Krzysztof Kieslowski - interview for Three Colours Blue

Liberty, equality and fraternity are the themes of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy, Three Colours. The first, Blue, lives up to his reputation for gravitas. Yet for the director of the Decalogue and the Double Life Of Veronique his job is 'a game'

Jonathan Romney's interview with Krzysztof Kieslowski was originally published on 15 Oct 1993
Krzysztof Kieslowski
The thinker … Krzysztof Kieslowski. Photograph: Garry Weaser / The Guardian

Introducing a Krzysztof Kieslowski film on television a few years ago, Lindsay Anderson commented that what he most associated with Polish cinema was a quality of seriousness. No one, he added, better exemplified this seriousness than Kieslowski. Some people consider Kieslowski to be the finest film director currently working in Europe that he's among the most serious there can be no doubt.

His seriousness has an allure that can keep an audience in awestruck thrall - which is not always the best critical response a film-maker could wish for. His films are sparing with their humour and their moral gravity is of the sort that brooks no argument. Kieslowski favours the large themes. His acclaimed series of television films, The Decalogue (1988), illustrated the Ten Commandments his last feature, The Double Life Of Veronique, addressed life, death and the elusive nature of identity. His new trilogy, Three Colours (Blue is released today with White and Red to follow), takes on the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

For devotees of the art-house tradition at its most sombre, Kieslowski belongs in the lineage of Bergman and Tarkovsky, who figure in his own pantheon. He is another of those northern directors whose austerity suggests an uncompromising vision with transcendental import. A former documentarist, he made films in the 1970s and 1980s that dealt directly with the hard political realities of everyday life in Poland, notably Blind Chance and No End. But it was The Decalogue's more abstract moral concern that put him on the world map as an object of auteur adulation.

Fans of The Decalogue tend to be so reverent that it is hard not to wonder whether there isn't less to these dramas than meets the eye. Visually prosaic, the series had enough elusive symbolism and gravitas of pacing to make it more resonant than its anecdotal nature seemed to allow for. The Double Life Of Veronique, on the other hand, was extremely stylised, Slawomir Idziak's baroque photography bringing an eerie depth to an already elliptical story (Idziak achieves similar wonders in Blue).

Kieslowski is anxious to play down the mystery quotient of his work, but he's not inclined to give too much away. 'My part of the work is to make the film. Your part is to find something in the film, or perhaps not. For me it's always important to hear viewers' interpretations. They turn out to be very different to my intentions. I don't hide my intentions. I speak about them - but not about my interpretations.'

In fairness, Kieslowski cannot be accused of cultivating a gnomic air, but his tendency to reduce questions to commonsense basics only fuels the mystique. Interviewing him through an interpreter, you get a sense of somehow skirting the heart of the matter, and his Polish intonations - a drawl with peculiar dying cadences - contrive to make him sound either dismissive or excessively self-deprecating.

On his relationship with his audience, Kieslowski manages to suggest that he's at once out to make his meaning crystal clear, and the exact opposite. 'Whatever stage I'm at with a film, whether I'm writing the script or editing, I always look at it from the point of view of the viewer - what he's expecting, the way he'd like me to entrap him and the way he'd like to be released from the trap, when he wants to be surprised, when he wants to laugh, when he wants to cry. You could describe my job as a game with the viewer - to give him what he wants but at the same time covertly to slip in something that he might not be expecting.'

That covert something is, one imagines, the sense of the transcendental. 'People are looking for this,' he agrees, 'but it's not because of a particular director or film. I think they need something like that, because what they have isn't enough. What they already have isn't explained to them - the sense of getting up in the morning, the sense of its history, sometimes of religion or of politics, a sense of the terrible.

'The Stalinists used to get up in the morning to kill their opponents and pull their fingernails out - we're always looking for some meaning in life. Throughout history and even now, there are lots of us trying to find out a sense of why we're here, but nobody ever has.'

