Interview

Roman Polanski may soon be permitted back into the U.S., but he’s made some of his most compelling films while in exile from the Hollywood machine. As he collaborates with artist Francesco Vezzoli on a commercial for a fictional perfume starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, the director talks about the Perils of the movie world and the pleasures of skiing drunk at night.

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When Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli went looking for a director to help him make his latest artwork, he went straight for the biggest. Vezzoli’s productions have always served up larger-than-life spectacles studded with Hollywood mythos and celebrity. His piece, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005), which starred luminaries Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren, Milla Jovovich, and Courtney Love, was an orgiastic “preview” for the 1979 film Caligula. For his live play reading at the Guggenheim of Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in 2007, Vezzoli cast actors such as Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, and Diane Wiest. This time, he had his mind set on creating a commercial and an ad campaign for an imaginary fragrance called Greed (heavily indebted to Marcel Duchamp’s own fictional perfume piece, 1921’s Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette). The artist selected two leading Hollywood beauties who pointedly did not already have fragrance contracts—Portman and Michelle Williams—to be the faces of the perfume. He had Miuccia Prada specially design the costumes. He had art dealer Larry Gagosian produce the project, which will be exhibited at Vezzoli’s show at Gagosian Gallery in Rome this month. Naturally, for a work this overloaded with talent, he could think of only one man to direct: Roman Polanski. Last October, in a suite at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, the 75-year-old director shot his glamorous testament to a substance that everyone wants but no one can ever get their hands on because it doesn’t actually exist (the metaphor couldn’t get any better, could it?).

Roman Polanski is far quieter and content in person than his enormous legend suggests. This is a man who didn’t just watch some of the most shocking events of the 20th century unfold, he was inexorably woven into them—from the Nazi occupation of Poland to the unthinkable tragedy of the Manson murders in 1969. His own flight from the United States in 1978 is so famous (and erroneously recounted) that Marina Zenovich’s recent documentary for HBO, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008), finally exposed the judicial corruption that left Polanski little choice but to go into permanent exile. Thankfully, in part due to Zenovich’s digging, Polanski’s lawyers petitioned in December for the 32-year-old charges against him to be dismissed. That might bring the director back to Hollywood, but he’s had little trouble making his stunning, psychologically explosive films outside of U.S. shores. Polanski has crafted some of the best works ever known to cinema—notably Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), The Tenant (1976), Frantic (1988), and The Pianist (2002). While he continues to direct, preparing for his next film, The Ghost, a conspiracy thriller starring Ewan McGregor, Kim Catrall, and Pierce Brosnan, about a Tony Blair–like former prime minister whose war crimes come all too close to being made public, the world still seems fixated on the cult of Polanski’s private life. Can you blame the director for expressing a dislike of American media when it’s ceaselessly cast him as the devil instead of the artist who brings the devil to the screen? He now lives a much less Hollywood-style existence in Paris with his wife, actress Emanuelle Seigner, and their two children. But he did agree to sit down with Vezzoli and Interview in his Paris office—decorated with photographs and a broken Eames chair—to smoke a Cuban cigar and discuss his film heroes, his fight with Faye Dunaway, and why Wanted and Desired brings him some degree of closure. Polanski proves that he won’t be bothered to play the part of victim. He’d much rather direct. 

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: What kind of cigars do you smoke?

ROMAN POLANSKI: The best. Mainly Montecristo. We only have Cuban cigars here, you see. Not like in America. [pauses] You know, I did an interview for Interview with Andy back in 1973. 

CB: I think, in fact, you did two with him. Do you remember the questions he asked you?