Playboy Interview: Roman Polanski

There was virtually no action, and the plot was starkly simple: A successful middle-aged Polish journalist, his restless wife and a young hitchhiker they have picked up spend a weekend on a yacht, with subtle, potentially murderous psychosexual tensions developing among them. But "Knife in the Water," Roman Polanski's first feature film (which he co-authored), won an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film of 1963 and made its director internationally famous at the age of 30.

All the violence in "Knife" was in the characters' minds, but Polanski's next two films (which he also co-authored) revealed what some began to consider a morbid fascination with scenes of gruesome death. In "Repulsion," the frenzied insanity of a beautiful young Belgian girl (Catherine Deneuve) drives her to murder her suitor, and "Cul-de-Sac" told a black-humor tale of two criminals who take refuge in the isolated island home of a weak transvestite and his tarty bride. Polanski kept some of his allies among the critics who had heaped praise on "Knife," but others couldn't stomach his taste for the macabre. Time saw "Cul-de-Sac" as "a jittery, tittery comedy of terrors.... In frame after frame, the danger lurks just out of sight until the onlooker feels like a man cooped up with a cobra he can't really see." But Judith Crist complained that the film was entertaining only "for those who can laugh while fighting off nausea."

After a mildly amusing side step in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," a harmless parody of old horror movies, Polanski pushed on to somewhere near the outer limits of suspense with "Rosemary's Baby," his adaptation of Ira Levin's best-selling novel about a modern-day witchcraft cult in Manhattan. Starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, the film was a spectacular success both with the critics and at the box office.

Polanski's personal brushes with suspense and brutality in life began at an early age. When he was eight, his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and not long after, he escaped from the infamous Jewish ghetto in Kraków and survived the war by shunting among various families willing to take him in. One day, he had to dash for cover as a German soldier decided on some casual target practice and whizzed a bullet over Polanski's head. Then, when he was 16, a thug nearly beat him to death.

After he was graduated from Poland's superlative State School of Filming in Lodz, Polanski scrabbled to make a living in Paris for a couple of years before the Polish government finally gave him a budget for his screenplay of "Knife in the Water" and sent him on his way up in the world. He quickly established a reputation as one of the celebrity circuit's most successful bachelors; and in 1968 he married Sharon Tate, a beautiful young American actress. Moving at a fast pace between film sets and their homes in London and Los Angeles, they were known as a jet-set couple until the night of August 9, 1969, when Sharon and three friends--Voyteck Frykowski, men's hair stylist Jay Sebring and coffee heiress Abigail Folger--plus an 18-year-old boy who was visiting the caretaker, were sadistically murdered at Polanski's rented house in Los Angeles. The press gave the case saturation publicity and made it one of the most sensational mass murders in the country's history.

For months, the popular theory was that the murders were committed by someone from the "rich hippie" crowd in which Miss Tate and Polanski were such popular figures. Eventually, the theory proved false, when police apprehended Charles Manson and his bizarre "family" of young men and runaway girls who were living at an abandoned ranch a few miles outside L. A. After a long and widely reported trial, Manson and two of his followers were sentenced to death for the murders and Polanski's name dropped out of the news and the gossip columns. Now, three years after "Rosemary's Baby" and two years after the murders, he has completed the filming of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," adapted for the screen by Polanski and British author-critic (and Contributing Editor) Kenneth Tynan and produced by Playboy Productions. To explore Polanski's vision of himself, his films and his life today, Playboy sent free-lance writer Larry DuBois to London for the first interview he's granted in more than two years. DuBois writes of his experiences:

"Roman Polanski inspires strong, and often conflicting, feelings in people; and after you've been around his pals, women and professional associates for a while, you get used to a frustrating ambivalence about him that is most often expressed in remarks that go something like: 'God, how I like that little bastard.' I couldn't say it any better myself. During the extended course of this interview, there were moments when I'd have fought for Polanski, moments when I only wanted to fight with him--or with the editor responsible for the assignment--and moments when I passionately wished I'd never met either one of them. After most of two and a half months chasing Polanski to wrench from him the 20-odd hours of taped conversation I finally acquired, I see that my own ambivalence fits neatly into four stages, which assumed an almost perfect symmetry as my affection and my irritation deepened simultaneously.

"Stage one: You enjoy him as a gloriously colorful figure, with a keen sense of humor, who takes great pleasure in entertaining whoever happens to be around him with anecdotes--vigorously re-enacted--or a showman's monolog that can go on for an hour or more. But his ego is as unbending as a natural law, and he has a fierce suspicion of anyone, especially a journalist, whose goal is to penetrate the wall of emotional invulnerability he has constructed around himself. So you soon begin to feel this interview is going to be difficult.

"Stage two: Endlessly following him around as he works, you begin to perceive his large talent and his tenacious determination to have any project he is concerned with done his way. I felt quite a sympathy for the technicians at Shepperton Studios who had to cope with Polanski's relentless drive to get every frame of 'Macbeth' absolutely perfect for maximum dramatic effect. I also felt quite a sympathy for myself when Polanski either ended one of our sessions abruptly because he didn't feel in top form or ordered me to 'turn that fucking recorder off' while he paced, pulled at his hair, yelled, told jokes or whatever else he felt like doing while he searched for exactly the word or thought to express what he meant. His Polish accent is thick and his grammar isn't perfect, but his vocabulary and his feel for the nuances of English are simply astonishing for someone who learned it only a few years ago. This talent, and his striving for perfection, makes him an artist to admire. But, as I now realized with a sinking heart, they make an interview even more difficult than I had feared.

