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In Darkness

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Leopold Socha (Robert Wiêckiewicz,) a sewer worker and petty thief in Lvov, a German-occupied city in Poland, encounters a group of Jews trying to escape the liquidation of the ghetto, and hides them for money in the labyrinth of the town’s sewers beneath the bustling activity of the city above. What starts out as a straightforward and cynical business arrangement turns into something very unexpected, the unlikely alliance between Socha and the Jews, as the enterprise seeps deeper into Socha’s conscience.

Opened January 27, 2012 (LA, NY)

Runtime:2 hr. 25 min.

 

Interview with Director Agnieszka Holland

 

(Q) : So here you get a little bit of the dark side as well.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : I really want to make a comedy. No one wants to finance a comedy of mine.
 
(Q) : Finding the locations for this; how did you decide?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : First we wanted to shoot in Lvov but it was impossible for financial reasons that we had to spend some money in Germany and also the Ukraine, and conditions were like the most expensive.
 
(Q) : Really, expensive? I thought everything was cheap in the Ukraine.
 
(Agnieszka Holland): It's not a logical market economy yet, you know? I remember in the early '90s I went to a festival and it was so cheap in Russia, and to be living in the hotel which was like very Communist kind of the apartment hotel. And on every floor you had those women, which during the Communist times they'd be the KGB-like people. And after Perestroika they decided they want to make the market business and they've been selling vodka on every floor. Except that in the shop downstairs you can buy vodka for 10 rubles and on the floor it was for $100.

They did not understand why no one is buying, and they said these Western people they are so stingy. I said change the price to twice what is downstairs and they will sell it, but they didn't believe me. And it's a little the same with the Ukraine film industry apparently. So no anyway, we didn't shoot in Lvov but we visited Lvov and Lvov sewers, which are the worst, because after I visited the sewers in many cities in Poland and in Germany.. So if you go to sewers I will advise you.
 
(Q) : So you have a whole new documentary on the sewers of Eastern Europe.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : Right, I am quite an expert. But you can find the website and there's a guy who is filming all the sewers in the world.
 
(Q) : After you or before you?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : Before me. I was using his website. He didn't know about it. And the most spectacular are the sewers in Montreal. Beautiful. Beautiful sewers. Really, you know, with the stalactite and the things like that.
 
(Q) : I saw the film "Kanal," by Andrzej Wajda. Was there any influence by his work?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : Well for sure. He was my mentor and my producer also. I was a part of his film group for a long time when I was working in Poland, and he's my friend also and I wrote some scripts for him. So he was a huge influence on me for sure, and "Kanal" was like the classic movie. Everybody in Poland interested in the cinema or even not interested in the cinema watched this movie at some point. So it was for me kind of the challenge. If I can do another "Kanal," if I can to send to competition eventually was my private question to myself. Of course it's a different story and a different reality in some way. But Wajda was very complimentary about my work and was very gracious and said that I did better, but no.

(Q) : Your depiction of the people that lived in that time is really extraordinary, because they were flawed characters, they were real people, and real connections between the people that lived in that area, whether it was the Polish, the Jews, the Ukrainians. And knowing the languages you could see okay the Ukrainian was the bad guy as the police, but there was also the good guy who was helping getting to the work camp. And if you don't know the languages then you're not going to be able to differentiate.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : I know. We didn't want to put too much information into the dialog, but if you know the languages yeah, you know that Kovalev, this guy who's helping him for nothing and who gives to the main guys some kind of a lesson. He's a high staking man and he said "God will pay me." So yeah, it's a lot of subtly like that which you will not have if you don't understand the language. Also the woman in the market who is speaking sympathetic about these hung people and she's Ukrainian as well. It's not only bad guys who are Ukrainian.
 
(Q) : One of the challenges which is evident, the lack of light. In darkness, real darkness, you have to shoot underground in those tunnels so it was very challenging. What tools did you use with the cameraman to make it readable for the audience?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : She's a master really. We had very little dramatic moments because she accepted the pressure from the producers because we had a very limited budget to shoot it on Red. Red is the digital material, which when we were shooting two years ago it was not sensitive really. So her concept was that she would put relatively a lot of light, and after she would dim it down during the postproduction process. But I didn't want it in this way. I wanted it to be really dark and to have the actors to really act in darkness and not to pretend that they see nothing.

