1. profiler2 profiler 3/ / /// /
Roman Polanski arrives for our interview with a smile. Which is a relief. The
last time we met, around the time he made his 1999 satanic thriller The Ninth
Gate, I asked him about his “notorious” reputation in the media and he near-
enough boiled over. “How can you ask such a question?” he steamed. “What
is ‘notorious?’ I think you’re too much a victim of the media, and I would
rather be known by my work than my notoriety.”
Polanski will always be known for his work. Films like Rosemary’s Baby,
Chinatown, and more recently The Pianist – which won him the Palme d’Or
in Cannes and an Oscar for Best Director – are undeniably high-water marks
of modern cinema. But his private life has been one of horror, tragedy and
scandal – events so dramatic they’ve been on a par with anything depicted in
his films. As critic David Thomson put it, “Polanski was famous as a survivor”.
For those around him, however, it was a different story. Polish-born, his
mother died in Auschwitz, while Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto and
roamed the German-occupied countryside, living hand-to-mouth. Upon his
arrival in Hollywood, in the wake of the huge success of Rosemary’s Baby,
his second wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by Charles Manson’s “family”
of acolytes. And, most famously, there was his arrest in Los Angeles for the
alleged sexual assault of the 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977.
With Polanski indicted on six counts of criminal behaviour – including rape
– he fled the US hours before sentencing, never to return. I’m under strict
instructions to not broach his personal issues – which came to a head in
2009 when he was arrested in Switzerland and faced extradition to the US.
Eventually released, he survived once again. Offering a private apology to
Geimer by email, two years later, in 2011, he made it public, in the documen-
tary Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir. “She is a double victim,” he said, “my
victim and a victim of the press.” Today, dressed in blue jeans, a white jacket
and grey V-neck, Polanski looks unscathed by all his troubles. He may be 80
now, but aside from a small hearing aid in his ear, he seems tip-top. Partly,
he’s been energised by his work of late. The Ghost – the film he made shortly
before his 2009 arrest – won Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival. Then
it was Carnage, an energetic (if sometimes puerile) adaptation of Yasmina
Reza’s play about two Manhattan couples locked in a war of words.
Now comes Venus in Fur, an adroit two-hander starring Polanski’s wife Em-
manuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric. It is his first film in French – all have
been in English, except his Polish-language 1962 debut Knife in the Water
– and he seems delighted by the warm critical response. “This is my greatest
satisfaction – to do what I can, what I’m allowed to do. The lower the budget,
the more freedom I had. Here I had total and absolute freedom. On every
point. If something is screwed up, you can only blame me.”
Another stage adaptation, this time from David Ives’s Tony-winning 2010 play,
it’s a nimble backstage comedy. Amalric’s weary playwright/director Thomas
comes face-to-face with Seigner’s leather-clad actress, Vanda, as she arrives
in a deserted theatre to audition for his latest show, which is based on
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs. What follows is an
intricate battle of the sexes and study of identity that recalls much of Polan-
ski’s early work from Cul de Sac to The Tenant.
As much as the film deals with male-female power-play, Polanski is swift to
underline where his tastes begin and end. “I’ve seen one or two films involv-
ing sado-masochism and that’s one area that I’m completely disinterested
in,” he says. Well, that’s cleared that up. For him, the difficulty was to “not
bore the audience” in such a confined space with only two actors. “I need
some kind of challenge on each film,” he says, “not to be bored.”
Unlike Thomas, Polanski claims he’s not the sort of director to clash with his
cast (though Faye Dunaway, his Chinatown star, might disagree with this).
“You never have this with actors. You can explode because something’s not
there or something’s done wrong or something is stupidly broken. But for
those reasons, you can explode – like people do at home. I explode if there
is a general fuck-up! But not because an actor does something incorrectly.”
“You never have this with actors. You can explode
because something’s not there or something’s done
wrong or something is stupidly broken. But for those
reasons, you can explode – like people do at home. I
explode if there is a general fuck-up! But not because
an actor does something incorrectly.”
FEATUREFILM-MAKER
CONTROVERSIAL
GREG TILMAN (words)
TANYA JOHNSTON (Photo)
For Polanski, this return to the theatre takes him back to his childhood when,
aged 14, he took to the stage to act.
“That started my artistic life,” he says. Across his whole career, he’s directed
plays and opera – everything from Verdi’s Rigoletto to Peter Shaffer’s Mozart
tale Amadeus. “I have a sentiment and nostalgia for the theatre. I like the
smell of the theatre. I like everything about it… so to film a subject of which
the action entirely plays in a run-down theatre to me was a joy.”
