Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancée Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska, Chemo), Peter (Israeli actor Itay Tiran, Lebanon) has been given a gift of her family’s ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It’s a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen. During the wild reception, Peter begins to act very strangely — a dybbuk, the iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes possession of him at this celebration for a very particular reason. This final work by acclaimed director Marcin Wrona, who died at the age of 42 just as Demon was set to premiere in Poland, is a fascinating look at what can happen when people are reluctant to acknowledge their own past. I talked to Wrona’s widow, producer Olga Szymanska, about this beautiful, haunting film.
Danny Miller: I loved how this movie works on so many different levels. You can take Peter’s “possession” at face value or you could imagine him having some kind of mental or physical illness or even that Peter is simply an interloper that people are suspicious about.
Olga Szymanska: Marcin always liked to leave an open ending in his films. He loved those layers and loved exploring good and evil and the ways that people act. When you finish watching his films, including Demon, you are always left with a lot of questions. The project he was working on when he died was very similar.
It was amazing to me how instantly I was rooting for this couple, Peter and Janeta, their chemistry was really intense. What was that casting process like?
Marcin loved working with actors. For this film he had a list of some of Poland’s best young actors for these parts and he tested them in different configurations. He thought of a few different people for the main roles but the chemistry just wasn’t right so he gave them different parts in the movie. But when Itay came on and did a scene with Agnieszka, everyone was shocked at how perfect they were together. In fact, they knew he had the part even before Marcin told them.
Did Itay learn Polish just for this movie?
He learned his lines phonetically. The original script was written for a Polish guy so they changed it to work for Itay’s accent. Marcin had developed this back story that Peter had these Polish Jewish ancestors that had ended up in England.
I love that we don’t really see that and we’re never sure about some of the Jewish things he does — do they come from his own background or is it the dybbuk?
Marcin loved that kind of ambiguity. We did want to plant a few seeds that made it seem like he could have Jewish and Polish roots — like when he sings that song at the wedding and says he learned it from his grandparents.
Physically, Itay’s performance was just astounding. I assume none of that was done with special effects?
No, not at all! Itay was amazing — he worked with a modern dance choreographer and had done a lot of research about the story and the dance of the dybbuk that they used in the original play in Poland in the 1960s. He brought so much to that role. We also had a choreographer from the Jewish Theater in Warsaw working with him.
My own background is Polish and Jewish so this story had so much significance for me. My great-grandparents came from the town of Staszow.
Staszow? Wow, that is very close to my home town! I knew there was a very large Jewish population there before the war.
The way Poland deals with its past and what happened to the Jews there is so fascinating to me. Did this film open up a lot of discussion about that?
Yes. We’ve had other movies in recent years that touched on this subject, of course — very different films such as Aftermath and Ida. Our intention with Demon was to look at certain aspects of our recent past that includes a Poland without Jews. Some people know very well why this is the case, some people don’t know at all, and some people remember but don’t want to talk about it. We think people should talk about it. If you go to rural Poland, you might hear people say, “No, this house was in our family for many generations” when you know it was once part of a Jewish community. You’ll see all these beautiful synagogues in small towns that are now shut down or turned into something else — but you can tell by the architectural features what it once was. It’s really sad.
I was intrigued by the older Jewish character in the film who seems to be the only Jewish person from before the war still living there. Is that something you’d see today in such towns?
Usually not, especially in the countryside. But remember that some people changed their names after the war or they were raised Catholic and discover years later that they are actually Jewish, I know people like that myself. One close friend of mine was raised Catholic and then when she was 18 her parents told her they were Jewish. She was completely shocked. They ended up leaving Poland and moving to Israel.
This looked like it must have been a grueling shoot — everyone was constantly wet and covered in mud, I felt sorry for the costumers!
Oh my God, it was crazy. I think we had three wedding gowns for Janeta and they were constantly washing them. I’m pretty sure this was the hardest these costume designers had ever worked.
Do people really drink that much at Polish weddings? I have to say that I’ve never seen so much booze in my life!
(Laughs.) Kind of — especially in the country!
All those extras did a great job. Were they people who actually lived in that town?
Yes, they were not actors at all, just people from the villages. They were absolutely amazing, they became very involved in the movie and worked so hard, even the children! We actually shot mostly at night and with all that rain, you should have seen what the set looked like, it was absolutely crazy.
That scene when Peter was swallowed up in the mud was pretty nuts.
Oh God, that actually dug a huge hole and stuck poor Itay in the mud. We did it two or three times and had a diver on set waiting to rescue him in case anything happened. He’d come out shaking from the cold and we’d hose him down and start again, it was insane. Marcin worried that the scene was just too much for the movie and he decided he was going to cut it. We said that after going through all that all night long Itay would be really made if we dropped the scene so Marcin kept it in!
I realize it must be difficult for you to do press about the film so soon after Marcin’s death and I commend you for that.
Thank you. To be honest with you, after Marcin’s death, people were a little scared of this movie. When we had the premiere in Poland, which we didn’t postpone even though it was only a month after Marcin died, it was mostly seen as “the final film of Marcin Wrona” so there wasn’t a great deal of analysis about the content of the film. I think we need a little bit more time to take a breath and I hope this kind of discussion will happen later, maybe when it airs on TV. You know, we have a pretty small society of filmmakers and film critics in Poland, everyone knows each other.
Are you hoping to finish that film that Marcin was working on?
That is my dream. The most difficult thing is finding the right person to direct it. I want to give it to someone I can really trust but who will treat it as a real movie project, not something that he or she is doing for Marcin or for me. We have the script that he worked on and I’ve translated it into English but I just need more time. I’m not quite there yet, it may be next year, it may be in ten years. Marcin was growing so much as a filmmaker. After Demon, I had this feeling he could do anything.