Roman à clef
By Sue Summers
02 October, 2005
The ObserverFor someone whose name has made headlines for the past 40 years, Roman Polanski is a bit of an Artful Dodger when it comes to his own publicity. At the outset it looks as though it will be a harder job to get Bill Sikes to go straight than to get Polanski to talk about his new film Oliver Twist.
Since his libel victory over Vanity Fair, he has gone to ground at home in Paris, not even answering requests for interviews from a British press he believes has always had it in for him. I telephone his office and by sheer luck Polanski himself answers. 'Why should I make an exception for you?' he asks, in that voice fascinatingly poised between French and Polish. Because he'll enjoy it, I tell him. 'Bullshit,' he replies. Then laughs.
As Charles Dickens knew so well, it's amazing what a little laughter can do. A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L'avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.
'I am widely renowned, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,' the director wrote in his 1984 autobiography Roman. But that was then. The Polanski I meet is an attractively rumpled family man with a thick head of grey hair, expensively creased linen jacket and trainers. While certainly small, he is slim and agile and, like many people who lost their childhood in the Holocaust, looks much younger than his real age, which is 72.
Endearingly, the case which most obsesses him is not the one against Vanity Fair but the dreadfully heavy school case his daughter has to carry to school. 'I've weighed it and it's between eight and eight-and-a-half kilos,' he says. 'Do you have the same thing in England? It's a scandal, I think. I have complained to the school, of course, but it's like chopping water.' He also has impeccable manners. When I leave the restaurant after him at the end of our interview, I find he has already paid the bill.
He is decidedly wary, though. His appraising blue eyes watch me closely and he is as alert as any Dickensian lawyer to signs that I am infringing the rules of our engagement. 'Don't make me regret giving this interview,' he says when he thinks my line of questioning is deviating too far from Oliver Twist into territory he finds uncomfortable. 'I can see you are slowly sliding into doing a "portrait" of me, as they call it, which I hate. Stick to the point - revenir à nos moutons, as the French say.' Since there is something about Polanski that makes you want his good opinion, all this is making me nervous. My mind strays from Dickens to Basil Fawlty and 'Don't mention the war'.
The new film continues the recent major upturn in Polanski's creative energy after the erratic offerings of the late Eighties and Nineties - Pirates, Frantic, The Ninth Gate and Death and the Maiden. First there was The Pianist, his superb realisation of the life of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, which saw the director confronting his own past as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland for the first time and won him the 2002 Oscar for best director. Now he has achieved the seemingly impossible task of adding a new dimension to Oliver Twist, when for more than half a century many have believed it was impossible to improve on David Lean's classic.
What prompted him to turn to Dickens was the desire to make a film his children could see for a change. 'They come on the set of my movies, they know what I am doing, they live around all that, but the result of all this work is something so remote from their world they can't identify with it,' he says. 'I wanted something they could, so I started looking for subjects that would be suitable.' Although he reads to his children every night, the only Dickens he had read them was A Christmas Carol; it was his wife, Emmanuelle, who suggested Oliver Twist, knowing his fondness for Carol Reed's film of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!
Surprisingly, he had never seen Lean's film until he and writer Ronald Harwood - who also collaborated with him on The Pianist ('We laughed so much people thought we were making a comedy') - embarked on their adaptation. 'If I'd seen it before I'd have thought it was indeed time for something else. It's dated, it's expressionistic and I think the Alec Guinness performance is over the top with the glued-on nose and the accent which is all over the place.' By contrast, Ben Kingsley's brilliant Fagin manages to make the character as sympathetic as he is frightening and evil, particularly in the final harrowing scene where Oliver goes to visit him in jail before he faces the scaffold - a scene which was criticised when Dickens wrote it for being excessively mawkish and which Lean excised completely, but which in Polanski's hands becomes memorable.
'It's still a Jewish stereotype but without going overboard,' Polanski says of Kingsley's Fagin. 'He is not a Hassidic Jew. But his accent and looks are Jewish of the period. Ben said a very interesting thing. He said that with all his amoral approach to life, Fagin still provides a living for these kids. Of course, you can't condone pickpocketing. But what else could they do?'
If at first sight it seems a long way from wartime Poland to Victorian England, there are in fact many themes in common with The Pianist - not least that of the outsider having to rely for survival on the kindness of strangers, as Polanski himself had to do as a child separated from his parents and forced to make his way alone in Poland under the Nazis. Does he identify with Oliver? 'Obviously I do,' he says. 'But it's not the reason why I made the movie. I'm not going to exploit it for promotion and I'm even uncomfortable talking about it. But if you have this experience it's completely natural that you would use it in your work.'
With a £25 million budget, Oliver Twist is the director's most expensive film ever. Much of the money went into recreating Dickensian London - from contemporary drawings such as those by Gustave Doré - in the streets of Prague. For Polanski this was much of the pleasure of making the film. 'It was fantastic, exciting. Now you are talking about the elements of our profession which make it worthwhile,' he says. He also relished the challenge of working with kids. 'The surprising thing which a lot of people wouldn't accept is his quite extraordinary ability to get on with children,' says the film's British executive producer, Timothy Burrill. 'Not just his own, though he is a unique father.'
