When an idea as good as this comes up,
then its fulfilment almost comes of its own accord and it's not difficult,
it generates itself, and this scene in particular,
Zbyszek Cybulski understood it well and his interpretation
was very good because it wasn't a scene of two young people
celebrating the deaths of their friends.
He's saying, 'This is what life is like, we can handle it.
We are... What do you expect of us? What do you want from us?
You want us to die, and we can handle that.'
And an enormous part of the young generation,
especially those who fought in the Warsaw Uprising,
were easy, so to speak, about losing their lives
without thinking that we and Poland would need their lives so very much.
If this was our fate, and it could have been better,
we were mainly lacking those young people who at that moment simply
disappeared from our artistic life,
our literary and scientific life.
They were all young people who could have played an important role.
But we were thinking about illustrating this through using very expressive scenes,
with the help of vivid ideas,
and here, American cinema was much closer to us than Italian cinema which had receded by then.
The shots were quite different, they were strong, expressive, vivid.
I have to say that
on the first day of shooting 'Ashes and Diamonds' things went well.
First thing in the morning, we were working on the scene
where Maciek Chełmicki meets with his superior
who was being played by Adam Pawlikowski. They meet and he wants to give him back... he says,
'If you don't want to fight any more, give me back your gun.'
And then suddenly, 'No, I don't want to give it back!'
Because he knows that when he gives back his gun, he'll be vulnerable so he can't get rid of this.
He can think about backing out of further action
but he... the years of occupation have made him always carry a weapon
which he can use against others or against himself.
He always has the choice but once he surrenders his gun he becomes a nobody.
And Zbyszek Cybulski stood like this...
And it was a good idea of ours that this scene should take place in the toilet,
in a seedy hotel because
it's a very lofty scene, it's a scene that
normally would have a heroic aspect to it, I'd say;
we tried at all costs to show it as degraded.
I remember that Zbyszek Cybulski was standing with his back
against the door that was there and began rocking from one foot to the other.
The door was swinging on its hinges, we came back to him and he said to me,
'I feel good, I feel good, I feel good.'
I understood that he was looking for a way of expressing with his whole body the character he was going to be playing.
Why with his whole body? Because, among other things, he couldn't act without his glasses.
It was very clear that his eyes were dead;
he was so short-sighted, that his eyes had no expression in them.
Because of this, he wore dark glasses and so his eyes were invisible.
People rightly say that
the eyes express everything, they are like the window to the soul.
Why do the police always say during interrogations,
'Look me in the eyes, look me in the eyes, look me in the eyes'?
Because it's immediately obvious if he's telling the truth or if he's lying. The eyes can't lie.
If he had no eyes, how could he act in a film?
He could only act because he transferred everything that his eyes would have expressed to his physical appearance.
His body was exceptionally expressive and because of this,
I already understood that there was no point in filming him up close,
and that his feet were important, that his behaviour was important.