K i e s l o w s k i    Quotes

"I don't like the word 'success', and I always fiercely defend myself against it, because I don't know what the word means at all. For me, success means attaining something I'd really like. That's success. And what I really like is probably unattainable, so I don't look at things in these terms. [My recognition has] got nothing to do with success. That's very far from success."

"I think I must have made ['The Scar'] because I wanted to make a film. That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film. You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it."

"I always think on a small scale, and I certainly don't want to make a film about things on a macro scale, on a global scale. That doesn't interest me in the least because I don't believe societies exist, I don't believe nations exist. I think that there simply are, I don't know, 60 million individual French or 40 million individual Poles or 65 million individual British. That's what counts. They're individual people."

"You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn't matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of intellect...A lot of people don't understand the direction in which I'm going. They think...I've betrayed my way of looking at the world...I absolutely don't feel I've betrayed any of my opinions or my attitude to life. The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film...I've been trying to get there from the beginning. I'm somebody who doesn't know, somebody who's searching."

"I haven't got a great talent for films. Orsen Welles, for example, managed to achieve this at the age of twenty-four or twenty-six when he made 'Citizen Kane' and, with his first film, climbed to the top, the highest possible peak in cinema. But I'll need to take all my life to get there and I never will. I know that perfectly well. I just keep on going. For me, [each film] isn't better or worse. It's all the same only a step further, and, according to my own private scale of values, these are small steps which are taking me nearer to a goal which I'll never reach anyway. I haven't got enough talent."

"The difference between the cinema and television audience is very simple. The cinema-goer watches a film in a group, with other people. The television viewer watches alone. I've never yet seen a television viewer hold his girlfriend by the hand, but in the cinema it's the general rule. Personally, I think that television means solitude while cinema means community. In the cinema, the tension is between the screen and the whole audience and not only between the screen and you. It makes an enormous difference. That is why it's not true that the cinema is a mechanical toy."