Innocence blinded and trapped by evil in the films of Roman Polanski www.deceptivevirtue.com
Copyright @ 2014 Rehab Hassanin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission. Designed, compiled, and written by Rehab Hassanin in San Francisco, CA. For the course GR 612 Integrated Communications Course taught by Christopher Morlan For the film festival “Deceptive Virtue� to celebrate the work of Roman Polanski Printed in Fall 2014 gd.rehab@live.com AUU ID 03604948
Contents 02 03
Contents 05 INTRODUCTION
07 ROMAN POLANSKI THE DIRECTOR AND HIS WORK 12 Biography 14 Filmography 20 Other Works For Polanski
23 THROUGH POLANSKI’S EYES 25 The Psychology of Seeing by Davide Caputo 28 Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood
33 AWARD HIGHLIGHTS 35 Awards
43 46 47 50 51 54
FESTIVAL FILMS Rosemary’s Baby Story Cast Production Details Review
90 91 92 93 94
56 58 60 61 64
Chinatown Story Cast Production Details Review
66 68 70 72 74
The Pianist Story Cast Production Details Review
80 82 85 86 87
Oliver Twist Story Cast Production Details Review
Tess Story Cast Production Details Review
101 TALKING WITH POLANSKI 102 Interview by Roger Ebert 103 Interview by Scott Foundas
111 113 114 115 116
FESTIVAL LOCATION & SCHEDULE Location & Date Map Popular New York City Attractions Schedule & Showtimes
120 Sources 121 Colophon
Roman Polanski
Introduction 04 05
Roman Polanski is a director who has had a great impact on modern arthouse films. The Deceptive Virtue festival gives audiences a first time ever opportunity to see a collection of some of his finest works. Join us at The Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York for three days with Roman Polanski, discovering his dark, psychological exploration of human nature.
Roman Polanski
A glimpse of his life and his work
Roman Polanski
—Roman Polanski
“ You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity.”
Biography Life & Filmmaking Roman Polanski was born on August 18, 1933 in Paris to Polish parents, and was raised and educated in Poland. He made his stage acting debut at the age of 14, and performed on the radio show “The Merry Gang.” Also in his teens, he appeared in several Polish feature films, including Andrzej Wajda’s “Generation.” He attended art school in Cracow and the National Film School in Lodz, where he directed several short films, including “Two Men and a Wardrobe” (1958) and “When Angels Fall” (1959). These short films garnered him awards at various film festivals. His feature film directorial debut was “Knife in the Water” (1962), which won the Critics’ Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign-Language Film, and made the cover of Time.
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Journeying to England, Polanski made his first English-language feature, “Repulsion” (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve. The film earned the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, while Polanski’s next British feature, “Cul-de-Sac” (1966) won the Golden Bear Award at the same festival the following year. He played a lead role in his next British film, “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), before coming to America to make “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), starring Mia Farrow. That film brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and earned Ruth Gordon the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Polanski returned to Europe to direct Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in his adaptation (co-written with Kenneth Tynan) of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (1971). His next film, “What?” (1972; a.k.a. “Diary of
Forbidden Dreams”) starred Marcello Mastroianni. He went back to Hollywood to make Chinatown (1974), which won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture [Drama]. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway starred in the film, which was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Original Screenplay for Robert Towne’s script. Back in Europe, Polanski next helmed “The Tenant” (1976), in which he starred with Isabelle Adjani; and “Tess” (1979), which was adapted from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The film, starring Nastassja Kinski, earned six Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Director.
The Director and His Work 12 13
His autobiography, Roman by Polanski, published in 1984, was a best-seller in several languages. Polanski subsequently directed “Pirates” (1986), starring Walter Matthau; and “Frantic” (1988), starring Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner. Seigner also starred for him, alongside Peter Coyote, Hugh Grant, and Kristin Scott Thomas, in “Bitter Moon” (1992). Later in the decade, he made “Death and the Maiden” (1994), starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, and Stuart Wilson; and “The Ninth Gate” (1999) , starring Johnny Depp, Lena Olin, and Seigner. The memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who detailed his survival during World War II, were the subject of Polanski’s next film, “The Pianist.” In its world premiere at the 2002 Cannes International Film Festival, the feature won the top prize, the coveted Palme d’Or (Best Picture) award.
“The Pianist,” starring Adrien Brody as Szpilman, was subsequently honored around the world. The film won seven César [France’s equivalent of the Oscar] Awards, including Best Film, Best Director. “The Pianist” also won Best Film and Best Director at the U.K.’s BAFTAs [British Academy of Film and Television Arts]. In Poland, the film won eight Eagle [the country’s Oscar equivalent] Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and Polanski received an Honorary Eagle Lifetime Achievement Award. “The Pianist” earned seven Academy Award nominations, among them Best Picture. Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Director. In addition to directing for the screen, Polanski has directed stage and opera productions. He directed Alban Berg’s “Lulu,” at the Spoleto Festival; Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” at the Munich Opera; and Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” at the Paris Opera Bastille.
In 1981, he directed and starred in a production of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” that was first staged in Warsaw and then in Paris. In 1988, he played the lead role in Steven Berkoff`s stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” In 1996, he directed Fanny Ardant in a production of Terrence McNally’s “Master Class.” Also in 1996, Polanski directed a musical comedy production, “Tanz Der Vampire,” in Vienna, which was based in part on his 1967 movie “The Fearless Vampire Killers.” In a rare latter-day lead acting role, Polanski starred opposite Gerard Depardieu in Giuseppe Tornatore’s “A Pure Formality” (1994). He also starred in Andrzej Wajda’s “Zemsta” [“The Vengeance”] (2002). He became a member of the Institute De France’s Académie Des BeauxArts in 1999. He is the 2002 recipient of the Golden Scepter, awarded by the Foundation of Polish Culture.
Roman Polanski
Filmography Roman Polanski has 35 credits.
2013 Venus in Fur
2009 Greed
Genres: Drama Country: France | Poland Language: French | German
Genres: Short Country: USA Language: English
2011 Carnage
2005 Oliver Twist
Genres: Comedy | Drama Country: France | Germany | Poland | Spain Language: English
Genres: Crime | Drama Country: UK | Czech Republic | France | Italy Language: English
2012 A Therapy Genres: Short | Comedy Country: France Language: English
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1999 The Ninth Gate
2007 To Each His Own Cinema Genres: Comedy | Drama Country: France Language: Mandarin | English | French | Italian | Russian
Genres: Mystery | Thriller Country: Spain | France | USA Language: English | French | Latin | Portuguese | Spanish
2010 The Ghost
2002 The Pianist
Genres: Mystery | Thriller Country: France | Germany | UK Language: English
Genres: Biography | Drama | War Country: France | Poland | Germany | UK Language: English | German | Russian
The Director and His Work 14 15
1994 Death and the Maiden
1986 Pirates
Genres: Drama | Mystery | Thriller Country: UK | USA | France Language: English
Genres: Adventure | Comedy | Family Country: France | Tunisia Language: English | French | Spanish
1992 Bitter Moon
1976 The Tenant
Genres: Drama | Romance | Thriller Country: France | UK | USA Language: English | French
Genres: Thriller Country: France Language: French | English
1993 The King of Ads
1979 Tess
Genres: Documentary Country: UK | France | Italy | Spain | Russia | USA Language: English | French | Italian
1972 What?
Genres: Drama | Romance Country: France | UK Language: English
Genres: Comedy Country: Italy | France | West Germany Language: English | Italian | French
1988 Frantic
1974 Chinatown
Genres: Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller Country: USA | France Language: English | French
Genres: Drama | Mystery | Thriller Country: USA Language: English | Cantonese | Spanish
Roman Polanski
1972 Weekend of a Champion Genres: Documentary Country: UK Language: English
1966 Cul-De-Sac Genres: Comedy | Drama | Thriller Country: UK Language: English
1968 Rosemary’s Baby Genres: Drama | Horror | Mystery Country: USA Language: English
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1971 Macbeth
1965 Repulsion
Genres: Drama | History | War Country: UK | USA Language: English
Genres: Horror | Thriller Country: UK Language: English
1964 The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers Genres: Comedy | Crime Country: France | Italy Language: French
1962 Mammals Genres: Comedy | Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
1967 The Fearless Vampire Killers
1962 The Knife in the Water
Genres: Comedy | Horror Country: USA | UK Language: English
Genres: Drama Country: Poland Language: Polish
The Director and His Work 16 17
1961 The Fat and the Lean
1957 Murder
Genres: Short | Comedy | Music Country: France Language: French
Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
1959 The Lamp
1957 Teeth Smile
Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: French | Dutch
Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
1959 When Angels Fall Genres: Short | Drama Country: Poland Language: Polish
1957 Break Up the Dance Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
1958 Two Men and a Wardrobe Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
1955 Rower Genres: Short Country: Poland Language: Polish
Roman Polanski
“ Polanski excels at exploring the dark recesses of the human mind and the fraught�
—Geoff Andrew (The Director’s Vision)
Other works for Roman Polanski Director of the stage musical “Tanz Der Vampire”, which is based on his film The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) (a.k.a. “The Fearless Vampire Killers”) and has been seen by more than five million people worldwide. The musical had its premiere in Vienna, Austria in 1997 followed by Germany (Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, Oberhausen), Poland (Warsaw), Japan (Tokyo), and Hungary (Budapest). Directed the music video for Italian musician Vasco Rossi’s song, “Gli Angeli” (1996) Commercial for Parisiennes cigarettes Autobiography: “Roman”, William Morrow & Co. (1984) Directed and starred in the hit Paris stage production of “Amadeus” in the early 1980s. 1976: Provided his own dubbing in the Italian post-synchronized version of his film ‘Le Locataire’ (L’inquilino del terzio piano).
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The Director and His Work 20 21
“ People living on the ragged edge-or forced to live on it: this Polish (French-born) director’s films are concerned with pressures, alienation and a succumbing to the evil nightmares lurking within us. One senses a bitterness in Polanski that the beauty of the images he often creates on screen can’t gloss over.” —David Quinlan (Quinlan’s Film Directors)
Roman Polanski
Through Polanski’s Eyes 24 25
The Psychology of Seeing by Davide Caputo Reviewed by Tessa Chudy, Senses of Cinema
The films of Roman Polanski make a provocative and challenging body of work, but one which is also difficult to separate from the almost melodramatic details of Polanski’s own life. It is also difficult to align the cold horror of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with the gritty re-envisioning of Macbeth (1971) with the gleaming neo-noir perfection of Chinatown (1974), and the Hitchcock-ian flourishes of Frantic (1988) with the playful horror of Dance of The Vampires (1967), the psychological disintegration of Repulsion (1965) and the holocaust memoir of The Pianist (2002) to name just a few. But a close examination of Polanski’s cinema reveals a body of work that is linked by its close attention to detail, visual stylistics and at times claustrophobic explorations of the subjective states their characters.
Caputo’s book is intriguing, its title seems to suggest a revelation through perception and the more one thinks about it, the more important perception seems in Polanski’s cinema. However, those hoping for an easy in, or a coffee-table type examination of the director’s work will be disappointed. Polanski and Perception is a difficult read, but it does offer slowly unfolding and at times frustrating rewards. It also has the distinction of forcing the reader to think, not just about the book, but also about Polanski’s films.
