Roman Polanski and Pierce Brosnan Talk Love, Loss and Sharon Tate, A Review of Valley of the Dolls and More

Pierce Brosnan was interviewed recently and said he and Polanski had discussed Sharon and the loss of loved ones.  Brosnan himself lost his own first wife, Cassandra, to ovarian cancer.  She died in his arms, no less and one day after their 11th Anniversary on December 20, 1991.  He, like Polanski has since married again.

He has said of Cassie: "Cassie has made me the man I am, the actor I am, the father I am. She's forever embedded in every fiber of my being."

Roman has seemingly been as impressed by his time with Sharon.  He never forgets her and remembers always how special she was.


http://www.cinematical.com/2010/02/08/pierce-brosnan-on-polanski-percy-and-r-patz/

Cinematical: How did you get involved with The Ghost Writer?

Pierce Brosnan: Well, I was in London, I think wrapping up Mamma Mia! or doing something like that on that movie. My agent said, "Roman Polanski would like to meet you. He's doing a movie." And I said, "Great!" And I hopped on the train over to Paris. I was with my son who's 26, Sean, and my mother, and I said, "Do you want to come to Paris for the weekend?" And that's how it happened. I got over there on a Saturday morning, my son and my mother went off 'round the city, and he and I sat and had the most long, long, long lunch and we talked briefly about the movie and established that I wasn't doing Tony Blair, and once we established that, then we talked about everything else but the movie.

Wow, what's it like to be a fly on the wall during a lunch like that?

PB: We talked about life, we talked about our losses in life. We talked a little bit about Sharon [Tate], and the deep loss and the deep pain that he still... It was a very kind of man-to-man talk. [We talked] about children. We talked about movies, making movies, the economy of movies; country, travel, food. It was very delightful – most, most charming. I did go home on the train and I thought, "God, maybe he might not want me for the job! [laughs] Maybe he might change his mind!" A director told me when I was starting out, he said, "You're always going to have to test for someone." So no matter whether you've got an Oscar or two Oscars in your back pocket, there's gonna be someone, sometime that you just have to test for. But anyway, we got on very well, and then I didn't see him until my first day on the set in Berlin.

I was under the impression that in the book, your character Adam Lang was supposed to be a thinly veiled version of Tony Blair. I thought yours had a twist of George W. Bush in there as well.

PB: Well, I certainly didn't go to Bush within it; I kept front and foremost Tony Blair and [David] Cameron and those people, and the rest was just me and my imagination – what if I were a Prime Minister and first and foremost, the great pretender, the great [performer]? And the vortex and the crisis that this man is in at this point in his life and the sham of his life and his leadership – that's what intrigued me.

Once I was off the hook, and I realized that I wasn't going to be doing a Tony Blair impersonation or trying to be like Tony Blair – Michael Sheen had already done that – you know, I just had great fun with it. There was a real sense of irony to the character, and there was humor, and I'd like to think there was some heart to the man, and that his life was a bit of a sham, really, and he knows it and he knows that he's absolutely hamstrung without his wife, and to... have so little to really fight for, that's what kind of I tried to bring to the work... Once the camera starts rolling, the performance starts pouring out of him -- the populist [who] wanted to be charming, wanted to be loved and to be witty, but absolutely has no f*ckin' idea how to run a country. Absolutely none whatsoever. A total puppet. A total puppet.

What's interesting is that it's a very timely movie politically but it has an old Hollywood drama and moodiness to it from the very first shot. Did you feel that tension on set? Everything was very gloomy, and everything was very dramatic.

PB: Well, you know, Roman comes with a lot of legend, and baggage with legend written all over it – as a filmmaker, as a man, as a controversial figure in life. And it was fairly palpable on the set... We wanted bad weather, we got bad weather. The style of filmmaking is a throwback – in style, in composition, in pacing -- to the '70s, maybe. He hasn't made a thriller – he's never made a political thriller – so here he is doing his first political thriller, and getting away with it beautifully. And it's evident up on the screen. It's very elegant and claustrophobic and tight. There's no wriggle room for the characters or for the audience, really. The set was a very happy one, but Roman is Roman, and he is the director, capital letters. He knows what he wants and how he wants it, and he's a great actor. In his world, he's a great actor, and he knows how to act, he knows how to put on a performance, and he does. But he was very happy, I think, in making the movie, and nothing was really discussed on a day-to-day basis. You know, it was very workmanlike.

What was your reaction when you heard about Polanski's arrest? Were you concerned that the movie would never see the light of day?

PB: No, I wasn't, actually. I wasn't concerned for that. I was concerned for him, as a man and as someone who had become a friend. And, you know, I hoped for closure, I still hope for closure for him and for all parties concerned. I think what happened back then was wrong in every way, and I think he certainly would like to have closure. And again, I never had discussions with him, but it's certainly adds a controversial spotlight to the movie.

Do you think people will be able to see The Ghost Writer on its own terms, despite how they might feel about Mr. Polanski?

PB: I don't know. It's not an easy question to answer, really. I can't tell what other people will react [to]. He is heralded in Europe as a magnificent director and very much appreciated here in America within the community of filmmakers as a fantastic, magnificent director. You know, but the media will certainly wring this for every ounce of blood that's in the story because it's very controversial. So I don't know how [people] will react. All I know is I came to this to work with one of the great directors of cinema.

So to wrap things up and come full circle, what's your favorite Polanski movie?

