Disguised as a mystery thriller, THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH is in effect a very precise description of a familiar condition. Tom Ricks wants it all – admiration, literary greatness, love, family – and he refuses to accept that all of these desires have a price and could be mutually exclusive. As Tom’s grip on reality weakens and the facts of his life begin to fuse with fiction, he slides into a nightmare from which there’s no waking up.

Our film dramatizes the mental disintegration of a man who fails to pay attention to the outside world, who lives in his own head and is totally incapable of understanding his true motives. It’s a condition I’m familiar with and it’s what first attracted me to the material. In that sense, Tom Ricks is not unlike the protagonists of my other films, from my first documentary MOSCOW TO PIETUSHKI to LAST RESORT.

The Paris of this film is an unfamiliar and ambiguous landscape – a Paris of the mind. I wanted to achieve this sensation without any trickery or special effects, but by means of subtle stylization, i.e. through the choice of locations, framing, lighting, and a creative use of sound. I’ve employed such defamiliarization strategies in my previous films, but in THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH, I went much further to turn Margit’s apartment and Sezer’s warehouse – where unspeakable things may or may not be happening – into a Lynchian netherworld reflecting the progressive derangement of our hero.

Though the world of the film is stylized and dream-like, the acting needed to be as psychologically ‘real’ as possible. For the novelist hero I chose Ethan Hawke, an actor with a keen intellect and imagination – qualities that are simply impossible to act for those who don’t have them. Ethan also happens to be a novelist in his own right and is totally at home with the creative struggles – the moments of euphoria and omnipotence and the pangs of anxiety and self-doubt – that afflict his fictional character. Ethan embodies the right balance between neurotic edge and irresistible boyish charm. It is key that the audience is in sympathy with our hero, even when it dawns on them that he is dangerously deluded.

The elusive, timeless Margit is played by Kristin Scott Thomas – an actress who can be dark, maternal, tragic, erotic, ambiguous, romantic, urbane. For the role of romantic autodidact Ania, I’ve chosen the brilliant young Polish actress Joanna Kulig, who generated the right mixture of warmth, spontaneity, and demotic charm.

As was the case in my previous films, the script for THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH was a rather lean and stripped-down text. The idea was to give myself and the actors space to add texture to the characters and scenes during a lengthy process of workshops. The script was there to convey the shape, the feel, and the overall meaning of the piece, but the real “film-writing” for me began in rehearsals, location scouting, prep, and the actual filming.

The film is a strange cultural hybrid: it is set in Paris, drawn from an American novel, played by a multi-national cast, and directed by a Polish filmmaker with a documentary background. The dialogue is spoken in French and English, languages in which I feel equally at home.

My goal was to strike the right tone for the film – a precarious balancing act between realism, absurdist comedy, and nightmare – and to stick to it with unswerving confidence.

—Pawel Pawlikowski