Repulsion (Polanski, 1965) Using the theory that perception is an active process affected by emotional and psychological factors, Caputo creates two loose trilogies, what he calls the ‘Apartment Trilogy’ (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant (1976)) and the ‘Investigation Trilogy’ (Chinatown, Frantic and The Ninth Gate (1999)) and analyses them in close detail. The ‘Apartment Trilogy’ is marked by mental illness and an extremely close identification with the breakdown of the perceptual abilities of the protagonists, but also the emphasis is stro-ngly feminine with the one male protagonist (Trelkovsky in The Tenant) seemingly transforming into a woman through the course of the narrative.
The work of Professor Richard L. Gregory and his influence on Polanski (who apparently carried a copy of Gregory’s Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (1966) around with him while filming, and the two collaborated on 3D experiments in the 1970s) provides the basis for Caputo’s examination of Polanski’s cinema. Gregory built on the theories of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) who claimed that perception is an active process, exploring the impact ‘that mental states have on perception’ (p. 34) which runs counter to the model of direct visual perception championed by J.J. Gibson where perception is seen as an unmediated process free from sensation and emotion.
Roman Polanski
The ‘Investigation Trilogy’ is marked by a distance which contrasts with immediacy of the earlier films including those in the ‘Apartment Trilogy’. Caputo notes this division as two separate bodies of works, ‘… the group of films in which the camera is able to penetrate the psychological sphere of the characters to which it is connected, and those in which it maintains a more observational stance, ‘outside’ the subjective perceptual experiences of these characters’ (p. 66). The ‘Investigation Trilogy’ features male protagonists, who are not suffering from mental breakdowns (their female counterparts in the ‘Apartment Trilogy’ as Carole in Repulsion, Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby and Trelkovsky in The Tenant may or may not be experiencing), although these men still are afflicted by perceptual inhibitions – an inability to understand what they are dealing with (Gittes in Chinatown), difficulty with language and cultural differences (Walker in Frantic) as well as literal barriers to clear perception, for example the glasses worn by Corso in The Ninth Gate film.
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The Ghost (2010) is positioned as bridge between the two bodies, in that it contains elements of both perceptual stances, but Caputo stresses that it does not neatly tie-up Polanski’s cinema because there is no neat ending available. However it does serve to conclude Caputo’s argument that active perception and perceptual psychology provide a model for how ‘individual cognitive agency in the creation of perception through hypothesisation … ultimately reveals our isolation from the world’ (p. 259). Genre plays an important role in Polanski’s cinema, but not as a fixed entity, rather something fluid and permeable, a set of rules to be broken, and the recurrence of horror is something that could be explored further. Caputo notes that endings in Polanski’s films tend to be disappointing – (Noah Cross gets away with his crimes in Chinatown, Rosemary doesn’t make an escape in Rosemary’s Baby, Corso seemingly reaches enlightenment through a deal with the devil in The Ninth Gate) – there are no easy or neat solutions to a Polanski film and Caputo embraces this ambiguity, his conclusion:
We are not left solutions or truth, but with clashing hypotheses. Robust realities are not re-stitched, but unravelled; and thus satisfaction is consistently denied. But it is through this dissatisfaction that Polanski’s films transcend their role of delivering visceral pleasure; these are the struggles, I argue, through which an even higher order of pleasure is accessed (p. 267). In the end, the book is not satisfying in the way Polanski’s endings are not satisfying. This is a heavy read, at times difficult to immerse oneself in, filled, though with big ideas, and scholarly attention to detail. What Polanski and Perception reveals is layers of possibilities and intense scrutiny of possible ways of seeing. Perception becomes a way of unfolding Polanski’s cinema, a way into the closed and often claustrophobic worlds it presents and also a way of hopefully separating Polanski’s films from the sensationalistic details of the director’s own life.
Through Polanski’s Eyes 26 27
There is no neat conclusion, no definitive truth here, but the thing about Caputo’s exploration of the role of perception in Polanski’s cinema is that it raises some decidedly provocative questions that do force the reader to re-evaluate their perceptions, before defiantly concluding that there are no answers. It suggests that this very absence of answers is in itself an empowering and potentially exciting state to be in and I find that I cannot help but agree.
Roman Polanski
Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood by Dennis Lim, The New York Times
“ THE GHOST WRITER,” the 18th feature by Roman Polanski, opens this week, and, not for the first time in Mr. Polanski’s career, the movie itself is likely to be overshadowed by the man who made it. Critics and viewers have long been tempted to link Mr. Polanski’s work to his life—to view one through the prism of the other—not least because the life has been so public and so uncommonly eventful. “There’s nothing about human nature that would surprise him,” the novelist Robert Harris, a co-writer of “The Ghost Writer,” said recently. “He’s a sort of walking microcosm of history.” As Mr. Harris suggests, Mr. Polanski’s biography could double as a summary of the 20th century. Born in 1933, he spent part of his boyhood scrambling to stay alive in the Krakow ghetto. He was reunited with his father after the war, but his mother died at Auschwitz. A precocious actor and street performer, he started plotting his escape from Communist Poland at a young age. His award-winning early films were his ticket out, and he arrived in London on the eve of the Swinging ’60s.
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He made it to the United States in time for the summer of love, only to become a tragic symbol of the end of the ’60s, when his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson. The counterculture hangover continued; one might even say it never went away. In 1977 Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl. Last September, more than 31 years after he fled Los Angeles to escape sentencing, he was arrested in Zurich by Swiss authorities pending possible extradition to the United States. While Mr. Polanski’s films are generally not self-revealing in any literal sense, he invites psychobiographical criticism because he has been, for almost his entire career, that relatively rare entity: a celebrity director. His persona is so much a part of the public imagination that it looms even over a movie as devoid of autobiographical echoes as “The Ghost Writer,” which had its premiere Friday at the Berlin International Film Festival and opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.
His filmography amounts to its own microcosm, cutting a swath through a half-century’s worth of cinematic trends. He came to prominence as part of the European art cinema of the ’60s: “Knife in the Water” (1962), his poised first feature about the triangle among a married couple and a young hitchhiker, earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. In America he directed “Chinatown,” one of the crowning achievements of Hollywood’s most recent golden age. He has a taste for potboiling Grand Guignol (“The Ninth Gate”) but won an Oscar for his most restrained film, the Holocaust drama “The Pianist” (2002). A terminal outsider—“a fugitive all my life,” as he once put it—he has navigated the tricky logistics of international co-productions, especially since his banishment from Hollywood, making films that are often defined by displacement and rootlessness (“Frantic,” “Bitter Moon”).
Through Polanski’s Eyes 28 29
Journalists and biographers reflexively scour Mr. Polanski’s life for clues to his art and vice versa. His “violent life and times,” Barbara Leaming argued in “Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur” (1981), “form the subtext of his cinema.” Mr. Polanski is, to say the least, dismissive of this interpretive tack. In 2003 one question too many from Premiere magazine led him to cut short the interview: “Whatever happens to you changes the result of your work. Even sometimes trivial things. Now I must stop. I’ve had it.” With a new film—and new circumstances in his life—the game of connect the dots continues. Based on “The Ghost,” a best-selling 2007 novel by Mr. Harris, “The Ghost Writer” unfolds from the point of view of a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hired to whip into shape the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), a Tony Blair-like American ally under investigation for war crimes. Watching this twisty thriller—which for long stretches finds Mr. McGregor’s character sequestered in a Martha’s Vineyard beach house in the dead of winter, another one of Mr. Polanski’s secluded heroes in another one of his restricted locations—it is hard not to note that the film was completed by its director while confined to his own chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. (He has been under house arrest since December.)
It’s also tempting to observe that Mr. Polanski used a ghostwriter (the journalist Edward Behr) for his 1984 autobiography, “Roman by Polanski.” “The Ghost Writer” is Mr. Polanski’s first postexile film to be largely—and pointedly—set in the United States. Since he has not set foot on American soil in more than three decades, those dune-edged beaches are not, as we’re supposed to believe, in Massachusetts. Exteriors were shot on the German coast; the palatial vacation home was built on a Berlin soundstage. But there is another way to see Mr. Polanski in his films, and that is through his authorial presence. More than half of his features are adapted from existing texts, but much of his work retains a striking unity of theme and mood. “His personality infiltrated it inevitably,” Mr. Harris said of the script for “The Ghost Writer,” which he wrote with Mr. Polanski.
The film gives us a quintessentially Polanskian me-against-the-world setup, in which an isolated protagonist succumbs to increasing paranoia. In Mr. Polanski’s movies paranoia can be a symptom of madness (“Repulsion”) or the only proof of sanity in a crazy world (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Sometimes it appears to be both, as in “The Tenant” (1976). In that film, both a black comedy about French xenophobia and a splitidentity psychodrama, Mr. Polanski plays the title character, a Pole who rents an apartment in Paris and comes to suspect that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into its previous resident, a woman who threw herself out of her window. Mr. McGregor’s unnamed character in “The Ghost Writer” is also haunted by his dead predecessor: the writer he’s replacing drowned under mysterious circumstances. Mr. Polanski’s obsessions seem to have emerged fully formed. The series of short films he made in the late ’50s and early ’60s map out his universe in embryo. His first student film, “Murder,” stages in just over a minute a fatal stabbing by penknife: a killing without motive or context, rendered with startling detail and economy. Films like “Teeth Smile,” “Break Up the Dance” and “The Fat and the Lean” hint at the mind games and power plays to come.
Roman Polanski
From the start Mr. Polanski was a distinctive filmmaker with a penchant for extreme situations. The aura of violence and perversity that surrounded the films suited an enfant terrible who enjoyed notoriety. But the murder of his wife, besides shattering Mr. Polanski’s life, turned this convenient master narrative into a sick joke. Describing the carnage at his rented Benedict Canyon home, the Satan worship of “Rosemary’s Baby” fresh in their minds, journalists could not refrain from comparing it to a movie—specifically a Roman Polanski movie. “It was a scene as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski’s film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character,” Time magazine declared. Roger Gunson, the prosecutor assigned to the statutory rape case, prepared for the trial that never happened by taking in a retrospective of his films. “Every Roman Polanski movie has a theme: corruption meeting innocence over water,” he says in Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” noting that Mr. Polanski had seduced his under-age quarry in a Jacuzzi.
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As glib as such connections can seem, they are not always unfounded. Especially in times of distress Mr. Polanski has been drawn to material that might seem personally difficult. His first film after Ms. Tate’s death was an adaptation of “Macbeth” (1971), a blood-soaked tragedy that had many viewers fixating on the scene in which Macduff learns of the massacre of his family. Pauline Kael spoke for many critics when she wrote, “One sees the Manson murders in this ‘Macbeth’ because the director put them there.” After leaving the United States, Mr. Polanski again turned his attention to a classic that suggested parallels with real-life circumstances. The young heroine of “Tess,” his adaptation of Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” is raped and cast out of society; the film starred the teenage Nastassja Kinski, who had reportedly been involved with Mr. Polanski since she was 15. Despite the provocative casting, some critics saw the film as an apology—Tess does avenge herself—and the sexual violence is shot with conspicuous, fog-shrouded discretion, in contrast to the lurid rape at the center of “Rosemary’s Baby.”
