Oscar-winning Polish film-maker says he will tell the story of how an uneducated worker triggered the collapse of communism
Poland has had a complicated relationship with Lech Walesa. The love-hate of past years, however, is danger of fading into indifference and neglect. Poles are often surprised when foreigners ask after him, as if he is a half-forgotten uncle.
Now Andrzej Wajda, a veteran Oscar-winning film director and, at 85, something of a national treasure himself, has decided enough is enough. A jaundiced, dyspeptic, post-modernist nation will be made to look again at "the hero in its midst", with a biopic recounting the Solidarity struggle.
"The Walesa figure is necessary nowadays in the reality of contemporary Poland where everyone is quarrelling with each other. There is a nasty atmosphere of accusation flying around and we need to be able to refer back to a figure from national history," Wajda said at his Warsaw studios. "Poles have an explanation for everything. Everyone is to blame except themselves, so Walesa is also guilty."
The film is still being cast. Wajda, who is collaborating on the project with novelist and playwright Janusz Glowacki, has yet to find an actor to portray the union leader in his shipyard prime. He wanted to persuade Walesa to represent himself in old age, to give his own perspective on the events recounted, but he is playing hard to get.
"I know I have to avoid Wajda, so I don't have any influence on what he does" the ex-president told the Guardian. "I don't want anybody to make any accusations that I put pressure on him so, when I find out that Wajda is around, I escape to the other side of the room."
Wajda's intention is to demonstrate how it came to be that, after the generals, students and intellectuals had failed, it was an uneducated worker who finally triggered the collapse of communism.
"The communist authorities fell victim to their own propaganda. This was the 'workers-peasants government' and the 'workers-peasants government' could obviously only talk to workers and peasants," Wajda said.
"But they didn't take into account that the workers' experience of the world was the most brutal of all. They worked in the worst conditions, earned the least. They got up at four in the morning to get in at five to work. They worked 10 hours a day, sometimes more. This wasn't the worker that they thought he was."
Two years ago, Wajda took on another giant historical subject, the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer corps in 1940 by the Soviet NKVD, who blamed it on the Nazis. His gruelling film, Katyn, generated a outpouring of emotion not just in Poland but in Russia, too, where 12 million cinemagoers watched it, many of them becoming aware of Russia's role for the first time.
But where Katyn united, Walesa is likely to divide. Wajda's film will be scrutinised in particular for its treatment of the most controversial episode in Walesa's life – his run-ins with the communist secret police when he was an inexperienced union agitator arrested in the aftermath of the bloody suppression of riots in December 1970.
Glowacki, who like Wajda witnessed Solidarity's ultimate victory over communism first-hand, said: "He didn't know what he was doing. He was lost and he signed some papers which he never wanted to follow. In 1976, he finally said to the secret police: fuck off, I don't want to talk to you, and then became an official enemy of communism. He has this moment of weakness when he was 27 and he completely changed. That is what we want to show."
Sitting around a table at the studio it is clear that Wajda and Glowacki have some differences of approach that have yet to be ironed out.
Wajda seems to view the conversations with secret police not as a mistake, but as the only way Walesa could make his views known the authorities. "Nobody else was interested in talking to him," he says.
When Wajda says: "This is not going to be a critical film about Walesa. I see no point. It's not the moment," Glowacki is visibly uneasy.
Speaking alone, after the interview, Glowacki said: "This is not just going to be romanticism. There will be irony, too. Don't worry."
If two veterans of the Polish underground, collaborating on the depiction of events they saw with their own eyes, cannot agree, it is unlikely that film itself is going to heal many rifts.
But Wajda gives the impression he is past caring. "Those who want to be divided, nothing can help," he said. "A film least of all."