Polanski’s children

NO matter where he looks, Roman Polanski cannot find the study about the nutritional nightmare of children’s cereals. For more than three hours, over tea in one brasserie, lunch in another, then a cigar in his office, the exiled filmmaker has talked about his life, his libel case, his legacy, his opinions about Hollywood and his new movie, Friday’s “Oliver Twist.” Right now, though, something far more urgent occupies all of the Oscar-winning director’s attention: Just how many teaspoons of sugar have the teeth-rotting makers of sweetened cereals packed into each serving of Cocoa Puffs?

Inside his penthouse workplace that overlooks Paris’ fashionable 8th arrondissement surrounding the Champs Elysees and Place de la Madeleine, Polanski rummages through stacks of magazines, pokes underneath a small pile of screenplays and burrows along bookshelves filled with assorted novels, biographies and histories in French, English and Polish -- all in search of the magazine article about bad breakfasts. Polanski eventually enlists his assistant to come in from her office and help track it down, yet the report can’t be found. The rare interview with the writer-director-producer-actor eventually winds back to “Oliver Twist,” Polanski’s first film squarely aimed at children and, as one collaborator says, his most autobiographical. From cereal to Charles Dickens to recommending books about parenting, much of the 72-year-old filmmaker’s late summer day revolves around family. Polanski’s 12-year-old daughter, Morgane, stops by the office in the middle of the afternoon to say hello to her father, who later gives her a few euros so she can go out for a sushi lunch with a friend. Afterward, at 8:30 in the evening, a dozen other kids gather with 40 of Polanski’s friends and colleagues for a private showing of “Oliver Twist” in a small Parisian screening room. As the event winds down and midnight approaches, Polanski accepts compliments about the film while his 7-year-old son, Elvis, plays peekaboo with a coat check girl.

It is not at all what you might have expected: an image squarely at odds with a reputation shaped by violent cinema, grisly tragedy, philandering, unlawful intercourse with a minor, and a flight from American justice. It even sounds somewhat ungainly on the tongue -- Roman Polanski, family man.

If anyone thinks Polanski is a new member of Focus on the Family, though, there are numerous reminders of his uncensored life. The most prominent visual hallmark of Polanski’s office is a huge painting above his desk of an erotically posed nude woman, far more visibly displayed than his best director Oscar for “The Pianist,” which is tucked away on a low shelf, beside a couch. Oscar-winning “Pianist” screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who also adapted “Oliver Twist,” says that Polanski’s interest in a new project is signaled by whether it gives him “an erection.” And over lunch, Polanski looks up from his steak, smiling and nodding at a stunning young woman walking down Rue Marbeuf.

For all the contradictions, however, what finally materializes is an artist at peace. While he and his producers seem nervous about the prospects for “Oliver Twist,” at $60 million Polanski’s most expensive film ever, Polanski appears both calm and confident. When an American woman approaches Polanski on the street to praise his films, Polanski feigns ignorance of English, which he speaks nearly fluently: He doesn’t want to hear her compliments.

In a London courtroom six weeks earlier, Polanski recorded a significant -- and, to the losers, stunning -- libel victory over Vanity Fair, convincing a jury that the U.S. magazine had concocted a titillating anecdote about Polanski’s behavior after the 1969 Manson family murder of his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. After the verdict, Polanski took a relaxing and celebratory trip to Bali with his wife, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, both of whom have “Oliver Twist” cameos. Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, he looks fit and tanned. Rather than rush into another movie, he is contemplating directing a play.

“A lot has changed for me. My life has improved,” Polanski says, finishing his cigar. “It’s not only children, but the relationship with my wife is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He is asked to consider his legacy, if he fears he might be remembered not for what he has accomplished as a filmmaker -- his credits include “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” -- but for what he has done, and what has happened to him, away from the cameras.

“I am not a fortune teller,” he says deliberately. “I would like to be judged for my work, and not for my life. If there is any possibility of changing your destiny, it may be only in your creative life, certainly not in your life, period.”

