Jerzy Skolimowski

Jerzy Skolimowski (b. May 5, 1938 in Lodz, Poland) is a Polish film director, scriptwriter, dramatist and actor. A graduate of the prestigious Polish Film School in Lodz, Skolimowski has directed more than twenty films in and outside of Poland since his 1960 debut Oko wykol (The Menacing Eye). Jerzy Skolimowski is a distinguished accomplished director, writer and actor. He is now living in Los Angeles for some years where he paints in a figurative, expressionist mode and acts occasionally in films.

Film as life

After Barrier he left Poland to make Le Départ in Belgium in French. According to him Le Départ was a light film rather than a comedy, ?does not have the serious layers that I like in my work?. Skolimowski returned to Poland to make Hands Up!, the third film of the Andrzej trilogy and the fourth of his Polish sextet.

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Between Hands Up! and his next feature Arthur Conan Doyle?s The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Skolimowski contributed a story to a Czech-produced portmanteau film, Dialóg 20-40-60 (1968), in which three different directors (with Zbynek Brynych and Peter Solan) each devised their own story using identical dialogue even though the central characters are separated in age from those in the other stories by twenty years. Skolimowski's segment, titled The Twenty Year Olds, would seem to be an extension of Le Départ with Leaud playing opposite Skolimowski's wife Joanna Szcerbic.

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Deep End (1970) was Skolimowski's second non-Polish feature to be based on his own original screenplay. The movie with a coming of age storyline bears distinctive thematic similarities to Le Départ. Deep End was a promising film yet it was poorly handled by the studio. His films The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982) became critical success, Moonlighting, the fifth of his Polish sextet and critically and commercially his most successful film.

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