She also thought that she would put strong sources of light inside of the tunnels, which mostly when you watch for example "Third Man" you'll see that it's lit in this way. The canals, the sewers looked very spectacular; they look like the cathedrals in some way, and they didn't want the cathedrals. So by then she said "Okay, but I'm afraid that it will be totally invisible." And she pushed Red, she pushed the things, and we made the flashlights as strong as was possible, which made them incredibly hot. For the actors to have it was really challenging. And after it was how to make it really dark but to see what you need to see, and that it was her job. And also the actors had been lighting each other.
 
(Q) : What work did you do also with the actors to get them to get into the feel of that whole environment? Did you lock them into a room for days? Were there special processes, how some people do method things?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : We had this idea; it was impossible for technical reasons. They were not available for a long amount of time. We'd been meeting a lot, especially with the Polish gang, because there were three Germans who came later to the process. And talking a lot and they'd been learning the languages also because it was languages that they didn't know. For example, Socha, the main guy and his wife and the help, the young guy who is helping him, they learned a special kind of the Polish evolved dialect which today Polish audiences don't understand.

So they spent like probably months learning this with the coach and everything, and two Polish actors learned Yiddish, and the German actors learned Polish. So this language school was kind of the metal to go into the time and the place of the characters. I think it was very helpful. We watched a lot of documentaries together. Everybody they are I think very grownup, cautious actors most of them, and they found their ways to connect to the story of the characters. And during the shooting it was actually interesting. We were shooting the chambers, the second chamber and third chambers had been on the stage, and they'd been not leaving during the day. They were not going to the trailer or to the room or nothing like that.
 
(Q) : What about the raw scenes in the film? Because obviously this is a life and death situation, so it's very primal in a lot of these scenes. How did you deal with some of the nudity, some of those types of scenes, and how did the actors kind of react to those scenes in particular?
 
(Agnieszka Holland): I told them that we wanted to try to be as real as possible and to show all the dimensions of those characters and what's going on. I was inspired very much by the man who I put in the beginning of the movie, the medical man, who was a very important Jewish figure in Poland and who was the last commandant of the ghetto uprising. And after the war he was in the opposition to the Communists and he was also a very famous professor of cardiology. Very wise and very brave, non-conformist man. And he wrote before dying a year ago, two years ago, the book called "The laugh in the ghetto." And he was always obsessed about making the movie that would show the people in the ghetto were loving.

It was fucking, it was erotic dimension, a sexual dimension, also a very altruistic dimension, just the closeness. And in some way he never had such a rich erotic life during those years in the ghetto. Even in the bunker when the commandants of the uprising had been hiding and after they died they were fucking all the time when they were not fighting. So I thought that I have to show it. I have also to break this kind of faceless, bodiless vision of the angelic victims which are just noble, and I think it's not true.
 
(Q) : You know ironically, coincidental to you being here for the film, they have several films in the Jewish Film Festival, "Remembrance," and another film about a Polish man who's raised as a Catholic but he discovers he's Jewish and he's converted back into becoming an Orthodox Jew.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : It's a documentary?

(Q) : That one's a documentary. The other one, "Remembrance," is also a story about one guy in the Polish resistance, a Jewish woman he falls in love with talking about the sex. Were there things that you discovered or things that you were reminded about, both about the Polish experience, both about the Jewish experience that brought up certain feelings and attitudes, and can you talk about how you experienced that in the process?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : I don't know. I have always the impression that I know it in some way. I learned that I'm partly Jewish from my mother, who is not Jewish, when I was six, and her vision of the Judaists it was an experience of the Holocaust. For her to be Jew it means to be a Holocaust victim, and she had incredible interest, compassion for this experience, and she was also saving the Jews during the war as a very young girl, so it was a very courageous act. So for me for a long time to be a Jew it meant to be the Holocaust victim or Holocaust survivor, and to have this burden of the memory and the duty to remember.