And yet the two keep intersecting. Although it was adapted from Wladyslaw Szpilman’s Holocaust memoir, “The Pianist” was largely informed by Polanski’s parentless childhood in Krakow during the Nazi occupation (his father survived the Austrian camp in Mauthausen, while his mother died in Auschwitz in Poland). “Oliver Twist” feels far more fictional than “The Pianist,” but it too was guided by Polanski’s homeless wanderings during World War II.

“When he talks about his past, it is as if he is talking about someone else,” screenwriter Harwood says. “He never emotionalizes it. He never colors it. It’s just: That’s what happened. In ‘Oliver Twist,’ it’s much more concealed, but I think it is entirely autobiographical, because of what happens to a little boy, and how he does come through.”

No matter their different time periods, “The Pianist” and “Oliver Twist” are both narratives about endurance, tales of quietly heroic characters who suffer unimaginable ordeals, are scarred by their experiences but nevertheless -- through both determination and good fortune -- emerge triumphant by the time the curtain falls.

Is he unconsciously drawn to survival stories? “You should ask my psychiatrist, if I had one,” Polanski answers. “But the answer is maybe. Any kind of survival is a subject I enjoy dealing with.”

Attention to detail

THE grime and disrepair inside Fagin’s lair is palpable, almost visceral; the place smells like wet wool. If you scrape a fingernail along the walls, it comes up dirty. Unlike Carol Reed’s colorful and oddly upbeat 1968 “Oliver!” musical, Polanski’s “Oliver Twist” owes more to David Lean’s darker, black-and-white 1948 adaptation. It’s desaturated and unromantic, the Dickens of “Great Expectations” and “Bleak House,” not of the song “Food, Glorious Food.”

“Take a look at this railing,” Polanski says, guiding a visitor up a staircase inside the “Oliver Twist” stages at Prague’s Barrandov Studios. “You would never know that it was just built. It looks as old as it is supposed to be.”

That attention to 19th century detail influences not only Allan Starski’s production design but also Anna Sheppard’s costumes, one of the places where Polanski’s own life guided “Oliver Twist’s” making. When Sheppard first presented the director with the shoes Fagin gives Oliver after the orphan trudges 70 miles to London, Polanski steered her away from something that would comfortably fit the young character’s feet.

“He wanted Oliver to wear men’s shoes,” Sheppard says. “When the war was over, [Polanski] didn’t have shoes, and so he had to wear men’s shoes. It was a sign of being incredibly poor -- you can’t be choosy. He understands being badly treated. He understands survival. So it’s more personal than a lot of people expect.”

On the Prague interior set, Polanski is directing Sir Ben Kingsley as Fagin, who is about to meet Oliver for the first time. The director inspects Barney Clark, the then-11-year-old Londoner who is playing the title role, and says his feet don’t look terrible enough. “Having painful blisters is something I remember from during the war,” Polanski says. “I remember having my feet bloody.”

Kingsley is unrecognizable behind two hours of makeup, eviscerated teeth, a mess of stringy hair and piles of tatty clothes. Fagin’s posture is stooped and his shuffle arthritic. His eyes dart about, looking for any advantage he and his young gang of pickpockets can exploit.

In the scene Polanski is filming, the street urchin Nancy is leading Fagin out of the apartment of the violent criminal Bill Sikes. Sikes and Fagin’s ragtag fencing syndicate is on the verge of discovery by police, and Sikes (Jamie Foreman) and Fagin are plotting to kill Oliver. But Sikes’ girl, Nancy (Leanne Rowe), wants to save the boy’s life. Fagin suspects she is about to betray him, and is prying for information.

“You have a friend in me, Nance. You know me of old,” Fagin tells her as Nancy lets him out of the Sikes flat, seeking any information he can glean. “I know you well,” Nancy replies curtly, sending Fagin on his way.

