Polanski’s Dilemma: Promoting From Afar : Movies: How to publicize ‘Death and the Maiden’--without the director having to step foot on U.S. soil--has been a challenge for Fine Line.

Since Roman Polanski can’t set foot in the United States without getting arrested, doing publicity for his forthcoming film, “Death and the Maiden,” was something of a challenge.

So Polanski employed the latest in technology to skirt his legal restrictions, holding a press conference here via satellite from Paris on Saturday to promote the film, an adaptation of the play by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman.

The several dozen reporters from all over North America who assembled in a room at the Rihga Royal Hotel could see Polanski, 61, sitting in an armchair, dressed in a blue blazer and open white shirt, his shoulder-length hair curling about his ears. A dozen yellow roses bloomed on a table to his left. But Polanski, considered by many to be a genius of the visual image, could only hear the reporters, not see them.

“It’s not the same thing” as being there in person, he said, when asked if he felt he had triumphed over American justice by appearing on the satellite feed. “I would prefer to see your face and smell your perfume.”

Polanski has been a fugitive since pleading guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse after having sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles, so arranging Polanski’s meeting with the American press had been a challenge for Fine Line, the picture’s distributor. At first, Fine Line announced grand plans for an offshore press junket on a boat on international waters, but Polanski’s lawyers feared the boat could drift into U.S. territory. Then the studio proposed flying Polanski and reporters to a remote French island off the coast of Newfoundland, but it then learned that this was the windy season, and that air travel was not recommended.

A civil suit brought by the girl has been settled. As for any progress in the criminal case: “I cannot foresee it,” he said.

Despite the awkwardness of the setup, Polanski seemed eager to talk to reporters and clearly longed to be able to return to the United States, especially to make Hollywood movies. “It would make my life much easier,” he said. “In Europe, filmmaking can hardly be called an institution.”

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In Los Angeles he’d be closer “to the money,” able to go to lunches and parties and better able to put deals together, he said.

During the hourlong conference, Polanski answered questions ranging from his childhood to the making of “Death and the Maiden,” which opens Christmas Day. Like many of Polanski’s films, it is about unimaginable terrors that are all too real; set in a South American country, it focuses on a woman (Sigourney Weaver) who seeks her own kind of justice from a doctor (Ben Kingsley) she believes is her former torturer.

The story, with its questions of truth, justice and victimization, is evocative of many elements in Polanski’s own life. Born in Paris in 1933, but raised in Krakow, Poland, Polanski lost his mother when the Germans deported her to Auschwitz where, four months pregnant, she was sent to the gas chamber. In 1969, infamous tragedy struck in the form of the murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by Charles Manson’s followers.

“I did come to terms with those things,” said Polanski, who is now married to French actress Emmanuelle Seigner and the father of a daughter, Morgane, 2 1/2. “During my first trip to Germany when I was a film student, I remember seeing the people around me. I realized I bore no grudge.” Nevertheless, he added, “I suffer when I remember my mother. Every thought of her brings tears to my eyes. But I have no desire to kill anyone.”

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Polanski said he could identify with all three characters in “Death and the Maiden”: the victim, the accused and the victim’s husband.

But he added, “It is not a catharsis. Filmmaking is a job to me. I have never derived any kind of therapy from it.”

Still, he admitted, if a psychiatrist were consulted about why he made the movies that he did--where women are usually the victims, “maybe he would say it has to do with . . . my childhood and the fact that my mother was taken away from me. And she was a victim.”