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Wajda on Walesa film: ‘I don’t want to but I have to'

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 25.11.2011 10:20
Veteran film director Andrzej Wajda has said that his forthcoming biopic of Solidarity legend Lech Walesa will be "the hardest" in his 55-year long career.

photo
photo - PAP/Tomasz Gzell

“If I am asked why I am making a film about Walesa, I say: I don’t want to but I have to”, he told journalists at a press conference in Warsaw, quoting one of Walesa's famed quips from the time he ran for presidency in 1990.

“I have to because there is a need to portray a very special hero that Poland produced: someone who scored a real victory, a victory of spirit”, Wajda added.

Prominent writer Janusz Glowacki said he agreed to write the script because Wajda told him he did not want to erect a monument to Walesa. In Głowacki’s view, Walesa is a complex personality, a strong man with many weaknesses.

Walesa is to be portrayed by Robert Wieckiewicz, and his wife Danuta by Agnieszka Grochowska. Both are among Poland’s most sought after actors. Their credits include Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, the Polish candidate for an Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Film category.

According to Wajda, Poland has not had such a group of wonderful actors for quite some time.

Grochowska told reporters that she has just read the newly-published biography of Danuta Walesa.

“It helped me a lot. She is no longer such a mysterious figure for me. She is a genuinely free person deep in her heart. Her book deprived me of all the fear connected with my role” Grochowska said.

Location shooting for the biopic about the shipyard electrician turned Solidarity leader and will begin in Gdansk on 1 December.

The first scenes to be shot will be the film’s opening sequences, focusing on the bloody workers’ protest on the Baltic coast in December 1970, in which Walesa, then 27, took part.

The film is to end with the original footage of Walesa’s historic speech to the US Congress in November 1989, which opened with the words “We, the People”.

The Director of Photography is Pawel Edelman, whose credits include Wajda’ s Katyn and Polanski’s Oscar-winning The Pianist.

The film is scheduled to go on general release in the autumn of 2012. (mk/nh/pg)

tags: Cinema, Wajda, walesa
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