DEFINITION November 2018.pdf

COLD WAR | SHOOT STORY

MULTIPLE TAKES

Leading actor Joanna Kulig who plays Zula says: “Some small part of Ida was in Zula for me. I used my own voice singing and I trained for one year to learn how to dance. I had problems with my coordination, but I really worked hard. I was so happy, but surprised, to get compliments on my dancing from a professional ballerina. The most important thing for me was to be very free and open, and to do things naturally. Pawel does many takes – sometimes 16, 18 even, and the actors have to be very free. Now I understand why it was important – they look for the exact frame, for the right light. But we had a lot of time to get things just the way Pawel wanted. The script and the scenes were changing all the time, but we have a such an open relationship, that if we suggest something, and it works, we use it, if it was not good, OK, move on.”

including Poland by artists such as Bergman and Herzog. I did not know a lot about ‘American Cinema’ as there was no Internet then, so what I knew was from people talking about it. I knew about Spiderman , but I had not seen it. “I didn’t treat film like entertainment, I was looking for films that touched my emotions. I did love stills photography, but I felt that film had a much stronger emotional impact. At that time, I was searching for a way to express myself. I tried different activities, such as acting in the theatre and working as a journalist, but I discovered that they were not for me. I finally found the medium where I could express myself and that was with film.” REFERENCES “On Cold War , we prepped from June 2016 to January 2017. We found references in many different places,” explains Zal. “We looked at a lot of still photography by artists, such as Ralph Gibson and Helmut Newton. We also watched films by Godard and Tarkovsky, and reviewed film archives of Paris and jazz photography from the 1960s and 1970s. We listened to musicians, such as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, and spent a long time watching the Mazowsze folk group. We then began to film their concerts and, later, the rehearsals with Joanna/Zula, looking for formal solutions. “We created storyboards using photos and then began to catalogue the stills by the different locations for each scene. These storyboards started to represent what we wanted to capture in the frames when we finally went to shoot it. I kept a notebook and wrote in it every day – do this, Do NOT do that, but my last note was to ‘BE ready for the unexpected. Be open, BE FLEXIBLE, for anything unusual can happen’.” Zal adds: “It was such a collaborative effort and everybody on set worked together to offer ideas and input. I cannot emphasise enough how the work of the amazing duoof production designers, Katarzyna Sobanska and Marcel Slawinski, made my lighting

when he fell ill in the first week of shooting, Lukasz was moved into the role of director of photography. “Even though I was 32, I looked young and Pawel kept calling me ‘the student’,” laughs Zal. Lukasz Zal grew up in a small town in Northern Poland called Koszalin where there was only one cinema. He also had to wear glasses at a young age so his parents did not allow him to watch television as they feared his eyesight would get further damaged. Because of this, Lukasz’s interest in cinematography really began with his father’s love of photography. “My father constantly took photos of weddings, funerals and of our family with a Russian Zenit camera and a 6x6 START camera, the Polish version of a Hasselblad. I took photos with him and began to develop them in the darkroom at school,” says Zal. “When I was 15, they offered a film workshop and that is when I fell in love with motion pictures. My school and our city library had a media library where there were shelves full of VHS tape cassettes. They were labelled by categories (for example Director, Oscar-Winning, European Film, Russian Film, etc). I remember my parents asleep upstairs, while I stayed downstairs watching films all night long. I watched films from different European countries,

LEFT Lukasz Zal preparing for a shot with director Pawel Pawlikowski.

NOVEMBER 20 1 8 | DEF I N I T ION 37

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