Jan Bujnowski about his film Bad Ideas – Polish Film Festival

Bad Ideas was one of the shorts I did as a part of my PhD at Łódź Film School. The theoretical part of my dissertation is about new narrative structures in modern cinema of short films, so also in practice I try to experiment with this matter. With time, however, I have discovered that my favourite method of experimenting is, well, no method. It’s difficult to make assumptions and stick to them throughout the whole process. That’s why up to editing and sound mixing I allow myself changes, sometimes significantly impacting the sense of a film.

Bad Ideas was financed by Młoda Polska scholarship. Originally, the film was to be significantly more hermetic - all scenes were to be shot entirely from above. I was wondering if one could create an emotional process of a character in a dozen or so minutes without showing the character's face. The scholarship committee clearly found this interesting, since it granted us funds for this project. 

I soon began to have my doubts about this idea and, in the end, kept only a segment lasting a few minutes, supplementing the film with classic narrative scenes. I decided that I didn’t yet feel confident enough in the language of animation to take the plunge into such deep (or such shallow) waters. Did this work in the film’s favour? It’s hard to say. I reckon I’m somewhere in the middle. For viewers accustomed to traditional storytelling, Bad Ideas may be a bit off-putting, whilst for those who are well versed in international arthouse cinema, it may, in turn, not be radical enough.

The whole film was produced with Młoda Polska scholarship funds. 55.000 PLN gross may seem like a lot of money but at the same time it turns out to be barely enough to make this kind of film. The decision to shoot on positive film certainly didn’t make the budget any easier to manage. However, together with the cinematographer Ignacy Ciszewski, we wanted to see what could be achieved with this approach. If it’s an experiment, let’s make it a proper one.

We shot almost the entire film on the Łódź Film School set. We were able to work there without having to pay but we had to adjust to available dates - between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the beginning of January 2025. Thanks to this, we were able to celebrate the New Year’s Eve together, setting up scenography. It’s hard to imagine a better way for team integration.

As a director, I often get a feeling that I’m just a big boy playing a surreal game in which Lego, cars and figurines are replaced by actors, cameras and lighting gear. However, with this film the fun went a bit too far. At some point I realised that we have been shooting scraps of rugs and people in colourful sombreros on a green carpet for the whole day. Luckily, the crew was small so there weren’t many witnesses.

The real embarrassment came only during the editing. With every film I make, I understand more and more why I like working on film – there’s less of it, so you have to sit through your bad ideas for an hour rather than six. In this case, we had an additional thirty-minutes-long footage of rugs and sombreros, from which the editor Staszek Frankowski had to create animations.