It’s a classic Polanski composition, as filmed by cinematographer Pawel Edelman, who also shot “The Pianist.” Kingsley and Rowe appear in shadowy profile, the light barely brighter than a small flame; you can hardly make out their faces. “There are a lot of candles in this movie,” Polanski explains.

There are also a lot of period streets and buildings too, a massive exterior construction project that took three months to complete. Inspired by the drawings of Gustave Dore, Starski’s sets include five London streets, a labyrinth of side alleys and several distinct neighborhoods, from Fagin’s muddy slums to the stylish estate of Oliver’s rescuer, Mr. Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke). Even the cobbles are real, harvested from Prague’s old roads. The production chose to film in Prague chiefly for the affordable construction; had the movie been filmed elsewhere, it might have cost as much as $100 million, the film’s producers say.

But it’s scarcely this kind of financial benefit that drew Polanski to the project. He was more attracted by the value of the “Oliver Twist” story itself, a book he and his wife have read to their children. “What he told me was that he wanted to do a film for children -- his children,” Harwood says.

Even though the sprawling novel has been adapted more than two dozen times, Polanski felt two, if not three, generations of moviegoers had gone without seeing a new movie version, and a half-century had passed since Lean’s adaptation. What’s more, he believed he knew how to make it, now that he was a dad.

“I would never think of doing a movie for children if I did not have any,” Polanski says back in his Paris office, months after filming has completed. “A lot of things in the film I know about. I relate to all the sufferings much more now that I have kids. I see it from the outside now. And before, I didn’t. Children have this capacity for resistance, and they accept things as they are, maybe because they have no other reference. They are somehow more flexible; they adapt much faster than adults.”

Polanski also drew on his own memories of the war to convey that as much as Oliver hungers for food, shelter and warm clothes, what he desires more than anything else is to be among loving parents -- it’s in part why Oliver is drawn to Fagin, the best available substitute.

“The worst is separation from the parents,” Polanski says, and at first it’s unclear if he is talking about Oliver or himself. Yet as happens on several occasions during the interview, the two have become interchanged.

“Nothing I remember more for that period -- none of the suffering -- was greater than being separated from my parents,” the filmmaker says. “Not the fleas, not the gruel, not the beds I had to sleep on. It was just, ‘Where’s my father? Where’s my mother?’ ” Although Polanski’s mother died, he and his father were reunited.

The “Oliver Twist” actors recognize their director is working in a familiar emotional landscape. “His comprehension of patterns of human behavior are earned,” Kingsley says during a break in filming. Says Foreman: “I think Roman is Oliver. Look at his life, and how he was brought up -- to survive the life he had.”

Suing Vanity Fair

IT’S not hard to grasp why Polanski holds a nearly Nixonian mistrust of the media and why he avoids reporters at almost all costs.

In his memoir, 1984’s “Roman,” Polanski recalled how a magazine report from the set of his first feature, 1962’s “Knife in the Water,” turned into a hatchet job (the film was nominated for the foreign language Oscar), an omen of much of the reporting about him and his films that was to follow. The media were far more vicious after Tate and others at their home were murdered, placing blame on Polanski and his lifestyle before Manson was implicated in the deaths. And Polanski was, not surprisingly, vilified after he fled the country in 1978 after pleading guilty but before being sentenced for having sex with a 13-year-old Los Angeles girl.

For all the nasty things written about him, though, Polanski felt Vanity Fair’s description of his conduct inside the Manhattan restaurant Elaine’s could not go uncontested. The lengthy 2002 article about the restaurant’s history mentioned Polanski only briefly, yet the anecdote was venomous.

As related to Vanity Fair journalist A.E. Hotchner by author and editor Lewis Lapham, Polanski immediately after his wife’s murder stopped by Elaine’s on his way from London to Los Angeles, where the murders occurred. While at Elaine’s, Polanski approached a beautiful Swedish girl, Lapham recalled. “I watched as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long, honeyed spiel which ended with the promise ‘And I will make another Sharon Tate out of you,’ ” Lapham quoted Polanski saying.

