Before today’s Bryant Park Hotel interview with Cold War director-writer Pawel Pawlikowski and star Joanna Kulig, I was told I couldn’t take my own photos. Which I initially found irksome but whatever. So I asked the hired photographer, a guy with a really nice Canon camera named Andy Kropa, to shoot Pawel and Joanna using window-light only, and to shoot them together and then Joanna alone. Lo and behold, the photos turned out nicely…voila!
The interview was pleasant enough but only lasted 12 minutes, partly because my digital recorder wasn’t working at first. We covered six or seven topics, and indulged in a lot of chit-chatting and cross-jabbering. I’ll expand upon portions of our talk tomorrow.
I explained to Joanna that I’m the only Gold Derby “expert” who’s included her performance as a top five Best Actress contender, but (a) big things have small beginnings and (b) I know what I’m talking about. Here’s my Joanna riff, posted on 9.25.
A saga of a difficult, in-and-out love story in Poland and France of the ’50s and early ’60s, Cold War is a stone masterpiece. It deserves to win the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar — hands down, no question. It earned a huge, sustained standing ovation at the end of last night’s New York Film Festival screening.
