17  Michal Leszczylowski

I talked with Michal over a leisurely lunch at an old established restaurant, Ulriksdals Vardhus, which is set in a royal estate overlooking an inlet on the outskirts of Stockholm. I was eager to learn how this man from Poland had ended up in Sweden cutting Tarkovsky’s last film, ‘The Sacrifice’. Since then he has become the editor of choice for the new Swedish generation that includes Lukas Moodysson.

I was born in Poland in 1950, on a Sunday afternoon. ‘Lazy guy’, they said he is going to be, which I still try to prove to be false. My parents were both chemists and of course they wanted me to be a pharmacist too, which I did not want.

One of the main things which formed me professionally almost from the time I was born is that I had a brother three years older than me who was supposed to be a pianist – at least since he was five. So from when I was two, he practised piano at home for at least five hours a day – so this is the way I got the music. Then they tried to make me a pianist but I wanted to play football! So I got some education in music for three years and then I said thank you very much while my brother continued to the age of nineteen at which point he closed the piano at home and said never again and became a mathematician. That’s how I got music in my veins, in my blood, in everything. Basically what I do in films is to deal with the musical part of it as far as feelings are concerned.

I studied at the University in Poland. I was born in a town called Lodz,¹ which is the second biggest city in Poland. I studied economics for three years. Then I came to Sweden and stayed here.

RC:So you were in Lodz but you didn’t go to the Film School.

ML:No, no, no! I was at a couple of parties in the late sixties. That was my only contact with the Film School. Then I came to Sweden and tried to continue with economics – then I said no way. I was twenty-one years when I emigrated.

RC:Apart from music had you developed a love of other culture including cinema or theatre?

ML:Yes, yes of course – it was a part of our middle class life to consider the existence of the arts – not as a guide in moral or emotional life but it was present there. So I’ve seen theatre and read books like all middle class children do – for what reason though was hidden from me.² They were the things you did but nobody told you about the reasons.

One of my closest friend’s mother was a film editor. I was a little interested in what the film business was and she said, ‘I will never do anything to help you get your foot in the production company – it’s a place where all the alcoholics and all the prostitutes are gathering’. So that was the only thing I knew about the film business, alcoholics and prostitutes, which I now understand what she meant, though I don’t agree.

RC:But did you think of cinema as serious?

ML:No, no, never although I was a member of the film club when I was small I never understood that there was something behind it – that you made them – that was out of the range of my understanding.

So I came to Sweden at twenty-one years and I met some guys in Film School who always wanted someone to carry their things. So I started with that and then I started taking sound. I was very young – I had no idea and then by chance I started editing and said wow, this is something!

RC:Somebody wanted something edited?

ML:No, no – first of all I went for a reportage for TV and this had to be edited on the spot. So the cameraman said I’ll do that so I was sitting watching him and I understood that I could do it five times as good. He didn’t know what he was doing really, and I said maybe I’ll try it and since then I am editing.

I went to the Film School in Stockholm in the sound department as there was no editing department at all – with an aim to edit so I edited everything during those two years I was in the School – everything that was made I edited.³

RC:So when you were in Film School and began to do things did you feel differently a bout cinema?

ML:Oh yes, very much so.

RC:You convinced yourself it was a serious occupation?

ML:Exactly, but something I was not conscious about was that I could dive into the emotions and stay in there in them for a long time – I have a patience in that respect that is independent of me. I was very allergic as a kid so I had some very severe skin problems. What developed in me was the patience because it was itching and the pleasure when I could scratch. Those two things are also fundamental with what I do as an editor: I have a patience to get into the emotions and to stay there and work with them.

RC:And the pleasure comes from this?

ML:I wouldn’t say that it’s conscious – that I consciously use those elements of my life, but now I see that it’s not accidental – I really took what I had and used it.

RC:So was Tarkovsky a turning point?

ML:Oh yes, very much so in several different ways. One of the things I did in my youth was to watch movies, especially the movies I did not understand – and Tarkovsky was on top of that list among others. So I could see his movies several times 5–6–8–10 times and each time I found something new in them.

RC:What were other examples of films or film-makers?

ML:Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini – those are the ones I think of immediately when you ask – and Wajda,⁴ but later. I loved all the films they made because they show their reality. Not one of them is fully presenting the inner world. I at least met two of them – that’s fantastic!

