Andrzej Wajda - 'Innocent Sorcerers' and the most difficult time in my life (82/222)

To listen to more of Andrzej Wajda’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Andrzej Wajda (Film director)   Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki] TRANSCRIPT: I think the time's come to speak about the most difficult period of my life. Namely, after these first successes and my first very obvious failure in the form of 'Lotna', I began to look for new subjects for myself, new subjects for my films. Unfortunately, over the next years, for several successive years, I couldn't find myself. The films made in that time were not well defined, not very successful. In short, each year I made one film. I'll begin with 'Innocent Sorcerers' which was a modern film about contemporary youth. As I've said, at that time the world that was being shown, Jerzy Andrzejewski had written the screenplay, this world was mostly the world of the film school in Łódź, and I think that a young director like Romek Polański or one of the others would have made a better film than I did. I immersed myself in a world which wasn't really mine. In addition to this, I couldn't find the actors who could have been this pair; I don't think this was Tadeusz Łomnicki's finest role. He was made to play someone who had been created, whereas the actor ought to have been a person of those times, but I couldn't find anyone like that. I couldn't make up my mind; Cybulski was too old to play that part and I couldn't see any young actors. Skolimowski would have played that part the best, but he was just starting out as an actor. He'd helped write the dialogue for this film. So that's the film. After that, I went back to the subject of war.