Polanski himself starred in The Tenant (1976). It screens Dec. 22.
Even when he’s shocking, terrifying or simply annoying people, on-the-lam film director Roman Polanski is also capable of impressing them.
“He has a very clear idea of his own mythology and how to manipulate it,” says Toronto filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who says he’s followed Polanski “pretty obsessively” for many years.
Polanski noisily scoffed at Egoyan’s and Cronenberg’s expressed fears that digital gadgets and diminished screens were ruining the moviegoing experience. He then became furious over “empty questions” posed by journalists. Polanski stalked out of the news conference in a huff.
“It was completely uncalled for,” a chuckling Egoyan recalls in an interview, “but he said he was completely appalled by the shallowness of the questions. He was probably right, I guess.”
The “rightness” of the situation likely didn’t stay in Polanski’s mind much past the time it took him to storm out of the Palais des Festivals.
From his earliest days, even before he was a studying film in the 1950s at Poland’s famed National Film School in Lodz, Polanski has been consumed by the grim notion that the world rotates on absurdity and cruelty.
As a child during World War II, he barely escaped death in the Nazi Holocaust, a fate not spared his parents, who were sent to concentration camps (his mother perished in Auschwitz).
In 1969, he again dodged death, this time at the hands of Charles Manson’s murderous followers, who randomly killed his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and several other people at Polanski’s L.A. home.
It would be reasonable to conclude that Polanski’s life experiences have informed the bleak majesty of his best work, in which extremes of emotional and physical distress are visited upon both the guilty and the innocent.
“Let’s not necessarily confuse ‘devil’ with ‘evil’ and my life with what I do in my movies,” he chided.
Regardless of what you think of Polanski — whom the late film critic Pauline Kael once dismissed as “a Gothic-minded absurdist” — there’s no denying his immense skill as a director. He always knows where to place the camera for maximum impact, be it a shudder or a smile.
When Mia Farrow’s anguished Rosemary drops the kitchen knife she’s holding in the film’s climactic ending, the first reaction of another character is to make sure it hasn’t scratched the hardwood floor.
It’s not every day that a legal fugitive, one still sought by U.S. authorities for an unresolved 1970s statutory-rape case, gets a retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox. The honour begins Saturday when the Polish director’s 1962 debut psycho thriller Knife in the Water screens.
In the week to come, TIFF Cinematheque will present, in nonchronological order, what amounts to almost a greatest-hits collection of Polanski’s shadowy visions: Chinatown (1974), Cul-de-sac (1966), Repulsion (1965), The Tenant (1976), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Ghost Writer (2010).
The series will be followed by the Dec. 30 TIFF debut of Carnage, Polanski’s latest film, in which two supposedly civilized couples engage in beastly behaviour while debating the antics of their children. A ferocious comedy of manners, it’s a departure for Polanski, but the interior life exposed is every bit as wicked as his darkest dramas.
The 78-year-old Polanski won’t be in attendance for any of it, because he hasn’t returned to North America since he fled Los Angeles in 1978, decamping to Paris for the busy life of a celebrated exile. “He has a very clear idea of his own mythology and how to manipulate it,” says Toronto filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who says he’s followed Polanski “pretty obsessively” for many years.
“He really understands the value of a film persona. I think from a very young age he was able to manicure the idea of the enfant terrible.”
Egoyan, along with his friend and fellow director David Cronenberg, had a personal encounter with the enfant terrible at the Cannes Film Festival a few years back. The three were among a group of 32 international filmmakers gathered at Cannes for a news conference to discuss the state of cinema. Polanski noisily scoffed at Egoyan’s and Cronenberg’s expressed fears that digital gadgets and diminished screens were ruining the moviegoing experience. He then became furious over “empty questions” posed by journalists. Polanski stalked out of the news conference in a huff.
“It was completely uncalled for,” a chuckling Egoyan recalls in an interview, “but he said he was completely appalled by the shallowness of the questions. He was probably right, I guess.”