"Stage three: Traveling with him, and staying for a week at the lovely 19th Century farmhouse he rents in the countryside a few kilometers from St.-Tropez, you discover that he is a superb companion. He likes to go there to relax in privacy, but he also zooms through the resort's cafés, yachts, discothèques, penny arcades and dinner parties, and gradually a body of empirical evidence accumulates to indicate that he is more than just a talented eccentric. Behind the charm is a remarkable grace, and he turns out to be a generous, considerate, even sentimental man, with real warmth for his friends and even many of his casual acquaintances. By now, however, it is apparent that he is not difficult at all but nearly impossible to interview, being beyond reason about such niceties as schedules, deadlines and questions he can't get excited about.

"Stage four: Unbelievably, you finish. And the sense of accomplishment and relief can only be described as pure joy, because almost without realizing it, you've come to agree with Polanski's friends, who have the same high opinion of his worth that he does; but, as you explain to your editor, you would rather spend the next several months interviewing, say, an insurance salesman about actuarial charts for men over 50 than ask Polanski one more question. Ever.

"My memory barely extends as far back as the beginning of this assignment, but I recall that from his films and the press after the murders of his wife and friends, I had the image of Polanski as a flaky, perhaps even macabre character. On the contrary. He is as cavalier about his work as an ambitious executive and about as macabre as a California beach boy. His disposition is cheery and optimistic. He is straightforward to the point of discomfiting bluntness. He tends to surround himself with intelligent, serious people and gets bored quickly with what he calls 'the aimless, futile individuals' he sometimes encounters in St.-Tropez.

"His only genuine indulgence is women, which is what he does with most of whatever free time he has in St.-Tropez and elsewhere; and in that, he lives up to his image. At least superficially, his seductive style is roughly that of a wily street urchin (he's 5'5?) faced with rich tourists, disarming them with a kind of youthful enthusiasm and naïveté. It works. In his other personal habits, he is almost depressingly disciplined. He exercises diligently. His diet includes wheat germ, yoghurt and other health foods. He rarely drinks more than a glass of wine or beer and he is not above lecturing his friends about the evils of cigarette smoking.

"Now that the interview is over, only one of our many differences still bothers me: He is a most terrifying driver of automobiles. I find nothing endearing about having rocketed with him in an XK-E through the French holiday traffic around St.-Tropez at 110--120 miles per hour. When I tried to explain my own concept of personal safety, he just said, 'You must understand: What seems like a risk to you may not seem like a risk to me.' The uninitiated might read all sorts of meanings into that about his background, and some hidden fatalism. But I dropped the subject, because I knew that, as usual, he meant exactly what he said and no more. He is, quite simply, so goddamn arrogant about his abilities that it's never occurred to him that such speeds might confront him with a situation he can't handle. And as for those who may be unhappy with his pace, well, they're completely free to take a taxi.

"Finally, I should note that there is one section of this interview that didn't require a struggle to extract. One Sunday evening, we sat on the porch of his farmhouse with nothing around for miles but the silent French countryside, and I hesitantly brought up the subject of Sharon and the murders. For two straight hours, without any further coaxing, he told his story, simply and with none of his usual interruptions. He obviously wanted to go through it all once, let it all out; and when he was finished, I think he felt better. For myself, I was unspeakably depressed. It was a couple of days before either of us mentioned the interview again. The transition from that subject to another was a difficult one then, as it is now. So just one last thing: All along, Polanski kept telling me, when the tape recorder was off, that it would be impossible to translate his personality onto paper, since he expresses so much of his irresistibly high-spirited and playful nature through antics rather than words. He's like a movie, he said; he has to be seen to be appreciated. I think he was wrong. I think readers will be able to develop their own affectionate ambivalence about him."

[Q] Playboy: Your films have earned you a reputation as a master of the macabre. How do you explain your fascination with it?

[A] Polanski: I don't know why I like it. Why do some people like boxing, or writing? I'm a film maker; I make pictures. I don't like to talk about them and I don't think about why I make them. You're asking me to psychoanalyze myself and this is not something that interests me at all.

[Q] Playboy: We're not really asking you to psychoanalyze yourself--just to tell us about the personal vision you convey in your films.

[A] Polanski: All right. I'm not preoccupied with the macabre--I'm rather more interested in the behavior of people under stress, when they are no longer in comfortable, everyday situations where they can afford to respect the conventional rules and morals of society. You can really learn something about a person when he's put into circumstances in which civilized values place his own identity, even his very being, in jeopardy. In a way, Knife in the Water was my minute example of this. I took three people and put them in a situation that subjected them to stress, due to their confinement on the yacht and the competition between the two males. In a way, Cul-de-Sac was the same situation, where the people could not react the way they were accustomed to. Before the death of my wife, I was working on a film about the Donner Pass group, which got stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1847. It's an extremely interesting story, because besides being symptomatic of the problems the pioneers faced in the beginning of that country, it shows civilized people reduced to circumstances where they have to decide on the most drastic moral issues, like eating each other, in order to survive. I don't know what I would do in that situation. But I don't think I would eat your flesh. I think I would rather die. Not because I would think there was something morally wrong with eating you after you were dead. I simply don't think I would be willing to swallow your flesh. Would you swallow mine?

[Q] Playboy: Who knows? Our cultural aversion to the idea would probably make us throw up, anyway.

[A] Polanski: Only in the beginning, my friend.

