Chance or Fate

 Krzysztof Kieślowski (still), Blind Chance, 1982.

I don’t really know why there wasn’t any true description of Poland in the 1970s in the other arts.1 There wasn’t even a proper description of it in literature and literature is easier to produce than film. It’s not subject to censorship to the same degree although individual writers or individual books might be. Yet films offered the best description of Poland in the 1970s. At the end of the 1970s, I realized that this description was limited, that we had reached these limits and that there was no point in describing this world any further.

A result of this train of thought is Blind Chance, which is no longer a description of the outside world but rather of the inner world. It’s a description of the powers which meddle with our fate, which push us one way or another.

I think its fundamental flaws lay in the script, as usual. I like the idea to this day; it’s rich and interesting. I just don’t think it was made adequate use of, this idea of three possible endings—that every day we’re always faced with a choice which could end our entire life yet of which we’re completely unaware. We don’t ever really know where our fate lies. We don’t know what chance holds in store for us. Fate in the sense of a place, a social group, a professional career, or the work we do. We’ve got much more freedom than this in the emotional sphere. In the social sphere we’re greatly governed by chance; there are things which we simply have to do, or we have to be the way we are. That’s because of our genes, of course. Those were the thoughts which preoccupied me while I was making Blind Chance.

Witek, the main character, behaves decently in each situation. He behaves decently even when he joins the Party. At a certain moment, when he sees that he’s been manipulated into a situation where he ought to behave like a bastard, he rebels and behaves decently.

The third ending is the one which means the most to me—the one where the aeroplane explodes—because one way or another, that’s going to be our fate. It’s all the same whether this happens in an aeroplane or in bed, it doesn’t matter.

The film wasn’t going all that well. I’d shot about eighty percent. I edited it and realized that it was going in the wrong direction; it was equally inadequate in the way it was being filmed and in the way the idea of the three individual endings was being expressed. It was mechanical. It had been inserted into the film and didn’t give the impression of forming an organic part of the whole. So I stopped shooting, and had a break for two or three months. Then I reshot about half of the material and another twenty percent of new material which I needed. And there was a considerable improvement.

I often worked that way—and I still like doing this—that at some point I’d stop shooting and give myself a certain margin of freedom so that I could check in the editing room and on screen how various elements work together. Here, in the West, it’s difficult to work in this way because there’s a lot of money behind any project and it’s terribly hard to play with this money. It was easy in Poland, at that time, because the money didn’t belong to anybody, even though you had to take care not to make the films too expensive or unnecessarily extravagant. I was always very careful in this way. But you could play around with the money. You could manipulate it. And I often did.