So Tarkovsky was a turning point in several ways. I will tell you a little anecdote about how we met. I met the producer of ‘The Sacrifice’ two years before the shooting started. At that time I was thirty-four and I felt I was ready to edit big movies but I hadn’t made it yet. I met her at a party and she was kind of ‘happily tensed’ by something and I felt that. I said ‘what is it?’ and she said ‘I am going to produce Tarkovsky’s next movie!’ and I said ‘And I am going to edit it’ and she laughed and said ‘Oh, the queue for that job is very long’. I said, ‘Don’t worry’.

Half a year later I started a conversation course in Russian. I had a good education in Russian, partly because under the occupation the Soviet Union demanded education in Russian, although most Poles didn’t want to speak it. On the other hand I also had private lessons in Russian so I spoke it more than most Poles. So I started the conversation course because I had never used Russian since I left Poland – it had been thirteen years.

Michal Leszczylowski working with Andrei Tarkovsky (Courtesy of Michal Leszczylowski)

In the end Tarkovsky refused all the editors and said I am going to edit the film myself, so I need an assistant and I was the only assistant who could speak Russian, so we could communicate without a translator.

I remember meeting Tarkovsky for the first time. He sat alone in the cinema watching dailies. It was dark and I only saw the silhouette of the great master. The takes were silent. He made some comments by saying ‘Oh no!’ and other unprintable expressions. The takes were long but few. I did not know at that time that the film would only consist of one hundred and forty images.⁵ After thirty minutes or so the lights were turned on and we shook hands and he asked when I was able to start working. Almost two years of waiting for that meeting were over.

We started working the next day. We spent eight hours with one cut which we did not succeed in making. It resulted in shooting extra picture to put in between the two images. I noticed how extremely accurate he was in analysing the images and making the final decisions. That was the first lesson. I went home that evening with a clear feeling of having seen something very important – the accuracy.

The next day Sven Nykvist⁶ came to me and congratulated me. Tarkovsky liked me and accepted me for the job. I was not nervous for the job itself, I knew that a great master knows all there is to know about film-making. I was nervous because I did not know whether I knew enough how to serve the film. I was really happy now, in front of me I had a year of flying on the highest possible level in films. I enjoyed every minute of it. Those endless analyses of the images, the light, acting, contrast, camera movements. And the motto of our first day in the editing room: ‘If it is not good enough, re-shoot’.

That was perhaps the biggest lesson – you write, you shoot, you edit and then you evaluate it as a ready piece of the movie. If it is not good then you have to consider what can be done. Tarkovsky was always in doubt whether what was done was good enough. Now I know that only debutantes do not doubt – they know. The great directors I worked with have in common the ability to doubt and so to adjust, re-shoot, re-write and in the tense atmosphere monitor their own feelings of what is right or wrong, not forgetting the audience, the true receiver of our efforts.

Tarkovsky had in me an eager and hungry listener. As we got close in the working process much of our common time was spent talking about life, philosophy, perception, religion, politics (that was a social background we shared as members of the Eastern European middle class) and on that base the art is being built. Editing is merely to choose the pieces of a recorded reality.

I was talking about what constitutes the real differences between film-makers. I realised that it’s partly the sense of time, the feeling for rhythm, and more importantly what kind of memory a person has. Tarkovsky had a very good memory for atmospheres for ‘feelings around’ – not that kind of mathematical memory – the numbers of the cars or the houses or what happened in what order – but the aura of feelings around the people, and he was talking only about that. While Bergman has an extreme memory for relations between people and it’s only that, which is not very little. They both were very true to their memories. They did not elaborate more or change them.

RC:Do you think it’s also honesty about that?

ML:Very – as artists – and it’s a big difference to be honest as an artist from honesty as a person. As people they were normal, perhaps Bergman is more ‘normal’ than Tarkovsky was. Tarkovsky was not ‘negotiable’ while Bergman is more realistic and has a big knowledge about people, which is very funny, because he once said ‘I nowadays don’t think that I know that much about people – I only know things about actors’.

Which is exactly the same phrase as Kazan⁷ told me, ‘Oh you know people are complicated, but the actors, I know something about the actors’. That was very funny – only Kazan and Bergman could say this.

RC:You met Elia Kazan?

ML:Yes I met Kazan because he was supposed to make a film in France and I was suggested to him by the producer. I left with a job after forty or fifty minutes of talk – he was in a very good mood. Later I met him again in Stockholm after he had had a stroke and he did not remember – he didn’t recognise me. He was an ageing giant trapped in a weak body and it was so painful to see. The film was called ‘Beyond the Aegean’ and was never shot as the French Minister of Culture did not support this kind of American production.

