Roman Polanski: Roman Holiday

Before we go back in, he turns and says, "Yes, we do."

"Yes we do what?"

"Emmanuelle and I, we do bicker. I never knew what this was called in English."

During another break, the subject turns to drugs (don't ask, it was a stream-of-conscious-ness type thing).

"It's obvious," Polanski says, "that drugs must be legalized. The calamity of this society is really heavy drugs, no? And all this could be eradicated by simple legalization of this stuff."

"Listen, Roman, you haven't been in America in a long time. There is no way that they're going to legalize drugs. I mean, they're about to make smoking illegal..."

"What are you saying?"

"It's like prohibition, but with cigarettes. You can't smoke inside, you can't smoke at work, soon they'll make it so you can't smoke in the streets."

Polanski doesn't miss a beat. He storms off to the corner store, picks out a nice Havana cigar, and puffs on it for the rest of the day. Enough said.

After hours of having me watch as he works, Polanski asks if I like what I'm seeing on the screen.

"Oh, yes," I tell him. "Death and the Maiden is really perfect for you. It's claustrophobic. There are only three characters stuck in this house, and you're never sure if what Sigourney Weaver is feeling is the truth or not. It's perfect for you."

"This is what intrigues me," he says. "Here is this woman who went through hell, worse than hell. She was tortured, violated, abused. And now she has a chance to face her torturer. But maybe it's not him. It's about vengeance and retribution, about the relativity of truth. And what is she capable of, how much degradation and pain is she willing to put him through? What they did to her was unspeakable, yet she wants to talk about it."

"This is certainly going to change how people think about Sigourney," I say. "She's never done anything remotely like this."

"Yes, she's usually used for sort of strong, down-to-earth people, well balanced and healthy. Here she will surprise everyone."

At one point we take a walk, and I ask, "Do you know what cooties are?"

"No, what is this, 'cooties'?"

"It's this thing from when we were kids, and if you did something the other kids thought was stupid or gross, they'd tag you and say you had 'cooties.' It was like an invisible virus that made you an outcast."

"I understand," he says, but I'm not entirely convinced.

"Well," I say, "I have something to confess. I once wrote this piece about how you get cooties in Hollywood. Like, Faye Dunaway got them because she played Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, and it was like all of a sudden everyone thought she beat her kids, like she really was Crawford."

Polanski is nodding.

"And I said that you had cooties, not because you fucked a 13 year old in Jack Nicholson's hot tub, but because Sharon Tate had the misfortune to be killed by Charlie Manson."

"That's what I always thought," Polanski says. "When Sharon died, the press said the most terrible things about us--that it was connected to black magic, that it had something to do with the type of movies I had always made. They just lie and lie and lie, but when they print it, then people think it's true. When they found out that Manson was behind it, then they changed their song. But they were relentless. And when the trouble happened with the girl, it was like everyone said, 'We were right about him, he's crazy, that's why his wife got killed.'"

Pages: 1 2 3 4