The central ambiguity of “Tess”—is the director identifying with Tess or her rapist or both?— gets at the complex notion of victimhood that runs through Mr. Polanski’s cinema, and through aspects of his biography, from Holocaust survivor to grief-stricken widower to accused rapist. There are plenty of victims and victimizers in his movies, but also plenty of victims turned victimizers: Tess, Catherine Deneuve’s character in “Repulsion” and Sigourney Weaver’s in “Death and the Maiden.” Mr. Polanski’s psychobiographers might do well to keep in mind a recurring tenet of his movies: Things are not always as they seem. Many have described the confined spaces in his films—the apartments, boats, castles and islands that offer no escape—as the visions of a man who spent his childhood in the walled-in ghetto of Krakow. Mr. Polanski has a more benign explanation. In a 2001 interview with the BBC he talked about his early love for Laurence Olivier’s claustrophobic 1948 film “Hamlet,” connecting it to the intimacy of a Vermeer: “I liked films which made you feel you are actually inside an interior, feeling virtually the fourth wall behind you, like in Dutch paintings.”
Through Polanski’s Eyes 30 31
It is in keeping with the unpredictable turns of Mr. Polanski’s life that his current unhappy chapter should come after “The Pianist,” a stately late-career triumph that many considered a culminating work. More than a quarter century ago he wrote in “Roman by Polanski,” “I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf.” That caricature had faded away over the years, along with the stories of his brutal on -set perfectionism, replaced by a picture of a marginalized but respected industry elder whom journalists and collaborators have described as reticent and not especially prone to introspection. (He has been married for more than 20 years to the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children.) Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “The Pianist,” has been in regular contact with Mr. Polanski by telephone these past few months. “ I ask him how he is, and he says he’s fine,” Mr. Harwood said. “But I don’t know how he is. No one really does.”
Roman Polanski
Award Highlights 34 35
Awards 2010
2002
National Society of Film Critics Best Director (Runner-up) - Won
Broadcast Film Critics Association Best Director - Nominated
2003
2002
Broadcast Film Critics Association Best Director - Nominated
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Director - Won
2010
2002
2002
National Society of Film Critics Best Screenplay (Runner-up) - Won
Directors Guild of America Best Director - Nominated
French Academy of Cinema Best Director - Won
2002
2002
National Society of Film Critics Best Director - Won
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Picture - Nominated
Roman Polanski
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2002
1980
Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or - Won
Hollywood Foreign Press Association Best Director - Nominated
1980
1979
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Director - Nominated
French Academy of Cinema Best Picture - Won
1994
1979
1974
Independent Spirit Awards Best Director - Nominated
French Academy of Cinema Best Director - Won
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Director - Nominated
1980
1974
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Director - Won
British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Director - Won
1974
1968
Directors Guild of America Best Director - Nominated
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Adapted Screenplay - Nominated
1974
1963
British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Picture - Nominated
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Foreign Language Film - Nominated
1974
1968
Hollywood Foreign Press Association Best Director - Won
Hollywood Foreign Press Association Best Screenplay - Nominated
1968
1963
Directors Guild of America Best Director - Nominated
British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Film - Any Source - Nominated
Roman Polanski
Festival Catalog
Award Highlights 38 39
Roman Polanski
Festival Films 44 45
“ I dreamed someone was raping me, I think it was someone inhuman” —Rosemary
Roman Polanski
Rosemary’s Baby Pray for Rosemary’s Baby
1968
Written by Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Ira Levin Release Date: 12 June 1968 in United States
A shot for the main character who is Rosemary in the Rosemary’s Baby film
Festival Films 46 47
The Story
In 1965, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a bright but somewhat naive young housewife, and Guy (John Cassavetes), her husband and a stru-ggling actor, move into the Bramford, an antiquated New York City apartment building. The couple learns from the building’s manager, Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook, Jr.), that their new residence was previously inhabited by Mrs. Gardenia, an elderly woman who had seemingly gone senile. Guy also discovers a dresser concealing a simple closet which contains nothing except a vacuum and a few other items. Rosemary and Guy are quickly befriended by their elderly, eccentric neighbors, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer). Rosemary meets a young woman, Terry Gionoffrio (Angela Dorian), a recovering drug addict whom the Castevets took in from the street. As Rosemary admires a pendant necklace the Castevets gave to Terry, she notices its strange smell. Returning home one night, Guy and Rosemary find that Terry has thrown herself to her death from the window of the Castevets’ seventh-floor apartment.
Minnie invites the Woodhouses to dinner and they reluctantly accept. Guy forms a bond with the Castevets. Minnie gives Terry’s pendant to Rosemary, telling her it is a good luck charm and the odd smell is from a plant called “tannis root”. Later, Guy lands a role in a play when the actor who was originally cast suddenly and inexplicably goes blind. Guy suggests that he and Rosemary have a baby. On the night they plan to conceive, Minnie brings them individual cups of chocolate mousse. Rosemary finds hers has a chalky undertaste and surreptitiously throws it away after a few mouthfuls. Rosemary passes out and experiences what she perceives to be a strange dream in which she is raped by a demonic presence in front of Guy, the Castevets, and other Bramford tenants. When she wakes, she finds scratches on her body. Guy tells her that he had sex with her while she was unconscious because he did not want to pass up the moment for her to conceive.
Rosemary learns that she is pregnant and is due on June 28, 1966. She plans to receive obstetric care from Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin), who is recommended to her by her friend Elise (Emmaline Henry). However, the Castevets insist she see their good friend, Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who says that Minnie will make Rosemary a daily drink which is healthier than the usual vitamin pills. For the first three months of her pregnancy, Rosemary suffers severe abdominal pains, loses weight, becomes unusually pale, and craves raw meat and chicken liver. Dr. Sapirstein insists the pain will subside soon, and assures her she has nothing to worry about. When her old friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) sees Rosemary’s gaunt appearance and hears that she is being fed the mysterious tannis root, he is disturbed enough to do some research. Before he can tell Rosemary his findings, he mysteriously falls into a coma. When Rosemary can’t bear her abdominal pains another minute, they suddenly disappear.
Roman Polanski
Three months later, Hutch dies. He leaves Rosemary a book about witchcraft and it is delivered to her at his funeral along with the cryptic message: “The name is an anagram”. Rosemary deduces that Roman Castevet is really Steven Marcato, the son of a former resident of the Bramford who was accused of being a Satanist. Rosemary suspects her neighbors and Dr. Sapirstein are part of a cult with sinister designs for her baby, and that Guy is cooperating with them in exchange for help in advancing his career. Rosemary becomes increasingly disturbed and shares her fears and suspicions with Dr. Hill, who, assuming she is delusional, calls Dr. Sapirstein and Guy. They tell her that if she co-operates, neither she nor the baby will be harmed. The two men bring Rosemary home, where she briefly escapes them. Despite Rosemary locking them out, they enter the bedroom. Rosemary goes into labor and is sedated by Dr. Sapirstein. When she wakes, she is told the baby died.
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In the hall closet, Rosemary discovers a secret door leading into the Castevet apartment and hears a baby’s cries, revealing that her child is alive. She then finds a congregation made up of the building’s tenants, as well as Dr. Sapirstein, gathered around her newborn son. After seeing the disturbing appearance of her baby’s demonic eyes, Rosemary is told that Guy is not the baby’s father and that the baby, named Adrian, is actually the spawn of Satan. This horrifies Rosemary, who spits in Guy’s face. Roman urges Rosemary to become a mother to her son and assures her that she does not have to join the cult if she doesn’t want to. She adjusts her son’s blankets and gently rocks his cradle with a small smile on her face.
Rosemary’s Baby is suffused with Polanski’s style and preoccupations.
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Roman Polanski
Cast
Mia Farrow Rosemary Woodhouse
Hanna Landy Grace Cardiff
John Cassavetes Guy Woodhouse
Phil Leeds Dr. Shand (as Philip Leeds)
Ruth Gordon Minnie Castevet Sidney Blackmer Roman Castevet Maurice Evans Hutch Ralph Bellamy Dr. Sapirstein
Victoria Vetri Terry (as Angela Dorian) Patsy Kelly Laura-Louise Elisha Cook Jr. Mr. Nicklas (as Elisha Cook) Emmaline Henr Elise Dunstan Charles Grodin Dr. Hill
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D’Urville Martin Diego Hope Summers Mrs. Gilmore Marianne Gordon Rosemary’s Girl Friend Wende Wagner Rosemary’s Girl Friend (as Wendy Wagner)
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Production Details
Filming Locations Dakota Hotel 1 West 72nd St. at Central Park West, Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA
Set Decoration by Robert Nelson Costume Design by Anthea Sylbert
Los Angeles, California, USA New York City, New York, USA Paramount Studios 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA Writing Credits Ira Levin (novel) Roman Polanski (screenplay)
Produced by William Castle (producer) Dona Holloway (associate producer)
Box Office Budget $2,300,000 (estimated)
Music by Krzysztof Komeda (as Christopher Komeda)
Gross $33,395,426 (USA) ( 1969) ITL 550,800,000 (Italy) ( 1969) ESP 29,819,982 (Spain)
Cinematography by William A. Fraker director of photography (as William Fraker)
Technical Specifications Runtime 2 hr 16 min (136 min)
Film Editing by Sam O’Steen Bob Wyman Production Design by Richard Sylbert Art Direction by Joel Schiller
Roman Polanski
—Roman Polanski
“ The Devil is how humans like to imagine evil, with horns and a tail. Evil is part of our personality.�
Review by Roger Ebert, Roger Elbert website
Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” is a brooding, macabre film, filled with the sense of unthinkable danger. Strangely enough it also has an eerie sense of humor almost until the end. It is a creepy film and a crawly film, and a film filled with things that go bump in the night. It is very good. As everyone must have heard by now, the movie is based on Ira Levin’s novel about modern-day witches and demons. But it is much more than just a suspense story; the brilliance of the film comes more from Polanski’s direction, and from a series of genuinely inspired performances, than from the original story.
This is why the movie is so good. The characters and the story transcend the plot. In most horror films, and indeed in most suspense films of the Alfred Hitchcock tradition, the characters are at the mercy of the plot. In this one, they emerge as human beings actually doing these things. For this reason, the effectiveness of “Rosemary’s Baby” is not at all diminished if you’ve read the book. How the story turns out, and who (or what) Rosemary’s baby really is, hardly matters. The film doesn’t depend on a shock ending for its impact. Although I haven’t read Levin’s novel, I’m informed that he works in the conventional suspense mode. We meet Rosemary and her husband and the couple next door. We identify with Rosemary during her pregnancy, sharing her doubts and fears, But when the ending comes, I’m told, it is an altogether unexpected surprise. Polanski doesn’t work this way. He gives the audience a great deal of information early in the story, and by the time the movie’s halfway over we’re pretty sure what’s going on in that apartment next door. When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. Rosemary makes her dreadful discovery, and we are wrenched because we knew what was going to happen— and couldn’t help her.
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A great deal of the credit for this achievement must go to Mia Farrow, as Rosemary, and Ruth Gordon, as Mrs. Castevet, the next-door neighbor. Here are two of the finest performances by actresses this year. And the interesting thing is how well they work together: Miss Farrow, previously almost untried in the movies, and Miss Gordon, an experienced professional. Because we can believe them as women who live next door to each other, we find it possible to believe the fantastic demands that the Castevets are eventually able to make on Rosemary.
Polanski has also drawn a memorable performance from Sidney Blackmer, as the explicably sinister old smoothy, Roman Castevet. John Cassavetes is competent as Rosemary’s husband but not as certain of his screen identity as he was in “The Dirty Dozen.” The best thing that can be said about the film, I think, is that it works. Polanski has taken a most difficult situation and made it believable, right up to the end. In this sense, he even outdoes Hitchcock. Both “Rosemary’s Baby” and Hitchcock’s classic “Suspicion” are about wives, deeply in love, who are gradually forced to suspect the most sinister and improbable things about their husbands. But Cary Grant in “Suspicion” was only a bounder and perhaps a murderer, and we didn’t even really believe that (since he was Cary Grant). Rosemary, on the other hand, is forced into the most bizarre suspicions about her husband, and we share them and believe them. Because Polanski exercises his craft so well, we follow him right up to the end and stand there, rocking that dreadful cradle.
