The first thing you notice about the film director Paweł Pawlikowski is that he looks like a movie star. This is an unusual state of affairs. As a rule, if you happen to be—as Pawlikowski is—demonstrably tall, dark, and handsome, with a flexible sense of humor, a yen for cinema, and industrial quantities of charisma, your rightful spot is smack dab in front of the camera. So why go and lurk behind it? Why didn’t Pawlikowski become an actor? “Oh, no, I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “I never know what to do with my eyebrows.”
These days, having recently turned sixty-nine, Pawlikowski has a dusting of gray in his hair and his stubble—the annoying effect of which is to render him more, not less, like the very model of a leading man. It made complete sense, as we walked together down a street in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, when a young woman in a white dress ran ahead of us, turned around, explained that she was an actress at the National Theatre, and professed her adoration for Pawlikowski’s work. He smiled, thanked her graciously, and moved on. That kind of thing must happen all the time to Keanu Reeves, but few directors—especially middle-aged Polish directors—can be guaranteed the same treatment.