Roman Polanski

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds. His mother was raised Catholic despite having a Jewish father. His father was a Jewish painter and sculptor from Poland. Within four years, the family would move back to Kraków. Within six, they would be trapped inside a ghetto. Within a decade, Polanski's mother would be dead in a gas chamber at Auschwitz, and the boy would be surviving by pretending to be someone he was not.

  By the time Roman Polanski reached adulthood, he had already lived through more than most people encounter in a lifetime. He had watched his father marched away by German soldiers. He had attended church and recited Catholic prayers by heart to avoid detection. He had been used as target practice by those same soldiers for sport. And yet, through all of it, one thing persisted: his obsession with the movies.

  The story of what Polanski built from that wreckage is extraordinary. He went on to direct 23 feature films, win an Academy Award for Best Director, a Palme d'Or, a Golden Bear, and ten César Awards. He directed Chinatown, one of the most celebrated American films ever made, and The Pianist, a work that bore the mark of his own childhood terror. But the story of his life also contains a crime he committed in 1977, an escape from justice, and decades of legal pursuit that have never quite ended. The same man who made art out of survival became a fugitive. Understanding how those two realities coexist is what this documentary sets out to do.

• 2. The Ghetto and Its Aftermath

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  When Polanski was about six years old, he attended primary school for only a few weeks. Then, as his biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "all the Jewish children were abruptly expelled." That was just the beginning. Jewish children over twelve were required to wear white armbands printed with a blue Star of David. Polanski would not enter another classroom for six years.

  His father was transported to Mauthausen, a network of 49 German concentration camps in Austria. His mother was taken to Auschwitz when she was four months pregnant. She was killed in the gas chamber shortly after arriving. Polanski was hiding from the Germans when he saw his father being marched away. He tried to get close enough to speak to him. His father spotted him and, afraid that German soldiers would notice the boy, whispered in Polish, "Get lost!"

  Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 with the help of Polish Roman Catholics, including a woman who had promised his father she would shelter him. He attended church, memorized the catechism, and conducted himself as a Catholic. The effort came apart at least once, when a parish priest questioning him one-on-one concluded plainly, "You aren't one of us." Helping a Jew in German-occupied Poland carried the death penalty.

  Roaming the countryside, Polanski witnessed German soldiers using him as a target for practice shooting. The author Ian Freer has argued that Polanski's constant childhood fears and dread of violence fed directly into the atmospheres he would later conjure in his films. By the war's end in 1945, a fifth of the Polish population had been killed, the vast majority civilians. Three million of the dead were Polish Jews, representing 90% of the country's Jewish population.

  After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father, who remarried on the 21st of December 1946 and died of cancer in 1984. Polanski recalled the rural families he stayed with during the war as "really simple Catholic peasants" living without electricity, people who "wouldn't believe me when I told them it was enough to turn on a switch." In October 2020, Polanski returned to Poland and paid respects to Stefania and Jan Buchala, the couple who helped him hide. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, had recognized them as Righteous Among the Nations. Polanski called Stefania Buchala "extremely noble."

• 3. Cinema as Obsession

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  Polanski's fascination with movies began around age four or five, when his parents would take him to the cinema before the war. After the family was forced into the Kraków Ghetto, that access vanished. But the Germans sometimes showed newsreels on a screen in the market square, outside the ghetto walls. Polanski remembered finding a corner where you could see the screen through the barbed wire. "I remember watching with fascination," he recalled, "although all they were showing was the German army and German tanks, with occasional anti-Jewish slogans inserted on cards."

  After the war he spent whatever pocket money he had on film tickets, describing the seats as "dirt cheap" and saying he "lapped up every kind of film." What began as escape became something deeper. He described his attraction to everything connected with cinema, including "the luminous rectangle of the screen, the sight of the beam slicing through the darkness from the projection booth, the miraculous synchronization of sound and vision, even the dusty smell of the tip-up seats." What captured him most was the mechanics of the process itself.

  One film above all shaped his ambitions. Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, released in 1947, was, in Polanski's words, "one of the best movies I've ever seen and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else." He said he believed he continued to "perpetuate the ideas of that movie" in his own work.