Roman Polanski
Chinatown A web of deceit, corruption and murder
1974
Written by Robert Towne Release Date: 20 June 1974 in United States
A shot for the main character who is J.J. Gittes in the Chinatown film
Roman Polanski
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A shot for J.J. Gittes with Evelyn Mulwray in the Chinatown film
Roman Polanski
The Story
A woman identifying herself as Evelyn Mulwray (Ladd) hires private investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson) to carry out surveillance on her husband Hollis I. Mulwray (Zwerling), the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Gittes tails him, hears him publicly oppose the creation of a new reservoir, and shoots photographs of him with a young woman (Palmer) which are published on the front page of the following day’s paper. Upon his return to his office, Gittes is confronted by a beautiful woman who, after establishing that the two of them have never met, irately informs him she is the real Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway) and that he can expect a lawsuit.
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Realizing he was set up, Gittes figures whoever did it wants to get Mulwray, but, before he can question the husband, Lieutenant Lou Escobar (Lopez) fishes Mulwray, drowned, from a freshwater reservoir. Suspicious of murder, Gittes investigates and notices that, although huge quantities of water are released from the reservoir every night, the land is almost completely dry. Gittes is confronted by Water Department Security Chief Claude Mulvihill (Jenson) with a henchman (Polanski) who slashes the investigator’s nose. Back at his office, he receives a call from Ida Sessions, an actress whom he recognizes as the bogus Mrs. Mulwray. She is afraid to identify her employer, but provides a clue: the name of one of “those people” is in that day’s obituaries.
Gittes learns that Mrs. Mulwray’s husband was once the business partner of her father, Noah Cross (Huston), so he meets Cross for lunch at the latter’s personal club. Cross offers to double Gittes’ fee to search for Mulwray’s missing girlfriend, plus a bonus if he succeeds. Gittes visits the hall of records where he discovers that a large amount of acreage in the “northwest valley” has changed ownership. Further investigation there leads to an attack on him by angry landowners; they believe he is an agent of the water department, attempting to force them out by demolishing their water tanks and poisoning their wells.
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Gittes’s review of the obituaries uncovers a former resident of the Mar Vista Inn retirement home, who is one of the valley’s new landowners. He infers that Mulwray was murdered when he learned that the new reservoir would be used to irrigate the newly purchased properties. Evelyn and Gittes bluff their way into Mar Vista and confirm that the real estate deals are surreptitiously completed in the names of some of its residents. After fleeing from Mulvihill and his thugs, they hide at Evelyn’s house, where they nurse each other’s wounds and end up in bed together. Early morning, Evelyn has to leave suddenly; she warns him that her father is dangerous and crazy. Gittes manages to follow her car to a house where he observes her with Mulwray’s girlfriend. He confronts Evelyn, who finally confesses that the woman is her sister.
The next day, an anonymous call draws Gittes to Ida Sessions’ apartment; he finds her murdered, with Escobar waiting for his arrival. Escobar pressures him because the coroner’s report found salt water in Mulwray’s lungs, indicating that the body was moved after death. Escobar suspects Evelyn of the murder, and insists Gittes produce her quickly or he’ll face charges of his own. Gittes returns to Evelyn’s mansion. There, he discovers a pair of bifocals in her salt water garden pond and finds her servants packing her bags. His suspicions aroused, he confronts Evelyn about her “sister”, whom she then claims is her daughter, Katherine. Gittes slaps her repeatedly until she cries out “She’s my sister and my daughter!”, then tearfully asks Gittes if it is “too tough” for him to understand what happened with her father. She points out that the eyeglasses are not her husband’s, as he did not wear bifocals.
Gittes makes plans for the two women to flee to Mexico. He instructs Evelyn to meet him at her butler’s home in Chinatown. Gittes summons Cross to the Mulwray home to settle their deal for the girl. Cross admits his intention to annex to the City of Los Angeles the northwest valley, then irrigate and develop it. Gittes produces Cross’s bifocals — a link to Mulwray’s murder. Mulvihill appears and confiscates the glasses, then forces Jake to drive him with Cross to the women. When the three reach the Chinatown hiding place, the police are already there and detain Gittes. Evelyn will not allow Cross to approach Katherine, and when he is undeterred she shoots him in the arm and drives away with Katherine. As the car speeds off, the police open fire, killing Evelyn. Cross clutches Katherine and leads her away, while Escobar orders Gittes released, along with his associates. One of them urges “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Roman Polanski
“
She’s my sister and my daughter!” —Evelyn Mulwray
Festival Catalog
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Cast
Jack Nicholson J.J. Gittes
Beulah Quo Maid
Faye Dunaway Evelyn Mulwray
Jerry Fujikawa Gardener
John Huston Noah Cross Perry Lopez Escobar John Hillerman Yelburton Darrell Zwerling Hollis Mulwray Diane Ladd Ida Sessions
Roy Jenson Mulvihill Roman Polanski Man with Knife Richard Bakalyan Loach (as Dick Bakalyan) Joe Mantell Walsh Bruce Glover Duffy
Belinda Palmer Katherine Roy Roberts Mayor Bagby Noble Willingham Councilman Elliott Montgomery Councilman Rance Howard Irate Farmer
Nandu Hinds Sophie James O’Rear Lawyer (as James O’Reare) James Hong Evelyn’s Butler
Roman Polanski
Production Details
Filming Locations Big Tujunga Wash Foothill Blvd, Sunland, Los Angeles,CA, USA (dry river bed) Archer School for Girls 11725 Sunset Boulevard, Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA (The Mar Vista Rest Home)
1315 South El Molino Drive, South Pasadena, California, USA (Evelyn Cross Mulwray’s Mansion) 1972 Canyon Drive, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (Katherine’s House) Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA Chinatown, Los Angeles, California, USA
Channel Islands, California, USA
30 Lemon Grove Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (Curly’s ‘San Pedro’ house)
Crescent Bay, California, USA Echo Park Lake, Echo Park, Los Angeles, California, USA (J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittes spys on Mulwray) Lake Hollywood Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (Lake) Avalon Casino 1 Casino Way, Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, Channel Islands, California, USA (J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittes visits Noah Cross)
Koreatown, Los Angeles, California, USA Ord Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles, California, USA (finale) Spring Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles, California, USA (finale) The Prince 3198 W. Seventh Street, Koreatown, Los Angeles, California, USA (The Brown Derby Restaurant) Trident Ranch (actor Walter Brennan’s thenhome), 3240 Sunset Valley Road, Moorpark, California, USA (orange grove and ranch house where Gittes crashes his car, is knocked unconscious, and later awakens)
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848 1/2 E. Kensington, Echo Park, Los Angeles, California, USA (J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittes finds the fake Evelyn Cross Mulwray) Bradbury Building - 304 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA Canyon Drive, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA Council Chamber, City Hall - 200 N. Spring Street, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA
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Film Editing by Sam O’Steen film editor
Produced by C.O. Erickson associate producer Robert Evans producer Music by Jerry Goldsmith Cinematography by John A. Alonzo director of photography Stanley Cortez (uncredited)
Casting By Jane Feinberg Mike Fenton Production Design by Richard Sylbert
Costume Design by Anthea Sylbert
Art Direction by W. Stewart Campbell
Box office Budget $6,000,000 (estimated)
Set Decoration by Ruby R. Levitt (as Ruby Levitt)
Gross $29,200,000 (USA) $30,000,000 (Worldwide) ( January 2000) Technical Specifications Runtime 2 hr 10 min (130 min)
Roman Polanski
Review by A.D. Murphy, Variety Media
“Chinatown” is an outstanding picture. Robert Towne’s complex but literate and orderly screenplay takes gumshoe Jack Nicholson on a murder manhunt all over the Los Angeles of 35 years ago, where Faye Dunaway, also above the title, is the wife of a dead city official. Roman Polanski’s American made film, first since “Rosemary’s Baby” shows him again in total command of talent and physical filmmaking elements. Richard Sylbert’s production design is magnificent. The Paramount release, first to bear the producing credit of production chief Robert Evans, has money written all over it, and strong word of mouth should easily overcome any misconceptions suggested by the title.
He is in disfavor with the local police (Perry Lopez and Dick Bakalyan), hounded by goons (Roy Jenson and Polanski, in a bit role) in the employ of John Huston, and partially conned by Dunaway despite a romantic vibration between the two.
Towne, whose most recent credit was the sensational adaptation of “The Last Detail,” in which Nicholson’s performance also was superb, has mixed a lot of period L.A. fact with some spicy fiction. The factual details – the procurement of water supplies for the Southern California area, profitable land acquisitions by knowledgeable insiders, etc.–may rattle a lot of civic skeletons in the closets of first families. It is easy to speak of Los Angeles admittedly prairie metropolis morality and behavior, but it must be remembered that the swindles and corruption and capers of the latterday pioneers rank with the worst in municipal rape. Towne, director Roman Polanski and Nicholson have fashioned a sort of low-key Raymond Chandler hero who, with assistants Joe Mantell and Bruce Glover, specializes in matrimonial infidelities. When Diane Ladd, posing as Dunaway, commissions a job on Darrell Zwerling, the city’s water commissioner (named Hollis Mulwray, for those who might recognize a similarity to the name Mulholland), Nicholson becomes involved in a series of interlocking schemes.
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The many plot angles including a very discreet development of incest, eventually converge in Chinatown for a climactic shootout which, at fadeout, will likely be papered over as a typical ghetto incident, the kind of event that respectable people never hear about. The phrase “Chinatown” is thus used in a cynical context (not unlike U.S. Marines when they say “semper FI”), and has meaning only after the film is over. Nicholson’s performance is excellent, and for Dunaway this is her best part in years. Huston’s crotchety old character delineation works well, and among the very large, expertly selected cast, John Hillerman delivers a great performance of polite menace. Besides Polanski, associate producer C.O. (Doc) Erickson also does a bit.
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John A. Alonzo’s Panivision-Technicolor cinematography is excellent. Sam O’Steen was editor of the 130 minute film, a rare example of a picture that sustains interest throughout an above average duration.
Sylbert’s production design hasn’t missed a trick in recreating the period. And the most gratifying aspect is that the audience is never insulted by overemphasis on period. There’s absolutely no offensive showoff of the nostalgia; the clothes, cars, houses, etc. are simply part of the scenes. Considering the enormous logistical effort involved, there must have been fleeting temptations to lingering shots of sporty cars and the like, but thankfully any such urges were resisted. Jerry Goldsmith, who is one of the best, and genuine, film composers currently active, contributed a fine score. Since Raymond Chandler’s world is the world of this film, film buffs will likely conjure up memories of “The Big Sleep.” Goldsmith’s score is as evocative and dramatic in this film as Max Steiner’s was for “Sleep.” A handful of period poptunes also are interpolated with good discretion.
The film opens with the old black and white Paramount trademark, and the titles are done in the old style script on a neutral background. The small print in the credits indicates that the film’s copyright rests in an entity known as Long Road Productions; that “production services (were) furnished by Freedom Service Co.,” and that it is a Paramount-Penthouse Presentation. All of these relate to the tax shelter syndicate structure by which about 25% of the film’s $3,200,000 cost was sold to investors for about 10% of the profits. There has been a lot of advance interest by the trade in “Chinatown” film. It lives up to the bruited expectations.