[Q] Playboy: Do you film characters under stress in order to find answers you're seeking for yourself or to force the audience to confront problems you think you already understand?

[A] Polanski: Neither. It simply fascinates me. When something fascinates you, you talk about it, and making films is my way of talking about it.

[Q] Playboy: Why are you more fascinated by characters under stress than by those who aren't?

[A] Polanski: I sometimes surprise myself that I don't ask myself these questions, but I don't. Perhaps if I did, I would know the answers, but I don't feel any need for that. That's the way I am. Perhaps it's because as a child I had plenty of opportunities to see how people behave under stress. I often think: How would a friend with whom you've drunk a lot of vodka and had a lot of fun respond when one morning you plant yourself on his doorstep and say, "Hide me. I'm being chased by the Nazis." And now he has to decide whether or not to risk his life for your friendship. But it's difficult for me to judge how much part the war plays in what I create. I don't think I'm obsessed by what I lived through. I was a child during the war, and children are resilient. Whatever you create, it's an accumulation of millions of things in you, of what you go through as a boy, as a young man, of what you read, of what you see in the cinema, of the people you know. All these have affected my emotional life. I remember, for instance, that one of the profound experiences of my youth was seeing Of Mice and Men. That has stayed with me. I couldn't stop thinking about this big, lovely man and his friend, and their friendship, and I thought that if I were ever a film maker, I would certainly try to do something along those lines, something against injustice and intolerance and prejudice and superstition. And I have. These elements are weaved through my films.

[Q] Playboy: Why, then, did you decide to make Rosemary's Baby, which could be said to have celebrated, or at least popularized, superstition?

[A] Polanski: You don't have to be superstitious to enjoy a fantasy. If you are around me for long, you will see that I have no belief at all in the supernatural of any kind. It's just a fashionable distraction for people seeking easy explanations to certain phenomena they are otherwise incapable of understanding. Myself, I am down to earth in my philosophy of life, very rationally and materialistically oriented, with no interest in the occult. The only obsession that compelled me to make that film was my liking for good cinema. When Bob Evans, the head of production for Paramount, called me and asked me to read the galleys of the book before it was published, I found it fascinating material for a film, with a terrifically suspenseful plot.

[Q] Playboy: Suspense is another of the hallmarks of your films. What makes it so important to you?

[A] Polanski: I'm in the drama business, and suspense is the essence of drama. In my films, I'm concerned with the unexpected and with making what is unbelievable believable. Life is like that to me. We can never control what will happen out there. I don't live my life suspensefully, but in cinema I like the constant unexpected because that's what makes a story interesting. The essential is not to allow the audience to be able to anticipate what is going to happen next.

I remember when I was six, some friends and I made this skull out of clay and put these pieces of glass in it for eyes and hung it on the wall, thinking that anyone who walked by would be scared of it. I also remember making a mask of the Devil with a red tongue made out of a candy wrapper, then putting a flashlight behind it. These are the things that intrigued me--but not for any supernatural or bizarre reasons, only because I already liked the show-business aspect of this mask making. My fondness for the dramatic and the unexpected has always been so obvious to me that I never stopped to ask why. I must have been born with it.

[Q] Playboy: Your past films have been contemporary suspense stories. Now you've chosen to direct a medieval Shakespearean tragedy. Why?

[A] Polanski: After the murders, everything I was considering seemed futile to me. I couldn't think of a subject that seemed worth while or dignified enough to spend a year or more on it, in view of what happened to me. That may sound extremely pompous, but I couldn't make another suspense story. And I certainly couldn't make a comedy; I couldn't make a casual film. In the state of mind I found myself, this type of project seemed most acceptable. As a kid, I loved Shakespeare, and when I was a teenager I saw Laurence Olivier's Hamlet 20 times. I always had this great desire to make a Shakespearean movie someday, and when I finally decided I must go back to work, I thought to myself: "That's something I could do, that's something I could give myself to. That's worth the effort."

[Q] Playboy: From all of Shakespeare's plays, what made you choose Macbeth?

[A] Polanski:Macbeth was the most seductive because there are a lot of lines and descriptions that are verbal but can be easily translated into great action scenes, and because there is a great character in Macbeth, who can be developed and shown a new way on the screen.

[Q] Playboy:Macbeth is also a tragedy full of violence and murder. In view of your personal memories, wasn't it difficult for you to film those scenes?

[A] Polanski: No. When you're actually staging such scenes, it's amusing. It has nothing to do with reality. You never even associate it with reality. It's all artifice, special effects. A knife is not a knife and blood is not blood. You can play with it, and we all laughed and behaved like children doing those scenes. It's only when you put it together later and show it to an audience that you realize there's something horrific in it. But certainly not during the actual filming.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics and moviegoers may feel that you chose Macbeth as a kind of catharsis, to purge yourself of the kind of violence you had so recently experienced in your own life. What would you say to them?

[A] Polanski: I would say they are full of shit, because it's not so. I've told you why I decided to make this film, and once I decided to do it, I had to do it according to my own standards. If you make a film about a murder, you have to show the murder, or do a film about something else. If you use the screen as a medium, then what you tell has to be told by visual means. Of course, you could put a guy in front of a camera and have him read the play and the same story would be told to your audience in a different, perhaps more gentle way. I happen to think it would also be a very boring way. When you're telling a story about a man who kills a head of state to take his place, you are absolutely obligated to show the act that is the culmination of the whole play.

[Q] Playboy: There's still the question of taste and finesse. Some critics have said that you've indulged in excessive violence on the screen.