“It’s just ... I don’t want to talk about it,” Polanski says, then quickly changes his mind. “It was monstrous. There were a lot of bad things written about me. But no one tried to portray me as a monster -- a man who learns about the murder of his eight-months-pregnant wife and stops over on the way over to the funeral and tries to seduce a woman?” He then runs out of his office to retrieve a recent clipping from London’s the Mail on Sunday, in which the woman at Elaine’s, former model Beatte Telle, said the incident never happened.

Debasing Polanski’s love of his murdered wife was one thing; correcting the record was another. Unable to leave France (which will not extradite the filmmaker to the United States) and travel to an American court, Polanski sued Vanity Fair in England, whose libel laws are tilted toward plaintiffs. The House of Lords allowed Polanski to give evidence by videoconference from Paris, as Polanski feared extradition if he traveled to testify in London.

The irony was inescapable: A target of one country’s legal system for 27 years was able to use another nation’s courts to strike at a place across the Atlantic he cannot visit, all without leaving France. If the mechanism was ingenious, the trial itself was more predictable, as Vanity Fair attempted to prove that, as Polanski says, “I did not have a reputation to defend.”

Consequently, a Vanity Fair lawyer called Polanski “a fugitive from morality” and the magazine’s case hinged on both the story’s accuracy and a chronicle of Polanski’s libertine past. The jury heard all about his admitted adulteries, his group sex encounter with a then-15-year-old Nastassja Kinski, his sleeping with a flight attendant a month after Tate’s burial and, of course, his pleading guilty and subsequently fleeing from justice after having unlawful intercourse with a minor, a model he was photographing at Jack Nicholson’s house for a French Vogue magazine layout.

Of that last incident Polanski testified, “As far as those events are concerned, I would not even start to justify myself.... What I did was wrong and I don’t see why I should go back to this for the purposes of this trial.... I made one mistake, and I am still suffering for that.”

Polanski also called Lapham’s recollection “the worst thing ever written about me. It is obvious that it’s not true. I don’t think you could find a man who could behave in such a way. But I think it was particularly hurtful as it dishonors my memory of Sharon.”

Polanski, his witnesses (including “Rosemary’s Baby” star Mia Farrow) and his lawyers ultimately were able to disprove several details of the Vanity Fair anecdote. Telle, who is in fact Norwegian, never appeared in court to say if the groping or the promise of stardom actually happened. Polanski showed that he stopped at Elaine’s after the funeral, not before it. And, most important, the jury ultimately believed he never said what the magazine said he did. In addition to legal fees, Polanski was awarded $87,700 in damages.

“I had to go through it,” Polanski says of the trial, finishing his brasserie lunch. “I never had a doubt that I would win. Because the truth always wins, sooner or later.”

Making a family film

MORE than anything else, Polanski says, he longs for a pastrami sandwich at the Nate ‘n Al Beverly Hills delicatessen.

It’s a glib comeback about what he misses most about the United States, but one thing he doesn’t seem to pine for is Hollywood. Years ago, even when he could live in Los Angeles, studio executives brought Polanski creative despair.

“Hollywood is like that,” he writes in his memoir. “A spoiled brat that screams for possession of a toy and then tosses it out of the baby buggy.”

Most family films today, he says, “are appalling. They are just mindless special effects, sound effects, which rattle your brain with very little emotion, in general.” He singles out “Shrek” and “Shrek 2,” however, for praise.

Hollywood furthermore underestimates children, he says, assuming they have little interest in period dramas. “But you can show them a story about Jesus Christ and they will treat it as a contemporary movie,” Polanski says. (“Oliver Twist” is being distributed by Sony’s TriStar Pictures, which had hardly any creative involvement in the film, financed by a consortium of banks, investors and foreign distributors.) The studio obsession with focus groups and audience-pleasing endings, he says, “is against any kind of principle of show business. If you install some buttons that one can press when decisions should be made at any point of a story, there would be no story.”

