Jakub Wenda on his film Honeymoon

Festival Newspaper Published on 21.09.2026

In my films, I often return to the theme of people who are close to one another. I suppose it’s because, when I was younger, I wanted to have that sort of relationship with someone myself. Someone with whom you could do anything, tell each other everything, and simply always be together. When I needed it most, I didn’t have that person. Perhaps that’s why it’s stayed with me to this day, and why I like to seek out such relationships in cinema. In Honeymoon, I wanted to explore this kind of closeness between a mother and son for the first time.

Marina gave birth to Hubert when she was fifteen, so in a way they grew up together. They’re family, but they’re also best friends. They share inside jokes, they mess about, and they listen to the same music. I wanted it to be clear that they really enjoy being together.

I thought a lot about my mum whilst I was writing this. We had a turbulent relationship, especially when I was younger. I used to say some really awful things to her; I made her cry many times. Back then, I thought I was in the right. Today, I regret many of those things. The longer I wrote about those two, the more I found myself thinking about us, too.

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I didn’t want to see Marina and Hubert as a problem to be solved. They do a lot of good for each other, they mean a lot to each other and they truly love one another. They’re just a bit too close for comfort.

At first, Hubert was supposed to be the film’s main character. I felt closer to him. It was easier for me to understand his selfishness, his dreams and his fear of rejection. Even when he insults Marina and says horrible things to her, he’s actually trying to say something completely different. He doesn’t know how to ask her not to leave him. So he does it in the worst possible way.

I struggled with Marina for quite a while. I was a bit daunted by the prospect of writing her. I could picture Hubert from the inside, but for a long time I think I saw Marina more through her son’s eyes than as a person in her own right. At one point, I realised that she had much more to lose in this story. And that’s when I thought: can a mother abandon her child?
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From that moment on, Marina took more and more control of the film. I wondered whether dreams, selfishness and everything else one experiences during adolescence really do disappear simply because a child comes along. I was interested in how much of that fifteen-year-old girl remained in Marina a dozen or so years later. And whether she still had the right to want something for herself.

Whenever I thought of her, I always had it in the back of my mind that she was terribly afraid of being left alone. People in her life came and went, but Hubert was the only one who was always there for her. And I suppose she brought him up in such a way that he would never leave her.

Quite a few things that eventually ended up with Marina originally belonged to Hubert. In the early drafts, he was a completely different sort of lad. He loved Lana Del Rey, wore crop tops, and his biggest dream was to go to the States to see her in concert. Later, I watched Sean Baker’s Tangerine and thought that perhaps Marina should embody more of that energy. She doesn’t have to be a serious, world-weary mother. She can enjoy having fun, like being admired, be a bit immature at times, and still have desires.
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When I’m working on a film, I always put together a playlist of songs that capture its vibe. The idea for this film came to me along with John Maus’s song ‘Hey Moon’. I came up with a scene where Hubert sings it to Marina at karaoke. For a long time, that was the heart of the film for me. It’s actually the same with every project I do. There’s always one scene I keep wanting to come back to, and it’s the one that keeps me writing.

So for a long time, the film was called hey moon!. With each subsequent draft, however, it became clear that there was less and less room for the karaoke scene, until eventually I had to remove it from the script. And that’s when ‘hey moon!’ stopped making sense. Along the way, the Lana Del Rey storyline also disappeared from the film. I was a bit sorry about that, because I listen to Lana non-stop. I suppose I couldn’t quite bring myself to cut her out of the film completely. That’s why Marina has ‘Stargirl’ tattooed on her.

Once I realised that hey moon! wasn’t going to work, I thought to myself that it does sound a bit like ‘Honeymoon’. And one of Lana’s albums is called ‘Honeymoon’. At first I liked it as a casual reference, but I soon realised that this title suits Marina much better too. On the one hand, she’s getting ready for her honeymoon with Dave and a new life in the States. On the other, she gets one day with Hubert and, somewhat unwittingly, ends up spending her honeymoon with him.