Roman Polanski is a complex and controversial figure.
Roman Polanski
Festival Catalog
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The Pianist Music was his passion. Survival was his masterpiece
2002
Written by Ronald Harwood (screenplay), Wladyslaw Szpilman (book) Release Date: 28 March 2003 in United States
A shot for the main character who is Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist film
Film Festival Catalog
The Story
In September 1939, Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist, plays on radio in Warsaw when the station is bombed during Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland at the outbreak of World War II. Hoping for a quick victory, Szpilman rejoices with family at home when learning that Britain and France have declared war on Germany. But Poland’s allies do not live up to their promises of aid and with both the German and Russian armies invading Poland from all sides, fighting lasted for just over a month. German troops soon enter Warsaw, where life for Jews deteriorates as the Nazi authorities prevent them from working or owning businesses and force them to wear blue Star of David armbands. By November 1940, Szpilman and his family have been forced from their home into the overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto where conditions only get worse. People starve, the guards are brutal and corpses are left in the streets. On one occasion, the Szpilmans witness the SS kill an entire family during a łapanka (raid) in an apartment across the street.
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On 16 August 1942 the family are deported to Treblinka extermination camp, but Wladyslaw survives at the Umschlagplatz due to an intervention from a friend in the Jewish Ghetto Police. Szpilman becomes a slave labourer and learns of a coming Jewish revolt. He helps by smuggling weapons into the ghetto, narrowly avoiding a suspicious guard. He then manages to escape and goes into hiding with help from non-Jewish friend Andrzej Bogucki and his wife Janina. In April 1943 Szpilman observes from his window the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that he aided and its ultimate failure. After a neighbor discovers him hiding, Szpilman is forced to flee and is provided with a second hiding place. He is shown into a room with a piano yet is compelled to keep quiet while beginning to suffer from jaundice.
In August 1944, the Polish resistance attack a German building across the street from Szpilman’s hideout during the Warsaw Uprising. A tank shells his apartment, forcing him to escape and hide elsewhere. Over the course of the next months, the city is destroyed and abandoned, leaving Szpilman alone to search desperately for shelter and supplies among the ruins. He eventually makes his way to an abandoned home where he finds a can of pickles. While trying to open it he is discovered by the Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld, who learns that Szpilman is a pianist and asks him to play on a grand piano in the house. The decrepit Szpilman plays Chopin’s Ballade in G minor, which moves Hosenfeld enough to allow Szpilman to hide in the attic of the empty house where the German Captain regularly brings him food.
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In 1945, the Germans are forced to retreat due to the advance of the Red Army. Hosenfeld meets Szpilman for the last time and promises he will listen to him on Polish Radio after the war. He gives Szpilman his greatcoat to keep warm and leaves. However this has almost fatal consequences for Szpilman when he is mistaken for a German officer and shot at by Polish troops liberating Warsaw, who then apprehend and save him. In Spring 1945, former inmates of a Nazi concentration camp pass a Soviet prisoner-ofwar camp holding captured German soldiers and verbally abuse them. Hosenfeld, among those captured, overhears a released inmate lament over his former career as a violinist. He asks the violinist if he knows Szpilman, which the violinist confirms. Hosenfeld wishes for Szpilman to return the favor and help release him. Sometime later, the violinist is able to bring Szpilman back to the site but they find it has been long abandoned. Later, Szpilman works for Polish Radio and performs Chopin’s Grand Polonaise brillante to a large and prestigious audience. An epilogue states that Szpilman died at the age of 88 in the year 2000 while Hosenfeld died in Soviet captivity in 1952.
Roman Polanski
“
No. Please. I’m Polish. I’m not a German.” —Wladyslaw Szpilman
Festival Catalog
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Cast
Adrien Brody Władysław Szpilman
Richard Ridings Mr. Lipa
Thomas Kretschmann Captain Wilm Hosenfeld
Daniel Caltagirone Majorek
Frank Finlay Father Szpilman Maureen Lipman Mother Szpilman Emilia Fox Dorota Ed Stoppard Henryk
Julia Rayner Regina Jessica Kate Meyer Halina
Valentine Pelka Dorota’s Husband Zbigniew Zamachowski Customer with Coins
Ronan Vibert Andrzej Bogucki Ruth Platt Janina Bogucki Michał Żebrowski Jurek Roy Smiles Itzhak Heller
Roman Polanski
Production Details
Filming Locations Beelitz, Brandenburg, Germany
Rembertów, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland Stalowa, Praga Pólnoc, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
Instalatorów, Ochota, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland (Umschlagplatz scenes) Konopacka, Praga Pólnoc, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany Jüterbog, Brandenburg, Germany Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland Kobylka, Mazowieckie, Poland
Babelsberg, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany Berlin, Germany
Kozia, Sródmiescie, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
Hotel Saski, Plac Bankowy, Sródmiescie, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
Krakowskie Przedmiescie, Sródmiescie, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland Mala, Praga Pólnoc, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland Norblin Factory, Wola, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
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Zabkowska, Praga Pólnoc, Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
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Music by Wojciech Kilar Cinematography by Pawel Edelman director of photography Produced by Robert Benmussa producer Timothy Burrill executive producer Daniel Champagnon line producer Gene Gutowski co-producer Henning Molfenter executive producer Roman Polanski producer Lew Rywin executive producer Alain Sarde producer Rainer Schaper associate producer
Film Editing by HervĂŠ de Luze (as Herve De Luze)
Set Decoration by Wieslawa Chojkowska Gabriele Wolff
Casting By Celestia Fox
Costume Design by Anna B. Sheppard (as Anna Sheppard)
Production Design by Allan Starski Art Direction by Nenad Pecur
Box Office Budget $35,000,000 (estimated) Gross $32,519,322 (USA) (30 May 2003) Technical Specs Runtime 150 min | 142 min (DVD edition)
Roman Polanski
Review by Roger Ebert, Roger Elbert website
The title is an understatement, and so is the film. Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” tells the story of a Polish Jew, a classical musician, who survived the Holocaust through stoicism and good luck. This is not a thriller, and avoids any temptation to crank up suspense or sentiment; it is the pianist’s witness to what he saw and what happened to him. That he survived was not a victory when all whom he loved died; Polanski, in talking about his own experiences, has said that the death of his mother in the gas chambers remains so hurtful that only his own death will bring closure. The film is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was playing Chopin on a Warsaw radio station when the first German bombs fell. Szpilman’s family was prosperous and seemingly secure, and his immediate reaction was, “I’m not going anywhere.” We watch as the Nazi noose tightens. His family takes heart from reports that England and France have declared war; surely the Nazis will soon be defeated and life will return to normal.
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It does not. The city’s Jews are forced to give up their possessions and move to the Warsaw ghetto, and there is a somber shot of a brick wall being built to enclose it. A Jewish police force is formed to enforce Nazi regulations, and Szpilman is offered a place on it; he refuses, but a good friend, who joins, later saves his life by taking him off a train bound for the death camps. Then the movie tells the long and incredible story of how Szpilman survived the war by hiding in Warsaw, with help from the Polish resistance. Szpilman is played in the film by Adrien Brody, who is more gaunt and resourceless than in Ken Loach’s “Bread And Roses” (2000), where he played a cocky Los Angeles union organizer. We sense that his Szpilman is a man who came early and seriously to music, knows he is good, and has a certain aloofness to life around him. More than once we hear him reassuring others that everything will turn out all right; this faith is based not on information or even optimism, but essentially on his belief that, for anyone who plays the piano as well as he does, it must.
Polanski himself is a Holocaust survivor, saved at one point when his father pushed him through the barbed wire of a camp. He wandered Krakow and Warsaw, a frightened child, cared for by the kindness of strangers. His own survival (and that of his father) are in a sense as random as Szpilman’s, which is perhaps why he was attracted to this story. Steven Spielberg tried to enlist him to direct “Schindler’s List,” but he refused, perhaps because Schindler’s story involved a man who deliberately set out to frustrate the Holocaust, while from personal experience Polanski knew that fate and chance played an inexplicable role in most survivals. The film was shot in Poland (where he had not worked since his first feature film, “Knife in the Water,” in 1962), and also in Prague and in a German studio. On giant sets he recreates a street overlooked by the apartment where Szpilman is hidden by sympathizers; from his high window the pianist can see the walls of the ghetto, and
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make inferences about the war, based on the comings and goings at the hospital across street. Szpilman is safe enough here for a time, but hungry, lonely, sick and afraid, and then a bomb falls and he discovers with terror that the running water no longer works. By now it is near the end of the war and the city lies in ruins; he finds some rooms standing in the rubble, ironically containing a piano that he dare not play. The closing scenes of the movie involve Szpilman’s confrontation with a German captain named Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who finds his hiding place by accident. I will not describe what happens, but will observe that Polanski’s direction of this scene, his use of pause and nuance, is masterful.
Some reviews of “The Pianist” have found it too detached, lacking urgency. Perhaps that impassive quality reflects what Polanski wants to say. Almost all of the Jews involved in the Holocaust were killed, so all of the survivor stories misrepresent the actual event by supplying an atypical ending. Often their buried message is that by courage and daring, these heroes saved themselves. Well, yes, some did, but most did not and—here is the crucial point--most could not. In this respect Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Grey Zone” (2001) is tougher and more honest, by showing Jews trapped within a Nazi system that removed the possibility of moral choice.
By showing Szpilman as a survivor but not a fighter or a hero—as a man who does all he can to save himself, but would have died without enormous good luck and the kindness of a few non-Jews— Polanski is reflecting, I believe, his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed. After the war, we learn, Szpilman remained in Warsaw and worked all of his life as a pianist. His autobiography was published soon after the war, but was suppressed by Communist authorities because it did not hew to the party line (some Jews were flawed and a German was kind). Republished in the 1990s, it caught Polanski’s attention and resulted in this film, which refuses to turn Szpilman’s survival into a triumph and records it primarily as the story of a witness who was there, saw, and remembers.
Roman Polanski
Festival Catalog
Festival Films 76 77
Roman Polanski
—William R. Meyer (The Film Buff’s Catalog)
“ Compelling tales which are chilling and bizarre are his trademark.�
Oliver Twist Dickens Reimagined
2005
Written by Ronald Harwood (screenplay) based on Charles Dickens (novel) Release Date: 30 September 2005 in United States
A shot for Fagin and Oliver Twist who are the main characters in the Oliver Twist film
Film Festival Catalog
A shot for Andreas Papadopoulos with Oliver Twist in the Oliver Twist film
The Story
Young orphan Oliver Twist is forcibly brought to a workhouse in an unidentified town In England on his ninth birthday. He and the other resident children are treated poorly and given very little food. Facing starvation, the boys select Oliver (through a lottery) to ask for more food at the next meal, which he tentatively does. This results in Oliver being chastised, and the workhouse officials, who are wealthy, well-fed, hypocritical men, decide to get rid of him. After nearly being sold as an apprentice to a cruel chimney sweep, Oliver is sent to Mr. Sowerberry, a coffin-maker, whose wife and senior apprentice take an instant dislike to the newcomer. After more poor treatment, Oliver snaps and attacks Noah, the snotty older apprentice, for having insulted his mother. Knowing his life with the Sowerberrys will only get worse, Oliver escapes on foot.