It runs in the family too. He and Seigner’s eldest child, 21 year-old Morgane,
is studying acting at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. Then
there’s Seigner’s past; her grandfather Louis Seigner and her aunt Françoise
Seigner both performed at the Comédie Française. “This theatrical back-
ground for her, which she knew from childhood, helped her to do the part.
But in life, she’s much more like the other part – which is why I thought it was
an interesting role for her to do. “Polanski met Seigner in 1985, before they
made Frantic, when he was casting for Pirates. By 1989, they were married.
“As a director, he hasn’t changed,” she tells me. “He always was so good and
talented… he’s almost a legend. For me it’s hard to tell because he’s my hus-
band, but he’s such a legend and a great director, and there are not so many
of them left.” But how has he changed as a person? She pauses for thought.
“I think he became more vulnerable, which is really nice. He didn’t change.
But he just became more vulnerable.”
Seigner, 47, is more forthcoming than her husband about their life in Paris.
“People recognise us but they’re nice. It’s not like being in America, I guess,”
she says. What about when Polanski was put under house arrest – did life
change then? “Yeah, that was just that moment, where it was a problem, but
before and after it was normal.” How was it to deal with that? “Yeah, well,
it was not the best moment. But everyone has his moments; it’s life.” Being
incarcerated at his home in Gstaad, the Swiss ski town high in the Alps where
he has lived on and off since just after the murder of Sharon Tate, must’ve
felt like living in one of his own movies at times. From Catherine Deneuve’s
meltdown in Repulsion to the tale of a captor and captive in Death and the
Maiden, the best Polanski films are rife with claustrophobia. Ask him what
freedom means to him, however, and he senses where this is going. “I don’t
know what freedom is! Let’s not get into too philosophical considerations
here.”
Still, it leads into a discussion towards the social mores of today, and just
how different it is to the Sixties and Seventies. “Puritanism is over-taking
the globe, on all sides of it,” he says. “Certain hypocrisy of media is the
illustration of it.” In particular, attitudes to swearing: “In television now, you
can’t use ‘bitch’, ‘son of a bitch’, you can’t even use ‘witch’ because it looks
like ‘bitch’! You can’t say ‘orgasm’, you can’t say ‘masturbation’.” He seems to
be enjoying himself. “America is almost half the market. You can’t say ‘69’!”
How would his career have fared if he’d stayed in the US? “That’s like asking:
‘If you had a brother, do you think he would like cheese?’ It’s possible, but I
can’t go further, because it’s a guess. Maybe I would go more for commercial
stuff.” He shrugs at the idea.
“I like sports, I like ski-ing. I was competing in ski-ing when I was a kid. But
the thing that gives me the most satisfaction is film-making, and being on
the set: that means also making things that you want to do.” Polanski is now
working on an adaptation of An Officer and a Spy, the book by Robert Harris
(who has worked with the director twice before, on Pompeii – a project that
collapsed – and on The Ghost). This time, Harris was inspired to write the
book by Polanski’s interest in the Dreyfus affair – a political scandal that
divided France at the turn of the 20th century, dealing with a young French
artillery officer who was wrongly convicted of treason. Currently titled D,
Polanski hopes to shoot it later in the year – in what will be the 21st feature
of an extraordinary career. Does he consider it a dream project?
“Every project I do is a dream,” he says. “Once you start getting involved,
you want to do it to your best.” The only thing he’s not doing, as he enters his
ninth decade, is catering to the consumer. “I do these things spontaneously,”
he smiles. “I don’t really care what people think.”
Whether he cares what people think about the crime that has cast a shadow
over his career is something he is keeping to himself.
Roman Polanski

2. profiler4 profiler 5/ / /// /
gnomic. “I’m not mysterious!” he says, laughing.
Tsukuru Tazaki, as the author calls his own novel for short, sold a million
copies in two weeks when it came out last summer in Japan. (Murakami was
born in Kyoto to two literature teachers, and grew up in the port city of Kobe.
These days he lives near Tokyo, having spent periods in Greece, at Princeton
and Tufts universities – where he wrote his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle – and recently in Hawaii.) It contains passing mysteries like the pi-
anist who sees auras, but it is also a mystery novel in a larger sense. Tsukuru,
its 36-year-old protagonist, is still in mourning for the years before he went
to university, when he was part of an inseparable group of five friends – until
one day they told him, without explanation, that they never wanted to see
him again.
“In the first place I had the intention to write a short story,” Murakami says.
“I just wanted to describe that guy, 36 years old, very solitary … I wanted
‘Strange things happen in this world,” Haruki Murakami says. “You don’t
know why, but they happen.” It could be a guiding motto for all of his fiction,
but he is talking specifically about a minor character in his new novel,
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The character is a
jazz pianist who seems to have made a pact with death, and is able to see
people’s auras.