The “rightness” of the situation likely didn’t stay in Polanski’s mind much past the time it took him to storm out of the Palais des Festivals.
From his earliest days, even before he was a studying film in the 1950s at Poland’s famed National Film School in Lodz, Polanski has been consumed by the grim notion that the world rotates on absurdity and cruelty.
As a child during World War II, he barely escaped death in the Nazi Holocaust, a fate not spared his parents, who were sent to concentration camps (his mother perished in Auschwitz).
In 1969, he again dodged death, this time at the hands of Charles Manson’s murderous followers, who randomly killed his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and several other people at Polanski’s L.A. home.
It would be reasonable to conclude that Polanski’s life experiences have informed the bleak majesty of his best work, in which extremes of emotional and physical distress are visited upon both the guilty and the innocent.
Often this occurs by natural or supernatural forces: witness the wave-swept hoodlums of Cul-de-sac; the psychological attacks of Repulsion; the satanic rape and impregnation of Rosemary’s Baby; the catastrophic incest of Chinatown.
Yet Polanski rebelled at the suggestion that his life connects with his work, when I interviewed him in 2000 during a rare period when he spoke to the press.“Let’s not necessarily confuse ‘devil’ with ‘evil’ and my life with what I do in my movies,” he chided.
“Don’t think there is a connection between (his films) and anything that I went through. Don’t forget, I made Repulsion and people said I captured pretty well the girl’s sick mind, but that doesn’t mean I’m a mental patient.
“As a matter of fact, hardly any of my films has any connection with what I went through.”True to his contrarian nature, Polanski immediately contradicted himself. He was then working on The Pianist, a film about the Holocaust and the Warsaw ghetto, which he said would strike pretty close to home — and it did. It also won him the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director. (The Pianist isn’t included in the TIFF retro, and neither are Tess and Macbeth, puzzling omissions.)
Polanski said he’s interested only in good stories, not acknowledging deities of any stripe — even though his horror Rosemary’s Baby was sold with the slogan, “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby,” frightening people enough to send many of them from the theatre seat to the church pew.
“I don’t believe in the occult,” Polanski told the Star.
“I don’t believe, period. I don’t know whether I could call myself an atheist. Probably I would say agnostic, in the best case.”Regardless of what you think of Polanski — whom the late film critic Pauline Kael once dismissed as “a Gothic-minded absurdist” — there’s no denying his immense skill as a director. He always knows where to place the camera for maximum impact, be it a shudder or a smile.
There’s also his knowing use of potent motifs: brandished knives, to cite one example, appear at key moments in Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Tenant.
“I think he’s been able to marry art house with genre in a way that just in terms of sheer craft is impressive,” says Egoyan, who acknowledges that his 1999 film Felicia’s Journey, about a serial killer who befriends a pregnant runaway, was influenced by Polanski.
“He’s brought a European art house sensibility to mediums like horror and film noir. Chinatown just stands as this remarkably made film. It’s just beautiful to watch. I showed it to my son a few years ago. Polanski is just technically so assured and confident. I think that’s what I take from his work. He has supreme confidence in terms of his craft.”
Polanski also has a sense of humour so dark, it can only be called satanic.When Mia Farrow’s anguished Rosemary drops the kitchen knife she’s holding in the film’s climactic ending, the first reaction of another character is to make sure it hasn’t scratched the hardwood floor.
Egoyan laughs at two scenes from The Tenant: one involving a failed suicide attempt and the other a playground attack. He says the humour provides relief from escalating tension but also shines a light into the darkest reaches of the human mind.
“It’s so horrifying and weird, yet he has this knack of giving us a window into a side of our psyche that most people don’t go anywhere near, especially these days.”The retrospective “Roman Polanski: God of Carnage” begins Saturday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For tickets and info visit tiff.net or call 416-599-TIFF.
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