We'll build our own.' So we designed our own gimbal from scratch."įor me, it's super important not to do the whole stop-start filming thing, but just to always be in the moment. "We looked through all the gimbals on the market and none of them were good enough. We were like, 'Fuck it. Sometimes, I just couldn't see it any other way than me operating the camera, especially in a lot of the intimate scenes. But most of the scenes I actually shot myself. Sometimes, I had to do stuff further away from the camera and just get things going on in the scene and direct people. Marczak: There were some sequences where I like to be the director. NFS: You shot this film with another cinematographer, Maciej Twardowski. That's the beauty of that point in life: even though these characters know that, it doesn't matter, because they're doing it for the first time. Marczak: You're thinking over concepts that have already been thought over many times before, but you're having an epiphany because it's you that's actually experiencing or living through it. And there was so much downtime- sometimes, you felt like you were existing in order to kill time. Also, the film reminded me of the feelings and conversations that you had in adolescence when everything felt so big and small at the same time. It had this impressionistic quality, like a memory. The camera really did immerse you in the environment. NFS: Well, it absolutely had that effect on me. The editing of the film and the dramaturgy of the film was structured based on the way my memory works. I wanted to focus on the way that people remember their youth. I wanted it to be very immersive, where the camera would be one of the protagonists and the audience would be able to jump into their world. I wanted to make a film that would intimately make you feel what these characters' lives are like. In the West, people have had these opportunities for so many years, whereas in Poland, it just kind of appeared then. In Poland, we have a new generation-the first generation born after '89-that is free. I pitched it as a film that appeals to the senses, a film that appeals to the heart of what it is kind of to be young in this weird time and place in Poland. The fact that people are kind of accustomed to my work made it easier to get this made. I've done this kind of stuff before-my films take what's best from a more cinematic approach to filmmaking and combine it with documentary. Michal Marczak: It was an organic process. Marczak and his crew also forewent traditional film lighting to build practical lights into their sets, which disguised the presence of a film crew, allowing them to embed seamlessly into live environments.
The director/cinematographer built a custom rig so he could "shoot documentary in a cinematic way," modifying a gimbal so that it fit into his backpack and allowed him to shoot in close quarters. Marczak's sweeping camera is a character unto itself. We pushed that camera to its fucking maximum, and with the combination of software, color grading, and effects, we were able to push it even a step further." "It's about pushing the technology you have. Like Joachim Trier's magnificent Oslo, August 31st, All These Sleepless Nights has the mesmerizing, hypnotic feeling of teenage abandon. Marczak films them in unpredictable and intimate situations that feel too meticulously shot to be unscripted, but too visceral and spontaneous to be fiction. The docu-fiction hybrid, which Marczak filmed in Warsaw using non-actors, follows the misadventures of a pair of teenage boys over the course of many sleepless nights during which they party, meet girls, dance, wander aimlessly, and pontificate, usually while drunk or high (or both). Polish filmmaker Michal Marczak's All These Sleepless Nights is adolescence in experiential cinema form. A time when the simplest of life's pleasures-a good song, a first kiss, the first light of dawn-felt immeasurable in their beauty. A time when emotions were unnavigable, like a hedge maze of thorns designed specifically to trap you and only you.
A time when time itself seemed endless, provoking both impulsivity and utter boredom. What does adolescence feel like? I think of a time when the world was at once too small and too big-constrictive in its physical size, but nearly paralyzing in its existential questions. To shoot docu-fiction hybrid 'All These Sleepless Nights,' DIY master Michal Marczak built a custom rig, used practical lights, and recorded all of his dialogue in ADR.
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