I think that Zbyszek Cybulski not only understood this very well, but he had in him
an ease in front of the camera,
in life it was different, but this intensity in front of the camera
made it seem that he was preoccupied with something else.
We don't know exactly what it is but something is worrying him,
there's something there, something else that seems to be always with him.
This was independent of the scene he was playing in a film.
We quickly came to an understanding about this,
and I had the chance to be with him in Paris after we'd made 'Ashes and Diamonds'
and we went to look at the big apes in the Paris zoo.
The thing we liked about that, the thing we discovered was that when this mystery is revealed, the technique so to speak,
that this ape would fling itself against the cage
and makes a gesture like an operatic actor
after which it remains immobile and then it did this.
Or else it looked at us when a fly went past,
and the ape went 'snap' and caught the fly.
We understood that this was fantastic,
somewhere between the broad gesture used by a normal actor throughout the whole film
and the one where he acts in this way, so it's either like this or like that.
Life on screen creates a simultaneity,
and I think that Zbyszek Cybulski was fantastic in being able to exploit this at that moment,
especially as he wasn't able to think about the hero
whom he was playing in 'Ashes and Diamonds' as anyone other than himself.
I think that's why the audience accepted him so well.
He didn't want to act in any sort of costume,
he wore his own clothes even though historically they were completely wrong.
I know exactly how boys like that looked, how they were dressed,
but he rejected the costume we had prepared for him,
he was in his own things
with a small, green army haversack and that's how he came into the film.
So he gave himself up completely to the film 'Ashes and Diamonds' clothes, boots and all and that was fantastic.
When an actor behaves like that,
his involvement with the film is incomparably greater.
His involvement in the film wasn't as someone who's fulfilling the things that were written down earlier
but as the co-author of the text.
I came across actors who'd say, 'No, I won't say that, I don't agree with this.'
This doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
After all, an actor is meant to recite the dialogue which he has written down in front of him.
It meant that the actors in this film, my co-workers,
altogether we began to interpret these scenes
written by Andrzejewski into something that were very much film scenes.
What is a film scene?
It's a scene where the theme is expressed not with the help of dialogue
or a conventional situation of two people,
but we are searching for something
that is a short-cut, overemphasised.