I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the transformation of real places into emotional landscapes within film, using repetition of locations to enhance the storytelling.
Pawel Pawlikowski discusses his artistic approach to filmmaking, where he aims to evoke specific mental states through the use of recurring locations. He believes that by stylizing these landscapes within the context of subjective storytelling, the films gain a mythic quality, allowing viewers to connect more deeply with the characters' experiences.
In practice
A filmmaker could use this quote when discussing their artistic choices at a film festival.
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 celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic.
There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can't forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive its flaws.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.
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