I understand that The Lure was originally intended to be a psychological drama, but the subject matter was deemed too personal by the sisters who inspired it. Subsequently, your screenwriter Robert Bolesto came up with the idea to turn the film into a mermaid movie. What aspects of the film had to change to accommodate this new vision? What stayed the same?

It was a process. At the beginning, it was supposed to be a normal psychological drama about two young girls who grow up in a dancing club. It was based on the Wrońska sisters, who composed music for The Lure. But when we started working, one of the sisters, Basia, felt that the story was too close to her childhood, and she didn’t want to return to that time. So we thought we’d probably have to give it up. But Robert and I began talking, and I told him about a myth of a woman who came from the sea. And he said, “Okay, so let’s make them mermaids.” I thought it was impossible. 

The history of Polish cinema is psychological drama. Genre movies are classified as B-cinema. There are no horror movies or musicals. When you start to think about your first feature, you just want to get it made. But then we started to talk about the characters, Golden and Silver. We used mermaids as a metaphor for growing up. They express their feelings in song. We initially thought it would be a psychological drama with musical elements. But as we were writing the script, the mermaids were so naïve. We needed to push more boundaries. 

Was there ever a moment when you considered utilizing a different mystical creature or fairytale?

It was always mermaids. But the way we imagined mermaids was also a process. I went to the Polish painter Aleksandra Waliszewska and asked her if she could paint our opening credits. She was very inspired by Renaissance paintings. They weren’t the kinds of mermaids we’ve all gotten used to. They were like snakes: full of mucus, ugly. Her mermaids were half monster, half delicate girl. They were wild. Wild and free. 

When I think about incorporating these kinds of genre elements, I think it has to come from the character. There is a Polish journalist whose interviews are always totally different. And she says it’s because it’s all dependent on the person she’s speaking to, they impose the form. That is the key to cinema. The character is your starting place.

Can you talk about physical direction? That tail can’t have been easy to move in, and your naturalistic approach to nudity must have taken work to achieve.

It was important to me that the mermaids don’t feel that they are naked. For them, it’s something totally natural. Again, it was taken from the characters. I decided to offer workshops before we started shooting. Our choreographer Kaya Kolodziejczyk was crucial in terms of the physicality of the mermaids, how they moved and behaved. The prep was very important. The tails were huge and very heavy, and the actors Marta [Mazurek] and Michalina [Olszanska] had to get used to moving in them before shooting. We also workshopped how a wild creature would behave, how it would feel not to have legs, how it would feel to live in the bottom of the ocean. These were very challenging parts. Marta and Michalina had to sing, dance, move, and also be great actresses. The casting process was very long.

It’s a common trope in coming-of-age body horror films to externalize the internal split of the protagonist, to literalize the protagonist’s struggle with the human and animal instincts within them. You go further, splitting these two instincts into separate characters. 

It was a way of thinking about two sisters. They are two totally different girls, but somehow very similar. Silver is much more human. She wants to have a soul, she wants to be a girlfriend. She decides to cut off her tail, even though she will lose her voice. And Golden is much closer to nature, more instinctive, much more of a monster. But we don’t judge her. 

Silver chooses to pursue her humanity, and to find love, whereas Golden is violent, and continuously eating people. But as a viewer, the threat is not grounded in Golden’s acts of violence. The terrifying thing is Silver’s heteronormative relationship with her shitty boyfriend that she’s sacrificing so much for. You place the horror on normativity. Did you identify more with Golden?

Sometimes I prefer to be like Silver, because she is much more gentle. I really like the moment when she gives her boyfriend one of her scales. But then, of course, nobody likes to sacrifice themselves in order to be loved. And so I also love Golden, particularly her act of revenge at the end. When you direct a movie, you have to be every character. You have to be close to every part of them. And to inhabit both characters is much more complex than choosing sides.

I’d love to discuss the aesthetic maximalism of the film. Were you thinking about the visual language in relation to the larger-than-life feelings that are so characteristic of adolescence?

We were drawing from our memories of childhood. We were raised in communism but it was also the ‘80s. So we wanted to build something that was colorful and full of life, something totally different from what you typically see of Poland. But, it was always shown from the perspective of our characters. Again, we come back to character. We’re talking about mermaids, but we have empathy and imagination that allows us to think through their perspective. That was our organizing principle.

That organizing principle allowed you to take some big swings in terms of world building. Like, the Barbie vaginas!

They didn’t have vaginas because they were like angels. They don’t have sex. But Silver wants to be a girl, she wants to have a boyfriend, she wants to have sex, so she wants to have a vagina. But if you have a vagina, you have to sacrifice something. You will never be the same after the first time you have sex. You are totally changed. 

