Dying on the darkest hill: Why are so many actors happy to work with Roman Polanski?
These are the facts: On February 1st, 1978, Roman Polanski fled the US after 42 days in jail while awaiting final sentencing after pleading guilty to raping a child. In an ideal world that should be the end of this piece. By his own admission, in March 1977, the then-43-year-old director drove a 13-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house while the Chinatown actor was out of town. Polanski claimed he was going to take photos of the girl for French Vogue magazine while he was guest editor, but therein he gave her champagne and a quaalude, proceeded to have sex with her repeatedly, and then drove her home.
The next day he was arrested, and once more that should have been that. There is no moral ambiguity or philosophising to be done. His crime was reprehensible. He should have been incarcerated and then rehabilitated. Then, and only then, could any morally ambiguous musing begin about whether to work with the disgraced director had he chosen to continue in his field. But that didn’t happen. On the day Polanski was informed that he was due to receive a lengthy sentence, he fled the US, boarded a plane to London, crossed the border to France – where he has dual citizenship – and French law has prohibited his US expedition charge ever since.
As a fugitive, Polanski has gone on to direct 15 pieces. During that time he has worked with huge Hollywood names such as Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. He has also been nominated for several awards in the process. All while maintaining that he did rape a child and offering up the following explanation for his villainy in 1979: “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck you girls!”
Imagine now receiving an offer to work for this man and saying yes? When the facts are laid out it is impossible to reconcile, especially when it is compounded by the fact that this was his only case of paedophilia. Polanski doesn’t even recognise that he is a paedophile or that he is truly guilty of a crime—he sees being attracted to “young girls” as purely natural. As for the rape, he has dismissed this. Thus, in short, we are dealing with a child rapist who not only escaped justice but has also escaped rehabilitation and the just reconciliation of his own crimes. And yet many of Hollywood’s elite have not only accepted working with him but endorsed the matter.
As Kate Winslet said: “Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person. Woody Allen is an incredible director. So is Roman Polanski. I had an extraordinary working experience with both of those men, and that’s the truth.” She is not alone in showing public support for Polanski. In 2009, an astonishingly large number of leading figures in the film industry signed a petition calling for his release including David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai and Woody Allen.
The argument put forth is that his initial sentence at the time would have been three years in state prison and by that logic he would have served his sentence by now. They see the fact that his movement has been restricted to a few select countries and the condemnation of the press as punishment enough. If he had committed the same crime today, the sentence would have been severely harsher, but his defenders insist that he should be judged on previous, antiquated legal standards.
In fact, in 2003, Quentin Tarantino told Howard Stern: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing… He had sex with a minor, all right. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down.” It took Tarantino 15 years to apologise to Polanski’s rape victim for his evident ignorant and reproachable comments. Even then he caveated his recourse by saying “played devil’s advocate in the debate for the sake of being provocative.”
And therein lies one of the key reasons behind Hollywood’s failure to comprehend and address the crimes of Polanski. Somehow his artistic reverence muddies the picture and the intellectualised community struggle to call a spade a spade on the matter. This is further exacerbated by his tragic connection to the Charles Manson murders given that his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was one of the victims. This is horrific but mutually exclusive. Raping children is not an appropriate response to trauma, and he has never once connected the two himself. If it is deemed underlying, then this would have been addressed by professionals had he served his sentence rather than fleeing.
By fleeing, however, he was able to continue working and basking in the reverence that Hollywood affords him. In 2003, when Polanski won ‘Best Director’ at the Oscars, the venue erupted in a standing ovation. Naturally, the director wasn’t there to receive the award because he was, as the facts state, a fugitive from the US for raping a child there. This seems mind-bending now, but at the time, Hollywood had not had the reality check of #MeToo and was happy revelling in the fantasy of the troubled genius—and a European one at that.
But art does not have its own code of morality and Winslet’s recent contrasting comments seem to show that Hollywood is beginning to grasp that (slowly), as the actor said in 2018, seven years after starring in Polanski’s Carnage alongside Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly: “I realised that I wouldn’t be able to stand here this evening and keep to myself some bitter regrets that I have about poor decisions to work with individuals with whom I wish I had not.”
Perhaps it is a sign that other actors have taken heed of the recent call for justice as Polanski’s forthcoming film, The Palace, has only been able to attract the troubled names of Mickey Rourke and John Cleese. No doubt they will cling to the old rhetoric that he is an artiste who creates movies of the aggrandised degree that is beyond the moral scrutiny of the creator, and he has served his sentence in kind anyway—the reality still eluding them that he is a child rapist who has evaded any sense of justice or reconciliation of his crimes and the trauma that relishing in them further induces, who just so happens to have also made some good movies.
This is why we must all be careful when critiquing so-called woke culture and be wary that we are not, in fact, simply redressing wrongs we previously failed to comprehend because our egos got in the way. In only 20 years, it seems morally obvious that giving him a standing ovation is bafflingly condemnable. Hopefully, it will dawn on actors that to star in his films is to be complicit, and to move towards a better movie industry, we should champion those who deserve it.
After all, producing great films is a matter of bringing great ideas to life in an environment inductive to creativity, not some mystic art that only a few troubled souls hold the key to and they must be courted for the sake of cinema. At the end of the day, it’s only bloody cinema.