  Polanski graduated from the National Film School in Łódź, the third-largest city in Poland. His directorial debut came in 1955 with a short film called Rower, or Bicycle, a semi-autobiographical piece believed to be lost. The film drew on a real incident in which a notorious Kraków criminal named Janusz Dziuba arranged to sell Polanski a bicycle, then beat him badly and stole his money. The offender was arrested while fleeing after fracturing Polanski's skull and was later executed for three murders out of eight such assaults he had committed.

• 4. The Films That Made Him

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  Knife in the Water, released in 1962, was Polanski's first feature-length film and one of the first significant Polish films after the Second World War that did not carry a war theme. Scripted by Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg, and Polanski, it followed a married couple and a mysterious hitchhiker on a boating weekend. The only professional actor in the film was Leon Niemczyk. Jolanta Umecka, who played the female lead, was discovered by Polanski at a swimming pool. The film became a major commercial success in the West and earned Polanski his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1963.

  When Polanski moved to England, he made three feature films in collaboration with his frequent screenwriting partner Gérard Brach. Repulsion, from 1965, was a psychological horror film with clear debts to surrealist cinema and to directors including Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Alfred Hitchcock. It starred Catherine Deneuve as Carol, a young Belgian woman. Then came Cul-de-sac in 1966, a bleak tragicomedy filmed on location in Northumberland. Polanski himself described its debt to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.

  The Fearless Vampire Killers in 1967 was the first of his films shot in color using Panavision lenses. Polanski played a clumsy assistant named Alfred. The rich color schemes in the film were said to evoke the work of Belarusian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, who also provided the namesake for a character in the film. It was on this production that Polanski met actress Sharon Tate.

  Paramount studio head Robert Evans brought Polanski to America ostensibly to direct a different film, then handed him Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby. Polanski read it through the night and decided the next morning he wanted to write and direct the adaptation. He wrote the 272-page screenplay in just over three weeks. The film was a box-office success and carried him his second Academy Award nomination.

  Chinatown came in 1974, a return to Hollywood for Paramount. Inspired by the real-life California Water Wars, the film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including acting nominations for Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Robert Towne won for Best Original Screenplay. In 1991 the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Polanski used his memory of his mother's dress and makeup as a physical model for Faye Dunaway's character.

• 5. The Murder of Sharon Tate

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  On the 9th of August 1969, while Polanski was working in London, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered at their home in Los Angeles. Four of her friends were killed alongside her. The killings were carried out by followers of cult leader Charles Manson, at the house the Polanskis had been renting since February 1969 at 10050 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles. Tate was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time. Her unborn child was posthumously named Paul Richard Polanski. Charles Manson and members of his cult were arrested later that year, tried, and found guilty of first-degree murder in 1971.

  Polanski wrote in his autobiography that "Sharon's death is the only watershed in my life that really matters." He described the murder as having transformed him from someone of "boundless, untroubled sea of expectations and optimism" into a person of "ingrained pessimism... eternal dissatisfaction with life." He has called his absence on the night of the murders the greatest regret of his life.

  His response to press coverage of the murders was lasting and bitter. "Reading the papers, I could not believe my eyes," he wrote. "They blamed the victims for their own murders. I really despise the press. I didn't always."

  Tess, the film he dedicated to Tate's memory and released in 1979, had actually been her suggestion. She had recommended he read Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and he had imagined she would star in it. Nearly a decade after her death, he cast Nastassja Kinski in the role instead, sending her to London for five months of dialect study and time in the Dorset countryside. Shot in northern France rather than Hardy's England, Tess became the most expensive film made in France up to that point and earned Polanski César Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.

• 6. The Assault and the Flight

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  On the 11th of March 1977, Polanski was arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The charge was the sexual assault of Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old girl who had modeled for him the previous day during a Vogue photoshoot at the Bel Air home of Jack Nicholson. Polanski was indicted on six counts, including rape. He initially pleaded not guilty. A plea bargain was arranged through the victim's attorney, dismissing five of the six charges. Polanski agreed to plead guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor" and underwent 90 days of psychiatric evaluation at the California Institution for Men at Chino. He was released after 42 days.

  The arrangement fell apart after Polanski learned that judge Laurence J. Rittenband had told friends he intended to ignore the plea bargain and sentence Polanski to 50 years in prison. Rittenband reportedly told Polanski's friend screenwriter Howard E. Koch directly: "I'll see this man never gets out of jail." Gailey's own attorney confirmed the judge had changed course after a private meeting. Polanski's attorney told him the judge "could no longer be trusted" and that his representations were "worthless."

