Death and the Maiden Interview

Roman Polanski – Death and the Maiden Interview

“I was very hungry, yes. Eager to define my place in the world. And that’s normal, I think. You push hard, because the future seems never-ending, and not to triumph over it would be too terrible to contemplate. All the lines appear parallel, infinite. Only as you get older do you see them start to converge.”

Death and the Maiden Consider a twentieth century life. Ideally, it should cover periods of war and of peace and the grey area between; encompass, one way or another, most of the major themes of our time: globalism, exile, celebrity and its consequences. It must include the Holocaust, perhaps the pivotal historical event of the century. It should represent the hedonism of the sixties and show how that dream soured into the ideological muddle of the seventies and the dark uncertain days that were the eighties.

Then distill that life and give it a name: as such, Roman Polanski is a far better choice than most.

Start with the first things. How, as a child, his parents gone - his mother taken to Auschwitz and murdered, his father seized shortly afterwards by the Nazis - the young Polanski lived by his wits, fleeing to the Polish countryside, eking out a miserable existence among a family of peasants until, months later, word reached them that the war had ended. He returned to Krakow, tracked down some surviving members of his family and began, little by little, to piece his life together. Perhaps in reaction to these early experiences, he began to act — first on radio, later on the stage. After a period spent studying art, he entered film school in Lodz, where he was soon recognised as the most gifted student of his generation. Before long, he began the shift westward, to Paris, London, Hollywood.

What would follow was a journey unimaginable at its outset, an odyssey through four turbulent decades, comprising fame, sex and drugs, a succession of beautiful women, the assorted intrusions of violent death and criminal misdeed — and, finally, a redemption of sorts. It’s a hell of a story.

In person, Roman Polanski is a small, compact man, dressed casually in blue jeans and a white cotton shirt. His face, these days, is seamed, a maze of lines that converge mostly at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His hair, bunched untidily around the collar, is streaked with grey. The enfant terrible of the sixties, who helped to reinvent the cinema, is now entering his seventh decade.

“I don’t feel old,” he laughs softly. “lt’s only when I’m shaving that I have flashes of horror, looking at myself in the mirror. But what really frightens me is that sometimes, when I see my face, I see some resemblance to my father, which I never used to see. Those moments are like a cold shower. They irritate me.”

When he speaks, his eyes are intent, narrowed, as if the act of seeing is itself somehow painful to him. At the same time, they seem to reflect an almost sorrowful kind of calm. He has a habit of wincing very slightly as he speaks and this, combined with his soft accent (a weird melange of Polish overlaid with stratas of American and French), makes him seem far more melancholy than he probably is. Dry and wickedly funny, he tempers his cynicism with great affection.

Colleagues describe him as one of the least introspective of men and, indeed, he is quick to claim that I would much prefer to talk about my films, not about myself. I think, to be honest, I am a somewhat dull topic.” But he is not. He is as fascinating as the century that bred him and occasionally as difficult to fathom. There is a sequence in his latest film, Death and the Maiden, his adaptation of Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s acclaimed drama, which is so unmistakably his own that it utterly dispels any claims that he was merely a director-for-hire on a mainstream Hollywood project. A revenge play, it depicts the meeting, some years after the fact, of a female torture victim in a former military dictatorship and a man who might well be the doctor who raped her brutally and repeatedly to the strains of the famous Schubert quartet from which the play takes its name.

When Paulina, played by Sigourney Weaver, meets the man (Ben Kingsley), who comes as an unwitting visitor to her home, she knocks him unconscious and binds him to a chair. As she works, she sits on his lap, her legs wrapped tightly around him, their faces almost touching, their pose unmistakably erotic. When he tries to cry out, she gags him by shoving her panties into his mouth.

More than the film’s landscape — a lonely outcrop of land beset by storms, familiar from Cul-de-Sac and Macbeth — and its claustrophobic intensity (three characters, a single night, Knife In The Water), it is that conjunction of sex, violence and complicity that renders the film distinctly his own. This is Polanski’s best known territory: the exploration of the outer limits of sexuality, a cold-eyed examination of the shifting balance between victim and aggressor.

“But are they not also so deeply linked in life?” He smiles thinly. “More often than not, I suspect.”

With the action confined mostly to a single set, the film’s narrow focus also allows Polanski to do what he enjoys most: to experiment with form. “Most film directors don’t understand the essentials of adapting a stage play,” he says. They try to render it more like a movie simply by opening things up. It appears like a sneeze, you know? Completely artificial. Suddenly these people are going out into some new location, preferably one as open and large as possible - and for what?” he laughs. “To ventilate? They don’t get it. It’s not the fact that it happens in a single room that makes it theatrical. You can have an extremely eventful night in a broom cupboard and it could still be profoundly cinematic — if it’s filmed right.

