When Red, the concluding part of his Three Colours trilogy, failed to take top honours at Cannes '94 (against all betting) it prevented Polish film director Krzystof Kieslowski pulling off the unheard of feat of playing top-dog at all of Europe's pre-eminent festivals in less than a year (Blue in Venice; White in Berlin). Not that the man himself was particularly bothered - as he's fond of saying, film-making really isn't too important to the grand scheme of things. What makes it alarming though is that, for many, the 53-year-old is not only Europe's greatest film-maker but one of the world's most outstanding visual artists.

This book, unlike the others in the invaluable Faber series, is not question-and-answer; Danusia Stok edits away all probing, leaving in effect a feature-length monologue, occasionally rambling, but always filled with detail, intelligence and insight into an extraordinary body of work.

Originally rejected from film school, the young Kieslowski's early work was principally documentary and occasional shorts, made for Polish television. Little time (thankfully) is exhausted at the expense of his childhood, and not much more on some of those early films. Kieslowski doesn't especially like his films, and many of the initial ones not at all: "My so-called defeatism, bitterness or pessimism with regards to life...comes precisely from this; that my intentions, which were always good, worked out as if they were bad." The feature Short Working Day (1981) has, much to its maker's relief, not been shown at all. Kieslowski is not backward in saying that much of this work is buried and should stay that way.

As he tells it, the turning-point of his career came with the 1981 documentary Station. While filming at night in the Central Station, his crew narrowly avoided picturing a young woman disposing of her dismembered mother in the left-luggage lockers. The film was impounded as police evidence and only returned when it was found to contain nothing of use. "I'd have become a police collaborator," says the film-maker. "And that was the moment I realised I didn't want to make any more documentaries."

Researching a project in the early eighties, he was introduced to lawyer Krzystof Piesiewicz, and the two have worked together ever since, starting with 1984's No End, and moving into the Dekalog (1988). For many, this ten-part series (taken loosely from the Ten Commandments) is one of the landmarks of recent European cinema, originally made for television and partially financed through a commitment to expand two episodes to feature length. The bleak tale of unrequited obsession A Short Film About Love garnered critical and audience plaudits around the world, alongside its sibling, the heartfelt anti-capital punishment tract A Short Film About Killing - surely one of the most cheerless, terrifying, and visually striking films in recent memory. "I'm a citizen of this country, Poland," says Kieslowski of the latter work, "and if someone...puts a noose around someone else's neck and kicks the stool from under his feet, he's doing it in my name. And I don't wish it."

He and Piesiewicz followed their epic with the enigmatic The Double Life of Veronique, the complex, cryptic tale of two identical young women (both played by the arresting Irene Jacob) - one in Poland, one in Paris - who become conscious of each other only through the Pole's death:

"The film is about sensibility, presentiments and relationships which are difficult to name, which are irrational. Showing this on film is difficult: if I show too much the mystery disappears; I can't show too little because then nobody will understand anything. My search for the right balance between the obvious and the mysterious is the reason for all the various versions made in the cutting room."

Explaining the film at length, Kieslowski details both a plan to make versions unique to each cinema ("Why can't we say that the film is handmade? And that every version is going to be different?"), and his having to make a new, more explicit ending for America ("The scene is very enigmatically done and it's not made obvious that it's the family home she's returning to, but I don't think that anybody in Europe has any doubts").

The book ends, as his career seems set to do, with the new Three Colours trilogy, each film broadly taking its theme from the values of the French Revolution, and its title from the nation's flag.

What this book (perhaps the best of the series so far) evinces is an artist both equally at home with ideas and artistry, but one deeply frustrated by the inability of the film-making process to wholly fulfil his cinematic vision. That he's achieved so much without, as he sees it, realising his full potential is both illuminating and frustrating to artist and viewer alike.

"As to whether I'm going to make any more films, that's another question altogether, and which I can't answer at the moment," he says at the end of the book. "I probably won't."