Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski’s "Deep End”

Colour, HD CAM
Germany, 2010, 75 min
Section: Out of the Past

Synopsis

Deep End was only Jerzy Skolimowski’s second British film but he nevertheless captured the atmosphere of "swinging London” like few other filmmakers. A Polish immigrant primarily known at the time as the coauthor of Polanski’s Knife in the Water, he put together a group of young actors and experienced artists, and together they created a fascinating portrait of a tragic young romance which even years later comes across as unbelievably fresh and authentic. Robert Fischer’s documentary includes many of those involved in making the movie, and their recounting of events serves to lay bare the creative process. Here Skolimowski happily combined young talent with famous stars, allowed space for improvisation, and at the same time focused attention on the smallest details, thus gradually putting together the story’s symbolic plane. The director himself appears as well, and recalls problems with censorship and the festival circuit. The production designer and cinematographer accompany us to Munich locations, and after 40 years the lead actress and actor return to their favorite scenes.

About the director

Robert Fischer (b. 1954, Greven, Germany) is one of Germany’s foremost film historians, and since 1999 he has also made documentaries. He is the author of numerous books about world directors (Hitchcock, Welles, Lynch, Tarantino, Melville, Fassbinder, Bresson), and the French Minister of Culture conferred upon him the Order of Arts and Letters for translating the complete works of François Truffaut into German. With colleague Joe Hembe he wrote a history of modern German film. After five years working for the Munich Film Museum, where he participated in the reconstruction of Orson Welles’s unfinished pictures, he decided to try his hand at documentaries. He has shot numerous works dedicated to leading figures of world cinema, including Monsieur Truffaut Meets Mr. Hitchcock (1999) Milos Forman: Film Is Truth (2000), Fassbinder in Hollywood (2002), Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin (2006).