The end of the American dream – an interview with Marcin Borchardt – Polish Film Festival

Did you notice in the footage that Piotr’s success was difficult for his father to cope with?

Yes, definitely. It’s very clear, for example in the scene you mentioned. It’s happening in front of the cameras, and yet it’s completely authentic. It’s a living record of life. For a documentary-maker, this is gold, because we’re dealing with a situation that’s completely unmediated by the camera. The camera was a natural part of this family’s everyday life.

Witek was undoubtedly a little jealous of his son’s successes, particularly when Piotr’s career really took off following his Oscar nomination. Suddenly, Hollywood threw its doors wide open to him. It was also a special moment in the history of cinema, in the early 1990s, when American cinema sought to incorporate a European artistic flair. Polish cinematographers working in Hollywood gave it that European cinematic flair, that artistic soul. The idea was to combine the power of Hollywood production with something decidedly artistic.

Did everyone want their own Janusz Kamiński, like Spielberg?

Yes. And in the very first scene of my film, we’re on Robert Benton’s set. It’s a very significant moment for many reasons. There are only very famous people there. There’s Benton, a three-time Oscar winner, but there’s also a producer who worked with Miloš Forman.

And he says about Piotr: ‘We like Piotr; it’s the first time he’s worked with him; he’s very nice, but slow.’ Situations like that kept my film moving forward.

Of course, I also wondered: what if? For Witek, America was almost a promised land. He loved absolutely everything about it. Piotrek is becoming increasingly despondent, whilst for Witek everything is brilliant.

So one can speculate on what might have happened if Witek Sobociński had ended up in Hollywood. I think that by the 1990s, it was simply impossible. He was getting on in years, and his career had taken a different path – a European one. It’s hard to say whether his extraordinary talent might have flourished even more there. Perhaps the clash with American production realities would have been brutal.

This is evident, incidentally, on the set of Jerzy Skolimowski’s film. Witek had worked with Skolimowski from the very beginning, and together they achieved many wonderful things. On the set of Spring Waters, however, a conflict arose between Witek and Nastassja Kinski. The conflict escalated to such an extent that the actress threatened to bring the production to a halt. Witek had to leave, and another cinematographer finished the film. This was, of course, also a problem on a personal level, affecting the friendship between the director and the cinematographer.

There are plenty of stories like this in the film, but they remain somewhere in the background. For me, this is material for a book, not for this cinematic narrative. I’m interested in the answer to the question: is this work worth such a sacrifice?

Interestingly, these home videos, created by some of the most outstanding cinematographers in the history of Polish cinema, are probably no different from the family videos that each of us has on VHS tapes.

Exactly! That was an absolutely astonishing discovery for me. They used the cameras exactly as any of us would have used them. They didn’t stage reality for the camera. They were simply recordings.

Nothing was staged for the camera, unless it was for fun or to try out amateur digital technology as a professional tool. Witek did this very often. He’d try using the camera, for example, just to see what he could do with it, or he’d carry out a sort of exercise.

But that is also the difficulty with this subject matter. What are we filming? Not drama, but moments of happiness, of being captivated by something. Holidays, festive seasons, get-togethers with friends, shared adventures, the births of children – significant moments in everyone’s life. You only need to scroll through any of our mobile phones to see what we’re photographing. I, too, photograph mundane things: a moment of wonder at a particular place, dogs, my loved ones, friends. Scenes from life.

Here, too, I had scenes from life. It’s just that when you have 250 hours of footage, and there are so many holidays – skiing, the Masurian Lakes, Christmas, New Year, and so on – the question arises: what am I supposed to do with all this?

My work involves observing very closely. Looking at reality from years ago. And very quickly I noticed various cracks and micro-situations which mean that, as a career develops, the family situation changes too.

These are very small things. The erosion of relationships taking place through immense subtleties and delicacy. This fascinated me immensely, because when you can observe life over the long term, in a record spanning a decade or more, recurring situations begin to take on very clear significance.

But I suppose there’s also a risk here that, as a director, you might start attributing meanings to something that was originally just a family recording.

Of course. I felt I had to be extremely focused, and I kept asking myself whether I was interpreting everything correctly, or whether I was imposing my own interpretation on material whose context I might not fully understand.

This is a problem, because the aim of working on a documentary film is to get as close as possible to what we abstractly call the truth of the story being told. I say ‘get as close as possible’ because this is a difficult goal to achieve. We are unable to capture the whole truth in a film. We can, however, get close enough to it to say to the viewer: this is everything I’ve learnt about this story, and now I’m showing it to you because I believe it’s worth your while to see it. That it’s worth your time and attention.

