and I couldn’t control it, so I dropped out,” he says of the Sylvia Plath biopic he was at one point attached to. Yet he is warm, easy company, with a quick smile, a wry wit and an ability to speak, with slightly accented English, in perfect syntax. In 2006, while filming an adaptation of the Magnus Mills novel The Restraint of Beasts with Ben Whishaw and Rhys Ifans in the lead roles, his Russian wife fell suddenly ill. She died a few months later, a subject he refuses to talk about. He gave up the job, raised his children in his home in Oxford, and taught at the National film school.
When his kids left for university, Pawlikowski, unsure what to do with himself and in need of work, moved to Paris. “My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life,” he says of The Woman in the Fifth, pausing to sip his macchiato. “I thought at the time I was a normal director making a normal film. I turned it into a film about a lost guy in a weird city – and I was a lost guy in a weird city.”
Pawlikowski returned to London, where his son and daughter, now 23 and 21, were working and studying. “London’s a good place for the homeless,” he says. But he couldn’t settle, and realised it was time to return to the city of his birth. “I needed Warsaw,” he says, “because it’s so clearly shaped by history. In the west, people define themselves by these off-the-peg style choices, but Warsaw is not like that. It’s a place of simplicity and coherence. And that’s where I am in my life.”
Pawlikowski’s homecoming prompted something remarkable. He found a flat just a few streets from where he was born, and began to reconnect with his past. The result is Ida, a meditation on the makings of modern Poland that won best film at last year’s London film festival. Little in Pawlikowski’s career hinted at something so accomplished: Ida is now talked of as one of Poland’s cinematic masterpieces.
Shot in deep, glowing monochrome, with the camera completely still for all but two scenes, Ida is a study in expressive silence and composure. A young nun called Anna, clad in a habit, is called to see the mother superior, who tells her she must meet her only living relative, an aunt called Wanda. “Do I have to, Mother?” she asks. “You must stay there as long as is necessary,” she is told.
We are in the early 1960s and Poland is behind the iron curtain. Anna finds her aunt in Warsaw: when they meet, she is wearing a dressing gown, cigarette smoke curling from her fingers, a man getting dressed on her sofa. Almost before he is out the door, Wanda informs her niece that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, she is a Jew, and her parents left her at the convent in the hope she would survive the war. She hands Ida a picture of her mother holding her as a baby, then snatches it away. “Now we’ve had our little family reunion,” Wanda says. “I’m late.”
Wanda, we learn, is a Communist party member fallen from grace, a former believer who lost her faith and status. The two are opposites, yet they are bound by the need to be at peace with their family’s disappearance. It takes them into Poland’s forests – and its heart of darkness. Does the film relate to the experience of Pawlikowski’s family? “Everyone talks of it as being about Jewish-Polish relations,” he says. “I don’t want to step into that minefield. For me, the film is about what it is to be Polish.”
Pawlikowski was born in 1957 and lived in Warsaw until he was 14, when his mother, a ballerina, and father, a doctor, sought political asylum in the UK. Now 57, he is settled there with a community of film-making friends he refers to as his “tasters”. He namechecks Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard, but the film is as influenced by his own childhood memories of 1960s Warsaw, evoked by his family’s photo albums. “It’s a time I feel close to,” he says. “But it’s also a fascinating moment in our history. After the war, after Stalinism and the police state, came this sudden explosion of possibilities: literature, cinema and the most brilliant modern classical music. All this pent-up stuff just came bursting out.”
Pawlikowski has both Catholic and Jewish blood. “I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism,” he says. “I was baptised by my mother’s family, who were all traditional Catholics. But my mother was the black sheep of the family – she ran away to the ballet at 17.” He did not learn how he lost his grandmother until late in life. “My father’s mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz,” he says. “I only found out as an adult, because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms – partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn’t like being defined by other people. I don’t either.”
Has he ever visited Auschwitz? “I’ve been twice. At school then in the late 70s.” He pauses for the first time, his words faltering. “It punishes you,” he says. “But growing up in Warsaw, you grow up among tombs. There are plaques everywhere: 200 people were executed here, 30 people there. There were bulletholes in the courtyard I grew up in. 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. When people say the Poles connived with the Nazis – well, some did, some didn’t. Some people, quite a few, behaved atrociously. Others, quite a few, behaved with incredible courage. Most just tried to survive, the whole country was a victim.”
An important thing to remember, I suggest, with Nigel Farage vilifying Eastern Europeans. “Yes,” he says, “but in some ways that attitude is understandable. A single idea has been pushed for two decades: the total economy and these huge bureaucracies as the answer to everything. People are fearful of it. I’m fearful of it. There seems to be a huge vacuum of faith and ideas. That often means people retreat towards local certainties, simple certitudes.”
Is Ida a film of simple certitudes? He nods and smiles, a happier man in a city still freighted with sadness. “Maybe,” he says. “I started small and simple, then built up and up and up. I think it helped.”
• Ida is released in the UK on 26 September. Read Peter Bradshaw’s review
• This article was amended on 18 September. An earlier version said the film that Pawlikowski abandoned in 2006 was a biography of Stalin; in fact it was an adaptation of the Magnus Mills novel The Restraint of Beasts.
