The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda had long wanted to turn The Danton Affair into a movie before finally doing so in 1983 with his film Danton. The 1929 play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska was known for its fascinating look at the power dynamics between the two titans of the French revolution: Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton. Set in 1793 and 1794, the film's script by frequent Luis Bunuel screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière focuses on the breakdown of the two men's alliance. Danton becomes moderate as the revolution progresses, while Robespierre remains rigid and "incorruptible." Robespierre sees Danton as betraying the revolution and puts him on trial; the irony, of course, is that the revolution's Reign of Terror would ultimately claim the lives of both men.

Wajda staged the play three times in the years before making the film, but only when he saw Gérard Depardieu in another play in 1980 did Wajda feel he had finally found the actor to play Danton on screen. For Robespierre, Wajda cast the Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, who had played the part for Wajda on stage. The rest of the cast was also a mix of French and Poles, all performing in their native languages, with the Polish later dubbed into French for a completely French soundtrack. Wajda felt that Pszoniak, in particular, was better off performing in Polish because he had already done so perfectly on the stage, and a new language might have adversely affected his performance. "The character had grown perfectly into a part of him," Wajda said.

The director originally planned to make the film in Poland, but the imposition of martial law there in December 1981, and the ban on assemblies of three or more people, drove production to France. Major sequences were shot at Versailles, Senlis, and other sites near Paris. The film's cost was about $3.4 million, with completion funding coming from the French government.

Danton was controversial and politically charged from the start, and critics and audiences received the film very differently in different countries. Some found the portrayal of Robespierre too sympathetic and intelligent. The French generally responded negatively, finding the portrayal of the revolution too negative. The Poles generally liked what they saw as a pro-Danton slant, and they equated Danton with the real-life leader of the Polish Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and later become president of Poland.

Wajda denied any direct parallels to current events in Poland itself but did say that he saw Robespierre as representing the Stalinist East and Danton the free West. Even so, he was adamant that he saw the film much less as ideological allegory than as an examination of moderation vs. zealotry, and as a portrait of all revolutions. "One of the tragedies of every revolution," he said, is "the point when those who bring it about are no longer in a position to determine how it develops." Before production, Wajda sent Depardieu to Warsaw "for one day to see how revolution looks, and especially how its leaders look in the moment before the collapse of their undertaking.

"Every revolution lives with the fear that it will not manage to bring its work to its conclusion. Hence the hurry, and the endless pressure on the surrounding reality which the revolution tries to force into action. I wanted Depardieu to see the face of the revolution--inhumanly tired, with eyes wide open, which suddenly falls into a sleep which is never fully realized."

By Jeremy Arnold