[A] Polanski: The way I've done it is with finesse. Others do it euphemistically. They are afraid to show what is essential to the story. I will never forget a growing tension in the churchyard scene of Zorba the Greek, which culminates with a throat cutting that unfortunately happens just below the bottom edge of the screen. That was the end of the movie for me, because the director had copped out. He showed his cowardice. If you tell a joke that requires the use of four-letter words, then you have to say them. It's not good to say, "He grabbed her and ... dot, dot, dot, dot." It's better to tell another story. Showing the violence is an analogous situation, isn't it?

[Q] Playboy: But critics might argue that the graphic portrayal of violence is analogous to pornography, not only with no redeeming social value but with harmful effects on those who see it.

[A] Polanski: These people delude themselves that violence can be caused by what is on the screen. They should ask little children on the street what causes violence and they would become more enlightened. For me, when I see something violent happening on the screen, I react against it; I think this is most people's reaction. If there is violence on the screen that can make people act violently in their lives, it's the sterilized Hollywood conception of violence. It's the Western where the bad guy aggravates you so much for 90 minutes that finally, when the good guy gets rid of him in a tidy way, you feel relieved and happy. So what develops in young minds is that when somebody is bad enough, you can get rid of him--and without a mess. This is murder committed the "clean" way, murder that can be endorsed by movie-rating authorities who miss its real meaning. To me, this is immorality.

But if you show killing in an agonizing, realistic way, with the spurting of blood and people dying slowly and horribly, that is reality, because very rarely does a man die instantly, and to witness that on the screen can do nothing but repel you from engaging in it in real life. Look at literature. The Bible is enough to make you faint. And when Sholokhov tells you about the atrocities in Russia in And Quiet Flows the Don. he describes them with utmost detail and nobody would ever think of criticizing it, because that's how literature evolved, whereas cinema is something young, something much more commercial, and boundaries were forced upon it, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, so it couldn't evolve in the proper way. Instead, the cinema has tended to draw hypocritical, gilded pictures of life and death.

But even if Macbeth weren't a play about murder, the critics would be asking why I chose to make it after Sharon's death. What if I had made a scene with Macbeth, dagger in hand, going to the king's chambers, and then ... dot, dot, dot, dot? They would say, "After what happened to him, he lost his balls." Or what if I had decided to make a comedy? They would say, "After the murders, he has the bad taste to do a comedy."

[Q] Playboy: For the past two years, you've remained silent about the murder of your wife and friends, despite the enormous and lurid exposure it has received in the press. Are you willing to tell your side of the story now?

[A] Polanski: It's not something I talk about with friends, but I would like to go through it once from beginning to end. I have terrific difficulty in trying to reconstruct that period, but I have some definite things to say about it. I lost something most precious to me, and I'm sure that the people who were close to us feel the same way. But when it happened, the press said in unison, "Yes, of course, that's the way he lived, that's what he created in his films, and here is the result." That was the first outburst. Time magazine said, "It was a scene as grisly as anything in Polanski's film explorations of the dark and melancholy side of the human character." I was baffled, to say the least, by the cheapness and platitude of such writing. I remember their headline: "Nothing but bodies." It was sickening, the way the press sensationalized something that was already sensational.

This was a subject I knew more about than anybody else, a subject very near to my heart. I had long known that it was impossible for a journalist to convey 100 percent of the truth, but I didn't realize to what extent the truth is distorted, both by the intentions of the journalist and by neglect. I don't mean just the interpretations of what happened; I also mean the facts. The reporting about Sharon and the murders was virtually criminal. Reading the papers, I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe my eyes! They blamed the victims for their own murders. I really despise the press. I didn't always. The press made me despise it.

Some of those articles! From Pageant: "Those Sharon Tate Orgies: Sex, Sadism, Celebrities." Incredible! Particularly in view of the fact that a woman eight and a half months pregnant has limited desires for orgies. It was like the press suddenly had a new dictionary, with words like masochism, sadism, sodomy, suicide, witchcraft, rituals, drug abuse and necrophilia. They put in everything they could imagine. One magazine ran a photograph of Sharon with the four other victims floating around behind her like champagne bubbles while she is dancing. God damn them! The victims were assassinated two times: once by the murderers, the second time by the press.

[Q] Playboy: Why, do you think?

[A] Polanski: I don't know. I really don't know. I think because of some resentment, some bitterness, some jealousy; and let me tell you, a lot of journalists and nonjournalists who wrote "personal" accounts of what they claimed to know made a lot of money off the case. I wonder to myself: Were the people who wrote those slanderous articles any better than the murderers? I don't think so. They just use different forms of expression. Tell me, what makes the press so fucking vituperative?

[Q] Playboy: There's no question that certain elements of the press had a field day exploiting the murders, but the legitimate press made a more serious and responsible effort to find out if there was some connection between the victims and the murderers. Wasn't that both logical and understandable?

[A] Polanski: Yes, I suppose. But they all groped for the "irony" in the murders, which was nonsense, and then turned my films into a metaphor for the murders. And they all believed there had to be a logical motive, so they slandered us with articles about "the wild parties that led to the massacre"--which is an exact title of one newspaper story--and the connections of Jay Sebring and Voyteck with certain anonymous drug dealers. These articles remind me of the story about the guy who says to his friend, "Imagine. Pâté de foie gras, two-inch steak, with spinach and French fries, chocolate pudding and coffee, all for twenty-five cents," and his friend says, "That's impossible. Where?" And he answers, "I didn't say where. I said, 'Imagine.'"

