Cinema’s convivial survivor
THERE is something very much larger than life about the diminutive Roman Polanski, when he comes bounding in to the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris for an interview. Seventy-eight now, he looks more like a man in his 50s and is very relaxed and jocular, eager to talk about nearly everything, it seems.
Sony Classic Pictures, the distributors of his new movie Carnage, are feeling much more cautious and make it a condition of the interview that I sign an undertaking not to ask him anything about his ‘troubles’, most of them related to his rape of a 13-year-old in 1977. It turns out to be completely superfluous. Polanski wants to talk, and like a man who is trying to take stock and put things in order, everything is on the table.
It’s just over two years since his last film Ghost Writer was released and this time, he has elected to adapt the hugely successful stage play by Yazmina Reza, The God of Carnage, for the screen. Although the author of the play is French, and the play was originally written in that language many people have interpreted it as a meditation on the American middle classes. Polanski is among them.
“When I saw the play, I thought it’s much more American than a French situation. She wrote it in French, but these four people behaved like I have known Americans to behave,” he said. “That’s what attracted me to it and what’s really interesting in this play is this evolution from a people so polite and well behaved to something close to monsters.”
Polanski’s tumultuous personal life in Poland and then in the US has been the stuff of nightmares — from being sealed into the ghetto in Krakow at the age of seven, losing his mother, who was killed while pregnant in a Nazi concentration camp, periods of homelessness, to the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate in Los Angeles by the Manson Gang in 1969.
His conviction for the statutory rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in Los Angeles in 1977, with all the legal drama which ensued after he fled the US while out on bail, has cast a long shadow over his life and reputation. He has lived in France ever since, as a kind of fugitive, never able to be sure when the long arm of American extradition might try to reel him in again.
“What happened in the past happened and that’s my luggage,” he says shrugging. “Being an atheist and someone who believes in free will over predestination, I think that things happen as they must and it could not be any other way.
“I was around 20 when I went to Paris and left Poland for good. At the beginning, I was not that interested in America, except for the movies. I also loved Italian film, the neo-realism was so important to me.
“If I had stayed in America, there is no question but that my life would have been different. Whatever you eat makes you different — tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are. I’m often asked about the differences between Hollywood and Europe and now that the planet is so much more international, it’s practically the same.
“When I did my first film in Hollywood, there were far greater differences as far as technology is concerned. Going there allowed me to do things in my career that I could not have otherwise done. Rosemary’s Baby was my first film in Hollywood, so it was very important to me to do that.”
Despite the many hardships and heartbreaks he has endured, there has always been something of the canny survivor to Polanski, the spirit of one who manages to thrive somehow, even in adversity.
“Success works and breeds success. I knew how to drive the movie machine, that big complicated thing and if you know how to do it, you can do really great things with it. I know a lot of European directors that you have not heard about who went there and broke their legs, because they did not know how to operate the machine.
“Wherever you go, you are different. If I was in Marseilles and not Paris, I would be different. I would meet different people. I would live in a different climate and I would be bitten by different mosquitoes.”
Given all that has occurred in his personal life, including his arrest in Switzerland two years ago under an American warrant, Polanski is amusing about it all, lacking in bitterness, philosophical about power and powerlessness.
He was working on Carnage when his life came to a grinding halt in 2009. “My agent also represents Christoph Waltz and he called me up while I was locked up during my house arrest, or let’s call it my ‘sabbatical year’ — sometimes you have to use euphemisms — and I said, yes, it would be interesting to have him come and visit me. Much more interesting to have him come than the chief of Bern police who also came to have tea with me. He was extremely nice and said the arrest was not his doing, which is true.”
This is as far as Polanski goes in talking about his house arrest, but he frequently he steers the interview to talk about claustrophobia and confined spaces, surprising me by telling me how comfortable he finds them. “The influence of films I liked as a young man, or as a child much more, was happening in confined spaces, where I could feel the fourth wall behind me, even when I was sitting in the cinema. If it was masterfully done, you would feel in it.
“That was much more attractive to me than cavalry or two cavalries running across the field and then clashing and fighting, where you don’t know who is who. That’s why I came back to this with Carnage, where the viewer is the fourth wall. My first film Knife In The Water had three people in it on a boat, but with no walls around them.”
Given the darkness in many of Polanski’s films, I wonder how great a role the tragedies in his life have influenced his work.
“I can’t answer that question as to whether it’s indispensable for an artist to suffer. I think certain experience is useful. For example, The Pianist — most of that film I could do with my left hand because I had it all in my head. It’s all lived, so I would know how to deal with certain situations in a realistic way, to recreate everything from my childhood, just changing the characters, the way they are dressed. But like I said, I don’t wish anything were different. I accept things as they are.”
Polanski’s critics often argue that the best of his work was done in the 1960s and ‘70s with such movies as Repulsion, Chinatown and Macbeth, and that some of his later work has lacked the originality or urgency of that which came earlier in his career. Not surprisingly, he does not see it that way.
“There were some films in my youth, even my childhood, that attracted me tremendously and remain throughout in my work. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet which virtually all takes place in corridors, staircases and terraces, attracted me and when I was doing Death And The Maiden, I was trying to do the same thing.
“Although supernatural things are very remote for me, when I read the book that Rosemary’s Baby is based on, I found it tremendously exciting as a movie project. You never actually see anything supernatural in the film and the dream she has in which she gets pregnant is deliberately ambiguous — leaving the impression that someone is insisting on a supernatural interpretation of a real devil.
“Odd Man Out is a fabulous movie that I first saw when I was about 14 and it was so important for me and it is something I’m trying to redo in every movie I make. I first saw it in Krakow and it was rainy and grey. The film takes place over 24 hours and there were clocks and watches in it that you keep seeing as time progresses. These elements really attracted me for years and I went back to see it when I was doing Repulsion in London, trembling, because I was afraid I would now find it nil.
“It’s still fantastic and I was trying to figure out why it meant so much to me and then I suddenly saw that it was about a fugitive. I was a fugitive from the ghetto and it took many years later before I could identify with the role that James Mason plays in this film.”
We have been talking for more than an hour now and Polanski, realising the time, apologises for talking at such length. When I reassure him that it’s been a pleasure listening, he quips, “I wish my wife would say the same thing.”
Polanski has been married for 22 years to the actress Emmanuelle Seigneur. The couple have two children, 18-year-old Morgane and Elvis, 13. Mention of his children causes him to soften visibly. “I remember our daughter talking about her 18th birthday, as though it was going to mark some sudden liberation and she was going to go to a different planet. But nothing changed and she realised she was happy where she is. In Carnage, what is interesting is how the adults behave like children, they are really just children dressed as adults. The main difference is that adults can keep a grudge for longer, where children tend to forget.
Polanski attributes his youthful looks and energy to a lifelong passion for sport and the fact that he never smoked. Age notwithstanding, he has more movies he still wants to make, one of which concerns ageing and mortality.
“Ageing and plastic surgery are now universal subjects. Creams, pills, surgery have become a total craze. I would like to do a period film of pre-war times set in a period which does not have these tools and to see how one woman in particular goes through all the stages of her life.”
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