Roman Polanski was not at the Baftas to pick up his best film and director prizes for "The Pianist". Britain has an extradition treaty with the US, where he is wanted for the rape (in March 1977) of a 13-year-old girl. She recently gave an interview, saying that while she doesn't forgive Polanski, her experience shouldn't affect his chance of winning awards. "The Pianist" has been nominated for seven Oscars.
It is hard not to braid together Polanski's work and life. Yet, a few years ago, in a tense three-hour interview for television, my attempts to do so were derided by him as "monkey see, monkey do." He told me that he was far too evolved psychologically to transcribe his astonishing life into his astonishing work.
Polanski was born in Paris in 1933 to middle-class Jewish parents and grew up in Krakow. His father sometimes locked him in a cupboard and used lie detectors on him. During the occupation he, like many others, were forced by the Germans to watch films about lice-ridden, rat-like Jews. By the end of the war, his mother had been killed in Auschwitz and he had watched Poles defecate on German soldiers. Subsequently, he was drawn not to the colour films or escapist musicals of the early 1950s, but to two British ones: Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" and Carol Reed's "Odd Man Out". Both were filmed on sets and each was very atmospheric and claustrophobic.
Polanski's first feature film, "Knife in the Water" (1962), is one of the most claustrophobic films ever made. Amongst the first Polish films not to deal with the subject of the war, it was set and shot almost entirely on a small sailing boat. Like his later films, "Cul-de-Sac", "Death and the Maiden", "Frantic" and "Bitter Moon", it was about the strained geometry of a sexual triangle and the humiliation of getting too close to people. It was derided as "cosmopolitan" in communist Poland for its indulgence of fantasy, fear and desire. 20th Century Fox tried to remake "Knife in the Water" with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Warren Beatty. Polanski was on the Hollywood radar.
In 1966, he filmed "Cul-de-Sa"c on Holy Island, the first of many films echoing Hamlet's castle setting. The atmosphere on location was so tense that actor Donald Pleasance lodged a formal complaint and the crew threatened strike action. The story absorbed the tensions on set.
The following year, he made one of his best films, a technically dazzling spoof of Hammer Horror films, "The Fearless Vampire Killers". Again set in a castle somewhere in Jewish middle-Europe, Polanski himself played the lead. Opposite him was cast a beautiful young actress called Sharon Tate. She and Polanski dined and took LSD together, fell in love, got married, conceived a child and set up home in the Hollywood Hills. Polanski took on "Rosemary's Baby". His Hollywood crew was amazed at his devotion to detail and truth, making the vegetarian Mia Farrow eat raw liver and employing Anton La Vey, founder of the Church of Satan, as demonic advisor. On 9th August 1969, Tate and three friends were murdered in Polanski's LA home. The murderers, it was discovered, were followers of Charles Manson. "Sharon's death reinforced my belief in the absurd," he said afterwards. "I began to take on the traits of my father-pessimism, dissatisfaction with life, a profoundly Judaic sense of guilt and a conviction that every joy has its price." Two years later, Polanski made another castle film, about, in part, a man whose wife and child are murdered while he is away. "Macbeth" was his bloodiest film yet.
In 1974, he was sent a script called "Chinatown" by Jack Nicholson. In the story, the rape of the Owens Valley was originally written with an upbeat ending. Polanski reversed this, killing Faye Dunaway's character by having her shot in the eye. The film's screenwriter Robert Towne called this ending "the tunnel at the end of the light." Polanski had turned Hollywood utopianism on its head with a profoundly un-American cynicism and despair. It got 11 Oscar nominations.
In 1977, in Nicholson's jacuzzi, Polanski drugged and had sex with the 13-year-old girl he was photographing for men's "Vogue". He was imprisoned for psychiatric tests for 42 days and charged with unlawful sexual intercourse. Pending further sentencing, he boarded a plane, flew to Europe and hasn't returned to the US since. He began a relationship with Nastassja Kinski-then nearly 19, although reported in the papers as much younger-and together they made "Tess", a book recommended to Polanski by Tate. Dedicated to her, it is Polanski's most golden film. When asked about this, he said that since the world is absurd, it is bold to make something lyrical to add to it. Its rape scene is one of the most tentative in his career, shot through mist, without point-of-view shots (unlike the one in Rosemary's Baby) and with a deliberative, zooming camera. "Tess" got 11 Oscar nominations.
Indeed, any monkey can see the connections between Polanski's life and work. "The Pianist" is his latest-and most detached-imaginative reworking of the three central crimes in which he has been involved. But whereas the Tate murder and the rape incident occurred in his adulthood, the Holocaust and the deportation of his mother were formative. Having decided against directing "Schindler's List", he finally chose the story of an artist in the Holocaust to begin his own cinematic retrospection.