“Why that pianist can see the colours of people, I don’t know,” Murakami
muses. “It just happens.” Novels in general, he thinks, benefit from a certain
mystery. “If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be
frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret,
it’s a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it.”
The world’s most popular cult novelist is sipping coffee in the sunny library of
an Edinburgh hotel, which – perhaps disappointingly for admirers of his more
fantastical yarns – is not reached through a labyrinthine network of subter-
ranean tunnels. Murakami is relaxed and affable, rather than forbiddingly
to describe his life. So his secret was not to be dissolved; the mystery was
going to stay a mystery.”
But he hadn’t reckoned on the inciting power of a woman to move the story
forward, as Murakami’s female characters so often do. “When I wrote that
short-story part,” he continues, “Sara, [Tsukuru’s] girlfriend, came to him and
she said, ‘You should find out what happened then’, so he went to Nagoya
to see his old friends. And the same thing happened to me. Sara came to me
and said, ‘You should go back to Nagoya and find out what happened.’ When
I was writing the book, my own character came to me and told me what to do
… The fiction and my experience happened at the same time, in parallel. So it
became a novel.”
Murakami has often spoken of the theme of two dimensions, or realities,
in his work: a normal, beautifully evoked everyday world, and a weirder
supernatural realm, which may be accessed by sitting at the bottom of a well
(as does the hero of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or by taking the wrong
emergency staircase off a city expressway (as in 1Q84). Sometimes dreams
act as portals between these realities. In Tsukuru Tazaki there is a striking
sex dream, at the climax of which the reader is not sure whether Tsukuru is
still asleep or awake. Yet Murakami hardly ever remembers his own dreams.
“Once I talked to a very famous therapist in Japan,” he says, “and I said
to him that I don’t dream much, almost nothing, and he said: ‘That makes
sense.’ So I wanted to ask him: ‘Why? Why does it make sense?’ But there
was no time. And I was waiting to see him again, but he died three or four
years ago.” He smiles sadly. “Too bad.”
His novels thus far have generally divided into two types. There are the
overtly magical-realist romances (A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle, 1Q84), and the works on a smaller canvas, in which hints of the
supernatural remain mostly beneath the mournful, mundane surface (South
of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart). With its unresolved mys-
teries, tales-within-tales and maybe-dreams, Tsukuru Tazaki seems almost
a hybrid of both styles. “I had been thinking my novels are divided into two
categories, as you said,” he agrees. “So it’s just like Beethoven’s sympho-
nies, you know, odd numbers and even numbers. Three, five, seven, nine is
kind of a big symphony, and two, four, six, eight is a kind of intimate work. I
think my novels do the same thing. What do I think about this Tsukuru Tazaki?
Yeah, it might be a new category.”
Such musical comparisons come naturally to Murakami, who along with his
wife, Yoko Takahashi, ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat in Tokyo in his twenties,
which he opened while still a drama student at Waseda University. Murakami
sold the bar and concentrated on writing full-time after the publication of
his second novel, Pinball. Since then, his life has been one of writing and
long-distance running – as chronicled in his memoir What I Talk About When
I Talk About Running – and also collecting records. His novels almost always
feature a thematic piece of music (his breakout Japanese bestseller, Norwe-
gian Wood, was named after the Beatles song). The unusual harmonies of
Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” were perfect for this novel’s haunted
pianist, he thought: “Thelonious Monk’s tune is full of mysteries. Monk plays
some very strange sounds during the chords. Very strange. But to him it’s a
very logical chord. But when we are listening to his music it doesn’t sound
logical.”
What would he still like to achieve for himself, as a writer? “Honestly, I don’t
have any idea,” he replies. “Scott Fitzgerald was my idol when I was young.
But he died when he was 40-something. I love Truman Capote, but he died
at 50-something. And Dostoyevsky is my ideal writer, but he died at 59. I’m
65 right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen! So I have no role model.
I have no idea – when I am 80 years old, what will I write? I don’t know. May-
be I’m running and writing …” “That would be great. But nobody knows.”
He says he tries to think of himself as a kind of craftsman, a tinker. “I’d like to
be a perfect tinker. So I have to write good sentences – honest and beautiful
and elegant and strong sentences.”
“If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be
frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret
stays secret, it’s a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it.”
see with all
the senses
FEATUREAUTHOR
COME EXPLORE THE VIVID MIND OF
PETE APPLEBY (words)
TANYA JOHNSTON (Photo)
A WORLR MAKER
haru
ki
mura
kami