This is a very different kind of musical. Traditionally, songs within musicals narrate the story of the film. But in The Lure, the music is very tonal, almost textural. How were the lyrics ideated?

We were all working together, from the very beginning. Robert Bolesto, our screenwriter, asked Basia and Zusia [Wrońska] to give him all of their songs, even songs that were never published. For example, the song that plays when Silver is cutting off her fishtail—Basia wrote that song for Zusia when she was in the hospital to give birth. Zusia was depressed, so Basia wrote those lyrics to make her happier. And the song that is in the final moment of the film, when Golden goes deep down into the river, that’s a song Basia wrote after a very gruesome murder of a young boy whose mother threw him into the river. These songs were taken from real emotions. And Robert intertwined them into action. Through music, the mermaids can express themselves. But we never allowed the songs to refer to the action. It should always be about the emotions of the characters. 

In preparation for this interview, I re-watched The Lure and Fugue back to back. Wow! To say that the aesthetics are different is a wild understatement. Can you talk about the impulse behind, and the experience of, making such aesthetically different films?

The visuals are different because the characters are different; the script was different. Fugue was actually supposed to be my first movie. But the writing process took so long that I decided to work on The Lure. Without The Lure, the movie would be completely different.

In what way?

Initially, Gabriela Muskala wrote the script like a television drama; it was a psychological film based on dialogue. But I knew when I was working on Fugue with my DP [Jakub Kijowski] and my other collaborators, that it wasn’t enough to explore the characters. That’s when we added the vision scenes, like going down into the grave. It allowed us to understand her emotions, her state of fugue. It had to be done visually.

Did you feel any pressure, after making The Lure, to make your second film a horror movie?

I didn’t have time to feel pressure. I was already preparing Fugue right after The Lure premiered at Sundance. If there had been a break between films, I might have felt that responsibility. But I also wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat myself. I got so many horror scripts, but they didn’t resonate for me, particularly in terms of character. I was a young mother during this time as well, which attracted me to Fugue.

Both films grapple with questions of freedom from the constraints of womanhood. In The Lure, it’s the expectation that women will construct their identities around the men in their lives. In Fugue, it’s the constraint of motherhood. Is freedom a theme you continually return to in your work?

Yes, that’s one of the most important things for me. I remember the exact moment when I fell in love with my daughter—it wasn’t when I saw her for the first time, but it was when they gave her to me, about two hours later. Before starting work on Fugue, Gabriela told me that she saw a woman on the TV, and she didn’t know who she was or where she was from. A man calls in, and tells the woman that he is her father, and that she has a child. She didn’t remember her own son. I wanted to explore how you can forget your own child. That was very interesting for me. How can we be set free from motherhood? I wanted to show how you can love your baby, and at the same time, want to be set free. To be separate. This is what is so good about cinema, if you show something, you are telling your viewer that this is a possibility. It may not be real, but in a movie you can describe, or even touch the situation.

What is your relationship to horror now? The Lure is a cult classic of the genre. But it’s interesting that it was originally envisioned as a drama. Your subsequent films have been dramas, and your upcoming film Hot Spot is a psychological thriller. 

Hot Spot has horror elements. We were just doing visual effects, and I realized that there are three or four scenes that are even more “horror” than The Lure. But I like that horror is metaphorical, and that it allows you to visualize archetypes. For example, when you think about ancient Greek tragedy, they’re cutting off heads. But with Shakespeare, you’re forced to visualize passion. Love, hate, these are such strong emotions. Sometimes you need to use strong images.

When I was a kid, I had a huge imagination, and I was afraid. Even now, I can’t watch much horror. It’s too strong for me. But when I’m working on these things, I love it. I know the blood is artificial. And I can grab that intensity, and make it visual. You can show someone’s suffering, or their anger, not only using psychological tools. 

What is the landscape of horror films in Poland like now?

It’s a little better, but there still aren’t many horror films. But there is more genre blending. I think directors, producers, and writers are discovering that you can say more using genre, that genre blending can make movies more complex. If you combine genres, the viewer doesn’t know what will come next, because they don’t know which tools you are using. 

How are you reflecting on The Lure ten years later?

I love that it still resonates with people. I love when you read a book, or see a painting, or watch a movie, and it stays with you. It seems to resonate especially with young audiences. And not only in Poland. As a director, you can’t have more. It came from the bottom of my heart, and not just mine—everyone involved. 

At the same time, I know that no one would give me the money to make this movie now. The script was so crazy, it was so original, sometimes it was totally without logic. We say that there was a crack in the system, and we jumped.