Quotes from Pawel Pawlikowski

'The Restraint of Beasts' is a painful subject. We'd shot 60% of the film when I had to stop. The material looks great, like nothing I've ever done or even seen before. It could have been really great, definitely original.

For me, actors have to have a character, an aura, body language. They're not models. They used to call actors models. But I want them to participate in the film.

The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.

I lived a pretty chaotic life. I went to England, and I moved around, and there were a lot of things that I was interested in. I wrote poetry. I took photographs. I was a musician and all sorts of things. Nothing brilliant, but I did all these different things.

When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

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.

The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.

'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal.

If you wanted to make a film about British teenagers, it would be... well, it wouldn't interest me; let's put it like that. They'd be listening to music I hate, watching TV all the time, and talking about 'Big Brother.'

I grew up cinematically in the '70s. I was watching a lot of Godard, Bresson, Dreyer, and all sorts of old films and the Czech New Wave.

I'm so happy when someone does something original, and there's no focus group or planning committee. If the cinema doesn't get an injection of that once in a while, we're in trouble.

I dread to be compared to all these directors who have a lot of spontaneous emoting and swearing in their films - that is death; it's a cul-de-sac. It doesn't lift the material at all. It's just a cliched reproduction of what we think is normal behaviour.

My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. 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.

To cast Ida, it took ages, and I was a bit desperate. I couldn't find somebody I could believe in. I spent months looking for the lead among young actresses and drama students.

For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like, 'How do I make this film?' That's part of the pleasure, and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

I don't know what directing actors is all about apart from just casting well and then shaping their performances a bit, you know.

We made a film about the need for silence and withdrawal... and here we are at the epicentre of noise and excitement. Life is full of surprises.

For me, filmmaking is not exactly a career. I was never in it for Hollywood or anything. My films are markers of where I am in life, where I am in my head. So that's what I'm working on, and I try to keep things in proportion - life and filmmaking. One feeds into the other.

It's wonderful that Poland is free again and there's open debate and people can pursue their interests. I'm all for it.

I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism. 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.

Every good film is a bit like a dream, when you come away from it. That's what you should aspire to, rather than some social document. I want to create a little world that will stay with the audience.

I don't think women are that vastly different from men. I'm a bit of a woman myself. But I'm not a feminist filmmaker. I'm not making a feminist thesis to prove that women are important. I just happen to make films with strong characters that are women.