A genius, a criminal, a tortured soul: All descriptions fit the diminutive, notorious Roman Polanski, the Polish-born auteur who became one of the most celebrated and reviled directors of the last half-century.
He began his tragedy-scarred life in Paris in 1933. In 1938, his parents moved to Krakow, Poland. Both parents were taken away to concentration camps (his mother died and his father survived.) At 8, the child went through a hole in the fence surrounding the ghetto, depicted in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. He survived the war with Catholic peasant families, was reunited with his father and went on to act and attend film school.
In the 1950s, he established his name with a series of dazzling, surreal and often violent short films.
Then came the sixties, when Polanski's preoccupations with sexual kink and bloody violence mirrored the times. Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. In the middle of his success came grotesque tragedy: In 1969, his wife Sharon Tate, carrying their unborn child, was murdered by the Manson Family.
Then, in 1977, Polanski himself pleaded guilty to criminal charges, for having sex with a 13-year-old girl at his friend Jack Nicholson's house. Then he fled the country and remains a fugitive in Paris.
In recent years, the films have been fewer and more uneven. His last, a relatively straightforward rendering of Ariel Dorfman's play, Death and The Maiden, was in 1994. Now comes The Ninth Gate, a commercial occult movie starring Johnny Depp as a book-collector pursuing a black-magic cult in Europe. Polanski was given free reign on the project and, in exchange, he's made himself suddenly available for interviews with on one condition: no questions about his private life.
The voice on the phone line is heavily accented, gravelly and sardonic. Now 66, he sounds like someone who simply can't be bothered playing games, including the pretense that The Ninth Gate is an important film. He sounded frankly dismissive about The Ninth Gate in a New York Times article in January, though he says now he was misunderstood:
"The movie doesn't have any real deep meaning but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining. I hate talking to journalists and selling the merchandise.
"When I have a movie into a shape that is closest to what I envisioned, closest to my heart, then I care very much about a movie. It's like the woman you've chosen to spend your life with. At first, everything's perfect. Then, after a while, you start gaining more perspective and noticing some faults."
His description of The Ninth Gate is short, and accurate as far as it goes: "It starts straightforwardly and then goes deeper into the fantastic, without, I hope, the audience being very aware of it."
Try to talk more deeply about the journey structure of the work, the American in Europe or any other potential metaphors and he laughs mockingly: "Ah, yes, a road movie. It's like a Bruce Springsteen song, isn't it? We called it our road movie."
Is he serious?
"No," he says bluntly.
Pressed further, he says simply that he doesn't really analyze his work that closely: "It's like the centipede who starts thinking about walking and gets mixed up. Almost all of what I do is instinct."
Pressed a little further about why he made the film, he says he knew he could handle the material, occult being one of his specialties. He also saw the script as an opportunity for instilling some of his own brand of humour.
"I have an expensive kind of humour these days because it doesn't work for everyone."
He said he did the project because he was interested in working with Johnny Depp, who he had admired in Ed Wood and Donnie Brasco.
"I like him as an actor and I like his physique, the way he looks. He has the gift of never hitting a false note. He didn't play this character the way I had envisioned him. He played it really flat and underplayed, but I think it worked."
(Depp, who also lives in Paris, has been circumspect about his experiences, admitting reservations about the film and declaring his director too rigid for his taste and "out there.")
In spite of his notoriety, Polanski says he has no difficulty finding work. "It's easy for me to make the films other people want me to make but not the films I ask to make. Very seldom do I have a proposition that I wouldn't be ashamed of in some way. With my own ideas, it's often hard to find the financing."
One film he was given the chance to direct was Schindler's List. Spielberg knew the story was about a part of Polanski's life and approached him about directing it. Polanski declined, doubting that he could treat the subject appropriately.
"I don't get offered too many comedies. Chinatown and Tess weren't occult movies either, but I don't get as many chances with films like those."
In fact, one of Polanski's rare comic films, a horror spoof called The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), has found new life as a hit European musical, destined for Broadway this fall. Despite rumours, he says, he won't be in the United States for the opening.
But he does have another project, he says, that is "closer to my heart." It's a film adaptation of the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Jewish composer Wladyslaw Szpilman. Originally written in 1946, and suppressed by Communist authorities for 40 years, the book was released in North America just two years ago. Polanski is dedicated to making the film without any stars.
"It's not about my life," he says. "It's about Warsaw, where half a million were killed. But, yes, I think I know the territory."
Liam Lacey