Death and the Maiden “Here, the obvious thing would be to introduce flashbacks. Scenes of Paulina’s torture, of the days when she was a student activist. But I didn’t do that. It would conflict with the style of the picture, which is about three unities and the gradual building of tension.” To build tension, he shot the film in strict chronological order, allowing the atmosphere to ferment on the set as well as in front of the cameras. Of his methods, he will say only that probably my greatest fault is my temper, which can be very bad. From time to time, I expect too much of others, so I lack patience with them. Which is unforgivable, but perhaps to be expected. This is the great dilemma of being a filmmaker, you see: for ten, twelve hours a day, I rule the world. On set, every decision is mine; people must obey my instructions without question. And you have no time to be polite think. You or delicate. But then the shooting ends and I have to go home, to my family, my friends, and realise again that I am just a minor part of the world.”

A twentieth century life — crowded with incident, characterised by movement, often spent in transit. “It was unthinkable to stay in Poland. Inconceivable. I moved west as soon as I could. To any Pole, it’s normal to leave, to look elsewhere, because there’s no future to be found at home.” It’s easy enough to imagine him as he was then: young, prodigiously talented and highly ambitious.

He went to Hollywood, he says, “for more or less the same reasons that people like Hitchcock, Chaplin, Billy Wilder did: for the opportunities it represented. And of course its luxuries.” He shrugs. “Why not?

There’s nothing inherently bad about comfort and pleasure. But you must be aware of the fact that these things can destroy you, too. Can render you sterile. Kill your creativity. Wreck your mind.”

Wreck your mind, indeed. What finally happened to Polanski in Hollywood, the fate that befell him there, is well known: while he was away writing in London, his wife, the actor Sharon Tate, and their unborn son, were murdered by Charles Manson’s lunatic cult members. Years of disarray followed, films both good (Macbeth) and inconsequential (What?), a time in the wilderness that somehow culminated in the critical and commercial triumph of Chinatown. And then, in 1977, just as he seemed to be getting his life in order again, he was charged with the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, a model that he had been photographing for Vogue, whom he had allegedly plied with alcohol and drugs at Jack Nicholson’s house in the Hollywood hills. Polanski swore that she had consented, was neither as innocent of sex or of drugs as she had claimed. But the judge, openly disdainful of his famous defendant, believed otherwise. After serving a short term in a psychiatric hospital, and faced with the prospect of a further, indefinite jail term, the filmmaker fled America, apparently never to return. To this day, a warrant remains open with the Los Angeles District Attorney for his arrest.

Yet, for all the troubles he experienced there, his voice, when speaking of the US, betrays an odd tremor of nostalgia, a kind of wistfulness. Does he miss it? “The place? Not really. I miss the studios, the apparatus of production itself, which is so professional, so incredibly efficient.” Can he foresee a time when he might return to the States? “Well, obviously I would have to do something about it and take some fairly drastic steps. But I think sooner or later I’ll have to, if only for my own peace of mind. But exactly when, I can’t say.”

Given these events, the themes of exile and dispossession in Death and the Maiden must have some added personal resonance for Polanski? He shrugs. “Maybe. But one becomes used to it, as one becomes used to everything.

“And anyway, there’s no such thing as an ideal life. I mean, I’m very happy now. I’m married to a woman I love [Emmanuelle Seigner, star of his films Frantic and Bitter Moon]; I have a beautiful child. But, even with so much, you sense there’s still something missing, some tiny thing that could, if it were found, grant you complete happiness, make it all somehow perfect. It’s just human to feel that. But you know that if you had it, you would have no life. You would not be creative, or fulfilled, or even particularly happy.”

Part of the problem seems to be that his own celebrity tends to overshadow his work. Here, Polanski interrupts — “Celebrity? You mean notoriety, surely?” - and he smiles. “The media,” he drawls sarcastically, “have treated me with great kindness over the years, but let them say what they want. I have no intention of apologising for my life. I won’t do that. I never have and I never will.”

Polanski believes that, somehow, sometime, you pay for everything. It’s perhaps a streak of typically Polish fatalism, but he defends it nevertheless. “I’ve always believed that. There’s some kind of equilibrium, definitely. Between yourself and the universe, some balance is finally struck.

“Of course, it also depends on the amplitude with which you conduct your life. If it’s a straight line, then all well and good: you have few surprises, but also few torments. But as the saying goes, the higher you fly, the further you have to fall.”

Maybe it’s his soft, fatigued tone, or that wounded stare, but there is a sense of lingering sadness there. The wish, perhaps, that he had not flown quite so high himself. But Roman Polanski shakes his head slowly. “No, not really. To be honest, I have considerably fewer regrets than people might expect of me. My life is what it is. Situated, as ever, somewhere between chance and necessity.”