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With little food, Oliver determines to walk 70 miles to London. After he collapses from exhaustion, a kindly old woman gives him food and lodgings for the night. After a week of travel, he arrives at the city, barefoot and penniless. He meets Jack Dawkins, or “The Artful Dodger,” a boy-thief who takes Oliver to his home and hideout at Saffron Hill that he shares with many other young pickpockets and their eccentric elderly leader, Fagin. Soon, Oliver is being groomed to join their gang. On his first outing with the pickpockets, two of the boys steal a man’s handkerchief and Oliver is framed. However he is proven innocent by an eyewitness, and the owner of the handkerchief (the wealthy Mr. Brownlow) takes pity on Oliver, who had collapsed from a fever in the courtroom.
Brownlow informally adopts Oliver, giving him new clothes and the promise of a good education. However, while out running an errand for Brownlow, Oliver is forcibly returned to the pickpocket gang by Fagin’s associate, the evil Bill Sikes, and the young prostitute Nancy (who is in a complex and abusive relationship with Sikes). Fagin and Sikes worried that Oliver would “peach,” and tell the authorities about their criminal activity. Oliver is put under supervision until Bill Sikes discovers the boy’s connection to the rich Mr. Brownlow. Sikes and his accomplice, Toby Crackit, force Oliver to aid them in robbing Brownlow’s house. They are discovered and Oliver is wounded in a brief shootout between Brownlow and Sikes. As the three escape, Bill decides to murder Oliver to ensure his silence, but falls into a nearby river before he can take action.
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Sikes survives his near-drowning, but is confined to bed with a heavy fever. Fagin, despite treating Oliver kindly, remains crime-focused and plots with Sikes to kill Oliver when Sikes has recovered. Nancy has a maternal love for Oliver and does not want to see him hurt, but she is controlled by the abusive Sikes. She drugs Bill, and goes to Brownlow’s house where she arranges to have him meet her on London Bridge at midnight so she can provide information about Oliver. At the meeting, Nancy cautiously reveals that Oliver is staying with Fagin, and that the authorities will easily find them. Brownlow leaves to call the police. The Artful Dodger, who had been sent by a suspicious Fagin to spy on Nancy, had heard everything and is bullied by Bill Sikes to give up the information. Sikes is furious at Nancy’s betrayal, and brutally beats her to death in their apartment.
The next day, information about Oliver and Fagin appear in the newspaper, along with Nancy’s murder and Sikes is a suspect. Sikes’s everpresent dog, Bullseye, is a dead giveaway to his identity. After unsuccessfully trying to kill the dog, Sikes takes up residence with Toby Crackit. Fagin, Oliver, and the boys are hiding there too, after escaping their previous location before the police could find it. Bullseye escapes his master’s cruelty, and leads a group of police and locals to the group’s hideout. Eventually, Dodger, outraged at Sikes for killing the good-hearted Nancy, reveals their location to authorities. Bill Sikes takes Oliver onto the roof, knowing they won’t shoot if the boy is with him. When trying to scale the building using a rope, Sikes, distracted by his dog, loses his footing and accidentally hangs himself.
Some time later, Oliver is living comfortably with Mr. Brownlow again. Fagin was arrested (though the fate of the pickpockets is unknown), and Oliver wishes to visit him in jail. Brownlow takes him to the prison, where they find Fagin ranting and wailing in his cell. Oliver is distraught at Fagin’s fate, as he had been something of a father figure to Oliver. As Mr. Brownlow escorts a tearful Oliver to a carriage, gallows are being set up in the courtyard. Townspeople begin to gather to watch Fagin’s execution.
Roman Polanski
“ A terrible thing, Oliver... hangin. The dawn... the noose, the gallows, the drop! You don’t even have to be guilty, they’ll hang you for anything these days, that’s because they’re so very fond of hangin!” —Fagin
Festival Catalog
Cast
Ben Kingsley Fagin
Paul Brooke Mr. Grimwig
Jamie Foreman Bill Sikes
Ian McNeice Mr. Limbkins
Barney Clark Oliver Twist Harry Eden The Artful Dodger Leanne Rowe Nancy Edward Hardwicke Mr. Brownlow Mark Strong Toby Crackit
Frances Cuka Mrs. Bedwin Lewis Chase Charley Bates Michael Heath Mr. Sowerberry
Alun Armstrong Magistrate Fang Liz Smith Old Woman Patrick Godfrey Bookseller
Gillian Hanna Mrs. Sowerberry Chris Overton Noah Claypole Jeremy Swift Mr. Bumble
Roman Polanski
Production Details
Filming Locations Barrandov Studios, Prague, Czech Republic
Set Decoration by Jille Azis
Beroun, Stredoceský, Czech Republic
Costume Design by Anna B. Sheppard (as Anna Sheppard)
Prague, Czech Republic Zatec, Czech Republic Produced by Robert Benmussa producer Timothy Burrill executive producer Petr Moravec executive producer Roman Polanski producer Alain Sarde producer Michael Schwarz line producer
Music by Rachel Portman Cinematography by Pawel Edelman director of photography
Gross $312,096 (Hong Kong) (9 December 2005)
Film Editing by Hervé de Luze (as Hervé De Luze)
Technical Specs Runtime 130 min
Casting by Celestia Fox Production Design by Allan Starski Art Direction by Jindrich Kocí senior art director (as Jindra Koci) Jirí Matolín chief art director
Festival Catalog
Box Office Budget €50,000,000 (estimated)
Festival Films 86 87
Review by A. O. SCOTT, The New York Times
Dickensian Deprivations Delivered From the Gut Roman Polanski’s last movie, “The Pianist,” which was widely hailed as a return to form, was also an intensely personal movie for the director. Adapted from someone else’s autobiography, the movie, about a Polish Jew struggling to survive the nightmare of Naziism, nonetheless dealt with experiences painfully close to Mr. Polanski’s own life. The same might be said about his wonderful new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” a novel that has been brought to the screen many times before, but never with such a dark intensity of feeling. Or almost never. Precedent for Mr. Polanski’s somber, heartfelt interpretation of Dickens can be found in David Lean’s black-and-white versions of “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations,” both made just after the Second World War. Those films seem marked by the shadows of their
own time as much as by the memories of Victorian poverty, and this new “Oliver Twist,” while scrupulously reproducing the costumes and décor of the 19th century, seems hardly to be contained within the distant past. Mr. Polanski, a Polish Jew born in 1933, spent much of his childhood in hiding and in flight, which is pretty much the condition of Dickens’s young hero (as it was of Dickens himself). Mr. Polanski has, in many of his films, gravitated toward innocent protagonists hounded and bedeviled by monstrous cruelty and, when they are lucky, borne up by small instances of kindness and charity. His retelling of Dickens’s tale of a friendless boy discovers within the story those familiar, primal emotions of terror, fragility and the almost perverse will not only to survive but to remain human in inhuman circumstances.
In the landscape of “Oliver Twist,” as in “The Pianist,” goodness is so rare and inexplicable as to seem almost absurd. Oliver is played by Barney Clark, who was 11 when the film was made and whose slight frame and delicate features emphasize his character’s vulnerability. An orphan, Oliver lands first in a workhouse (its resemblance to a concentration camp is hardly accidental), and before long finds himself apprenticed to a weak-willed coffin maker. At every turn he is menaced by adults whose grotesqueness, while comical, is also a measure of their moral deformity, and of the ugliness of the society that makes them possible. The worst thing about these villains, who tend to occupy positions of at least relative power, is that they believe their sadism and lack of compassion to be the highest expressions of benevolence. Like Barbara Bush after seeing the “underprivileged” citizens of New Orleans exiled to the Astrodome, they insist on telling Oliver that things are working out pretty well for him.
Roman Polanski
The look of the movie, shot in Prague by the Polish cinematographer Pawel Edelman, is consistent with its interpretation of Dickens’s worldview, which could be plenty grim but which never succumbed to despair. There is just enough light, enough grace, enough beauty, to penetrate the gloom and suggest the possibility of redemption. The script, by Ronald Harwood (who also wrote “The Pianist,” for which he and Mr. Polanski won Oscars), is at once efficient and ornate, capturing Dickens’s narrative dexterity and his ear for the idioms of English speech. Ben Kingsley, hunched over and snaggletoothed, makes his Fagin a figure of hideousness and pathos. The film omits reference to the Jewishness that makes Fagin, along with Shylock, one of the more problematic figures in the English literary canon, but it does not bother to explain or expunge the vicious elements of racial caricature the nose, the clawlike fingers, the hand-rubbing greed - that cling to the character. There is, nonetheless, great tenderness in Sir Ben’s performance, and in the way Mr. Polanski treats him.
Festival Catalog
The rest of the cast, who are likely to be less familiar to American film audiences, honor the best traditions of British acting. Jamie Foreman is a scarily thuggish Bill Sykes, Leanne Rowe is a heartbreaking Nancy (who is nearly as much a child as Oliver), and Edward Hardwicke, as Oliver’s benefactor Mr. Brownlow, is the embodiment of stuffy British decency. But there is nothing stuffy about this film. It is bracingly old-fashioned - a literary adaptation with a somewhat overdone orchestral score (by Rachel Portman) and lavish sets and costumes. But unlike too many film adaptations of classic literature, “Oliver Twist” does not embalm its source with fussy reverence. Instead, with tact and enthusiasm, Mr. Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.
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Roman Polanski
Tess She was a poor man’s daughter, an aristocrat’s mistress and a gentleman’s wife. She was Tess, a victim of her own provocative beauty.
1979
An adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles Release Date: 12 December 1980 in United States
A shot for Tess Durbeyfield in the Tess film
Film Festival Catalog
Festival Films 90 91
The Story
Its events are set in motion when a clergyman, Parson Tringham, has a conversation with a simple farmer, John Durbeyfield. Tringham is a local historian; in the course of his research, he has discovered that the “Durbeyfields” are descended from the d’Urbervilles, a noble family whose lineage extends to the time of William the Conqueror. It is useless knowledge, as the family lost its land and prestige when the male heirs died out. The parson thinks Durbeyfield might like to know his origins as a passing curiosity. Durbeyfield immediately becomes fixated upon the idea of regaining his lost nobility, and using it to somehow better his family’s fortunes. To this end, he sends his daughter Tess to seek employment with a family named d’Urberville living in a nearby manor house. Alec d’Urberville is delighted to meet his beautiful cousin, and he tries to seduce her with strawberries and roses. But Alec is no relation to Tess; he has gotten his illustrious name and coat of arms by purchasing them. Alec falls in love with Tess and eventually rapes her.
She returns home pregnant, but the baby is born sickly and dies. Some time later, Tess goes to a dairy farm and begins work as a milkmaid. She meets her true love: Angel Clare, an aspiring young farmer from a respectable family. He believes Tess to be an unspoiled country girl, and completely innocent. They fall in love, but Tess does not confess her previous relationship with Alec until their wedding night. Disillusioned, Angel rejects her.
Shortly afterwards, Angel Clare returns from travelling abroad. A disastrous missionary tour in Brazil has ruined his health. Humbled, and having had plenty of time to think, he feels remorse for his treatment of Tess. He succeeds in tracking her down but leaves heartbroken when he finds her living with Alec. Tess realizes that going back to Alec has ruined her chances of happiness with Angel, and murders Alec. Running away to find Angel, Tess is reconciled with him; he can finally accept and embrace her as his wife without passing moral judgment on her actions. They consummate their marriage, spending two nights of happiness together on the run from the law before Tess is captured sleeping at Stonehenge. An ending summary tells that she is convicted and hanged for murder.