  On the 31st of January 1978, the day before sentencing, Polanski boarded a flight to London. One day later he left for France. As a French citizen, he could not be extradited. An Interpol red notice was issued in 1978. In 1988 Gailey sued him, and in 1993 Polanski agreed to settle. By August 1996 he still owed her $604,416; court records confirm the settlement was completed by 1997.

  In September 2009, Swiss authorities arrested Polanski at the request of the United States. He spent two months in a Zurich jail, then was held under house arrest at his home in Gstaad. On the 12th of July 2010 Switzerland rejected the extradition request and declared him a free man. On Polish soil, in October 2015, a judge in Kraków also denied the United States' extradition request, finding it would be "obviously unlawful." Poland's Supreme Court upheld that ruling in December 2016. Polanski remains a fugitive from the American justice system.

• 7. The Pianist and What Followed

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  In 2001 Polanski filmed The Pianist, adapted from the World War II autobiography of Polish-Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. The parallels to Polanski's own life were direct: Szpilman's experiences as a persecuted Jew in wartime Poland mirrored what Polanski and his family had endured, even though Szpilman and Polanski each escaped the camps while their families did not. The Warsaw Ghetto liquidation that forms the film's backdrop was the same real-life event that had immediately preceded his mother's deportation to Auschwitz.

  When Warsaw was chosen for the film's 2002 premiere, accounts described the country as having "exploded with pride." In May 2002 the film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. Polanski later won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director. Because he would have been arrested on American soil, he did not attend the ceremony in Hollywood. Actor Harrison Ford accepted the award on his behalf and later presented the Oscar to him in person at the Deauville Film Festival five months later, in a public ceremony.

  Roger Ebert wrote of the film that Polanski was "reflecting, I believe, his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed."

  Subsequent years brought The Ghost Writer in 2010, which swept six European Film Awards and won Polanski a Silver Bear for Best Director at the 60th Berlinale. An Officer and a Spy in 2019 centered on the 19th-century Dreyfus affair, following French officer Georges Picquart's decade-long effort to expose doctored evidence that sent Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few Jewish members of the French Army's general staff, to Devil's Island. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and received a standing ovation at its premiere on the 30th of August 2019. It also earned Polanski his fifth César for Best Director, the record for a single director.

• 8. Expulsions and Ongoing Reckoning

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  In May 2018 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted to expel both Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski from its membership under its Standards of Conduct, revised in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Polanski became one of only four members ever expelled. His wife Emmanuelle Seigner, whom he married in 1989, responded by rejecting her own invitation to join the Academy, denouncing the group's "hypocrisy."

  Additional allegations accumulated over the decades. In October 2017, German actress Renate Langer told Swiss police that Polanski raped her in Gstaad when she was 15, in 1972. That same month, American artist Marianne Barnard accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1975, when she was 10. In November 2019, French actress Valentine Monnier said Polanski raped her at a ski chalet in Gstaad in 1975 when she was 18. British actress Charlotte Lewis stated in 2010 that Polanski had forced himself on her while she was 16 and auditioning for his film Pirates in Paris in 1983. A civil suit filed in June 2023 by a woman who alleged Polanski raped her at his home in 1973, when she was under 18, was settled in October 2024.

  The 2020 César ceremony for An Officer and a Spy became a public flashpoint. Police fired tear gas at protesters outside the Salle Pleyel. Actress Adèle Haenel walked out. The French feminist collective NousToutes called his win "shameful." Polanski, who did not attend, released a statement describing the ceremony as likely to resemble "a symposium rather than a celebration of cinema" and said he was staying away to protect his wife, children, and team.

  Samantha Geimer, Polanski's original victim, offered a more complicated public position. In a 2024 French magazine cover interview alongside her husband, she and Polanski met together for the first time in public. She said: "What happened with Polanski was never a big problem for me... Anyone who thinks that he deserves to be in prison is wrong." Polanski's most recent film, The Palace, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on the 2nd of September 2023. At 90, he remains one of the oldest working directors in international cinema, and one of the most contested.