I expect a great deal from myself. Above all, that I won’t make a mistake and that I’ll understand the material properly and in great depth. I verify this both through conversations with the protagonists and with many other people from the world I want to tell the story of. In this way, through contact with artefacts and people, I build the narrative.

So what was it like facing your family? After all, they didn’t know this material as well as you did.

It was incredibly interesting and a huge challenge. Imagine a situation where someone gives you a huge collection of mementos from their life, without knowing what’s on those tapes. None of the family had actually seen it, because it was unwatchable. Michał and Piotrek told me that back when there was still a camera in the house, they sometimes tried to sneak a peek at the footage, but that was many years ago.

And suddenly a stranger turns up, a complete outsider, to whom they decide to give everything they have, and he starts working on it.

What was that meeting with the family like?

I prepared some clips, edited them slightly, but above all I left them in longer sequences, in line with the source material. I arranged them in a certain chronological order and according to the dramatic arc I’d planned, but I didn’t tell the subjects that this was how it was structured.

I wanted us to watch these snippets from their lives and see what would come of it. I knew it would be a very intense emotional experience.

Imagine if someone suddenly started showing us snippets of our own lives. And what’s more, they spoke to us in such a way that we knew they were aware of things we ourselves couldn’t remember or hadn’t seen for years. The paradox of this material is that, whether we like it or not, we capture more on camera than we realise we are.

That meeting took place. It was very moving. We talked for a long time. They were surprised that it was even possible to work with such material in this way.

And then the film gained even more power during the editing process?

Yes. The clips I showed them were just snippets. The film only really comes into its own when it’s almost finished. That’s when all the elements of this narrative and dramatic work start to mesh, and the film gains its power.

I also had a very interesting experience at the premiere in Kraków. There was a huge crowd; almost all my protagonists were there, apart from Marysia, who had a theatre performance. The emotions were simply through the roof. I’d never experienced anything like it before.

I was sitting in the auditorium next to Piotr, and Piotr said to me: ‘Marcin, but this isn’t the version you showed us.’ I replied: ‘Piotr, it’s the same version. It’s just that once the sound and picture are finalised, everything suddenly seems more intense.’

That’s exactly what happens with archive material of this sort. There’s a wealth of interesting aspects to it, relating both to the material itself and to the relationship between the director and the subjects.

In the film, after Piotr’s death, there’s a sailing trip to Masuria. He’d mentioned earlier that he was really looking forward to that trip. Did you feel from the start that this would be the ending?

I suppose so. It’s in the script. There were a few things that were devised during the writing stage, in terms of the narrative style.

Among other things, we begin non-chronologically: we start in Hollywood, and later return to the same moment, the same house and the same city. It’s a certain narrative device.

For Piotr Mazura, those were moments of true, pure happiness. There, the camera is just for fun, not work. Suddenly, it turns out that work isn’t the most important thing in life. The most important thing is simply being with your loved ones.

And then the question arises: is it worth killing yourself over?

This doesn’t apply only to the world of film, but film is like a drug. It’s addictive. It’s adrenaline, endorphins, something that simply carries you away. At a certain point, you lose the ability to distinguish between your everyday life and your professional life, because everyday life doesn’t provide such strong stimuli, and you need more of them.

This is particularly true of cinematographers, who are among the busiest people in the industry.

Piotr worked non-stop. His career in the 1990s and 2000s also coincided with a certain idealisation of the American Dream. Poles, who were then entering the reality of capitalism, aspired to it very strongly. Over time, the culture that reached us from there began, I suppose, to strip us of the belief that America is the greatest and most beautiful. Piotr, sitting at home on the beach in Santa Monica, says he misses the Masuria region. That speaks volumes.

In a way, this film is precisely about the end of the American Dream. Just look at what’s happening now. The American Dream is no longer an American Dream at all. We’re somewhere else now. There’s still a vast world of American independent cinema – one that remains little known in Poland – but the question arises: why should I work there when I’d rather work in Europe? Here, the filmmaker is still valued.

American filmmakers come here to make films because there are crews here who value the filmmaker. That erosion of dreams of Hollywood was already beginning back then, and you can see it in this story.

Witold dreamt of Hollywood, yet achieved enormous success in Europe. Piotr, whilst in high demand in Hollywood, dreamt of the Masuria region. I wonder if they ever talked about how much expectations differ from reality.

Perhaps, but there’s no such provision. I’d love to ask them a few questions myself...