Kevin Lally on Film

I’ve been hesitant to post my 1994 phone interview with Roman Polanski, for obvious reasons. The now 89-year-old Polish director is arguably more controversial than ever after the emergence of the “Me Too” movement. His sleazy targeting of an underage girl in 1977 (one of several sexual abuse accusations) is inexcusable, but I can’t deny that he’s one of my favorite directors, with two films—Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby—in my personal all-time top 100. (The age-old art vs. the artist dilemma surfaces once again.) Polanski went on to win the Oscar for best director for his 2002 Holocaust saga The Pianist, and the César for best director and Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for the 2019 drama An Officer and a Spy, which has never been released in the United States. His latest film, The Palace, debuts in 2023.

This Film Journal profile focuses on Polanski’s erotic thriller Bitter Moon, and includes his provocative views on sex, love, and the changing tastes of movie audiences.

Roman Polanski has made another film about an American in Paris, and you can be sure it has no picnics in the park, high-kicking chorus girls, or Gene Kelly fantasy ballets. No, Bitter Moon is dark, disturbing, and eerily amusing—just the sort of thing you’d expect from the world-renowned director of Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown.

Peter Coyote is the Yank in question in this tale of a struggling but pompous American novelist and his turbulent sexual relationship with an unpredictable French beauty (Emmanuelle Seigner, the director’s wife, who starred opposite Harrison Ford in Polanski’s last picture, the 1988 American-in-Paris thriller Frantic). Hugh Grant co-stars as the uptight Englishman who protests but keeps coming back for more as Coyote recounts the details of his strange, ill-fated passion during an ocean-liner cruise.

Interviewed by phone in Paris, the 60-year-old director displays a sly intelligence and humor in keeping with the subversive brilliance of his film work. He admits to some concern about audience response to his latest film, which deals in serious questions about the nature of love and erotic attraction, but in a heightened, sometimes bizarrely comic fashion. “People are not used to the mixture of various degrees of seriousness, or mixtures of genres or whatever. If they’re going for a tragedy, they don’t want any fun. If they go for a comedy, they don’t want anything too serious. It’s simply that they have been used to such categories, and when they mix, they’re very often put off—they don’t know whether they’re allowed to laugh, for example. This is something I am a little bit afraid of. I think, however, that a more sophisticated audience has no hesitation about taking a joke, even at serious matters.”

In his dissection of a couple who take their sexual relationship to drastic, sometimes abusive extremes to keep it alive, Polanski contends, “I’m not giving any answers—I’m showing things… But one thing is sure: Love is somehow easier to sustain than sexual attraction. Unfortunately, they don’t always keep the same pace, and very often attraction decreases, whereas love can last. It can even amplify with time, and very often does.”

From the very beginning of Bitter Moon, it’s clear that this is going to be no ordinary love story: Coyote enters in a wheelchair, and Seigner is having something close to a nervous breakdown. Polanski cannily offsets the histrionics of their affair by having it told in flashback to Grant, who offers a hilarious portrait of a classic upper-class British twit. Foolish as he is, Grant’s Nigel becomes the one oasis of normalcy in the film. “He anticipates the audience’s reaction at each stage,” Polanski notes. ‘What he says colors what you feel as a spectator. You’d like to say, ‘That’s enough! Don’t anymore!’ But I hope it’s funny as well, his reactions, his being outraged. Sometimes it helps also to defuse a little bit the tension.”

Polanski says Coyote was one of his first choices for the part of the third-rate writer, Oscar. “I felt that he was very much the character as I saw it. He has a bit of an intellectual side to him, he speaks French, he’s suave—I know this type of animal. There are many Americans living on the Left Bank—a whole period of people who came here, G.I.s, after the war and decided to stay, and others who just wound up this way and decided to hang around and make a career in Paris and follow in the steps of their illustrious forefathers. There is even an American paper here called The Parisite. Those guys are very much like Peter—I see this type of man, often good-looking, smoking French cigarettes but reading The Herald Tribune.” Polanski defends the character Coyote plays, who comes across as extremely smug and self-absorbed. “Well, he’s got a lot of likeable things in him. Even if you hate him, he’s the guy you like to hate. Sometimes he’s a jerk, but at the same time he’s got humor. He’s irritating, but he’s honest about himself. He’s one of those guys you sometimes get stuck with at the bar—it’s quite painful.”

