Patryk Vega: How to find God, celebrate life and break patterns?

Vega, who claims he will live to 150 due to medical advances, takes a large number of supplements daily. When asked what they are for, he simplifies: they target blood and mitochondria, i.e., strengthening cellular resilience. This, he says, impacts everything from organ function to stress levels. He adds that his testosterone is slightly above the norm and he feels great about it. He negates the concept of age, likening it to the stress-is-killing-you belief — if you believe you age badly, you will. He feels around 30-something and credits having young children for keeping him physically active, playing football with 12-year-olds for 1.5 hours daily.

Vega admits he used to be like Alexander the Great, not appreciating others' work and treating good performance as something they should just do. After learning that praise can be more significant than a raise, he changed his approach. He now consciously builds synergy by complimenting and motivating people, so they bring their best to his projects while he still retains final creative control. He learned this after murdering (figuratively) potential business partners due to his competitive nature.

Vega realized early that actors from Łódź Film School, after 5 years of training, feel the need to turn every small scene into a grand performance. He found that by giving a non-actor a very narrow task — just say 'good morning' without subtext — the result looks far more genuine on screen. He also notes that non-actors are cheaper, which helped his budgets. The Polish film industry initially criticized him heavily, but now, he claims, all of film and TV has adopted this practice. He sees this as another example of his forward-thinking.

After observing the psychological toll of hate, especially on his mother who read everything and turned against him, Vega stopped reading any reviews in 2017. He sees the mechanism: unhappy people post negative comments, others pile on, giving the poster a false sense of importance. He claims he doesn't get emotionally affected himself, but he isolates for mental hygiene. Instead of post-release reviews, he now conducts controlled test screenings to adjust his films before release, as with 'Putin'.

Vega states that in journalism school he was taught to treat information from three independent sources as fact. He applies this to filmmaking: he ignores single opinions because everyone has one, but if he hears the same thing three times, he accepts there's truth in it. This helps him filter noise while remaining open to expert advice (e.g., from lighting experts).

While attending the US premiere of 'Pitbull. Nowe porządki', Vega went to a pub where women danced on tables while men sat gloomily. In Berlin, a female distributor snapped at him for opening her car door, saying "Do you think I can't open the door myself?" He connected these signals to an impending macro-shift in gender relations that would redefine equality worldwide. He then made a film with strong, full-blooded female characters and men in the background, which drew nearly a million viewers in three days. Realizing that women choose which film to watch, he concluded he could ignore male audiences and focus entirely on satisfying women, a strategy that repeated with theatre and books. Vega says he applies this same observational method to all social phenomena, including blockchain, AI, and youth audiences — recently he spent months reading what 15-year-olds and 20-year-olds want because his older fans have aged out.

Vega explains that being told he was the best at everything was a disaster because it imposed an enormous burden. He genuinely believed he was the best at dancing, poetry recitation, bowling, basketball — and if he missed a shot, he dismissed it as irrelevant because he was still the world champion of basketball. This created a frantic hunger for the world to confirm his greatness. Around age 30, he started having a fear of causing a car accident. He dissected the fear: at age 7 he had read a detective magazine describing a man raped in prison; later, he replayed memories of missing basketball shots. He realized he had treated driving as a competitive field where he had to prove he was the best, but his subconscious expected the "miss" — a car crash. By unpacking those associations, he shed 200 kg of mental baggage and accepted he could be a great guy in just two or three things, not everything. This allowed him to stop chasing universal superiority and find fulfillment as a filmmaker.

Vega recounts that on Christmas Eve, he had a serious car crash where both vehicles were totaled. As he got out, a man screamed 'You killed my father!' Vega realized that no amount of money could provide security, because a split second can take everything away. At that moment, he thought that only God can give that safety. Immediately another man shouted that the father was alive, and everyone walked away unscathed. This redirected his life vector, though he admits he still sinned and fell. Later, a priest forced him to attend a Holy Spirit renewal retreat. Vega resisted, hating group settings, but eventually agreed to go. During a healing mass, he couldn't believe that the Holy Spirit could heal him. After 30 minutes of internal battle, he said: 'Okay, Holy Spirit, for 30 seconds I will switch off all my rational limitations and believe you can come and heal me.' The church suddenly turned freezing cold — another person asked why it was so cold. Vega felt a physical force like a roller pressing into his spine from behind, so intense he thought his spine would break. He says that from that moment, he doesn't need to believe — he is 100% convinced it exists.

Vega faced the challenge that people in India, Brazil, South Korea, and the US have completely different emotional connections to Putin. A single communication strategy wouldn't work. So he conducted precise test screenings globally, resulting in a roughly 100-page analysis. He learned which threads people didn't understand, which characters bored them, what was weak, and what worked. Instead of just shortening the film, he edited multiple versions: the Asian version has a completely different construction and opening than the US version. From a 3.5-hour cut, he assembled 150-minute versions optimized for each region's audience. He frames this as a proactive way to listen to viewers pre-release, rather than reacting to criticism after the premiere.

Vega says his entire life success is built on sociology: the highest value in today's world is information. He tries to capture topics floating in the collective subconscious. He gives the example of the 'Pitbull' series, which initially flopped in cinemas but became cult through repeated TV airings, and how later sequels drew millions because they became sociological events — people went not just to watch a film but to join either the haters or the fans and discuss it at work. He says he now sees children who were 14 before the pandemic are the current cinema audience and have never seen any of his films, so he has been studying what 15- and 20-year-olds want to watch. This is part of his broader method of scanning social currents, including blockchain, AI, and medicine.