Happy Birtday director Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941–1996)

Born: June 27, 1941 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland

Died: March 13, 1996 (age 54) in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland

Married to:
Maria Cautillo (21 January 1967 – 13 March 1996) (his death) (1 child)

QUOTES:

If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I’ll never achieve it; in the same way that I’ll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.

[on Ingmar Bergman]: I can identify with what Bergman says about life, about what he says about love. I identify more or less with his attitude towards the world… towards men and women and what we do in everyday life… forgetting about what is most important.

[on Andrei Tarkovsky]: Andrey Tarkovsky was one of the greatest directors of recent years. He’s dead, like most of them. That is, most of them are dead or have stopped making films. Or else, somewhere along the way they’ve irretrievably lost something, some individual sort of imagination, intelligence, or way of narrating a story. Tarkovsky was certainly one of those who hadn’t lost this.

What do I want? Calmness. You can only aspire to it. The path is interesting. Who am I? A retired film director. That’s the truth now.
Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It’s an obsession of mine, that different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing, but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.

[on Three Colours: White (1994)] Warsaw is my city. One of the themes of the film is what’s good about Warsaw – there’s an impatience, an aggressive desire to become rich, to win at all costs, to obtain material possessions. Warsaw is where you can see this most clearly.

There it’s like a whirlwind. The air buzzes and people buzz with these desires.