As for working geographically close to Hollywood, “I don’t know how much being there corrupts the artist,” Polanski says. “I’m not able to assess [it]. But I suspect there must be a problem.”

“Oliver Twist,” of course, is exactly the kind of movie a studio would hesitate to make, unless Lindsay Lohan was playing Nancy, Russell Crowe took a stab at Fagin and the title role somehow could be rewritten for Dakota Fanning. The movie should prove a difficult sell for TriStar, as its PG-13 rating may scare off families with young children, and the subject matter might be seen as too juvenile for Polanski’s grown-up followers.

Polanski knows, too, some American critics are as likely to review his life as they are his movies, and conflate the two. “Of course, I would like not only my but other movies to be judged on the basis of their merits, and not any other reason,” he says. “The press all started with the tragedy [of Tate’s murder]. That’s when I realized that the press does not really take anything back. Even when they found it was Manson’s family, none issued a mea culpa.”

All the same, Polanski doesn’t seem to be that concerned. Even in a limited setting, such as his small Paris “Oliver Twist” screening, he still is proving culturally cool, as his audience included rocker Lenny Kravitz and “Sideways” director Alexander Payne. And starting this weekend and running through Saturday, the American Cinematheque is hosting a Polanski retrospective.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Polanski has finished his cigar and, though weary of talking about himself, doesn’t appear to be in a hurry for the conversation to end.

He starts with the role virtue plays in “Oliver Twist.” The movie’s final scene, in fact, shows Oliver visiting Fagin in prison so that the boy can pray with the condemned man. But even more important to the Dickens story, Polanski says, is fate: Had a magistrate not briefly lost his place when Oliver appeared before him, he might not have noticed the tears welling in the young orphan’s terrified eyes, and Oliver might have ended up a chimney sweep apprentice, dying an early death.

“I like 19th century English literature because of banal events that can change your destiny,” he says, taking down his tattered copy of the novel to read the section about the magistrate aloud.

It may be fantasy, he says finally, that we have much choice in how our lives will unfold. “If it’s an illusion that you are changing whatever it is, you can only do it in your creative work,” Polanski says.

“But it’s a good thing to have this illusion, no?”

*

Classic films of Polanski

Where: American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica

When: Sunday at the Egyptian; Sunday through Thursday at the Aero

Price: $6-$9

Contact: (323) 466-FILM or go to americancinematheque.com

Schedule

Egyptian

(Double feature)

Today, 6:30 p.m.

“Cul-De-Sac” (1966)

Francoise Dorleac and Donald Pleasance star in this black comedy thriller set in an isolated mansion.

“The Tenant” (1976)

Polanski stars in this cult thriller as a mild-mannered young man who moves into an apartment where the previous occupant had committed suicide. The strong supporting cast includes Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas and Jo Van Fleet.

Aero

“Oliver Twist” (2005), today, 5 p.m.

Polanski teams with “The Pianist” scribe Ronald Harwood for this adaptation of the Charles Dickens’ classic, starring Ben Kingsley as Fagin.

“Chinatown” (1974), Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

Jack Nicholson plays the L.A. shamus J.J. Gittes in this brilliant film noir set in the City of Angels in the 1930s. Faye Dunaway and John Huston also star. Penned by Robert Towne.

“Knife in the Water” (1962), Friday, 7:30 p.m.

Polanski’s debut feature film -- a compelling thriller about a couple and the hitchhiker they pick up while traveling to a lake.

“Repulsion” (1965), Saturday, 5 p.m.

Catherine Deneuve plays a sexually repressed young woman who lives with her older sister (Yvonne Furneaux). When her sister and her boyfriend (Ian Hendry) leave for the weekend, Deneuve descends into madness.

“The Tenant,” 7:30 p.m.