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Interview Marcin Wrona: »A special mission to change things in cinema«
By Alexandra Buzas | February 12, 2011
Polish director Marcin Wrona latest film The Christening – one of Warsaw’s competition films – is the first feature film to be co-produced by the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. Here he talks with Alexandra Buzas about how he developed the project and the current state of Polish cinema.
Your movie is based on a real story. Did it happen to you, or had you just heard about it?
Marcin Wrona: Fortunately, it didn’t happen to me. But the story is real – I would say that 80-90% of the movie happened in real life ten years ago. When I first read about it, I thought it was a very universal story. This wasn’t just a gangster movie – there was more to it. The fact that he somehow became a victim of the whole situation that he had himself created was so surprising that it both shocked and impressed me strongly. I also saw a biblical motive, the story of Cain and Abel, that everyone knows. There is also some ancient tragedy in the structure of the film.
And the screenplay?
MW: There were three writers and one of them was a friend of the guy that was murdered, so he knew every detail of the story, but I changed this because I wanted to make it more universal. As part of my research, I talked to a few prisoners in a Warsaw jail; they found the script very interesting and helped me change some of the dialogue. After our talks, I decided to re-write the beginning and the end. One of them told me that friendships rarely happen in a criminal environment, so I had to connect the characters before they joined the mafia. So the film starts in water, and it finishes in water, a symbol of christening. I wanted to present the whole situation as a ritual.
Is your film representative of current Polish cinema?
MW: We see a lot of efforts to create a new language and identity in Polish cinema, both in commercial pictures and the more serious films I prefer. We are looking for artistic values, and we have to make something intelligent, ambitious, but sometimes with a kind of genre style. I am trying to make it a special mission to change things in cinema. We had a period of great films in the fifties up to the seventies, but today there is no continuity. There was a huge break in the nineties when our country changed and we are still looking for a new identity. We have neither big budgets nor huge stars, so I think that we have to look for other qualities like emotions.
Alexandra Buzas – A graduate of Sociology and Social Sciences, Alexandra works in the culture and media department of the Romanian news agency Mediafax. She has taken courses in News Editing at the Romanian Centre for Independent Journalism and Script writing at the Nisi Masa Association in Romania last year.
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