A Short Film About Killing

DavidSloan · September 16, 2004

Has anyone seen this episode, from the Dekalogue? It has an eerie, sickly green tint and a black halo effect. If anyone has any info on how Idziak achieved this look, please tell us!

Thanks.

Wendell_Greene · September 16, 2004

Idziak is known for experimenting with filters, I love his work on this film as well as "Blue" and Double Life of Veronique" .

On this episode of Decalogue he experimented with green filters. More important question I believe is WHY he used this color, what was his MOTIVATION? This excerpt is from an interview with Idziak helps shed light on the subject and also speaks to why we cinematographers interpet things the way we do after we read a script and talk with a director:

"Being a freelancer, at the moment [Kieslowski] got a proposition to make Decalogue, he asked me if I would photograph one or two of them. I didn't like the idea to do these movies, because he planned it as a television series. I tried as much as possible to avoid to do movies for television, because what does it mean, cinematography for television? Not so much you know. And secondly, he planned it as a 16mm project. In Poland, all the labs, especially for 16mm, is so bad. You're working very hard, and your not getting anything interesting this way.

I wasn't so enthusiastic about doing a film, so I said okay, I will do maybe one of them. And he gave me all ten movies and said, "you will have to make your choice of which one you'd like to make." I decided to take number nine, the story about jealousy. It's a small movie, and I liked the script, [so I said] "I'll make this one." And we were both on a skiing vacation, and he says to me, "I know your trick. You know that now I am doing number five, the Short Film About Killing, and you have time. You could do this one. Number nine I am going to do at the end of the year, and probably at that time you'll be abroad and not available. So the trick is just promising something, and later on you are not here. So why are you not doing number five?" I say, "Kieslowski...why should I make the movie in which Jacek, the boy, kills the taxi driver. And later on, half an hour later, they're killing him! I don't want to do such an ugly thing." He says, "The script is good," but I say, "it may be good, but ach! It's a story I don't want. Not particularly." (laughs)

The way you [get out of something like this] in the west is very easy, because you say, "okay, I am very interested in your movie, but you know my fee is $200,000." So they say, "Thank you very much, nice talking to you!" (laughs) You couldn't do such thing in Poland, because our salary was fixed then. They're getting their money's worth, because for a feature movie you're getting not more than $200 for everything. (laughs) It was very funny...Kieslowski was having a seminar in Switzerland, and students asked him how much he makes. They said, "You have to be very rich. You've made ten scripts and ten movies." And he asks them, "So imagine how much I get [after making] these ten scripts, and directing ten movies." So they made up some numbers, and he said, "Let us not speak about numbers. I'll tell you: I get exactly the same amount of money I am getting for this seminar." And it was just a one-week seminar! (laughs) And it was true! It's no joke.... The communists believed we were artists, and so we didn't need the money; it's a privilege for us to be artists. So our salary, in general, was on the level of the worker's salary. We'd get a kind of permanent fee, which was very, very low.

So I had to find a way to tell him no, so I said, "Listen, Kieslowski, I am not going to do it...but if you'd really like me to do it, I will if you let me do it green, and using all my grad filters." I make my own filters; I have a huge collection, and some of them are quite extreme, you know, and my idea was to always use the grad filters not in the typical way, [but in a] more complicated way. And he said, "Green?! Why should I have my film green?" He was very angry, he realized my tactic, didn't speak to me the next day, and two days later approached me and said, "Listen Slawek, I am going to do the ten movies. If you are going to do one of them [as] green poop, do it -- it's your problem, not mine." (laughs) So now I have to do it, you know. It was very funny.

I am always telling this anecdote to my students...because for the first time in my life -- and I was really quite an experienced cinematographer -- I didn't have the burden of responsibility. Normally, someone approaches you, the director is sitting in front of you, you know that you are the one who's the key to his career. If you deliver it: "well done" -- you [both go up the ladder]. If you fail [down you go]. It's a very heavy responsibility, you know; very often it limits our risk.... So as it happened, I didn't have such a thing [on A Short Film about Killing]. And as a matter of fact I was so astonished because the film looked so ugly; it was a kind of greenish ugly, and at the Cannes festival in two or three reviews said it was the most originally photographed in the whole festival.... They didn't have a prize for cinematographers, but the praise this [camera work] won was quite a lot. Because it was so original, so different, so strange.

Is it true you made something like 600 filters for A Short Film About Killing?

Then I didn't have so many. I had something like 150. Now I have something like 600.

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Also if you get the DVD of "A Short Film..." you can listen to Idziak talk about his use of filters in a thirteen minute interview. Really cool stuff. Hope this helped!