Roman Polanski

The legacy of the ghetto and the Polish frame

Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but his identity was forged behind the walls of the Kraków ghetto. His mother was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He escaped through a hole in the barbed wire and spent the rest of the war hiding on Catholic farms under a false name. Those years of persecution and enclosed spaces shaped his visual grammar forever.

At the Lodz Film School, he learned that the camera should be an uncomfortable witness. He shot experimental short films before launching into his first feature. In 1962, he premiered Knife in the Water. It was a minimal production with three characters on a sailboat, yet it earned an Oscar nomination. It was the only film he shot in Poland for almost forty years.

And then the call from London came.

In 1965 he directed Repulsion with a Catherine Deneuve who could barely speak English. Polanski used the sound of cracking walls and the silence of a Kensington apartment to portray madness. European critics were won over by his ability to create claustrophobia. But his great ambition lay on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Assault on Hollywood and the Shadow of Manson

Robert Evans put the script for Rosemary's Baby on the table in 1968. Polanski insisted on shooting in New York's Dakota building to lend authenticity to the satanic story. The director obsessively controlled every detail of the costumes and lighting. The film grossed over $30 million at the U.S. box office on a tight budget.

Horror stopped being fiction in August 1969. While Polanski was working in London, Charles Manson's cult murdered his wife Sharon Tate at their home on Cielo Drive. She was eight months pregnant. The media impact was brutal, and the tabloid press tried to blame the director's dark lifestyle. His films became more cynical and violent.

In 1974, he returned to Los Angeles to shoot Chinatown. Jack Nicholson starred in this noir where water and political corruption were the central themes. Polanski changed the ending of Robert Towne's original script to make it far more pessimistic. It was his last major victory within the Hollywood studio system.

Justice changed his destiny in 1977.

He was arrested in Los Angeles on charges of sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's house. He spent 42 days in Chino prison undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. In 1978, before the judge could hand down a final sentence that could have sent him to prison for decades, he fled to France. He has never set foot on American soil since that day.

European exile and a return to his roots

Based in Paris, he shot Tess in 1979 as a posthumous tribute to Sharon Tate. The film won three technical Oscars, but the director had to watch the ceremony on television. During the eighties and nineties his output was uneven, with titles such as Frenzy in 1988 or Death and the Maiden in 1994. The international market kept buying his talent despite his legal situation.

In 2002 he reached his creative peak with The Pianist. It is the biographical story of Wladyslaw Szpilman in occupied Warsaw. Polanski poured his own memories of the ghetto and misery into the footage. Adrien Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor after losing 14 pounds for the role. The director won the statuette in 2003, but Harrison Ford accepted it on his behalf to a standing ovation from the theater.

The legal controversy flared up again in 2009. He was arrested in Switzerland as he was about to receive an award at the Zurich Film Festival, due to the arrest warrant from 1978. He spent months under house arrest at his chalet in Gstaad. Ultimately, Swiss authorities denied the extradition to the United States, and he regained freedom of movement in Europe.

Film was his only way out.

In 2019, he premiered An Officer and a Spy, centered on the Dreyfus affair. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but its premiere was surrounded by feminist protests. His most recent fiction work is The Palace, shot in 2023 with an international cast that includes Mickey Rourke and John Cleese. The production cost €17 million and was shot entirely in Switzerland.

The film received a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes after its screening in Venice. No major distributor in the United States or the United Kingdom bought the exhibition rights. Polanski currently lives in Paris under the protection of French law, which does not extradite its citizens.