Introduction “Every film I make represents a departure for me. You see, it takes so long to make a film. By the time you get to the next one you're already a different man. You've grown up by one or two years.”
Two journalists were interviewing Roman Polanski on the set of his film, Bitter Moon. One was from Italy, the other from Brazil. Neither knew what to make of him. Polanski sensed their discomfort and couldn’t resist the temptation to live up to his reputation. “Mr. Polanski,” asked one,”why do you have so much sex in your movies? Isn’t it hard to film?” “Not at all,” replied Polanski, “in fact, I’ve just added a new position, position 72.” Almost afraid to hear the answer, the other writer timidly took the bait. “What is position 72?” “Sixty nine with three fingers up the ass,” dead pans Polanski, his mouth curling at the corners. Polanski is what would have been called a kochloffel in the Krakow ghetto where he grew up, someone who likes to stir things up. One never knows what he will do next. He is, after all, the man who plucked a hair out of Faye Dunaway’s head on the Chinatown set and threw Jack Nicholson’s television out the window. “There is an absolute willingness to get as many people into trouble as are willing to be gotten into trouble at any given moment,” says his friend and producer Thorn Mount. Polanski is one of those icons of pop culture that rattle around in our collective consciousness. He realizes that people see him as an “evil, profligate dwarf ” and, when we meet, I can’t help staring at him trying to see it all: The Nazi occupation of Poland when he was a child; the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family when she was ninemonths pregnant; the raging libido that got him exiled from America for having sex with a thirteen-year-old. Still, he seems more normal than I expect. The watchful eyes and cocksure angle of his head give him the look of a hunted man, a survivor. Although much of Polanski’s reputation as a world-class sex fiend is probably deserved, his partner in crime and character witness, Jack Nicholson, argues that that doesn’t make him a bad person. “I don’t know a single evil bone in Roman’s body and I know him quite well. The strongest pejorative that could be used about Roman is domineering.” Left: With Mia Farrow in Film Above: Directing Mia Farrow and XX in Film.
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Roman Polanski: A Retrospective
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Directing Jack Nicolson on the set of Chinatown
“When you make a picture, you make little segments of it at a time. When you write a script, it's a similar situation. You then see portions of it in your daily screening. By the time you start putting it together you know these portions so well that you don't see the entire thread anymore. By the time the film is finished you can only have an instinct about it because you literally don't see the whole film anymore.”
At 80, the enfant terrible may have matured but he hasn’t mellowed. He is now a married man and a respected member of the arts community in France. Having settled into a kind of domestic demimonde with his 47-year-old wife and leading lady, Emmanuelle Seigner, he admits that there are now more important things in his life than making movies. Bitter Moon had the physicality of a young man’s work, but also the perspective of someone who has gained something from experience. For Polanski it was a transitional film about getting older and coming to terms with the excesses of his youth. But one can’t help wondering if Polanski’s personal growth and newfound contentment were beneficial to an artist who had fashioned a body of work based on the treachery of relationships. For all its sexual intensity Bitter Moon came to some tame conclusions about love and obsession. At his best, in films like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski created a world without a center, held together only by his menacing sensibility and absurd sense of humor. · As a child fleeing the nazis after his parents had been taken to Auschwitz, Polanski hid out with Polish peasants in the countryside pretending he was not Jewish. German soldiers fired at him for sport. Perhaps Polanski had seen enough for a lifetime and somewhere deep inside decided to stop growing physically and emotionally simply as a way to survive—to become invulnerable. “Sometimes you see him on the set and he’s operating at such a fevered pitch of anxiety, I can’t help but think that at one time this was a child whose life was worth less than dust,” says Coyote. “Now he’s created a universe in which he’s the central figure, nothing happens without him, and at least poetically, I sense a connection between the two. Sometimes I think of him as a little six year old living with Polish
