Jerzy Skolimowski

Biography

The film “Hands Up!” was shot in 1967, but audiences first saw it in 1981, at the Cannes Film Festival.

Skolimowski was born on 5 May 1938 in Łódź, the son of the architect Stanisław Skolimowski. His childhood fell under the German occupation. His father was connected with the underground: by some accounts he was executed, by others he died in 1943 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. After the war his mother became cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Prague, and the boy spent several years at a secondary school in Poděbrady, where his schoolmates included the future film directors Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer and the future writer and president Václav Havel. He then studied ethnography, Polish philology and literature at the University of Warsaw, and took up boxing, which later became the subject of his first film, and jazz. Through jazz he grew close to the composer Krzysztof Komeda, the actor Zbigniew Cybulski and the directors Andrzej Munk and Roman Polanski. In 1957 his poem “My Rounds” appeared in the magazine Nowa Kultura, two collections of poems followed in 1958 and 1959, and in 1961 his play “Someone Will Drown” was staged in Warsaw. Andrzej Wajda and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski showed him a script about contemporary youth; he criticised it, and in the end took part in the work on “Innocent Sorcerers” (1960), in which he also played a small part as a boxer. He then wrote the screenplay of “Knife in the Water” with Polanski and Jakub Goldberg, proposing, among other things, that the action be built on the rules of ancient tragedy, with unity of time, place and action.

At the Łódź film school, which he finished in 1963, his tutor was Munk. The short films he had made during his studies Skolimowski edited into the feature-length “Identification Marks: None” (1964) and submitted as his diploma work. He played the hero, Andrzej Leszczyc, himself; the same character appears in “Walkover” (1965) and “Hands Up!”. “Barrier” (1966) had to be made with reservations: the director was not allowed to play the lead, and the role went to Jan Nowicki. The French magazine Cahiers du cinéma ranked “Walkover” second on its list of the best films of the year.

“Hands Up!” was shot at the same time as the Belgian “Le Départ” (1967), a comedy with Jean-Pierre Léaud. “Le Départ” won the Golden Bear at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival. The Polish film contained a scene from the Stalin years in which the heroes accidentally paste a second pair of eyes onto a portrait of Stalin; its screening was banned, and the director, having won no concessions, left the country. In 1968 he made a segment for the Czechoslovak film “Dialóg 20-40-60”, then in London directed “Deep End” (1970), which has since often been called his best work. He himself considered “The Adventures of Gerard” (1970) his worst film, and his adaptation of Nabokov’s “King, Queen, Knave” (1972) failed. His next film, “The Shout”, based on a story by Robert Graves, came out in 1978 and won the Jury Prize at Cannes. After martial law was introduced in Poland he quickly made “Moonlighting” (1982), about Polish workers in London, for the screenplay of which he received a prize at Cannes. “Success Is the Best Revenge” (1984), about a Polish director in exile, was left without proper distribution, and he moved to Los Angeles. There he made “The Lightship” (1985), which received the Special Jury Prize in Venice, then “Torrents of Spring” (1987), after Turgenev, and “30 Door Key” (1991), after Witold Gombrowicz’s “Ferdydurke”. The last film failed, and Skolimowski gave up directing for many years. He continued to act: in Taylor Hackford’s “White Nights”, Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!”, David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises”, and in 2012 he played a villain in Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers”.

In Los Angeles he painted in a figurative and expressionist manner; his first solo exhibition was held there in 1998, and his works were first shown in Poland in 2002, at the National Museum in Wrocław. It seems to me that painting was for him not a rest from cinema but a way of staying in the profession while there were no commissions.

In 2008 came “Four Nights with Anna”, and in 2010 “Essential Killing” with Vincent Gallo, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and, for its lead actor, the Volpi Cup. In 2011 Skolimowski received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 2015 he made “11 Minutes”, and in 2016 he received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in Venice. “EO” (2022), a free variation on Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar”, won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. In the same year he co-wrote Roman Polanski’s “The Palace” with Ewa Piaskowska.