The vagueness and open-endedness of his narratives suggest that Kieslowski is something of an old-school existentialist. Things simply happen, who knows why, and people just have to react to them. In his notes for Blue, he makes it clear that the theme of freedom is meant in a non-political sense: 'We're talking about individual freedom, a profound freedom, freedom of life.'

It's debatable, though, how far-reaching Kieslowski's films really are as moral inquiries. In The Decalogue, the detached style gets us close to the characters' anxieties, but ultimately shrugs them off as unknowable. In Veronique and in Blue, he goes even further - the elaborate camera work and unworldly beauty of Irene Jacob and Juliette Binoche make his heroines all but opaque.

Conversely, there's often an over-statement that seems intrusive in A Short Film About Killing (from The Decalogue), the argument against capital punishment comes across as incongruously rhetorical.

As a moral observer, Kieslowski again keeps his options open. 'I do think people are good. It's just situations that put them into terrible predicaments, although of course human beings like to create their own situations.' He explains that the young murderer of The Decalogue, who kills a taxi driver for no apparent reason, is basically good if his sister hadn't been run over by a tractor, things might have been different. 'It's important to get to the roots of things - the moment when something actually started happening.'

This approach is illustrated at the start of Blue. The story is about to begin with a car crash Kieslowski gives us advance notice by showing a close-up of an oil drip. But, he stresses, this is just chance: it's futile to look for a greater why.

'Every day thousands of people die in car accidents. Sometimes it's slippery, sometimes somebody falls asleep, perhaps a screw comes undone. I'm not for investigating accidents, I'm just saying there was an accident, a man and a girl died, and then I start thinking what's going to happen with the woman who's left behind.'

Kieslowski's films seem to invoke metaphysical imponderables while at the same time shrugging them off. But when things resist explanation, meaning is invested in the image itself. What really makes Kieslowski's films - which, arguably, he pulls it off with complete success only in Veronique - are those images that don't easily translate into words. It happens when Irene Jacob's face breaks out into a radiant grin as rain falls on it, or when we're given a luminously bloated glass globe to contemplate at leisure.

When the images do fit concepts, then beware. Kieslowski has a tendency to overburden objects with glaring symbolism: candle wax drips like tears on the face of the Virgin a wasp struggles out of a glass just as a dying man rallies round a devil's-head car ornament signals doom. And yet Kieslowski has insisted, 'I don't film metaphors … For me a bottle of milk is a bottle of milk.' In Blue, he explains, 'Juliette Binoche's face is reflected upside down in a spoon. Spoons reflect images upside down.'

This denial of meaning seems disingenuous. Veronique, for example, was remarkable for the way Kieslowski turned funding circumstances to his advantage. Working with French co-production money, he devised a story about a girl who dies in Poland and her double who goes on living in France. Clearly his symbolic farewell to Poland? 'It wasn't my intention for it to be a symbol of anything. A girl dies in Poland, that's all.'

The fact that he has been working in France, Kieslowski claims, is strictly a matter of funding, even though his new trilogy refers to the tricolour flag and a set of values dear to the Gallic heart. 'These concepts touch on everybody, not just France. If you ask Arafat's warriors what they're fighting for, they'll say exactly the same - liberty, equality, fraternity. Ask the Bosnians or the Serbs, they'll say the same. The concepts themselves are just pretexts to make films.'

Nevertheless, the three concepts have provided him with some philosophical grist. 'They're impossible to attain from the point of view of individuals. Politically, perhaps - apart from equality, of course. You can say, I want to be free, but how do you free yourself from your own feelings, your own memories, your own desires? Perhaps we can't function without them - which automatically means we aren't free, we're prisoners of our own emotions.'

As yet, it's hard to evaluate Blue, which has left many viewers feeling dissatisfied, especially in the light of a cryptic, portentous closing sequence. Perhaps Kieslowski would advise sceptics to wait and see how the rest of the trilogy develops? 'Absolutely no. I'd say, don't buy any more tickets.'