There is a couple who live in Hollywood, Joe Hyams and Elke Sommer. He's supposed to be a writer and she's supposed to be an actress, yet they were both out there peddling articles saying that they knew the way we lived and the people we hung around with, and so they knew that tragedy would happen to us sooner or later. Astonishing! I met them once in my life. Once! But there is something magical about the printed word, so the average reader says, "Well, if they print it, it must be true," and the press was booming about this sort of thing so often and with such assurance that even some of our friends were affected by it. They would read something and say, "We didn't know about that." And I would say, "I didn't either."

What people read about us after the murders would make them ask one question: When did they have the time to work, between their orgies and rituals and drug taking? How did I have time to make four films in three and a half years? How did Sharon have the time to make even more? How did Jay Sebring run a business? Abigail Folger was a social worker who got up at six in the morning to go to Watts to work, then to a speed-reading class after work, and she would come back at 11 at night, utterly exhausted and hardly able to perform rituals and orgies before getting up at six again the next morning. And Voyteck was desperately trying to get something together in films. I had promised him a job on a film about dolphins I was preparing, and he was very excited about that and doing his own research on the subject. Time magazine said he had "sinister connections to which even the tolerant Polanski objected." Where do they get this stuff? I ask you. Where do they get it?

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps from the reputation you and many of your friends had around Los Angeles for being sort of "rich hippies" whose life style revolved around parties, drugs, casual sex and the like.

[A] Polanski: All us sinful hedonists, eh? Should that have made the tragedy seem understandable to people? How could the press accept that as the explanation? These were all very good people, and this was a happy, blameless period of my life. There were lots of parties at people's houses, on the beach or in the mountains, and often Sharon would make dinner, and there was this magnificent group of friends who would come to our house, and we would sit outside where it was warm, with the sky full of stars, and listen to music or talk for hours--films, sex, politics or whatever. We all tried to help each other, we were all happy at each other's successes, and it was beautiful, and so new to me. I never knew life could be a luxury. It had always been hotel rooms and struggle, and now I loved this life, I loved the place, I loved the people, I loved my work. I was paying my maid over $200 a week, which is probably what a Polish worker earns in six months. I could not believe such affluence and comfort. Sharon and I had great prospects. We wanted to settle for good in Los Angeles. We had big plans. It seemed to be a kind of peculiar, happy dream. But there was nothing freaked out, sinister or immoral about it.

[Q] Playboy: There were stories that Sebring and Frykowski were into a drug-dealing scene.

[A] Polanski: Those stories were nonsense. The most they would ever do was buy pot from someone for their own use.

[Q] Playboy: At the time, the press stressed that Frykowski and Abigail Folger had been living in your house for several months, even while you were away, and that Sebring always seemed to be around. The implication was that this was evidence of bizarre goings on.

[A] Polanski: Jay was a frequent visitor, but he never stayed at the house. It seemed reasonable to have Voyteck and Gibby stay there to watch the house while we were gone, and when Sharon returned from London to Los Angeles before I did, we both felt better that she would have someone there with her. So it could hardly be considered some bizarre scene. You've seen how people come and go from my house in St.-Tropez. You've also seen that it's pretty innocent, in a college-fraternity sort of way.

[Q] Playboy: What about the occult rituals that stories said were taking place--stories that gained momentum from the fact that you had directed Rosemary's Baby?

[A] Polanski: Do you want me to be rude with you? As I said before, not only do I not endorse the occult but it is something so foreign to my rational, materialistic philosophy of life that I protest against those implications. And Sharon--it was fantastic what they were attributing to her. In death, they made a monster out of her. A monster out of the sweetest, most innocent, lovable human being. She was kindness itself to everybody and everything around her--people, animals, everything. She just didn't have a bad bone in her body. She was a unique person. It's difficult to describe her character. She was just utterly good, the kindest human being I've ever met, with an extreme patience. To live with me was proof of her patience, because to be near me must be an ordeal. She never had a bad temper, she was never moody. She enjoyed being a wife. The press and the public knew of her physical beauty, but she also had a beautiful soul, and this is something that only her friends knew about. Before I met Sharon in 1966, my love life, as opposed to my sex life, had been unsuccessful and painful, and I guarded my freedom. My first marriage had been a very traumatic experience.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Polanski: After I left Poland and was wandering around Paris in circles, young and full of enthusiasm, I was married briefly to a Polish actress--but I really hate talking about it for some reason. Not because it's painful to talk about but because it's so futile. So let's not talk about it. OK?

[Q] Playboy: OK. You were saying you met Sharon in 1966.

[A] Polanski: While filming The Fearless Vampire Killers, in which she had a role. I was living what you would call the life of a playboy, and marriage was the last thing in my mind. Except for the few months of my first marriage, I had lived all my life like a nomad. I grew up sitting on suitcases in the midst of war. My mother was taken to the concentration camp when I was eight and my father was taken a few months later. I felt that any type of family tie, anything that means nest, ends in tragedy. But seeing Sharon more and more often, I knew a sentimental relationship was developing. At the beginning, I was afraid of this. But she was so extremely understanding, tactful and clever. Being around me, she still made me feel absolutely free, and she made it clear that she was not going to engulf me. I remember once her words, "I am not one of those ladies who swallow a man." And it was true. Finally, she moved to my house in London and we began to live together, and a new emotional adventure started. After two years, I realized that she would like to get married. She never asked me, never said a word about it. So finally I said, "I'm sure you would like to get married," and she said she would. So I said, "We'll get married, then," and we did. By that time, I wasn't nervous about it at all.