Deserted by her husband, Tess meets Alec d’Urberville again. At first, she angrily rebuffs his advances. But after her father’s death, the Durbeyfield family falls upon desperately hard times, facing starvation, eviction and homelessness. Tess is forced to resume her relationship with Alec, becoming his mistress in order to support her mother and siblings.
Roman Polanski
Cast
Nastassja Kinski Tess Durbeyfield
Fred Bryant Dairyman Crick
Peter Firth Angel Clare
Tom Chadbon Cuthbert Clare
Leigh Lawson Alec Stokes-d’Urberville John Collin John Durbeyfield Rosemary Martin Mrs. Durbeyfield Carolyn Pickles Marian
Richard Pearson Vicar of Marlott David Markham Reverend Clare Pascale de Boysson Mrs. Clare Suzanna Hamilton Izz Huett Caroline Embling Retty Tony Church Parson Tringham Sylvia Coleridge Mrs. d’Urberville
Festival Catalog
Arielle Dombasle Mercy Chant Dicken Ashworth Farmer Groby Lesley Dunlop Girl in henhouse
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Production Details
Filming Locations Château Brocéliande, Paimpont, Ille-et-Vilaine, France (d’Urberville manor) Ferme des Tourps, Omonville-la-Rogue, Manche, France (Crick farm) Hermanville-sur-Mer, Calvados, France (seaside town) Eculleville, Manche, France (wedding) Château de Beaumanoir, Le Leslay, Côtes-d’Armor, France Cotentin, Manche, France Locronan, Finistère, France Manoir de Keraval, Plomelin, Finistère, France (honeymoon) Morienval, Oise, France (final scenes, Stonehenge reconstitution)
Film Editing by Alastair McIntyre Tom Priestley Casting by Mary Selway Morlaix, Finistère, France Plomelin, Finistère, France Verdun, Meuse, France (surroundings) Produced by Claude Berri producer Timothy Burrill co-producer Pierre Grunstein executive producer Jean-Pierre Rassam associate producer Music by Philippe Sarde
Production Design by Pierre Guffroy Art Direction by Jack Stephens Costume Design by Anthony Powell Box Office Budget $12,000,000 (estimated) Gross $20,093,330 (USA) ( 1981) Technical Specs Runtime 186 min
Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet Geoffrey Unsworth
Roman Polanski
Review by Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which Roman Polanski has turned into a lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie, might at first seem to be the wrong project for Mr. Polanski in every way. As a new biography of the director reports, when Tess was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the press pointed nastily and repeatedly to the coincidence of Mr. Polanski’s having made a film about a young girl’s seduction by an older man, while he himself faced criminal charges for a similar offense. This would certainly seem to cast a pall over the project. So would the fact that Hardy’s novel is so very deeply rooted in English landscapes, geographical and sociological, while Mr. Polanski was brought up in Poland.
Finally, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is so quintessentially Victorian a story that a believable version might seem well out of any contemporary director’s reach. But if an elegant, plausible, affecting Tess sounds like more than might have been expected of Mr. Polanski, let’s just say he has achieved the impossible. In fact, in the process of adapting his style to suit such a sweeping and vivid novel, he has achieved something very unlike his other work. Without Mr. Polanski’s name in the credits, this lush and scenic Tess could even be mistaken for the work of Lean. In a preface to the later editions of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Mr. Hardy described the work as “an impression, not an argument.” Mr. Polanski has taken a similar approach, removing the sting from both the story’s morality and its melodrama. Tess Durbeyfield, the hearty country lass whose downfall begins when her father learns he had noble forebears, is sent to charm her rich D’Urberville relations. She learns that they aren’t D’Urbervilles after all; instead, they have used their new money to purchase an old name.
Festival Catalog
Tess charms them anyhow, so much that Alec D’Urberville, her imposter cousin, seduces and impregnates her. The seduction, like many of the film’s key scenes, is presented in a manner both earthy and discreet. In this case, the action is set in a forest, where a gentle mist arises from the ground and envelops Tess just around the time when she is enveloped by Alec. Alec, as played by Leigh Lawson, is a slightly wooden character, unlike Angel Clare, Tess’s later and truer lover, played with supreme radiance by Peter Firth. Long after Tess has borne and buried her illegitimate child, she finds and falls in love with this spirited soul mate. But when she marries Angel Clare and is at last ready to reveal the secret of her past, the story begins hurtling toward its final tragedy. When Tess becomes a murderer, the film offers its one distinctly Polanski-like moment—but even that scene has its fidelity to the novel. A housemaid listening at a door hears a “drip, drip, drip” sound, according to Hardy. Mr. Polanski has simply interpreted this with a typically mischievous flourish.
Festival Films 94 95
Of all the unlikely strong points of Tess, which opens today for a weeklong engagement at the Baronet and which will reopen next year, the unlikeliest is Nastassja Kinski, who plays the title role. Miss Kinski powerfully resembles the young Ingrid Bergman, and she is altogether ravishing. But she’s an odd choice for Tess: not quite vigorous enough, and maybe even too beautiful. She’s an actress who can lose her magnetism and mystery if she’s given a great deal to do (that was the case in an earlier film called Stay As You Are). But here, Mr. Polanski makes perfect use of her. Instead of a driving force, she becomes an echo of the land and the society around her, more passive than Hardy’s Tess but linked just as unmistakably with natural forces. Miss Kinski’s Tess has no inner life to speak of. But Mr. Polanski makes her surroundings so expressive that her placidity and reserve work very beautifully.
Even at its nearly three-hour running time, Mr. Polanski’s Tess cannot hope for anything approaching the range of the novel. But the deletions have been made wisely, and though the story loses some of its resonance it maintains its momentum. There are episodes—like one involving Tess’s shabby boots and Mercy Chant, the more respectable girl who expects to marry Angel— that don’t make the sense they should, and the action is fragmented at times. That’s a small price to pay for the movie’s essential rightness, for its congruence with the mood and manner of the novel. Mr. Polanski had to go to Normandy and rebuild Stonehenge to stage his last scene, according to this same biography. As is the case throughout his Tess, the results were worth the big trouble.
Festival Catalog
Festival Films 96 97
RomanPolanski Polanski Roman
“ If there is any possibility of changing your destiny, it may be only in your creative life, certainly not in your life, period.�
—Roman Polanski
{01} The Director and His Work
Film Festival Catalog
Talking With Polanski 102 103
Interview by Roger Ebert, Roger Elbert website
Once was that all American movies were made by Hollywood directors, and the way you got to be a Hollywood director was to have been one for 30 years. A few foreign directors like Jean Renoir were summoned to Hollywood, but they invariably found it impossible to make movies with the studio czars breathing in their ears. And so it was often true that Hollywood movies were products of Group Think, and foreign movies were the work of individual directors. That’s no longer quite the case. Since the breakdown of the Hollywood assembly line and the tendency to make films one at a time for a more literate audience, studios have been giving their directors more freedom. Who would have guessed 20 years ago, for example, that Paramount would entrust one of its most lucrative properties to a young Polish director without previous Hollywood experience, and then let him write his own script and edit the movie to satisfy his own whims? That is the case with “Rosemary’s Baby,” which Roman Polanski directed without anybody looking over his shoulder. Polanski is the first director from an Iron Curtain country to work in Hollywood.
He is modest and proud by turns; told he was lucky to get such a splendid performance from Cassavetes, he said: “Luck has nothing to do with it. I am a good director.”
The result is a chilling, macabre film of the sort Polanski has already made in Europe. His first film, “Knife in the Water,” is recognized as a classic. His others have been “Repulsion,” the curious, brilliant “Cul-de-Sac,” and the dreadful “Fearless Vampire Killers.” “I saw ‘Vampire Killers’ and I wanted to throw up,” Polanski admitted with candor during an interview last week. “The producer cut 20 minutes out of it and added a little cartoon to explain vampires. It was a botch.” All Polanski’s films have dealt with macabre, bizarre subjects. “Rosemary’s Baby” tells of a pregnant young girl (Mia Farrow) who suspects her husband (John Cassavetes) has already sold their baby to witches next door.
Paramount signed Mia Farrow for the role, Polanski said. “I had only seen her on the cover of Life. To be honest, I was not enthusiastic about her until we started to work. Then I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that she is a brilliant actress. This is one of the most difficult woman’s parts I can imagine.” There are also splendid performances from veterans Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmur, who play the strange couple next door with a hearty friendliness and the most sinister undertones. “I just let them act,” Polanski said. “That is my method. Once you start discussing a part with an actor, he won’t let you alone. He’ll start in on motivation and all that nonsense.”
Not surprisingly, Polanski considers the Spanish director Luis Bunuel (who often uses black magic, fetishes and the supernatural in his films) to be his greatest influence. A small, slight man who looks much younger than his 34 years, Polanski could pass for a member of a pop group.
Roman Polanski
by Scott Foundas, Variety Media
Roman Polanski revels in recounting the story of how he met his wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, to whom he has been married for 25 years, and who is the mother of his two children. The year was 1985, and Polanski was in preproduction on “Pirates,” the problem-plagued, big-budget adventure comedy that remains the greatest critical and commercial failure of his career. With his casting director, Dominique Besnehard, he planned to attend a Paris drag cabaret in search of a female impersonator to play a role in the film. Besnehard asked if he could bring along a young French model who had recently filmed a small part in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Detective” but claimed to have no interest in an acting career. Polanski instantly replied, “Bring her.” The model turned out to be Seigner. “That was the best casting of his entire career,” Polanski says with a laugh. “It’s funny that I met my wife through a casting director, but it had nothing to do with the film, because there was no role for her.” Three decades later, in his new film, “Venus in Fur,” Polanski has rewarded Seigner with the role of her career.
When they aren’t in Paris, Polanski and Seigner live in a bucolic chalet — all exposed wood and sunlight — in the Swiss ski town of Gstaad, high in the Alps. Polanski first came here in the winter of 1969, after the murder of his second wife, Sharon Tate, and has lived in the town on and off ever since. He is still an active skier, which accounts in part for the lean, agile physique that belies his age. In an interview with Variety last August, right after his 80th birthday, Polanski recalls how his home was abuzz with revelers a few days earlier. Director Brett Ratner, a longtime friend, had even arranged for the local cinema to screen an archival print of “Citizen Kane,” one of Polanski’s favorites. Now, everyone has dispersed, save for Polanski’s lanky 15-year-old son, Elvis, who periodically passes through with a friend and—in a gesture all but inconceivable of an American teen— happily prepares everyone a lunch of fresh meats and cheeses ordered from a local market. (Polanski’s 21-year-old daughter, Morgane, is studying acting at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama.
It is a tranquil domestic scene, literally and figuratively many miles away from the personal tragedies and public scandals that have followed Polanski for much of his life. In his 1984 memoir “Roman,” the filmmaker said, “I doubt if I shall ever again be able to live on a permanent basis with any woman, no matter how bright, easygoing, good-natured, or attuned to my moods. My attempts to do so have always failed, not least because I start drawing comparisons with Sharon.” But Seigner changed all that, just as Polanski helped to alter her attitude toward acting. He cast her as the femme fatale who aids Harrison Ford’s Dr. Richard Walker in the search for his missing wife (Betty Buckley) in the taut thriller “Frantic” (1988), and then again as one half of a dangerously destructive sadomasochistic couple in the disturbing, darkly comic “Bitter Moon” (1992). Now, in “Venus in Fur,” she is an indelible combination of temptress and muse in a movie that is all about an actress, a director and the blurry relationship between life and art.
