Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski(Roman Raymond Polański (born August 18, 1933) is one of the most controversial contemporary directors in Cinema History.His name has become synonymous with events from his personal life, which in fact have at times detracted and taken precedence from his work as a filmmaker.

Roman has created films that unnerve and horrify the viewer such as "Rosemary's baby" and "The Tenant", as well as the masterpiece "Chinatown" starring, Jack Nicholson. He also directed the comedy vampire movie "Dance of the Vampires (also known as The Fearless Vampire Killers) and the period drama "Tess" based on the novel by Thomas Hardy starring, Nastassja Kinski. Both of these films exude a haunting yet luminous beauty.

As a filmmaker he is exceptional in his ability to produce works with a disturbing mood and atmosphere of suspense that is impossible to replicate. His hallmark is to utilize seemingly everyday events and situations and then expose the undercurrent of evil that lies beneath; he explores the thin line between madness and sanity with compelling expertise and intuitive mastery


Roman Polanski was born to Polish parents in Paris 1933. They moved to Krakow, Poland, when Romanwas still a toddler. Roman grew up in a constricted communist environment; however, he had a highlycreative intellect and created his own exceptional world of fantasy. His imagination was the key that helped him overcome the horror of War in Europe.

Whenever Roman had a chance to visit the theatre he had no uncertainties that one day he would appearon centre stage or behind the camera as a director, Roman was an incredibly confident child with grandaspirations.

Roman's father owned a plastics business in Krakow, although his parents were not rich they provided Roman with everything he needed. He was a child who in his own words "wanted everything his own way".His childhood would soon be shattered as War began in Poland.
The changes to the Jewish community began slowly and unpleasantly when Roman's parents were told to wear white armbands with the Star of David stencilled on them in blue. Roman was told it was because they were Jewish, although his parents did not practice their religion and his mother was only partlyJewish.

They were forced to move home by the Krakow Municipal Authorities. Soon after moving, Roman's sisterpointed outside the window and Roman looked out to see men building a wall, he and his family werebeing imprisoned in a Jewish ghetto. During this time both his parents were taken to concentration camps, his mother was never to return. Roman always believed he would see her again as he had no knowledge of the Third Reich's 'Final Solution' and he never had the opportunity to say goodbye to her.

His father had paid a family to look after Roman and he was moved from one place to another doing anything he could to survive. There were times of play amongst the ruined buildings of Poland with other children, yet he would always be a witness to brutality and depravity as the war continued witnessing scenes of inhumanity.

At the end of the World War II he was reunited with his father and began to pursue his dreams of having a career in the film industry, he started by working on a Children's radio programme called"The Merry Gang". He soon acquired a lead role in "The Son of the Regiment" the story of a Russian peasant boy. He attended Art School and finally with the help of Andrzej Wajda the great Polish directorhe applied to and was accepted at the Lodz Film School, the world of film and fantasy and the door to his dreams. At the film school his talent was readily apparent in his first student film "Two Men and a Wardrobe". He longed to escape Poland and travel abroad to America and Paris.

The first film he made that received significant attention was "Knife in the Water" made in 1962, this was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film. He then directed three films in England including "Cul de Sac" and "Repulsion" starring Catherine Deneuve as a young woman suffering from a mental illness.

He married the gentle, and talented actress Sharon Tate who starred in "The Dance of the Vampires", whowas brutally murdered in 1969. His next film "Macbeth" is notorious for it's violent and bloody adaptation of the play by the English playwright, William Shakespeare.

Relationship with Sharon Tate, Rosemary's Baby (1968), and the Manson murders


Polanski met rising actress Sharon Tate shortly before filming The Fearless Vampire Killers (she was known to producerMartin Ransohoff), and during the production the two of them began dating. On January 20, 1968, Polanski married Sharon Tate in London. In his autobiography, Polanski described his brief time with Tate as the best years of his life. During this period, he also became friends with martial-arts master and actor Bruce Lee.

Shortly after, in 1968, Polanski went to the United States, where he established his reputation as a major commercial filmmaker with the success of his first Hollywood film, Rosemary's Baby, based on the recent popular novel of the same name by Ira Levin. The film is a horror-thriller set in New York about Rosemary (Mia Farrow), an innocent young woman from Omaha, Nebraska, who is impregnated by the devil after her narcissistic actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), offersher womb to a coven of local witches in exchange for a successful career. Polanski's screenplay adaptation earned him asecond Academy Award nomination.

In April 1969, Polanski's friend and collaborator, the composer Krzysztof Komeda (1931-1969), died from head injuries sustained from a skiing accident, though other accounts of the cause of his death exist. After the short Two Men and aWardrobe, he scored all of Polanski's feature films (with the exception of Repulsion), and is probably best known in the U.S. for his final collaboration with the director: the haunting soundtrack to Rosemary's Baby.

On August 9, 1969, Tate, who was eight months pregnant with the couple's first child (a boy), and four others (AbigailFolger, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent) were brutally murdered by members of Charles Manson's "Family", who entered the Polanskis' rented home at 10050 Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills intending to "kill everyone there".Previous resident Terry Melcher (son of film icon Doris Day) had angered Charles Manson because he had declined to record some of his music. Melcher and his girlfriend at the time, actress Candice Bergen, had been living at the house but moved out in February 1969. The following month, Polanski and Tate moved in.

