The making of the film went smoothly. Edward Kosiński was the director of photography.
We'd known one another earlier. He had done some of the filming for 'The Promised Land'
and this contemporary journalistic style contrasted well
with the shots we used as we tried to show the past.
There were scenes here shot in colour
showing scenes from the past in our protagonists' stories
as well as scenes lifted straight from news reports
to which we'd added scenes
shot in the way films were made in the Fifties.
So the film was given several different aspects
which is always a good thing for a film.
It carried one very clear message
which I would say was profoundly uncensorable and forbidden.
Namely, a worker is turning to his leaders demanding his rights.
This was unthinkable, since the reason why there was a worker's leadership was so that
the worker wouldn't have to demand anything. The leadership thought for him, so there was no need for him to turn to them
because the leadership itself, being a worker's leadership, was looking after him.
However, reality and the truth had a completely different aspect.
The system of excellence at work
was a way of raising productivity,
but raising productivity without paying for the extra work.
This became an ideology: if others can do more, then so can you.
Of course, these excelling workers
very soon became stars for one season,
travelling from one building site to another
because this was the most visible image of building.
When somebody laid 30,000 bricks in a day the results were visible:
where before there'd been nothing, now there was a wall standing as high as a man.
So this was visible and this display, this circus,
which is how the brick-layers were often referred to, these brick-laying trios.
The Soviet system had been adopted by us. One man would prepare the bricks, another would pass them on
and another would lay down the lime which would fix the bricks.
This system of a trio was adopted by us,
and this circus of excelling workers travelled from one building site to another.
which the workers hated as they saw no reason why they should work harder
and more productively if they weren't being paid for it.
However, the Party was searching for a way of increasing productivity
which from year to year was decreasing.
And this whole lie, this deception
suddenly found itself in this film with total openness.
Why weren't we afraid? Who were we supposed to be afraid of?
We were making a film with the profound conviction that someone has to say this.
This is what Ścibor-Rylski, who'd written the screenplay, thought,
this was what I thought and it's what those young actors thought. We were just talking about what had happened.
It's true that the film became entwined with our reality of the Gierek era which was different,
those other times seemed to have been consigned to a museum, in the old news reels.
New times were coming, everything was looking different,
there was the appearance, so to speak, of a different better world.
The one with the other, combined.
It was an amazing film, very contemporary, immediate.
And it had this moral which was astonishing
because no one then had dared to make such a film.
It was the only film that stood up for the rights of those workers.
That's when I remembered the scene from 'A Generation'
where an old man with a beard, Karl Marx,
uses the mouth of the master who's instructing the youngster
making a door to explain about surplus value.
Here this surplus value was exposed in all its rawness.
This surplus value was being taken from the worker by someone and it turned out that it was the socialist state
that was taking it and doing whatever it liked with it.