Sharon was the first woman in my life who really made me feel happy. I mean literally aware of being happy. That's a very rare state. Strangely enough, about a week or two before her death, I remember an instant when I was thinking of it, and I was actually thinking: "I am a happy man!" And it was a sentiment that I hadn't known before, because there had always been something missing from my happiness, some little thing that always needed adjusting. I also remember thinking--and here is my middle-European background, probably--I remember thinking: "This cannot possibly last. It's impossible to last." And I suddenly got scared. I was thinking that you can't maintain such a status quo. I didn't have anything tragic in mind, but I was afraid, being quite a realist, that such a state cannot last indefinitely.

[Q] Playboy: How did the news of the murders come to you?

[A] Polanski: I was in our house in London, working on a script for The Day of the Dolphin, with my friends Andy Braunsberg and Michael Brown. I was walking around the room talking about one scene and the phone rang. It was my agent in Los Angeles. He said, "Roman, there was a disaster in a house." I said, "Which house?" "Your house," and then quickly, in one go, he said, "Sharon is dead, and Voyteck and Jay and Abigail."

[Q] Playboy: What then?

[A] Polanski: I just kept saying, "No, no, no, no." My first reaction was that there must have been a hill slide, with the mountains sliding down or something. I said, "How?" He said, "I don't know, I don't know." He was crying on the other end of the line, and I was crying, and I just kept saying it was insane, and finally he told me they had been murdered. A little while later, another friend came to our house and we went out and walked the streets for a while. When we came back, they called a doctor, who gave me a shot, and I slept.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to be in London just then, when Sharon was eight and a half months pregnant, rather than with her?

[A] Polanski: I had been working on that script for several months, while Sharon was doing a film in London. She was quite pregnant but working until the last possible moment. We were planning that I could finish the script and we would return to Los Angeles together, but the script kept dragging on. By this time, Sharon couldn't fly anymore, because the airlines don't allow you to after a certain period of pregnancy, so she decided to take the boat home. I couldn't take the boat, because it took so long, so I was supposed to take a plane as soon as I finished the script, and this was to be just days after she arrived in Los Angeles.

When she left London, I took Sharon to the boat, the Q. E. II, and we had lunch. When they asked visitors to leave the boat came the moment when we had to say goodbye to each other--the saddest moment of my life, because we were seeing each other for the last time and didn't know it. I remember I called her on the ship later that afternoon. She was telling me the news about our new dog, named Prudence. She told me the dog was very happy on the boat because her rubber ball never stopped rolling around the cabin. After that, we talked daily on the phone. The bill was astronomical. On the last call, just ten hours before it happened--it was a Friday--she told me that they had found a wild kitten and they were trying to feed it with an eyedropper, and they were keeping him in the bathtub because he was absolutely wild, jumping on people, etc. Funny how life is weaved out of these little banal moments that make it worth while. At the end of that call, I said, "I'm coming Monday." I was annoyed that I had to say Monday, because she couldn't wait for me to come, and I couldn't wait to leave, but the goddamn script kept dragging on. So I told her, "I'm coming Monday, whether I'm through or not." That was our last conversation.

[Q] Playboy: How long did it take you to accept the fact of her death?

[A] Polanski: A long time. At first the reaction is panic. Completely disjointed, you can't concentrate, you can't put things together to realize what has actually happened. You can't believe. You can't conceive of the fact that she and the others are no longer alive. I could not grasp this very thin moment that separated their existence from nothingness. After that came a period of utter grief that lasted as long as the investigation. Somehow, those two things were parallel. For months, I thought of nothing else and then, all at once, when the crime was solved, my obsession stopped. Then came the period of dismissal, of withdrawal. I moved to Switzerland and started skiing myself silly with a bunch of friends, hedonists you would call them. They were wonderful to me. Kind and gentle and tactful, but I was able to do it all only for the dismissal.

And after the period of extensive skiing and social life. I decided to go back to work. Right after the murders, everyone kept patting me on the shoulder and saying I must go back to work, and work would make me forget, make my life worth while. But I couldn't even have tried to pull myself together at that point, and I remember talking to Stanley Kubrick and he said, "I'm sure that everybody tells you to work. You can't work in this state of mind, but there will come a moment when you feel suddenly, 'I have to go out and work.'" And that is exactly what happened after the period in Switzerland. I have worked for over a year on Macbeth and now, two years after it happened, you talk to me, ask me questions, and it seems as though it all happened two weeks ago. So it's a kind of trial for me.

[Q] Playboy: Do you want to go through with it?

[A] Polanski: Absolutely.

[Q] Playboy: When your period of grief set in, how did you feel about not having been there that night?

[A] Polanski: I had, and still have, a tremendous feeling of guilt, a feeling that if I had been there, it wouldn't have happened, contrary to what our friends thought. They thought if I had been there. I wouldn't be here now.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you could have defended Sharon and the others from the murderers?

[A] Polanski: I think I would have been able to prevent it. I don't think I would let myself be intimidated or overcome by anybody. I think I could have prevented it.

[Q] Playboy: During the investigation of the murders, were you questioned by the police?

[A] Polanski: Extensively. I stayed in Los Angeles because I thought my presence could be useful to them. As a matter of fact, along with our friends, the cops were the best people of all in this situation. Unlike the press, the police were realistic, but human and with genuine feeling. They were devoted to their job and I had occasion to see all sides of their personalities and their own personal problems. They were great people. I think of them with a lot of sentiment.