Talking With Polanski 104 105
The setting is a cavernous theater on the ChampsElysees, where the director (played by French star Mathieu Amalric) is holding auditions for the lead role in his adaptation of “Venus in Furs,” the 1870 roman a clef by Austrian writer Leopold Sacher-Masoch, who quite literally put the “M” in S&M. Outside, a storm is raging, and it brings with it a strange visitor, who seems to have tumbled down from the heavens along with the wind and rain, a Mary Poppins among method actors. Her name is Vanda, and although she doesn’t appear on the call sheet, she comes to the audition more than prepared, with the full text committed to memory and her own props in tow. That she happens to share her name with Sacher-Masoch’s heroine at first seems a coincidence, but soon proves anything but.
The story is a diabolically clever two-hander that Polanski adapted with the playwright David Ives from Ives’ 2010 New York stage hit. “I just thought it was a terrific text,” says Polanski. “First, the humor of it. But then the sort of anti-macho spirit of it, and the richness of the allusions.” The director first read Ives’ play in his hotel room during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where his Oscar-winning 1979 Thomas Hardy adaptation, “Tess,” was being screened in a restored print. “This might be up your alley,” Polanski remem-bers his longtime agent, Jeff Berg, telling him. As it turns out, Berg was right. Polanski made “Venus” quickly: One year after first reading the play, he was presenting the finished film in competition at Cannes. It received enthusiastic reviews, especially for Seigner, who shot her scenes by day while appearing at night on stage in an acclaimed revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” In France, where the movie opened last fall, Polanski went on to win the Cesar for his direction, the latest addition to a trophy case that includes an American Oscar and the Cannes Palme d’Or (both for “The Pianist”). Later this month, “Venus” will receive its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, before opening June 20 via distributor IFC Films.
“Venus” is, in many ways, a vintage Polanski premise: a man and a woman confined to an intentionally claustrophobic space, enacting a series of slyly shifting psychological and sexual power games. This is, after all, the director who began his career with “Knife in the Water” (1962), a three-character spellbinder about the jealous tension that simmers to a boil when a married couple invites a young hitchhiker to join them on a sailing trip. Then came the terrifying “Repulsion” (1965), in which Catherine Deneuve’s mentally unstable manicurist descends into violent delusions after being left alone in the London flat she shares with her sister; and the grimly funny “Cul de Sac” (1966), whose bickering spouses find themselves marooned with a randy gangster and his wounded partner on a tidal island literally cut off from the outside world.
Roman Polanski
In the five decades since, there have been more films he has set in dwellings that become a kind of prison around the characters (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Tenant,” “Carnage”). In the chilling “Death and the Maiden” (1994), Polanski’s best film of the 1990s, a survivor (Sigourney Weaver) of torture in an unnamed South American country turns the tables on the man (Ben Kingsley) she believes to have been her captor. And in the wry “The Ghost Writer” (2010), a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) holes up inside his massive Martha’s Vineyard manor to escape a brewing scandal — a movie Polanski found himself editing, in part, from a Swiss prison cell after his 2009 arrest on a decades-old American warrant. Even when he has worked on a more epic canvas, in films like “Tess” and “The Pianist” (2002), Polanski has tended to favor fugitives and outcasts who must survive clandestinely on the fringes of society—prisoners in their own skin.
Critics and journalists have found it irresistible to liken these motifs to the tragic events of Polanski’s life—his childhood in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Krakow, the murder of Tate, the pariah status conferred on him by the American media in the wake of his 1977 statutory rape charges. Then aged 43, Polanski pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor, 13-year-old Samantha Gemier (nee Gailey). Threatened with possible imprisonment and/or deportation following a 42-day psychiatric evaluation at California’s Chino State Prison, Polanski fled to France and has lived abroad ever since. The filmmaker has nothing more to say on the Geimer case than he already has, having made a private apology to her by email in 2009, and a public one in the 2011 documentary “Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir.”
Festival Catalog
While many people continue to re-examine his past, Polanski is focused squarely on the future. Eighty, he says, “Is a number, nothing else— just part of the evolution from the womb to the grave.” To that end, he is already hard at work on his next project, “D,” which will reunite him with writer Robert Harris, who adapted “The Ghost Writer” with Polanski from his own novel. The “D” stands for Dreyfus, as in Alfred Dreyfus, the young French artillery officer who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island. Polanski and Harris collaborated on an original script for “D” prior to the making of “Venus in Fur,” which Harris then expanded into a full-fledged historical novel, “An Officer and a Spy,” published in January by Knopf.
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It’s tempting to ponder the course Polanski’s career would have taken had he continued to work in Hollywood.
More than a century after the Dreyfuss case, Polanski considers it as relevant as ever. “You can find parallels between state organizations — an army in this case — and the media, a magazine or a newspaper,” he says. And Polanski, who successfully sued Vanity Fair for libel in 2005 concerning allegations surrounding Tate’s funeral, knows of what he speaks. Some will once again suggest his art is imitating his life. “Maybe,” he admits. But he is quick to offer a different explanation for the recurring themes that run through his pictures: “I always liked the movies that happen within some kind of cocoon rather than on the fields,” he says. “As an adolescent, I preferred a film like Olivier’s ‘Hamlet,’ which had tremendous influence on me, to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’I like the lieu clos, as we say in French. I like to feel the wall behind me.” With luck—and proper financing—he hopes to be shooting “D” by the end of the year.
He left America in 1978, four years after the release of the ’40s noir classic “Chinatown,” one of the most influential of American films — oft imitated, never equaled. But it is also true that by 1978, the ground in Hollywood had begun to shift, and the iconoclastic, auteur-friendly alchemy that had made “Chinatown” possible was rapidly giving way to the impersonal, assemblyline blockbusters that would dominate the ’80s. Polanski famously fought “Chinatown’s” author, Robert Towne, over the tone and direction of the story; Towne wanted the Faye Dunaway character to live in the end.
Would he have thrived under such conditions? “It’s difficult to answer your question,” Polanski says, twirling the pasta on his plate at a local Italian eatery near his home. He seems to briefly consider the road not taken. “It would probably be easier to get work if I’d stayed, because most of my films were financed by studios anyway, but at long distance so to speak,” he says. It’s more difficult to do what I’m doing, but maybe that confirms the concept that an artist should suffer in order to do something interesting.”
Today, Polanski readily acknowledges, the film And retirement? likely wouldn’t be made at all, at least not by a major studio. “Tess,” the first film he made after his return to Europe, secured a U.S. distributor “I never really imagined how one can retire,” he re(Columbia Pictures) only after it opened overseas sponds at the mere mention of the word. “What do you do? Gardening? No, no, I feel really happy to glowing reviews—and strong box office. when I’m working. I think the best moments in my life are when I work. It was my passion when I was a young man, and it remains my passion. I feel probably the way a carpenter feels when he’s making a beautiful chair and seeing the result of his work. The work itself is satisfying, the process of getting the result.”
Roman Polanski
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Location & Date Location The Film Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza New York, NY 10023
Directions By Subway Take the #1 local train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center Station.
The festival will be held at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, a venue known for its hosting of international and independent films. Roman Polanski participated in the first New York Film Festival, so it is fitting that this retrospective of some of his greatest films is taking place in New York.
By Bus The M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines all stop within one block of Lincoln Center. For additional bus and subway information and directions, call the Travel Information Bureau at 718-330-1234 (24 hours a day). Garage parking is available at 65th Street under Lincoln Center.
Date March 23–25, 2015 Roman Polanski has won three Academy Awards including best director for The Pianist on March 23, 2002. This makes March 23 a special day in his career. The festival opens on this day to mark the occasion.
Roman Polanski
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Popular New York City attractions
New York City is rich with sights and entertainment for the visitor. If you are in town for only a few days, be sure not to miss these top. Empire State Building
Times Square
NYC Museums
Lincoln Center
Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
Metropolitan Museum of Art
9/11 Memorial
Central Park
The Museum of Modern Art (Moma) Museum
Roman Polanski
Schedule & Showtimes Monday, March 23 Rosemary’s Baby 3:10pm | 5:05pm | 7:00pm | 9:00pm
Wednesday, March 25 Tess 3:10pm | 5:05pm | 7:00pm | 9:00pm
Chinatown 1:30pm | 3:20pm | 5:30pm | 7:30pm
Oliver Twist 1:30pm | 3:20pm | 5:30pm | 7:30pm
The Pianist 4:15pm | 8:30pm Oliver Twist 12:45pm Tess 2:15pm | 6:30pm
Tuesday, March 24 The Pianist 3:10pm | 5:05pm | 7:00pm | 9:00pm Rosemary’s Baby 1:30pm | 3:20pm | 5:30pm | 7:30pm Oliver Twist 4:15pm | 8:30pm Tess 12:45pm Chinatown 2:15pm | 6:30pm
Festival Catalog
Chinatown 4:15pm | 8:30pm Rosemary’s Baby 12:45pm The Pianist 2:15pm | 6:30pm
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Roman Polanski
—The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994
“ Atmosphere is the most important element of his films and the core around which he builds his plots and develops his characters.�
Sources
“Roman Polanski.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www. imdb.com/name/nm0000591/>. “Rosemary’s Baby.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www. imdb.com/title/tt0063522/?ref_=nm_flmg_ dr_21>. “Chinatown.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_17>. “Tess.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0080009/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_15>. “The Pianist.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0253474/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_8>. “Oliver Twist.” Internet Movie Database. 1 Jan. 1990. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0380599/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_7>. “Roman Polanski: The Impact of Life on Art.” Masters of Cinema. 12 Aug. 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.mastersofcinema. net/2012/08/roman-polanski-the-impact-oflife-on-art/>.
Ebert, Roger. “THE PIANIST REVIEW.” Roger Ebert. 3 Jan. 2003. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/thepianist-2003>.
“Biography.” Roman Polanski. 1 Jan. 2004. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.romanpolanski. com/biography.php>. “Roman Polanski Biography.” Bio. A&E Television Networks. 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.biography.com/people/ roman-polanski-9443411>. Chudy, Tessa. “He Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski by Davide Caputo.” Senses of Cinema. 1 Nov. 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://sensesofcinema. com/2012/book-reviews/the-psychology-ofseeing-and-the-cinema-of-romanpolanski-by-davide-caputo/>. Lim, Dennise. “Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood.” The New York Times Company. 14 Feb. 2010. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www. nytimes.com/2010/02/14/movies/14polanski. html>. Ebert, Roger. “ROSEMARY’S BABY REVIEW.” Roger Ebert. 29 July 1968. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ rosemarys-baby-1968>. Murphy, A.D. “Review: ‘Chinatown’.” Variety. 19 June 1974. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http:// variety.com/1974/film/reviews/ chinatown-1200423300/>.
Festival Catalog
SCOTT, A. O. “Dickensian Deprivations Delivered From the Gut.” The New York Times Company. 23 Sept. 2005. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/ movies/23oliv.html>. Maslin, Janet. “Tess (1979).” The New York Times Company. 12 Dec. 1980. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF173DE777BC4A52D FB467838B699EDE>. Foundas, Scott. “Roman Polanski Talks His Life and Career, ‘Venus in Fur’ and Retirement.” Variety Media. 1 Jan. 2006. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://variety.com/2014/film/features/romanpolanski-i-always-liked-the-movies-thathappen-within-some-kind-of-cocoon1201154439/>. Ebert, Roger. “INTERVIEW WITH ROMAN POLANSKI.” Roger Ebert. 11 June 1968. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-with-roman-polanski>.
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Roman Polanski
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