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But the memories, these different artists have; it’s like for a painter – the way of seeing things – I don’t think we see exactly the same things – we are different people. The artists like Tarkovsky and Bergman they tend to remember different things than we do. So it was amazing to get into the universe of Tarkovsky and see those memories and emotions.

They were very documentary the films he made. I mean that everyone is making documentary film in one way or another – on the emotional level – but not on a practical and concrete level – but on an emotional level all productions are documentary, that’s why Bergman was making the films he was making.

RC:Do you think working with someone like that demands something different from the editor, or is it just more intense – is it possible to describe a difference?

ML:I would say it is less demanding working with someone who is dealing with factual life than with someone who is trying to execute fantasies. It’s much more convenient and for me much more understandable to approach a director like Tarkovsky. I’ve never worked with Bergman except that I was working with a script he had written and I met him several times. The film was directed by Liv Ullmann and we were re-editing the film for six weeks and he was partially present in the process as the scriptwriter, because we made major changes.

I always approach even what you call conventional movies in the way that I am looking for true emotions. Without true emotions there is no way to make a movie at all. So even if the ‘young guns’ are sometimes making very ‘wild’ feel good movies it’s still the question about real emotions.

‘The Sacrifice’ had a contract for two hours and ten minutes and we ended up with a film that was two hours thirty minutes. I was called by the French co-producer, Anatole Dauman,⁸ who is not amongst us anymore unfortunately. He said I want you to come to Paris to have dinner with me. At that time Tarkovsky was sick. I said I really don’t have time because we are finishing the sound, but he insisted. So I went for an evening and the question came, ‘Can we shorten the film down to two hours and ten minutes?’ I told him it is always possible to shorten a film, but if we cut down this film to two hours and ten minutes it will not be a Tarkovsky film. You will end up with a film, which is not Tarkovsky’s universe. The films are always built on an emotional basis. The rhythm is built into the script and it’s transferred into acting with the same emotional ear and eye of the director and in the editing you have to take care not to kill it.

I never understood the meaning of the word pause, in relation to film rhythm, because for me things are happening all the time, so hopefully I never violated this life nerve of the film. It is exactly what is in common between music and film. It is feelings developed in time. If you try to speed things up they will not be the same. Probably you lose both the timing and the feelings.

There are things that I have learned during all these years. For instance you really have to cry yourself and then to see the audience cry to see how long you can stay in a universe like that. Before starting to edit a film, I read the script and, watching the rhythm of the acting and the pace of the dialogue I decide how long the film should be and then execute it and not the opposite. It’s not that I am stupid that I would try to fit the film into the form that I have prepared. I am certain that sometimes I am wrong, but for the last six years I can judge the film within a minute. It’s not that I take out the things that are bad. It has to do with approaching the world of an artist – I ask how long do I want to be in this environment.

RC:That reminds me of the story of Kurosawa cutting a sequence with a particular piece of music in mind and finding when he had cut it that it fitted to the frame.

ML:That happened to me several times – it will fit because the emotions are developed in time. For instance, in the last movie of Lukas Moodysson⁹ I used a Vivaldi adagio in a very slow recording. I listened to twelve recordings and only one worked on a musical level. It fits to the frame with pauses, with everything. So now I know it’s a rule that if I make my emotional decisions right then it will always match someone else’s work who made his decisions right. We have very common feelings – some of us are more tense and some more relaxed – but within a certain range we are the same.

RC:Do you have routines? I remember not being able to cut because my rhythm had been disturbed. Do you have a kind of mental aerobics?

ML:Oh yes, yes sometimes I don’t feel like making this scene today. I’ll make it tomorrow because of some personal private reasons, or through reasons that I’m not really conscious about. So I really live out all the emotions because I know this is the only guideline we have.

RC:Sure, because I know musicians who, when they are honest will say, almost know that they will not perform well tonight. Whatever they do, they know they are not in the right state of mind to do the work justice and they can’t necessarily control that.

ML:In music it’s a very good example – I would like to convince once in my life the producers that there is a very good film to be made when the music is born. What is the difference between the guy who is reading the notes and the guy who is reading the notes and making the music, because technically you can play all the notes and it will not be music and these cue the emotions. Unfortunately the producers do not understand my point. The musicians do – all musicians know exactly at once what I am talking about. The same with the film – when is it that those ‘notes’ in the script and ‘notes’ during the shooting start to live their own life in the editing room – it’s when somebody puts his or her emotions into it.