[Q] Playboy: How did you think you might be useful to them?

[A] Polanski: I thought maybe there would be some minute clue they had overlooked. And I thought I could think of people, people who had come to our house, for instance, who wouldn't occur to the police. The press was writing so much about Jay and Voyteck being the probable motives, or essential persons, that I finally started to believe there could be someone I didn't know about. So I tried to establish step by step what everybody who knew us was doing at the time. It was quite difficult without seeming too obvious, and I didn't want anyone to know I was in constant touch with the police. I never believed it was some drug supplier of Jay's. I thought it was the work of some insane person, terribly jealous of one of us for some reason, but I couldn't give myself any plausible answer. I just kept listening and looking.

It's very difficult for me to talk about it. There are things I'm not sure we should even talk about. I was under this tremendous illusion that by solving the crime, it would be easier on me, somehow. Only after months did I understand that I was just chasing rabbits, running around in circles, that finding the murderers wouldn't bring her back. And I had to explain this to Sharon's parents, who I felt were under the same illusion. Colonel Tate, Sharon's father, was also seeing the police every day, for the same reasons I was. Thank God, Sharon's parents never allowed themselves to believe the trash the press was printing about us.

[Q] Playboy: You never felt the Tates somehow blamed you?

[A] Polanski: No. They were with me all the time. They knew the people who were our friends and they knew the press was lying about the way we lived.

[Q] Playboy: As it turned out, did you do anything during the investigation that now seems to have been helpful?

[A] Polanski: How could I? No one I knew had anything to do with it. I remember, at the very beginning, Lieutenant Bob Helder told me about this group of hippies living at that ranch with this guy they called Jesus Christ. Bob said they were suspected of being involved in the killing of some musician and writing a note on his body, and there was a possibility that these people had something to do with it. I said, "Come on, Bob, you're prejudiced against hippies." And I remember his words: "You should suspect everyone. Don't dismiss it so easily." But I didn't think much about it, because I could see no connection and I had nothing instinctively against them as hippies. The hippies, with their "Make love, not war" philosophy, were sympathetic figures to me.

[Q] Playboy: Before you knew who was guilty, didn't you fear for your own life?

[A] Polanski: In such a state, you don't give a damn for your own life. I was hoping that he, or they, would show up. I was living on the beach with a dear friend of mine, Dick Sylbert, the art director of Rosemary's Baby. He was mother and father and brother--I won't say wife--to me for three months, with me being constantly preoccupied. Poor guy. The neighbors were all up in arms about me being there. They believed what they read in the papers and thought they might have a scandal, or a murder, in their neighborhood. But I was prepared to defend myself if anything happened.

[Q] Playboy: Were you carrying a gun?

[A] Polanski: I asked the police and they said I shouldn't, because if something happened and I used a weapon, there would be all sorts of trouble. I didn't really want a gun anyway. I felt I could take care of myself; and anyway, it didn't matter, because I was obsessed with finding who was responsible. Then suddenly, when the police announced to the press that they had the murderers, the press had to somehow pretend they had known it was something like this all along, something totally unconnected with us and with my films, and I remember the policemen laughing sarcastically about how the press had now decided that the victims were not actually the guilty ones after all. Suddenly, it was obvious to them that it had been a bunch of crazy hippies, and people like Mr. Elke Sommer promptly forgot that he "saw the murder coming." The victims were now dismissed within 24 hours and new things started appearing--phony interviews with me and quotes that I was "overjoyed" at the news. That word hardly describes my emotions. But at that moment, a strange thing happened to me: I was relieved. I lost all interest in what was going to happen.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Polanski: I finally realized that the only way to get over it was to dismiss it completely, and also I knew I couldn't change anything. It's like the only way to cope with the stress was to dismiss everything, to erase that part of the tape from my memory bank. It just disappeared in my head. I had no reason to follow what the press said about Manson, because I had no reason to believe they would be any more accurate about him than they were about Sharon and me, so I didn't read at all about him. All that I do know about Manson I knew from the police in those days before they broke the news to the press. For my own good, I completely ignored him and that trial, particularly because the press made a real circus out of it. The way they handled it was as deplorable as the way they handled the reporting of the murders. Before you ask how I know if I didn't read about it, I'll tell you: There are headlines you can't avoid, and the radio. You can't escape knowing certain things. I can't reconstruct the trial period for you at all, but I suspect that the ritualistic element of the crazy sect was grossly exaggerated by the press and that the assassins willingly capitalized on that, being aware that this aura would give him more chance of publicity, which would render the trial more complicated.

[Q] Playboy: What makes you suspect that?

[A] Polanski: One of the policemen told me about one of Manson's friends being in jail--this was before the murders--and Manson was trying to get the money somewhere to bail him out, and they went to Terry Melcher, who had been renting the house before we moved in. I don't know the details and I don't even know if this was ever brought up at the trial, but in any case, I think they were after money that night, and Manson was clever enough to know that if money came to be viewed as the motive, he wouldn't seem such a mystifying figure, because materialistic motives are always regarded as more easily understandable, and therefore dismissed, than any kind of ideological motives. Even if the ideological motives are pure evil, people will pay much more attention to them than to robbery by an ordinary criminal, because then they have to contest the ideology. Manson knew if he was seen as a false god, not only would he get more attention but he would even force the middle-class hypocrites he hated so much to look at him more closely and compare his values with theirs. But his ideological, ritualistic motives for the murders were tremendously exaggerated.