PB: Chinatown. Rosemary's Baby. Knife in the Water. I'd never seen until I started working with Roman, and it just blew me away. It just blew me away, that film, and anyone who's a lover of films, they must see that film by that young man all those years ago.
Here is a review of Valley of the Dolls:

http://thefilmivejustseen.blogspot.com/2010/02/valley-of-dolls-trashier-than-municipal.html

Actress Kim Cattrall talks about Polanski:

"When I think of Roman, I think of his nose; he smells the truth. He is very intense. Sometimes because he's French and Polish, the frustration to explain what he wants comes out and he's like 'No, no! Terrible!' And you think, 'I'm terrible?' In some ways it was very tense and in some exhilarating."

Jailed Polanski finishes film for Berlin Competition

Jailed Polanski finishes film for Berlin Competition

Gautuman Bhaskaran, Hindustan Times
 
January 2010
 
Roman Polanski, the Polish director, is no stranger to me. Certainly his work, no. My first brush with it was at one of the editions of the International Film Festival of India in Kolkata during the early 1990s. The film was Bitter Moon. Starring stars such as Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner and Peter Coyote, it was an extremely provocative work that had the classic Polanski’s psychological touch, thrilling to the core and disturbing to its depth. Set on the high seas, the movie traces the lives of two couples as they sail towards Istanbul on their way to India. Polanski explores bondage, sadomasochism and voyeurism to narrate the bitter story of death and destruction, passion and possessiveness.
 
I still remember that the film was introduced by the dashing Bengali actor, Victor Banerjee, whose parting line was, “Yes, there is a lot of masala in it”. But there has been even more masala in Polanski’s life, often tragic I would think.

Now under house arrest in Switzerland, waiting for his deportation to the USA, where he could be tried for having sex with a 13-year-old girl (who incidentally has long pardoned him), Polanski has completed his latest movie, The Ghost Writer. It will compete at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival to roll on February 11.

Based on the International Thriller Writers’ Award-winning novel, The Ghost by Robert Harris (who also penned the screenplay), Polanski’s movie was shot at Studio Babelsberg, outside Berlin, and was finished by him while he was in Swiss prison.

The film stars Ewan McGregor as a professional ghostwriter hired to pen the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister, essayed by Pierce Brosnan (the man we knew best as James Bond). The writer finds himself in political and sexual intrigues (without which, I guess, no Polanski work will be complete) that involve the ex-Prime Minister’s wife and his aide. It soon transpires that the Brosnan character has a terrible secret that may well upset international ties. Tony Blair is reportedly the inspiration for this character.

Often considered a master of crime and conspiracy, Polanski himself fell a victim to these when his beautiful, young and pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was savagely murdered by a cult in LA in 1969. A shattered Polanski, who was then in Britain, returned to Europe saying that there was nothing to hold him back in Hollywood. He later wrote in his autobiography that his “absence on the night of the murder is the greatest regret of my life…Sharon's death is the only watershed in my life that really matters… her murder changed my personality from a boundless, untroubled sea of expectations and optimism to one of ingrained pessimism ... eternal dissatisfaction with life".

And his work since then has reflected these.

He came out of his self-imposed seclusion in 1971 with The Tragedy of Macbeth. His later movies continued to have this tinge of the dark and the forbidding. Tess, Chinatown and Death and the Maiden, for example, have all had their share of the mysterious. Dedicating Tess (based on Thomas Hardy’s famed 1891 novel), to Sharon, Polanski said that his wife had given him a copy of the book on the last occasion he saw her alive. She had said that it would make a great film. It did.

Polanski continued to make movies such as The Pianist (2002, Palm d’Or for Best Picture at Cannes and Academy Award for Best Director) that in some ways were an echo of his own life. The Pianist is set during the dark days of World War II and was adapted from Jewish-Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman’s autobiography. Like Szpilman, Jewish Polanski escaped death in Nazi hands, while his mother was killed at Auschwitz. Polanski and his father survived German tyranny. The father lived through the horrors of a concentration camp, while Polanski escaped from the Krakow ghetto. He changed his name, behaved like a Catholic and saw the end of the war.

This was the fighter I met at Marrakech a couple of years ago, and his agility and verve amazed me. As the head of the jury at the film festival there, he was a 75-year-old bundle of unimaginable energy. In a way, he epitomises all that one sees in his cinema: sensitivity, intelligence and a lot more.

As he now bides his time incarcerated in a Swiss chalet, there is a wave of sympathy for him. Letters pleading for the dismissal of the American legal case against him have been coming in. Probably justice must prevail, but if his imprisonment, if that happens, can well be a sad loss for cinema. For at 77, Polanski may not have many more years of helming.

(Gautaman Bhaskaran has been writing on international cinema for over two decades, covering major film festivals at home and abroad, including Cannes, Venice and Berlin.)

A few more articles today on Polanski:

Swiss Preparing Decision on Polanski



Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF-New York Times



Published: January 7, 2010



The justice ministry of Switzerland said Thursday that it may decide soon whether to grant a request by the United States to extradite Roman Polanski, Agence France-Presse reported. The ministry’s spokesman, Folco Galli, told Agence France-Presse: “We are preparing our decision. It could be January, it could also be in February. I am not going to be more precise.” Mr. Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, was apprehended in Switzerland in September. He spent several months in a jail near Zurich before posting $4.5 million bail in December and is now under house arrest in his chalet in Gstaad. On Wednesday a written request from Mr. Polanski to be sentenced in absentia was presented to a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. The judge, Peter P. Espinoza, has scheduled a hearing on Jan. 22 to consider it.


And one more link of interest:

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b160804_roman_polanski_seeks_long-distance.html