When Manson ordered members of his group to go to the property and kill everyone, they obeyed. After Parent, Sebring,Frykowski, and Folger had been murdered, Tate pleaded for the life of her unborn son. Susan Atkins replied that she felt no pity for her and began stabbing her.
Polanski was at his house in London at the time of the murders and immediately traveled to Los Angeles, where he was questioned by police. As there were no suspects in the case, police checked on the past history of Polanski and Tate to try to determine a motive. After a period of months, Manson and his "family" were arrested on unrelated charges, which revealed evidence of what came to be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. Polanski returned to Europe shortly afterthe killers were arrested. He later said that he gave away all his possessions as everything reminded him of Tate and was too painful for him. His greatest regret was that he was not in Los Angeles with Tate on the night of the murders.

Sex crime allegations
In 1977, Polanski, then aged 44, became embroiled in a scandal involving 13-year-old Samantha Geimer (then known as SamanthaGailey). It ultimately led to Polanski's guilty plea to the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

According to Geimer, Polanski asked Geimer's mother if he could photograph the girl for the French edition of Vogue, which Polanski had been invited to guest-edit. Her mother allowed a private photo shoot. According to Geimer in a 2003 interview,"Everything was going fine; then he asked me to change, well, in front of him." She added, "It didn't feel right, and I didn't want to go back to the second shoot."

Geimer later agreed to a second session, which took place on March 10, 1977 at the Mulholland area home of actor JackNicholson in Los Angeles. "We did photos with me drinking champagne," Geimer says. "Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn't quite know how to get myself out of there." Geimer testified that Polanski performed various sexual acts on her, after giving her a combination of champagne and quaaludes. In the 2003 interview, Geimer says she resisted. "I said no several times, and then, well, gave up on that."

In his autobiography, Roman by Polanski,Polanski alleged that Geimer's mother had set up her daughter as part of a casting couch and blackmail scheme against him.

Charges and guilty pleaPolanski was initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor. These charges were dismissed under the terms of his plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

Imprisonment and flight

Following the plea agreement, according to the aforementioned documentary, the court ordered Polanski to report to a stateprison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, but granted a stay of ninety days to allow him to complete his current project.under the terms set by the court, he was permitted to travel abroad. Polanski returned to California and reported to Chino State Prison for the evaluation period, and was released after 42 days.

On February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to London, where he maintained residency. A day later he traveled on to France, where he held citizenship, avoiding the risk of extradition to the U.S. by Britain. Consistent with its extradition treaty with the United States, France can refuse to extradite its own citizens. An extradition request later filed by U.S. officials was denied. The United States government can request that Polanski be prosecuted on the California charges by the French authorities.

Polanski has never returned to England, and later sold his home in absentia. The United States can still request the arrestand extradition of Polanski from other countries should he visit them, and Polanski has avoided visits to countries that are likely to extradite him (such as the UK) and mostly travels and works in France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland

Polanski and Emmanuelle Seigner
Polanski and Seigner married in 1989. They have two children, daughter Morgane and son Elvis, whom is named after Polanski's favorite singer, Elvis Presley.

Current projectsPolanski made a cameo appearance in Rush Hour 3 (2007) as a French police official. After a failed attempt to adapt Robert Harris' Pompeii,he is currently directing an adaptation of Harris' The Ghost, a novel about a writer who stumbles upon a secret while ghosting the autobiography of a former British prime minister. It will star Ewan McGregor as the writerand Pierce Brosnan as the prime minister. Filming takes place in Germany by the Babelsberg Studios

Style and themes

Most of Polanski's films are psychological suspense thrillers, notable for their deliberate pacing, carefully established mood and atmosphere, and often Gothic treatment of settings and characters.As a stylist, Polanski favors long takes,deep-focus photography, detailed mise-en-scène and wide panoramic compositions;jump cuts and montage almost never appearin his work.

A recurring theme in his films is the relationship between victim and perpetrator, and the unstable and shifting dynamics of these power relations are often resolved in sudden outbursts of senseless violence. Many of Polanski's films (especially his early works) deal with characters struggling for mastery over an intractable situation and feature a circular plot structure — i.e., the action is framed by an ironic recurrence of events or reversal of fortunes at the conclusion.
In this sense, Polanski's oeuvre — particularly, his most celebrated work from the 1950s through to the 1970s — seems to reflect a decidedly pessimistic and desolate absurdist worldview. However, Polanski's old tendency towards unremittingbleakness appears to have mellowed in recent years, with films like Death and the Maiden, The Pianist and Oliver Twist ultimately imparting a more hopeful view of human nature and admitting the possibility of redemptive action in the face ofa hostile and incomprehensible universe.

Oscar
Received his first best director Oscar for the movie The Pianist (2002) five months after the awards ceremony. His friend, Harrison Ford, flew to France to present Polanski the award, since the director would be immediately arrested and incarcerated due to outstanding warrants stemming from his fleeing the US after his 1978 statutory rape conviction to avoid imprisonment. [8 September 2003].

Won the Best Director Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist (2002) at the age of 69 years and 7 months, making him the oldest person ever to win that award to that point in time. Polanski eclipsed the record previously held by George Cukor, whowas 65 when he won for directing My Fair Lady (1964). This record was beaten in 2005 when Clint Eastwood won at the ageof 74 for Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Personal Quotes

My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way.

[On filmmaking] "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."

[On his style of filmmaking] "I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line."

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

I never made a film which fully satisfied me

Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve as revenge. To show that I could

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."