Polanski views Bitter Moon as much closer in tone and style to his early films like Knife in the Water and Cul-de-Sac than to later, more immediately accessible projects like Tess and Frantic. Indeed, its shipboard erotic tensions recall, on a much bigger scale, the claustrophobic sexual triangle of his 1962 tour-de-force debut feature, Knife in the Water. That film instantly made the young Polish filmmaker an international name, and he followed it with two pictures equally steeped in unsettling psychological and atmospheric detail: Repulsion (1964), starring Catherine Deneuve as an unhinged London manicurist, and Cul-de-Sac (1965), an absurdist comedy about a mismatched married couple held captive by gangsters. Polanski made a smash Hollywood directing debut in 1968 with the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby, and his 1974 romantic detective thriller Chinatown is widely regarded as one of the very best films of its decade. In 1976, Polanski not only directed but played the lead role in The Tenant, a wickedly unnerving portrait of a timid Polish clerk who rents a room in a weird Parisian apartment building, and in 1980 he brought us a lavishly praised version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Sadly, Polanski’s filmmaking artistry has often been eclipsed in the public’s mind by his private traumas. A survivor of the Holocaust, he faced new horror in 1969 with the shocking murder of his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. He found himself in the tabloid headlines again in 1977 when he was charged with statutory rape and, after serving 42 days in prison, fled to Europe.

Asked if he misses anything about working in Hollywood, Polanski replies, “What I miss is the expediency of the studio and all the departments. When a film goes into production, you’re not wasting time on wheeling and dealing like you do with European films. But there are other rewarding things in making films in France—the great enthusiasm of the technicians is incomparable. They are extremely professional in Hollywood, but they have the Winnebago ready to go fishing at 5:30 on a Friday. They’re not involved beyond certain necessities… But one mustn’t underestimate the freedom you have making a film in a studio, when it’s all going well and your rushes are good. At least that’s how it was, how it used to be. You have anything you need. But I understand it’s changed a lot in the last ten years. The people I know who talk to me about making films in a studio, the ones who knew what it was like, they say it’s not the same.”

So, then, what is the climate like in France for a director like Polanski who makes English-language films? “It’s somewhere between jealousy and rejection,” he quips. “People are aware of the fact that you can’t hope for general distribution around the world if a film is made in the French language. But, on the other hand, they say we should make films for the French.”

Polanski laments that, today, “it’s difficult to get financing for any kind of ambitious project. Of course, if you accept the propositions of films that are being made, which are destined for very, very small children most of the time, then everything becomes easier. But to make films for adults today is very difficult.”

Have audiences, in his view, become less adventurous, less sophisticated?

“Definitely. And younger. I don’t know whether they are less sophisticated. They’re sophisticated in a way of gobbling images. Their digestion time has gotten shorter and shorter—they’re attacked by images from all sides. They get it all faster, they understand quicker the film language. This, combined with the lifestyle of today, makes them tremendously impatient. They see a frame and they say: ‘Yes, I got it, sock it to me. Next! Next!’ This, combined with the rhythms of everyday life, including the television and the commercials—the span of attention is never longer than the time between two commercials, and in most cases it’s as long as a commercial.

“There are other things,” Polanski says, wistfully. “There is atmosphere. There is mood. There is contemplation, feelings, emotions. They accept only very primitive emotions. Somebody’s being hit, and he hits back.”

Perhaps for these reasons, Polanski maintains a rich artistic life apart from the cinema. He has directed operas in Paris, Munich, and Spoleto, and he directed and starred to great acclaim in the Warsaw and Paris productions of Amadeus. In 1988, he returned to the stage in the lead role in Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Polanski’s next project will be the film version of Ariel Dorfman’s international stage hit Death and the Maiden, which the director has adapted with Fearless screenwriter Rafael Iglesias. Sigourney Weaver will star in this drama about a woman who suspects the stranger her husband has brought home is the same man who tortured her in prison. Discussing his attraction to the project, Polanski says, “I like some kind of formal challenge when I make a picture, and doing a film again with three people appealed to me. And, of course, the amount of suspense in it makes it more interesting. In Knife in the Water, I had a moving background because we were on a floating yacht. Here, you are stuck in one house, but you have this suspense that compensates to a certain extent. I like the idea of making a film about guilt and responsibility, and the relativity of truth. I would like to make a Rashomon, if I could—that theme appeals to me very much.”

The director is also considering doing a remake of the Luis Buñuel classic Belle de Jour, this time starring Sharon Stone. “It’s very vague, you know. I had one conversation with Sharon on the subject, but that’s the extent of it. I think it would be a great project for her.” But how does one improve on Buñuel? “Improve? You can always improve. It would just be a different film altogether.”

Despite all the indelible film work behind him, Polanski still isn’t satisfied. “I have the feeling of wanting to make something great, which has been with me for years. It’s nothing concrete. It’s something I feel exists and I’m not with it yet. I don’t think I made my film yet—I never felt I did. I feel like it’s all ahead of me.”

Pictured: Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner. Photo ©Fine Line Features. Bitter Moon is available for streaming on Kanopy and Prime Video.