On the other hand I try to cut the acting as little as possible, because the audience are not watching the splices they are watching what is in between. So the more perfect the performance we can deliver the better it is. Sometimes it’s perfect and we can say like Bun˜uel ‘We take away the clappers and that’s it’,¹⁰ which happened to me a couple of times only with Liv Ullmann¹¹ as director. She knows what acting is and she doesn’t think, maybe we take a little cutaway here and there. No she is really fighting until it is done and sometimes those performances are six, seven minutes long in a closeup. Tarkovsky burning the house (In ’The Sacrifice’) was eight minutes and I put one cut in that scene – which is not noticeable – to make it even better. But it really is ‘to take away the clappers’.

If you take a film like those of Bob Fosse,¹² as he was a choreographer he knows how important the performance is. You can’t cut the dancing – you have to dance and that’s very interesting to see how he uses it – not only in the dance numbers, but with acting. So he is a very good example of what pace is, what rhythm is. I never met him but he was very like his films and Tarkovsky is something else.

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RC:Whenever possible do you remain involved right to the mix? Do you work on the sound and the music?

ML:Right now I’m doing it because the whole film is in Russian¹³ so I have to be available for dialogue editing. The music is part of me that has to be ready when leaving the editing room. But I am more involved with script work with Lukas now from draft two to draft eight, because I know to edit a film well you have to guard yourself very heavily in the script. Not with the pictures, but you have to trace the feelings to where they start, and it’s very difficult to judge the script, how strong the feelings should be and how clear – how clearly told it should be.

So I am more involved with the script than the sound side, because with the sound the main parts I make in the editing. But there are many things you can only work on one to one. You can only judge when it’s done. You cannot judge by assumption that this probably will work – no you have to do it. So I do all the major things – music – all the dialogue which is a kind of music for me too – and the major sound effects.

You have to expose yourself to them in time so it always goes back to time. What editors, myself included, do is that we think the more we work the better things will be, while we have to rest to expose ourselves to other parts of life than the editing room. It’s very easy to dive into the film and get out of the room four months later.

RC:Do you mean that the film is always with you or that life itself has to be contiguous with the film?

ML:It’s both – like ‘Together’¹⁴ – I laughed through that film and it had an effect on my life. I laughed through that film all the weeks except the last – when we realised we had major problems.

RC:And you stopped laughing?

ML:Stopped laughing and started working.

RC:You were enjoying it too much perhaps.

ML:In this movie there are twelve major characters and that is the problem. Each one of the scenes was very good but put all together they kind of killed each other. So the last two weeks was a fight for us to get it right. I said don’t worry we have good scenes and if they are not good put together they are put in the wrong order.

RC:So it was a structural thing.

ML:Yeah and sometimes you can do something about it and sometimes not. It’s always about time and emotions and what sequence emotions come in and how fast: will I be disturbed by watching the next scene, in the feeling I have, or will it boost the feeling I already have.

RC:Or do I need to be disturbed.

ML:Well it’s a very ‘ephemeral’ thing, editing – you cannot really grasp what the core is except for these feelings in time – that’s the only thing that’s important I think.

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RC:You said that when you grew up that you learnt about culture but you didn’t know how it was supposed to connect with life – which I understand totally – and of course our culture, our society for many centuries now has not in that sense been integrated.

ML:It’s more integrated in the West than in the East of Europe.

RC:That’s an interesting statement. For me almost the soul of Russia is represented not only in Tarkovsky, but also in some other Russian cinema. There is a sense that what I am seeing is not just a story but something that is part of a culture. So the New Wave in Czechoslovakia somehow spoke to me about living in that society, even through metaphor perhaps, so I felt it was saying something beyond telling me a story in a way I could relate to emotionally and deeply.

ML:It’s that Western Culture, with all the ‘good things’, is putting the individual at the centre of the Universe, whilst in the Eastern European culture or even more in Asia you are part of time, of society, of culture and then you are like a medium yourself. While in the West you are a human being with a right to talk, in Central Europe and the East you are at most allowed to be a medium for cultural movements, time movements – all the wars, all the accidents – you can use your sensitivity to talk about it.

Tarkovsky was a supreme example of that. He was like a medium. He was not always aware of why things came to him and how they came. Whereas these young guys I work with now kind of feel what’s going on in their country – on an emotional basis. They don’t make action stories just to be directors – they really are sensitive. So I think there is a big difference between storytelling that is a western approach to art and developing your sensitivity for the time environment you are in.

