Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski is one of Britain's leading film-makers. He tells Andrew Pulver about his maverick way of working.
Pawel Pawlikowski exudes the confidence of a man who's conquered the town. And it's hard to say that his attitude isn't justified. His new film, My Summer of Love, won the top award at this year's Edinburgh film festival - and so did his previous one, Last Resort. Its entry into the lucrative North American market is assured after a screening at the Toronto film festival where it ended up the subject of a bidding war. Pawlikowski can afford to be satisfied.
All this is a long way from the BBC's Community Programme Unit (CPU), where he started out in the mid-1980s. Pawlikowski, now 46, scratched his way into film-making by coming up with ideas for Open Space, the CPU's forum for public-issue rants. He came across a priest who was planning to construct a giant crucifix on the top of Pendle Hill in Lancashire. The priest told him he was doing it to counter the influence of local satanists; all he was waiting for was planning consent.
Almost 20 years later, Pawlikowski giggles sheepishly at the recollection. His big break didn't work out as planned. For one thing, the priest never got his cross up. The local council didn't give him permission. But Pawlikowski made his film anyway; he had been given the money. Lucifer Over Lancashire turned out to be "some scrappy thing", but something about it stuck in his mind.
By the time the draft script of My Summer of Love was finished, a liberal adaptation of a Helen Cross novel, a large chunk of the plot centred on a born-again Christian who wants to put up a giant cross. Since My Summer of Love isn't a documentary, Pawlikowski could arrange things so that his revivalist character actually gets the job done - even if it all happens over the county border in west Yorkshire. So, for a while in the summer of 2003, a giant cross stood tall over the small town of Bacup. Some things just work out.
Since that "scrappy thing", Pawlikowski has emerged as an influential and important film-maker. After making a string of prize-winning documentaries in the late 1980s and 1990s, Pawlikowski achieved extraordinary success with Last Resort in a crossover into the land of fiction film-making. It's somehow ironic that one of Britain's leading cinematic lights was actually born and brought up in Poland, only coming to the UK as a 15-year-old with his mother after his parents' marriage broke down.
Now, he says, he can see a continuity between his fiction and non-fiction films. The documentaries he made, mostly under the aegis of the BBC's Bookmark programme, used literary subjects as a cloak to investigate and satirise burning social and cultural issues - mostly following his interest in eastern Europe and Russia. Probably the best known is Serbian Epics, an account of the revival of Serbian oral poetry that took Pawlikowski to the front lines of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian civil war in 1994, and Dostoevsky's Travels, a remarkable film about the novelist's grandson, whose primary goal while on a lecture tour of Germany is to get hold of a Mercedes and drive it back east.
"The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries," says Pawlikowski. "They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same. You take raw materials, a story that you emotionally connect with. And you put materials together that you like: landscape, character, location. Then you start sculpting.
"I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story."
PAWLIKOWSKI'S LITERARY INSTINCTS have encountered more resistance in the cut-throat world of feature film-making. "A good script is like a work of art in itself," he says. "If the writer has something to say, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that. Most scripts are just cliches building on cliches."
It's this impatience with standard film-making practices that has created Pawlikowski's reputation for unconventional working methods - a brew of on-the-spot improvising, ceaseless rewriting, and instinctive decision-making. Pawlikowski's "method" is responsible for, among other things, the strong, heartfelt performances, and the inspired exploitation of apparently humdrum backdrops in both Last Resort and My Summer of Love.
Pawlikowski characterises the way he goes about things as "like total football - whatever works". There is an intense period of actor workshops, but he hates the idea of being likened to Mike Leigh. He doesn't work to a set script, but bridles at the idea that he's looking to create a down-and-dirty realism.
"The only reason I keep things open, and try not to pin people down to specific text, is to keep some kind of life on screen. Because what's so horrible in movies is the sense of deadness about the dialogue and the scene. I'm not doing it for authenticity; in fact, I'm aspiring to a more unreal and dreamlike state. I dread to be compared to all these directors who have a lot of spontaneous emoting and swearing in their films - that is death, it's a cul-de-sac. It's just a cliched reproduction of what we think is normal behaviour."
In any conversation with Pawlikowski, you soon realise that the word "cliche" - and his hatred of it - is a big part of his world. Presumably that's why he turned away from the kind of ripped-from-the-headlines topicality of Last Resort and its asylum-seekers, towards the story of a love affair between two teenage girls in smalltown west Yorkshire. For My Summer of Love, he cast two relative unknowns in the lead roles, alongside his Last Resort star Paddy Considine ("there's something absolutely magnetic about him, a presence, strength").
Having such a distinct directorial style has its drawbacks. After the success of Last Resort, Pawlikowski was hired to make the Sylvia Plath biopic with Gwyneth Paltrow attached to star. Eventually, however, he walked out of it, citing the problems of dealing with a valuable Hollywood property's piecemeal schedule. "Gwyneth was kind of tickled by my ideas, I think. But there was no person to play Ted in the time available. For a long time I was talking to the producers and they would say: we like your methods, do it the way you want - by the way, she's free in October, three days for rehearsal here, four days there, and we have to cast whoever's available in that period. I thought, this isn't going to work."
But Pawlikowski has overcome what might have been a disconcerting, career-ending derailment. He's actually been here before: his first feature film, a hardly-seen 1998 effort called The Stringer (inspired fairly overtly by his documentary Tripping With Zhirinovsky, made three years earlier) was something of an embarrassment, not least for its leading lady, Anna Friel. Pawlikowski regained his edge by making Twockers, a TV film that harnessed the small-scale, actor-centred style that was a prelude to Last Resort.
Now that My Summer of Love has generated such a response, he can be generous. "Paltrow, she's a good actress. If pushed, she could be really good. Some of the scenes in the film are really good. But she needed a strong man to pin her down, to scare her. If there'd been a really good couple around, like Burton and Taylor, then it could have worked. You need a sense of reality about a relationship rather than just acting out a script. It's so hard to find a big man, a man's man, nowadays. That's why I did My Summer of Love: girls are the new men." - (Guardian Service)
My Summer of Love is showing at the IFI and UGC cinemas