Polanski's son and daughter each has a cameo role in the film - Morgane as a girl at the door of a cottage Oliver goes to looking for food and Elvis as a little rich boy who loses his hoop to Fagin's boys. 'It's for them, so they will be able to remember the movie some years from now when I won't be around,' says their father. 'Well, I won't be. It's obvious.'
Oliver reunited Polanski with members of his Oscar-winning team from The Pianist. In fact, he has worked with some of the same people - many of them British - for over three decades. 'He knows what he wants, he's a perfectionist in everything from the word go,' says Burrill. 'This can be very demanding on a crew because he will let nothing which isn't perfect go by.'
His long-time collaborators are highly protective of him. One of them said he 'beseeched me on bended knees' not to make any mention of the reason why Polanski cannot return to the US or even visit Britain without risking arrest. 'All of us who know and love Polanski find it terribly, terribly offensive that every time anyone writes about him they have to refer to the problem he had in the States and the fact that he had a tragic and very misguided affair with a young girl,' he said. 'This is what drives Polanski mad. His life has nothing to do with his talent as a director of films yet everyone keeps dragging it in to everything they write.'
It's true of course that the private lives of most great artists contain dark shadows. But few shadows could be darker than Polanski's. Born in Paris in 1933, he moved to Krakow with his Polish parents when he was three and, after the Germans invaded, the family found itself confined to the Krakow ghetto. He was nine years old on 13 March 1943, the day the Nazis liquidated the ghetto. His father cut a hole in the barbed wire and pushed his son through it. When he got to the nearby house of a man whom his father had paid to look after him, there was no one at home and Polanski returned to the ghetto in time to see his parents being taken away. 'Get away!' his father hissed at the crying boy. He ran off without looking back.
Polanski spent the rest of the war hidden with families in the Polish countryside. 'Being without food or clothing is immaterial to a child,' he said during the making of Oliver. 'Being separated from your parents is intolerable.' At the end of the war, he discovered that his mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Although his father had survived by working as a slave labourer in a stone quarry and they were reunited, he remarried and had little time for his son.
I asked Polanski why he thought interest in the Holocaust has now grown to a point where books on the subject outnumber those on Jesus, when in the postwar period survivors such as himself had basically to shut up and get on with it. 'First, you need a certain distance to get perspective on what happened. Second, it's a period now when the last witnesses begin to disappear. Third, as people get older they are willing to talk about it for the first time. That's certainly true in my case.
'We went to the premiere of The Pianist in Israel and they took us to a kibbutz where people who were involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising lived. We were put in a room with them and it was fun. Jews like joking about everything. And there was a very old guy who suddenly started talking about the ghetto and his experiences in the uprising. It started pouring out of him this story, in a constant stream of consciousness. And they were all flabbergasted. Because in all the years up to then, he had never said a word about it.
'Perhaps one of the reasons people are talking is that the world today wants to listen. I was really very surprised and pleased that the new generation today is so curious and interested. They want to know about all that. In the past, it was treated like it was a boring subject.'
Even during the war, films had been Polanski's great escape. In the Fifties, he took up acting and then studied at the film school in Lodz, where he attracted international attention with one of his very first student projects, Two Men and a Wardrobe. His first feature film, Knife in the Water, was a passport to British cinema, just at the point where it was starting to swing. By the mid-Sixties he was living and working in London, where he made Repulsion and Cul-de-sac
'The British were very quick to take me up,' he says. 'It was wonderful to find that people knew me and my work, and I made many friends. This artistic community really connected. I knew people in music and painting and photography - David Bailey, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - and we met up in clubs like the Ad Lib or restaurants like Alvaro's. It was a very creative place to work, extraordinary for me. I really recall those years as the best of my life.'
The years in America which followed, though they produced arguably two of his best films, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, were to prove personally disastrous. Polanski became a part of an event which perhaps more than any other signalled the end of the Sixties dream of love and peace when in 1969 his second wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was killed in their Bel Air home by the Charles Manson 'family'. At the time of her murder, Tate was eight months pregnant with their first child.
A distraught Polanski went back to Europe but returned to California in the Seventies to make Chinatown. It was after this that he became embroiled in the sex scandal which was to change his life, pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and fleeing the country rather than face the prospect of jail.
The 13-year-old girl in question is now a married mother of three in her forties who thinks that Polanski should have the threat of jail lifted from his head. But the fact remains that Polanski has cut himself off from ever working in Hollywood again. Whether he feels limited by this is not a question with which he wishes to engage. 'Hollywood used to be the mecca of the movies and I had to go through the experience of working there, but when I would go to Hollywood I couldn't wait to finish my work and leave,' is the most he will say. 'When you think of it, the American film industry was virtually created by European filmmakers from its beginnings until now. Mostly Jewish. Even Peter Lorre was Jewish.'
