The Tenant(Le Locataire)-1976

The Tenant (French: Le Locataire) is a 1976 psychological thriller/horror film directed by Roman Polanski based upon the 1964 novel Le locataire chimérique by Roland Topor. It is also known under the French title Le Locataire. It co-stars actress Isabelle Adjani. It is the last film in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy", following Repulsion and Rosemary'sBaby. It was entered into the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.

Director Roman Polanski casts himself in the lead of the psychological thriller

The Tenant.Trelkovsky (Polanski) rents an apartment in a spooky old residential building, where his neighbors -- mostly old recluses -- eye him with suspicious contempt. Upon discovering thatthe apartment's previous tenant, a beautiful young woman, jumped from the window in a suicide attempt, Trelkovsky begins obsessing over the dead woman. Growing increasinglyparanoid, Trelkovsky convinces himself that his neighbors plan to kill him. He even comes to the conclusion that Stella (Isabel Adjani), the woman he has fallen in love with, is inon the "plot." Ultimately, Polanski assumes the identity of the suicide victim -- and inherits her self-destructive urges.

The Tenant Interview

This interview is from two very old newspaper clippings, I do not have the exact date, however it was conducted during the filming of "The Tenant" which will have been around 1975 I should think.. Here Polanski discusses the movie and also many interesting opinions on filmmaking.

Polanski in Paris By A. ALVAREZ

The unpredictable Polish director Roman Polanski once remarked that he would like to make a movie that has only one character. "The Tenant," the story he is now filming in Paris, is not quite that-the cast includes Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas and Isabelle Adjani, who won acclaim in Truffaut's "The. Story of Adele H."-. But the hero, a man in the grip of a peculiarly distressing, ultimately fatal paranoia, is in almost every scene. And that hero is played by Polanski himself who, as well as directing, also collaborated on the script.

Polanski is in his early 40's and looks at least 10 years younger. His hair is thick and brown, without a trace of gray, his face, boyishly unlined. He is small trim fit and self-contained, a sharply defined presence, nothing blurred about him-which means not much emotion and no indecision at all. He looks as if he lives his life as he drives his Ferrari-with skill, precision, impatience with other people's hesitations, and no room for error. When at the start of a recent interview I remarked how young he looks, be said, "Age is a state of mind," and changed the subject.

Unlike "The Tenant's" doomed protagonist, Polanski is a survivor, and he has the survivor's knack of never looking back, a knack which he developed to a fine pitch so long ago that he is no longer aware of it. After all, he has had to be self-sufficient since the age of 8, when he escaped from the Cracow ghetto and went to live with a family of peasants. His parents were less lucky: they were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where his mother died. His father remarried when he returned Polanski chose not to live with him. He was 12 by then..

Polanski found solace in acting, attending art school, and, finally, studying at the famous film school at Lodz. In 1958, as his senior thesis, he wrote and directed a brilliant surrealist short, "Two Men and a Wardrobe," and went on to establish himself as a major figure on the international film scene with such stunning works as "Knife in the Water," "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby." With the latter film, one of the, biggest box-office hits of 1968, Polanski graduated into the genuine big time and he seemed invulnerable: professionally, acclaimed, financially successful and married, at last to Sharon Tate, "the only girl," says his friend Kenneth Tynan, "who ever moved into his life on equal terms."

Yet within a few months he was again reaching for his survival kit: Charles Manson's butchers' repeated what Nazis had done 25 years before. It took Polanski five years and two failures "Macbeth" and "What?"-to recover his stride. Then came "Chinatown," his best movie since "Knife in the Water." And now, with "The Tenant," it is more evident than ever that Pólanski is content only with total control: starring, directing, co-scripting, arguing technicalities with the technicians, camera angles with the great Sven Nykvist, Ingrnar Bergman's cameraman-and advertising campaigns with the publicity experts. I asked him if it wasn't hard to take on all these roles at once, particularly to act and direct. "No," he said. "That's easy, because it's one less person to argue with. It's not difficult to direct while acting. The difficulty is to act while directing. You stand in front of the camera and the moment the clapperboard claps you should concentrate, disconnect yourself from what's around you. If you keep thinking about lights and other people's performances and marks on the floor, then you can't act."

As a director, Polanski is a stern perfectionist. While I was at the studio, he did 30 takes of one sequence before he was satisfied. The first 15 came at the end of what had already been a long day's shooting. Polanski was playing a scene with Isabelle Adjani in which the hero goes back to the apartment of his sensual, but none too bright, girl friend. Both of- them are drunk, at cross-purposes. He wants to air his gathering paranoia; she wants to get him to bed. They sit together at a table, talking and drinking, and then she leads him to bed and undresses him while -he maunders drunkenly on. It was a long and difficult sequence, which might have been made easier if Polanski had broken it into shorter takes. I asked him why he hadn't done so.

