08/08/2022
Credit by Kieślowski
Slawomir Idziak on collaboration with Kieślowski (part 2)
"The script for 'Blue' was written as a psychological drama, almost a detective story. The journalist was the third most important character and she appeared three or four times in the script, but now she’s only in there once at the beginning. Kieslowski completely cut her out. So the script somehow turned during this final edit from a psychological drama into a more operatic, musically driven kind of film. And it works … In the edit, Kieślowski repeated this number with the blue light several times. So in the middle of one scene, for instance, he fades to black and then the music comes in, followed by the blue light. And this was the beginning of an idea that turned everything upside down - suddenly, the film was completely different ; it was attractive and it still worked nicely.
Krzysztof was a genius in terms of editing. I never met a director who is as good an editor as he was. He was good because he had spent millions of hours editing documentaries in the past. And that was real physical, manual work. He liked to cut everything himself. Editing was a completely different process back then - it was very mechanical because you had to splice together image and sound. But Kieślowski needed half the time a professional editor needed to do a cut. He was very fast, like a magician. He knew how to experiment and shift things around very quickly."
(source : "Film Comment", 2017)