pig farmers. He couldn’t cry, he couldn’t whine, he couldn’t be needy, he couldn’t express any of the terrors that must have been in his six-yearold heart. And I see that in him sometimes when he ’s directing . I see that he ’s focused all these deep feelings on his work.” I first met Polanski on a boat, the Odysseus, a second-rate, slightly seedy cruiser in the Piraeus line. We were there to make a movie. “I don’t know what it is with these boats,” pleads Polanski in his sing-song Polish accent. “In fact, I hate them. But they provide an enclosed space and therefore a stage for drama with a certain intensity. You are condemned to someone ’s company.” When he is working, Polanski is like a mad scientist, frantically mixing all the ingredients. If a wire breaks on the soundboard, he is elbowing the technician out of the way and fixing it himself. He ’s constantly in motion—moving the furniture, changing the lens, arranging the extras. In one scene he plops me down at a table so the back of my head can be in a shot. Emmanuelle admits he can be a pain in the ass. On the boat sometimes it was hard to tell where the movie ended and real life began. On a good day, Polanski and his wife were like newlyweds; they would stand by the railing making out. On other days things were not so lovey. At one point, when we stopped to take the cast and crew photo as a souvenir of the cruise, for some reason Emmanuelle did not want to be part of it. Such attitude gets Roman’s Polish temper going. He was in her face—pointing, squawking—angry from his nose to his toes. She took the picture. · Youthfulness is perhaps Polanski’s greatest creation. For years he has resisted the impulse to grow up. It is his way of defying the rules and making his own. At just a few inches over five feet with a ring in his left Polanski with (top to bottom) Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby); Francesca Annis (Film); etc. Top right: directing Natassja Kinski and Peter Firth in
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Roman Polanski: A Retrospective
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ear, he has a child’s body and a young man’s appearance. His films have consistently reflected the attitude of a Polish street punk and the charged sexuality of a kid in heat. But what is even more startling is how his face can transform in an instant to show his years, like a walking Dorian Gray. It’s a bit spooky to see. It’s as if he carries both men within him and by sheer will keeps his older self bottled. In a piece about Polanski written over twenty years ago, his friend Kenneth Tynan related a story that even then demonstrated Polanski’s refusal to accept that one day his physical powers might erode. A man in his mid forties who Polanski knew was experiencing migraines. Polanski was impatient, as he often is with things that don’t conform to his idea of how they should be. “What’s wrong with you, you used to be such a healthy bugger? Is it male menopause?” “I suppose so.” “Will that happen to me?” “Yes.” “Up your arse,” Polanski said giving him the finger. “It’s all psychological.” When I remind Polanski of the story, he proudly proclaims, “Well, it hasn’t yet.” Humor is the other great defense Polanski has against penetration or introspection. He delights in telling bad jokes and pulling pranks. With his buddy Nicholson he orchestrated a grand practical joke on the Paris set of Bitter Moon. In one of the film’s raunchiest scenes, Coyote is crawling around wearing only a G-string and a pig’s snout. When he Polanski with (top to bottom) Mia Farrow (Film); Francesca Annis (Film); etc. Top right: directing Natassja Kinski and Peter Firth in Film.
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Roman Polanski: A Retrospective
looked up to deliver his lines to Emmanuelle, instead he found himself cheek to jowl with Nicholson, much to his embarrassment. As much as his stories are smoke screens and road blocks to deeper inquiry, they also reveal the workings of his mind. He will often perform in a Jewish accent elaborate tales of sexual mishaps. Over lunch he tells me a rambling tale of an old man who marries a beautiful young woman but is then too senile to find his way home. His humor is the gallows humor of the Krakow ghetto where, in the worst of times, Jews still made fun of themselves. It was a way out, something that Polanski sorely needed and perhaps still needs. Ask Polanski a tough personal question and you are likely to get a joke in return. If life, as he believes, is made up of tragedy and farce, Polanski will choose farce every time. “Even at the funeral of someone very dear to you, if you see the priest slipping on the mat and falling on his face, it will make you laugh.” Having a good time has always been more important to Polanski than morbid thoughts of his own demise. He skis and drives like a maniac and just a few years ago started taking boxing lessons. Some friends wonder why he chooses to spend his time partying with people who clearly don’t challenge him in any way. Many of the women Polanski has had relationships with, among them Catherine Deneuve and Natassia Kinski, were archetypal innocents unsoiled by experience. “Roman is into total control and ties into women who like to be controlled,” says Polanski’s long-time editor Sam O’Steen . “Emmanuelle ’s certainly that way. She likes to be molded.” Emmanuelle admits that she sees little of her husbands dark side
“Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve as revenge. To show that I could.” 11
“I was trying to create … this Philip Marlowe atmosphere, which I had never seen in the movies the way I got it in [Raymond Chandler’s] books.”
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Roman Polanski: A Retrospective
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Polanski with (top to bottom) Mia Farrow (Film); Francesca Annis (Film); etc. Top right: directing Natassja Kinski and XX in Film.
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Chinatown
Polanski with (top to bottom) Mia Farrow (Film); Francesca Annis (Film); etc. Top right: directing Natassja Kinski and XX in Film.
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