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.
He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.
I was just a punk kid, trying to get a sound out of a guitar that I couldn't get off the rack, so I built one myself ... I wanted a Gibson type of sound but with a Strat vibrato .. I went to town painting it and I put three pickups back in, but they don't work - only the rear one works
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.