THE VOYAGES OF POLANSKI

In 1974, after he had just finished “Chinatown,” Roman Polanski thought of working again with Jack Nicholson in a swashbuckling comedy called “Pirates.”

The timing was wrong.

“Films were very heavy, loaded with messages--and there weren’t any movies like Lucas’ or Spielberg’s,” Polanski said at lunch in Paris before leaving for Cannes, where “Pirates” was scheduled to open the film festival last Thursday. (It opens in Los Angeles July 18.)

“Pirates,” which stars Walter Matthau instead of Nicholson, has been 10 years getting afloat and finally was financed by Tunisian producer Tarak Ben Ammar. Distribution also had trouble staying afloat. Obviously, there was a lot of behinds-the-scenes tiffing: The film was at MGM, then moved to the new De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and finally to Cannon Group.

The pirate galleon, which took two years to build, has been anchored for the film festival off the Croisette, where producers’ yachts once bobbed. The ship was hailed in a long, color spread in Paris Match as the festival’s biggest star.

Polanski, a practical worrier, didn’t like the idea of the boat getting so much attention: “We had to build this boat because we couldn’t do without it, but to make a star of it will make people want to see more of it, and I didn’t want to show more because I didn’t want to make a documentary of a 17th-Century Spanish galleon. I avoided unnecessary shots of beautiful boats sailing across the seas because I don’t think anyone would buy a ticket for a beautiful boat sailing across the seas.”

Polanski, with his gothic anarchy and what one critic called his gargoyle grin, encapsulated much of the mood of the 1960s and early ‘70s. He has not been lucky with his comedies: “What?” (1973) disappeared without a trace and “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), while an art-house staple in Europe, earned less in its heavily cut U.S. version than it did in Taiwan. He has not made a film since his sober and restrained version of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” in 1978.

“Tess” was a Franco-Anglo production. Polanski’s failure to raise money for “Pirates” in the U.S. makes it even more clear that Hollywood studios still are afraid of public reaction to Polanski’s fleeing California in 1978 before he could be sentenced on a morals charge involving a 13-year-old girl.

Polanski has accepted without difficulty the idea that there is life after Hollywood. What is more immediately unpleasant is facing questions about the incident and other aspects of his private life every time he gives a press conference.

But a press conference is the price paid for the honor of opening the festival. Polanski has no doubt that, as usual, one of the first questions would concern his intentions toward returning to the United States.

“I will say what I said before: ‘I want to clear up my legal problems for my peace of mind, not to live there.’ I am not going to try to make a publicity stunt out of my return. It is not only my future but the future of other people that is involved.”

In his autobiography, “Roman,” Polanski says he knows many journalists regard him as “an evil, profligate dwarf.” A press conference is always, in his words, a Catch-22 situation. What he says is likely to be misinterpreted, and so is anything he doesn’t say. “I know what the questions will be. I know they’ll be interested in everything but the film. You can’t believe the people you see, the venom that is there. There is so much bile and I don’t even know the origin.”

Asked how he would prefer to be described in a press conference, Polanski reflected, then broke into a cheeky grin: “Promising director.”

The six years between “Tess” and “Pirates” (or what Cannon is calling “Polanski’s Pirates,”) were spent in directing and playing Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” in Warsaw and Paris, in writing his autobiography, which he describes as an attempt to set things straight (“It is not an apologia; I have nothing to apologize for”) and in trying to raise money for “Pirates” in Hollywood.

“This atmosphere of wheeling and dealing and companies changing and the inability to follow through with the same executives, and meeting executives who were former lawyers, agents and brokers. . . . I found it humiliating to have story conferences with these people and I realized that 80% of my energy was going in a direction that is totally uninteresting to me.”

Polanski remained quick and funny and cheerfully argumentative. But there was a tinge of melancholy. “I know in my heart of hearts that the spirit of laughter has deserted me,” he wrote in his autobiography, which came out in 1984. “Well, that happened after Sharon’s death,” he said. “You know, I was a fool before. I loved practical jokes. I was behaving in a way that was just not appropriate after that.”

Probably no film maker has attended more Cannes festivals than Polanski, beginning in the late 1950s when he was a film student in Poland. “In the past, when I used to go with Gerard Brach, we had to borrow 500 francs from a film critic to get back to Paris.

“I know it’s good for the film and I know it’s prestigious to open the festival, and if you told me I would be doing it 20 years ago, it would be the top of my dreams. Now it comes and it seems to be the same with everything you experience. I think the happiest period in the life of a man or a nation is aspiration.”

At 53, the time for aspiration is past. But Polanski said he is happier than when he wrote his book and has found it natural that he is making fewer films. There are longer intervals separating films. “I don’t know what it is, all I know is one evolves, one learns, so when I undertake a new film I’m not the man I was on the last one. The gaps are greater as I learn and change my tastes and know more about technique.”

He is a remarkable technician but said technique should be invisible. “It should be as though the film maker was almost lucky at the time the sky was like that and the actor read the lines in such a way. When someone tells me what a beautiful camera movement, I shudder. A beautiful camera movement is one you’re unaware of.”

Recently, Polanski referred to himself as a former film maker and it is clear that his first love, the theater, is going to be more important in his life. “The work with the actors is more interesting because it involves longer sequences. The technical side of it is the light and sound, but with immediate results. Finally, there is the magic when the curtain goes up.

“I can only compare it with my first downhill ski race. You think you are prepared, then everything happens so much faster that you think you have forgotten or skipped something. And from time to time you see in the darkness the sea of faces and they’re immobile and looking at you. They don’t look as they really are.”

He folded his hands across his chest and assumed a dour entertain-me expression. “They look like this.” He raised his face in a parody of joyous expectation. “It’s fabulous.”

Kenneth Tynan once said Polanski’s aim is to be invulnerable, a description Polanski claimed says more about Tynan than about himself. An enthusiastic haggler about dictionary meanings, he decided that invulnerable means someone who doesn’t lose, and it is therefore acceptable. “I think we all prefer to win than lose,” he said.