MM: What was your editing process like with editor Dorota Wardeszkiewicz, who’s worked with Kieślowski?
Marczak: She’s edited so much, so she really wants to find something that is timeless, because she’s done everything. She’s completely open to playing with the form. She’s tired of classical editing. I came up with the idea of organizing this film around memories: “Let’s try to find connections with scenes that somehow link the characters, but they’re more emotional and reflect the inner psychology and the psychological development of the characters—the poetic aspect.”
We edited versions and versions of scenes, and we had this really big library that we played around with. We edited like you would edit all the memories separately. We didn’t edit the film; we edited moments. We tried to create as many interesting moments for each of the characters. Of course in the back of our heads we had the whole throughline and the construction, but we tried to really not think of that and take each separate moment and see what we shot and what we can add together to create these moments—not only within something that we thought was a scene, but [to] think of anything and combine anything with everything to create a scene that we never intended to be shot.
That was really long process to try all of those variables. The last month is the most rewarding because you have all of this stuff ready and different films that you’re making. You can see which one you like the best and which one plays out the best. Certain things felt like they were really great—the jumps from scene to scene, I felt like they worked well. And then there were moments that felt wrong and we were trying to find a way to get those places to work better. Always in the back of my head I had the thought: “Let’s look at how memories are formed. Let’s look at how people remember. Let’s try to be free to that and not be a slave to what we know and think, or a slave to what was in the shot.”
Many people say to look at your footage with a fresh perspective, but to actually do that, to get your head out of the fact that you know that this character walked here and then this happened—to be able to really not know that and put yourself in a space where you’re experimenting and creating new stuff—that’s actually really difficult. It sounds easy, but it’s not, because you really tie down all of your preconceptions of what this was. We tried to always have that in the back of our minds. Our memories just combine shit. You think you had that conversation at that place, but you really had it at that other place. To have that as an inspiration was always cool.
MM: What’s next for you?
Marczak: I love adventures, and I love to do new things and experiment. I’m still at that age where there’s courage [in me], but I do see the courage fading away a little bit. It’s important to start making films when you’re quite young; that courage is so important. I see that fading a little bit. MM
All These Sleepless Nights was released in theaters on April 7 , 2017 courtesy of The Orchard. All images courtesy of The Orchard.
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