"It's a gamble, but long takes create an atmosphere which might be lost by stopping every two seconds. That way, you don't have any continuity in the acting. To get the best out of actors, you have to give them time to build up. You don't have to use it all, but there's a chance of a better performance."

That evening, however, there was neither atmosphere nor continuity. Isabelle Adjani can convey feeling simply by moving her hand and she has one of those mobile faces, which can express anything, like a miracle plastic. But she was having difficulty with her English pronunciation, and both she and Polansk seemed to be fighting the script. There was also some tricky business with a Couple of glasses and a tequila bottle, which kept going wrong. The tension and frustration mounted steadily. Polanski tried using real tequila instead of water, but that only made things worse. At 8:30, he gave up 'and the exhausted company adjourned to the projection room to watch the previous day's rushes. At noon the next day they started again. This time it went more smoothly, although it took another 15 takes before Polanski was satisfied. At no point did he relent. He was tough and demanding with Miss Adjani and the crew, a man not generous with his praise. Was this deliberate?

"I just want them to do the job. I don't know whether that's a fault or a virtue. A lot depends on whom you are working with; every actor is different and requires a different approach. Faye Dunaway, for instance, is very temperamental, while Jack Nicholson has no temperament at all. He is one of the easiest persons to work with I've come across, and a very good actor."
What about politics? "Knife in the Water," which was made in Poland, was highly political, and many critics found political significance in "Chinatown."

"You make a film in a certain country, and if the subject is rooted in that place, then it is inevitable that it has some kind of political implication. 'Chinatown' was about a big swindle and the hero was a detective. Naturally, there were parallels with what's been happening in America. 'The Tenant' is a psychological drama of suspense about a man who is disintegrating mentally, so it doesn't have much to do with what's happening in France now. But that doesn't mean that it's not going to be deeply French. This is the most important thing in filmmaking: when you set your story somewhere it has to happen there-very French if it happens in France, very Polish in Poland. If you set it in Transylvania you must be sure it's very Transylvanian. You must establish where it happened. If the setting is a land of fantasy, you have to know everything about that land. You have to know the life of the imaginary place and then conform to the rules. The more lies you tell, the more you have to pretend they are true. That's where a lot of movies fail: you feel all the details are wrong; you just aren't convinced."

I mentioned that I had not been much convinced by the details in the Roland topor novel on which 'The Tenant" is based. It concerns a nondescript young clerk who takes over a dreary, faintly sinister Paris apartment from a woman who has fatally injured herself by jumping out of the window. Gradually, the clerk comes to believe that the other inhabitants of the building are trying to drive him, too, to suicide and he begins to fall apart. Everywhere he sees plots, the menacing signs and symbols of malice. He tries to escape but is drawn back, despite himself. He ends by dressing up as a woman and jumping from the window. It is effective melodrama, but as a study of madness it seemed to me sub - Kafka, rather naive. But perhaps that is the rule: good films come out of indifferent novels, and vice versa. Is literary excellence an inhibition for the moviemaker?

"No. I think great literature is unfilmable because its real value lies in the way it's written and not what it's about. Faulkner, for example, is a great writer but there has never been a good film made out any of his novels. That doesn't mean it can't be done, just that it's impossible to render the real value of literature through a camera. Assuming you have no inhibitions about the masterpiece, how do you render in images what has been achieved by words? You are forced to be pictorially literal, or to use parts of the book as a commentary or as internal dialogue. But that's not the way. The most perfect writing is poetry, but how can you translate a poem by Baudelaire into film? All you can do is show the story of the poem, and that's not it at all."
There are three main ingredients in a movie-the director, the stars and the script. In "The Tenant" he has assumed responsibility for all three. Which did he think the most important?
"To me personally, the script. For the simple reason that I have no time to think to conceive and to analyse during the period of shooting So I have to, be sure that I can rely on what Is written and if I just film it the way I anticipated, I won't go wrong. I have room for improvisation only within what's written in the script.

Polanski is now an international man, constantly on the move and speaking five languages-Polish, Russian, English, French and Italian. But he has kept his Polish passport t and, since the fall of Gomulka, has again become a figure on the Polish scene The Polish people, he says are proud of 'him. I asked him if he ever considered settling down In Poland

"If I am nostalgic, it is for friends and situations more than for the place. But I don't think you can ever have them back again, 'even if you try. Going back somewhere doesn't necessarily bring back what you had, loved or admired. Quite the contrary, it's usually a disappointment. Certain things have happened and they never come back again."