(image from The Double Life of Veronique)
I keep persuading younger colleagues to whom I teach scriptwriting or directing to examine their own lives. Not for the purposes of any book or script but for themselves. I always say to them, Try to think of what happened to you which was important and led to your sitting here in this chair, on this very day, among these people. What happened? What really brought you here? You've got to know this, That's the starting point.
The years in which you don't work on yourself like this are, in fact, wasted. You might feel or understand something intuitively and consequently, the results are arbitrary. It's only when you've done this work that you can see a certain order in events and their effects. I tried to fathom out what brought me to this point in my life, too, because without such an authentic, thorough and merciless analysis, you can't tell a story. If you don't understand your own life, than I don't think you can understand the lives of the characters in your stories, you can't understand the lives of other people.
Kieslowski on Kieslowski, edited by Danusia Stok
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