Between my home in Lodz and Warsaw – it’s only one hundred and thirty kilometres – and I often went to Warsaw to visit relatives – on the way there is the place where Chopin was born and I remember it from my childhood. Whenever I am in Poland I always go to Zelazowa Wola where Chopin was born and raised.¹⁵ In my childhood – I’m not certain about it today because it is so changed – but in my childhood I had a very strong feeling that no other music was possible to write there. With the light, with the nature, with the trees, with a small river, now polluted, and so forth – he was like a medium for the environment. Sometimes I go to places where people were active. I visited the place where Freud was active. I don’t think he could come with any other theory in this building, in this architecture, with this light. People are mediums for something else. You can disturb it and try to be somebody else or see things in other ways but that’s in vain really. Just as I don’t believe you can educate people. As a teacher the most important thing is whom you allow in the School. You can help release what is already inside. Creativity is the struggle to be effective.

RC:Was it true that Tarkovsky also admired Bresson?

ML:Yes, very much, very much. Bresson’s ‘Notes on Cinematography’¹⁶ I pump into the heads of my students.

Tarkovsky and Bergman never met, but once, at Film Huset in Stockholm they saw each other and turned and ran away. Bergman said: ‘Tarkovsky freely moved in the room, where I succeeded only to open the door a little to look in’.

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RC:You mentioned Kazan but he’s not a typical Hollywood filmmaker. Do you think it’s false to try to distinguish between the typical Hollywood film and the best of European cinema?

ML:I understand the distinction and I totally agree that there is a very big difference between the film as entertainment, which is typical of Hollywood, while the European cinema has it’s roots in other forms of culture which is not entertaining first of all. I think it’s a very great distinction and very necessary. I had a very big disagreement with my young students four years ago when I told them that they are beginning their careers at the worst possible moment of the culture or of the history of art. They said what do you mean. I said I am raised on film-makers who, have their roots in other arts – painting, theatre, literature, music. While you are raised by people who are raised on the films only. Only your position is even worse because you are raised, educated, by people who are raised on TV.

My hope is that film-makers will try to get nourished by other arts to make the films richer. Otherwise we are going to be – I don’t know the word in English, when you grow crops on one piece of land, the same crop. Then you drain the earth – you have to cultivate not only the crops but also the earth.

RC:Otherwise it becomes sterile.

ML:And that’s what’s happening in the States.

I think there are people like me with similar abilities and disabilities, because editors are disabled on the social level. It’s not normal to be alone in a room with people who look alive but are not. It’s a kind of dysfunctional element that editors have, that they can relate to people who are not really people. So I know there are a lot of people who are formed in that way too.¹⁷

Ready movies and the false appetite for making them. Hollywood makes movies that only create appetites for another of the same kind. ‘Hamburger films’ – consumerist film-making – out of one cinema and into another.

Notes

1.  Lodz – Home of the famous Polish Film School, which has produced generations of special filmmakers – directors and cinematographers. It has no editing specialisation.

2.  Middle classes and culture – A depressing thought but sadly true that bourgeois life treats everything as something to acquire – including culture – thus negating its significance.

3.  Swedish Film School – Has no editing specialisation either!

4.  Andrej Wajda – Father figure of post-war Polish cinema. Established his reputation with the war trilogy in the fifties: ‘A Generation’, ‘Kanal’ and ‘Ashes and Diamonds’.

5.  The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky – 1986. The average number of shots in a feature film is in excess of 500.

6.  Sven Nykvist – Bergmans cameraman for many years – since 1953.

7.  Elia Kazan (1909–2003) – Theatre and film director, who usually got the best performances of their careers out of actors.

8.  Anatole Dauman (1924–98) – Producer for Bresson, Resnais, Godard, Marker, Oshima, Wenders, etc.

9.  Lukas Moodysson – Born 1969, the next Bergman, according to Bergman.

10.  Luis Bun˜uel – Was remarkably economic when shooting and would often stop at one take, even if there might be technical imperfections.

11.  Liv Ullmann – Born in Tokyo, 1939. Her first appearance with Bergman was in ‘Persona’, 1966. Her first feature as director, ‘Sophie’ in 1992.

12.  Bob Fosse (1927–87) – Dancing and rhythm is one reason why some editors think you should stand up to cut.

13.  Lilya-4-ever – Lukas Moodysson, 2002.

14.  Together – Lukas Moodysson, 2000.

15.  Chopin’s Birthplace is about 50 kilometres west of Warsaw. I respect Michal’s belief in place as a specific inspiration and influence.

16.  Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography is in print (Sun and Moon Press) and the most relevant text for filmmakers that exists, along with Bazin’s ‘What is Cinema’.

17.  Editors as Dysfunctional Beings – And yet they mostly seem rather well adjusted to me.