In the Sewers With 'In Darkness' The Polish director Agnieszka Holland doesn't consider herself a specialist in Holocaust themes, but all three of her Oscar nominations are for films about that subject. The most recent, "In Darkness," is one of five contenders for this year's Academy Award for best foreign-language film, with a cast that is largely Polish and German and, though based on a script originally written in English, dialogue in Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian. Like "Europa Europa," which won Ms. Holland, 63, an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay in 1990, "In Darkness," which opens commercially on Feb. 10, is based on a real life story: For 14 months at the height of World War II, a Polish sewer worker and part-time thief named Leopold Socha protected a group of Jews hiding in the sewers of the city of Lvov. Ms. Holland's other Oscar nomination was for the 1985 film "Angry Harvest," which Germany had submitted for the foreign-language competition. In the fall, Ms. Holland, the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, stopped in New York on her way to scout locations for some television work she is doing. During an interview, she talked about the making of "In Darkness," her own family's experience of the Holocaust and her attitude toward other film treatments of that subject. Here are excerpts: When I heard you had agreed to direct "In Darkness," I was somewhat surprised, given that you had already made two films about Holocaust-related subjects. Did you hesitate to take on this theme again? After "Europa Europa," I said "I don't want to go to that place again as a filmmaker, emotionally." And as a filmmaker I had seen the future limits of the description of that reality. What kind of limitations do you mean? For me personally, I was always in some way pushed away by the fact that movies about this particular subject are made in English. It was an obstacle to me as a viewer. I think there are some realities which you cannot theatricalize, that when you translate the reality to lingua franca, which is what English is for the movies. It's not real, we are playing. I didn't feel it is right for me to do something like that. So why do this one? First of all, the main character, this Polish guy, was ambiguous, both hero and not hero, and a very simple, ordinary man, not very good. What was always interesting for me was not the mystery that people can be terrible. I think humanity has a tendency to be terrible. What always surprises and intrigues me is that in those circumstances somebody acts in a good way, especially somebody who doesn't have deep reasons or preparation to do so. Socha doesn't think about what will happen, what he will do. He just acts. What I thought was an interesting, dramatic part of the story was that you don't know what he will do. Even to himself he doesn't know. It's like walking on a wire, and at any moment he can slip to one side or the other. What about the portrayal of the Jews? Sometimes the film also shows them in a negative or critical light. The Jewish characters aren't one-dimensional angelic, they are full-bodied human beings with anger, sex, weakness and selfishness, and generosity and love as well. That was another thing that irritates me in English-language Holocaust movies: that in most of them the Jews are turned into some kind of non-living, positive stereotypes. I think that in doing so, in some way you are killing them again. They become unreal. When I think, for example, about my own family, those who perished in the Holocaust, I don't want to have posters of them. I want to know how they acted, what they felt, what were their weaknesses, what were their obsessions, their loves. I want to know everything about them. There has been much admiration expressed by your fellow filmmakers that you were very literal in actually making this film "in darkness" and working within the limitations imposed by what little natural light you had. What made you choose that approach? I found it crucial for the actors to be in the real darkness, not to pretend they are blind. Another thing I wanted to avoid was to make those sewers too spectacular. When you watch "The Third Man" or films like that, you see that the cinematographer always put in the big lamps, and so it looks like a cathedral. It looks very, very beautiful in some ways, and I didn't want it to look beautiful. It has to be real. I'm curious about the sewers themselves. I know that you had a reproduction of the sewers of Lvov built on a set in Germany, but did you actually go into real sewers too? And what was that like? Yes, we shot part of it in real sewers. It was ugly and wet, though the smell was not so terrible because we were not shooting in the [worst] sewers, only in the channels that feed them. It's very difficult to work there. You feel really bad after one hour. It was difficult to imagine how they can accommodate themselves for such a long time to these circumstances. I'm interested in this new sideline you have developed, directing episodes of American cable television series like "The Wire" and "Treme." What is the attraction of that for you? I think that good U.S television, like HBO and AMC, is now better than the American cinema mostly. It's more courageous, has more interesting subjects, and has less conventional styles. And for me there's also the tourist side, because I am going to places I would never be otherwise, which is fascinating. Also, it is what young people are watching. When I meet with young people in Europe, they are very respectful of my body of art, but when I say that I have directed "The Wire," it is like "Wow!" It is something that makes my stature much much higher.