Anyone who doubts how deep the wounds run in Polanski over Sharon Tate has only to look at the lengths to which he went to bring his recent libel case against Vanity Fair. In a profile of the fashionable Manhattan restaurant Elaine's, the magazine had alleged that Polanski propositioned a Swedish model while en route for the funeral of his murdered wife with the boast that he could 'make her into the next Sharon Tate'.
He decided to fight what he termed this 'abominable lie' in the full knowledge that Condé Nast's lawyers would use all of his sexual history against him. 'Obviously their line of defence was an effort to pour as much trash on me as possible,' he says. 'But I believe that the way of truth wins.' Even in a British libel court? 'Always, in the end. Sooner or later. I'm an optimist. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't. Anyway, did you read what they wrote about me?' Just in case I haven't, he calls Isabelle, his PA, who hotfoots it to L'avenue with a photocopy of the original article which he gives me.
The first Polanski knew of it was when people started calling him. Unable to come to Britain to testify for fear of extradition to the States, he fought for the right to do so by video link from France, taking his case right up to the House of Lords. Why was he so determined? 'One has to stand up for oneself. There are certain limits. These things get on the record and they are just repeated - by people like you.' He laughs but then his face becomes serious. 'Can you imagine one of my children reading that I did what they alleged I did?'
But the court case, in which he was cross-examined on virtually his entire sexual history, must, I say, have been a painful experience. I have already heard from one of Polanski's associates that he was 'angry and bitter' over the way the British press covered the case, feeling that he was the one being put on trial. But now all that is behind him. 'They lost, that's what counts,' he says. 'I feel very well about it, particularly since it was a unanimous verdict and I'm sure the jurors must have felt good when they read an article in the Mail on Sunday in which the woman [who, in fact, was Norwegian] confirmed that it never happened.'
His victory over the magazine, however, has not stopped its editor, Graydon Carter, from reopening the whole subject at enormous length in this month's issue. 'Bad loser,' Polanski says with a grin. 'Sour grapes.'
In his eighth decade, Polanski seems more at peace than even in the fabled Sixties. Much of that, it is clear, is due to the children he has waited so long to have. 'My taking them to school is the top moment of the day,' he says. 'It's the best. It's great to see them walking away into this school. It's a moving moment.
'I look at my own childhood in a different way now. I look at it through the prism of my children and I imagine how my parents perceived the problems that occurred at the time, which I didn't know before. My life is the best now it ever was. I had a very happy period in London too, but that's the past.'
What's he going to do next? 'I wish I knew,' he says. 'Or do I really? I used to talk on the phone to Stanley Kubrick. These were conversations which would last sometimes for a long, long time. I liked him very much. He was brilliant and bright and it was always so exciting to talk to him because he knew so much about everything. And he said, 'Don't you hate that interim period when you don't know what you are going to do next? Why is it from film to film more difficult to decide what you want to do?'
'And I remember I said 'yes, yes, yes' but I didn't know what he was talking about. Because in those times it was so easy for me to choose my next film. But now I know what he meant. One is much more exigeant - what is this? Demanding? Because you know it takes so much of your time and energy. It's like taking a dive. You hesitate before you jump.'
· Oliver Twist opens on Friday
Roman Polanski: Drama on and off the screen
1933 Born in Paris, to a Polish father and a Russian mother. The family returns to Poland two years later.
1943 Nazis liquidate the Krakow ghetto. Polanski escapes, but his parents are incarcerated at concentration camps and his mother dies at Auschwitz.
1954 Polanski performs a small role in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and decides to go to film school.
1962 His first feature, Knife in the Water, receives an Oscar nomination. It is now frequently cited as the second best 'first' film, after Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.
1968 Polanski marries his second wife, actress Sharon Tate, and relocates to Hollywood, enjoying the fabulous reception of Rosemary's Baby and his new celebrity status.
1969 Tate, eight months pregnant with Polanski's child, is brutally murdered by members of the Manson 'family' at the couple's home on Cielo Drive.
1974 Chinatown is the director's next big hit. When Jack Nicholson is asked why he let Polanski dictate his performance, he supposedly responds: 'Because the bastard's a genius.'
1976 His next film is The Tenant, in which he took the leading role.
1978 Polanksi's success is marred by accusations that he raped a 13-year-old girl at Nicholson's house. He admits to unlawful sex as part of a plea bargain, but skips bail and begins a life of exile in France, continuing to make films there.
1979 Tess, Polanski's adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, is dedicated to Tate who left a copy of the novel on his bedside table before she died, with a note saying it would make a great film.
2002 The Pianist earns Polanski an abundance of awards, including, finally, the Academy Award for Directing.
2005 Polanski wins his case against Vanity Fair for its claim that he had made sexual advances to a young woman on the way to Tate's funeral. Mia Farrow was among those providing testimony.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