And only later when I'd grown up and I had the possibility to connect any kind of the other aspects of Jewish history or religion, culture or whatever. I realized that the Holocaust in some way was the most terrible and murder, but the episode to what the Jewish identity is. I'm not mystical really, but sometimes I play with that, and I started to think that probably I lived during the Holocaust because I feel it so well. And maybe I died after and was reborn in my body or whatever. Anyway, my knowledge of the details was surprising to myself, especially before I really started to make the extended research.

So I think that this double identity and the fact that I was so close in times, at the same time because I have this double identity I'm never looking from only side on those stories. I cannot tell that I am objective, but I'm certainly much more objective than most of the people who are dealing with those stories. And I'm not interested in judging, I'm interested in approaching the what I think could be truth of that without being judgmental on any level.
 
(Q) : Besides reading the book this is based on were there any elements that when you were talking to the family members that you ended up putting in the film?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : In this moment when I did this movie, "In Darkness," I already was talking to probably a thousand survivors. I'm not speaking about my family, but some of the people who survived in my family and told me to an extent their experiences of the story. And a lot of friends of my parents have been Jews and some of them have been sharing the experience, and they read the book, which was accessible to me. But after doing "Europa Europa" I traveled a lot over the world with this movie with the Q&A and meeting the audience, and it was like 20 years ago so it was a lot of the people who were still alive.

Now it's less of them because in this time they'd be in their 60s. And after every screening it was at least like three, five, sometimes 10 people who came to me and who said "Listen, this is an incredible film, an incredible story, but my story…" and they told me their story, which I was stupid enough not to collect them, not to record them or something. But a lot of them stayed in my memories. So I had already a pretty rich knowledge of the different facts and destinies and details. And so for this movie I read. I didn't know too much about Lvov because there are very few survivors of the Lvov ghetto, so there are not so many of the memories.
 
(Q) : You show the woman's view very much in this film.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : I don't know. Probably yeah, it is different being the woman and telling this story for sure. But I am not self-analyzing myself. And the actors are more open with me also and more trustful, maybe because I am a woman they don't need to play something, like to be macho or something. They know that it doesn't work with me so they are very humble, they are very open. It's maybe why you ask me about this erotic stuff, and it wasn't a problem to them. And I didn't have to go very much around. I said what she will do, for example Klara, when she's with Yanek, the lovemaking next to her and she starts to masturbate. And Agnieszka Grochowska, who played this character, she's a very delicate person, and I said you know what, she will do, and it was not a problem.

(Q) : You mentioned that "Europa Europa" was a wonderful, exciting film and I can't understand the comparison because it was 20 years ago and the style was more playful and incorporated a lot of fantasy scenes like Stalin and Hitler dancing. In the course of the years you changed your perception probably, and I'm very interested in why you chose this more strict, academic style. It's a quite realistic discourse.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : I think I have something like my style, which you can see in those episodic things, but at the same time I'm very much serving the story. My style is changing depending on the truth of the story. And "Europa Europa" from the beginning I wanted to make it like the kind of philosophical fable, like "Candid," by Voltaire. And I did also like the comic books. It never goes to the depth of the psychological things, it's a little superficial in some way, and it has this epic dimension. And here is something very intimate and very restrained in some way and very close to the people. Most of the shots are the close ups in some way. And this story is like that. I cannot imagine to tell this story in the way I was telling "Europa Europa" and I cannot imagine telling "Europa Europa" in this way. It's a different song.
 
(Q) : It says on the press that you bought the last copy of the book on Amazon.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : It's the screenwriter. First I read the script. I didn't know even it was a true story. He sent me the script without the notes about the background, and I found the script very interesting. Actually it wasn't written like a true story, which is the strength of that. When you are doing the true story mostly you simplify the things because you don't want to tell something bad about the real people or whatever. This was written with a lot of freedom and I make even more of the liberties when doing it.

(Q: What are you doing next?
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : A miniseries for Czech HBO in Prague about '68, '69 in Prague, which was my youth in Prague. Not a very nice story.
 
(Q) : I liked the fact that you had in the movie the fact that the Poles didn't know that Jesus was a Jew. That I thought was a really good thing to throw in there.
 
(Agnieszka Holland) : My nanny, who was an illiterate Polish peasant woman and was wonderful, she told it to me as a secret.

 

End.