A graduate of the physics department of the University of Warsaw, he began making amateur films in the late 50s, after completing a film course as part of his elective curriculum. In 1960 he enrolled at the Lodz film school and remained there for six years. His graduation film, the half-hour-long Death of a Provincial (1966), won awards at several festivals, including Venice. This and his next short, Face to Face (1967), which he made for Polish TV, contained some of the elements of style and content that would characterize his future feature films, namely the ascetic use of camera technique, a concern with ideas rather than passions, and characters that are more intellectually than emotionally motivated. A strong partisan of the Solidarity movement, he was compelled to work abroad after its temporary defeat in the 1980s. One of his films, The Catamount Killing (1974), was shot in English in the US. He writes his own scripts.