Matthew Kawalski’s The Atlas won the award for Best Short Feature at the 2019 Bermuda International Film Festival. The prescreening team and I saw the film very early on and were unable to find a film that was, put simply, better than Kawalski’s movie. Some time after the festival had passed, I got in contact with Matthew to discuss the film. He was, at the time, filming a television series in Poland, and so I caught him on one of his (rare) days off.
The editing of a film is carried out, always, with an attention to rhythm. One of the reasons, I think, that Michael Bay’s action scenes are so thunderously dull (despite the amount of stuff going on at any one time) is because they have zero sense of rhythm. Every cinematic sequence, action-related or not, is like a ballet. The movements of the camera inform the movements of the story, that is, how all the bits of film have been put together in the editing room.
I thought that The Atlas had a very “jazzy” rhythm with its clear sense of direction, but, at times, random plot turns. (This is a compliment.) “I mainly listen to Jazz,” Matthew says, “I love Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans,” not Walker Evans the photographer, as he claimed during our conversation, “John Coltrane […] what I love in Keith Jarrett’s music is that a single piece can last up to thirty minutes and keep evolving and coming back and you can hear him humming over the piano. This personal touch somehow acts as his emotional state,” nodding intensely, “I think in moviemaking it’s there too. If you, as the audience, can figure out the structure […] that is when you get relaxed. And bored because there’s nothing to challenge you anymore. But at the same time, if it’s toocomplex, then you’re zoning out and that’s true with jazz; there’s some jazz that is beyond my reach.”
I suggest John Coltrane’s later work, such as Kulu Sé Mama (1967) and Expression (1967) as things that might be “beyond his reach”. He agrees, saying, “It’s inaccessible to me. It requires—”
“L.S.D.?” I interject.
“Yes!” he exclaims.
“I wouldn’t try that, though,” I add, “you may transcend time.”
Kawalski concurs: “You may transcend and not come back. It’s a one-way ticket. Yea,” he mumbles, his psyche folding inside out, “I think L.S.D. and John Coltrane is a one-way ticket. Pretty much.”
The script for The Atlas was, by Kawalski’s own admission “unprocessed by tutors” at film-school. Before he actually went to film-school, though, he was at medical school. “As part of routine training,” he explains, “you visit different wards: E.R. and internal medicine, and psychiatry is one of the mix…”
Cue flashback: The young(er) M. Kawalski wanders through a psychiatric ward, patients lining the walls like security guards in Gatwick Airport: “I saw a patient which was a rough prototype of the final Atlas,” staring at a patient for way longer than usual and considering, perhaps, that he may give all this medical stuff a pass and go to film-school instead. “There really was a guy who was standing still and had his hands raised. Catatonic. No eye- or verbal-contact. And he would stand all day. And he would collapse, but upon waking, the first thing he would do would be to stand up.”
What peaked Kawalski’s interest was the fact that nobody knew who this guy was. “But, for some reason,” Matthew relays in his hotel room, “this community around him didn’t allow him to remain unchartered land. They didn’t allow this mystery, and they had to fill it in. So what happened was gossip started to spread, and it was informed gossip, like, ‘I know what really happened!’”
Later, he had a serious urge to make the film: “If we don’t make our beliefs known, if we don’t stand for something, if we don’t make it explicit and visible, then the world will decide for us.” This is, certainly, the major strength of the film: the fiction-fabric that ultimately drives the eponymous Atlas away from the ward. “Somebody will take you, as a story, and put you into a box,” Matthew goes on, “and it may not be the box you intend to be in, but this is going to happen—It was very powerful for me at the time.”
It still is; what’s more, it exists in movie-form and is, as such, indestructible.
There were two parts in the film, however, that Matthew was determined to cast correctly. The first was The Atlas himself: Kawalski wanted Tomasz Kot to play the lead, which proved difficult since he was filming Cold War (2018) with director Pawel Pawlikowski. “I was waiting a long time for his availability,” Kawalski explains, “and, hell, I’m glad I did wait for him since he did such a marvellous job in the film.” They also became good friends. “He’s just a great human being in all walks on life,” Matthew says, “and so [The Atlas’s production] was really long; I think from the inception till the finished product was, like, five years…”
The second part was that of the psychiatry ward itself; and since he didn’t have Stanley Kubrick’s budget on The Shining (1980 – that is, in order to actually build said sets…), he found himself, his production designer Alicja Kazimierczak, and his Director of Photography Pawel Dyllus travelling across Poland, touring various castles, ex-hospitals and the like.
By “Old Castle Number 48”, they were sick of old castles, until they walked into the ballroom—“There’s this sculpture of Atlas,” seen in the penultimate shot of the movie, “it was there, like boom – ‘There’s no way we’re filming this film anywhere else but here! It just hasto be here!’”
Originally a monastery built in the Fourteenth Century, it had, in decades prior, been a proper psychiatric hospital. In fact, some of the old ladies who portray patients in the film used to be employed by said hospital. In turn, apparently, they needed little direction. “That was movie magic,” Kawalski remembers, “a synchronicity-magic moment, for real!”
With time running out, I decided to ask him a question that usually makes directors awkward. I asked him what his definition of a bad movie was. “I think…” choosing his words carefully, “what gets me the most is insincerity. And I think, somehow, it comes across [during a film] and I cannot pinpoint it. But I think good art comes from telling the truth. It’s pretty intangible because what is the truth? Nobody can tell you what is the truth. I love what Mark twain wrote—”
As it turns out, almost every major writer has said, basically, the same thing. For this piece, I will choose to attribute the following quote to Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel: “Keep the company of those who seek the truth – run from those who have found it.”
“So,” Matthew says, “I can’t tell what is the truth; we’re all looking for it. But I think insincerity comes across [in bad films]. Somehow, if [the filmmaker] is cynical about it, and it just shows that [they’re] using the craft, the tools of art but you’re not doing this to elevate your audience; to bring reflection; to make them feel something – you’re using it in a cynical way; just to achieve a purpose and play people for a fool, play them for dummies—That’s what gets me the most: Often, you have a film that lacks craft because, perhaps, the filmmakers didn’t have time; perhaps they were inexperienced. But you can see honest intention behind it. And you can fall in love with a movie like this, still—But if it’s the other way around: if it’s well made, if it’s well crafted, and, then, you feel you’re being played: ‘This is a trick.’ It really makes my blood boil.”
With that in mind, then: to the filmmakers reading this: Don’t do what Matthew just described.