[Q] Playboy: From what you know of him, how would you analyze a man like Charles Manson?

[A] Polanski: In any hippie area, you see sometimes an older guy, maybe even middle-aged, maybe with a fat stomach, who without the cover of hippiedom would only be a fat, perhaps pathetic man. But here he is with the long hair and wearing flowery shirts, and he seems to be an entirely different individual, and he enjoys the promiscuity of this type of life, and he becomes an attractive person to the hippies, who may be very naïve and ignorant. Now, this guy is basically the same as he was in straight society, with all the same impulses and motivations he had developed there, whatever those may be, but he becomes a part of the hippies and masquerades as one of them. Christ, it's so difficult to explain what I mean. I'm not a verbalist. I express myself every way better than with words. I want to tell you a story that will perhaps explain what I mean.

[Q] Playboy: Go ahead.

[A] Polanski: When I was 16 in Poland, and tremendously interested in bicycle racing, I met a guy in his 20s, and I hung around with him a little bit and kind of liked him. He was what you would call now a groovy guy. He offered to sell me a racing bicycle for a very cheap price and I got greedy. I had this appointment to meet him in an old German bunker near the park, and I went down to meet him and he got me alone and hit me on the head with a stone five times. I still have the scars on my scalp. I lost consciousness for a few seconds, and then I saw him standing above me asking where the money was. He took it and my watch and ran away. I couldn't understand why he had done that. A few minutes later, he was caught by some truck drivers, and a week later, the detectives came to the hospital to ask me for details. I said, "Will he get a long sentence?" They laughed at me. "He's going to be hanged," one of them said. "He killed three people before this."

It was the first time I was acquainted with this type of individual. People seem to dismiss the fact that Manson had a criminal track record, too. He spent a great deal of his life in prison. He had a record long before he tried to be a hippie. This man who hit me with the stone was another Manson, only Manson was lucky to live in a period when certain attributes are considered virtues: He could wear long hair and a beard for his hippie masquerade, while preaching a philosophy that was basically criminal. This other guy, who was trying to murder me, he was just a murderer, and no one would view him as anything but a criminal. No one would have mistaken him for a Jesus.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned earlier that the hippies were sympathetic figures for you. Are they still?

[A] Polanski: Remember the first be-ins in Central Park, when they would throw flowers at the policemen? How blameless. I think these people were sincere at that time. But the hippies don't really exist anymore. The hippie movement has degenerated, but the degeneration came from the top, not from the bottom. When the kids began preaching new values, the Government tried to beat their ideas out of them. The reaction, from Berkeley on, was only what you could expect: violence.

[Q] Playboy: Critics feel that drugs were an integral part of the hippie philosophy and a principal reason for the psychological degeneration of some of them, including the girls who carried out Manson's orders.

[A] Polanski: I don't have a professional knowledge about drugs to say anything really sound about it, but I do know that marijuana and the other hallucinogenic drugs are rather a source of indolence. They are dropout drugs. They make people passive. In this respect, you could say that these drugs make people more easily influenced; but, on the other hand, they would not incite you to take any action, any active enterprise, and they are certainly not murderous drugs. You know what marijuana does to people: They want to lay about and do nothing, smile and listen to music. So you have to decide which way you want it. You can't blame these drugs for making people indolent and also for inciting them to violent crime.

[Q] Playboy: But weren't hallucinogenic drugs a part of the whole pathology that turned Manson from a common criminal into a Jesus Christ figure in the eyes of his followers--a pathology that would require a certain passivity on the part of those being manipulated?

[A] Polanski: I think definitely that the people who are submitted to this kind of life are more vulnerable than regular members of society; but whatever the drugs do, they don't make you lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Do you think you could commit a murder under the influence of drugs?

[Q] Playboy: No. But we're talking now about those emotionally crippled young girls who, without exposure to a cult of mind-bending drugs, slavelike promiscuity and the rituals of a would-be Jesus Christ, would almost certainly never have been galvanized into committing murder.

[A] Polanski: Don't forget that certain individuals have a talent to draw masses behind them. Hitler did the same thing with normal, straight, square German society.

[Q] Playboy: Even given the historical fact of Hitler, aren't you willing to admit that drugs, which you accept or at least defend, played some role in what happened?

[A] Polanski: No. Which drugs? I think there is nothing wrong with marijuana. There are millions of people smoking pot, but there is no parallel of Manson's story within any other group of people that I could speak of. I can think of more similarities between Manson and In Cold Bood than with the pot smokers of this world. People are just looking for an easy excuse, an easy explanation for the murders. Personally, I don't think it had anything to do with smoking marijuana.

[Q] Playboy: What about LSD?

[A] Polanski: I have never endorsed LSD. I took about three trips on acid several years ago, and they were all bad and I swore off. But that's still an answer that's too easy. How about those people in West Pakistan, who maybe in their ordinary lives were just quiet peasants or office clerks before they were sent off with the army on its binges of murder? How about the German soldier committing atrocities during the war, who might have been an ordinary man with a family and children? Were these people under the influence of LSD? How about Charles Whitman and Richard Speck? How about Lieutenant Calley? He seems to me a very straight person by conventional standards. I just think that certain people need very little excuse to commit criminal acts, and maybe the drugs were an excuse for Manson and these girls to vent their murderous instincts.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react to the death sentences they received?

[A] Polanski: In principle, I'm against capital punishment. I think the world would be a better place if it were abolished. I don't think capital punishment is moral, because we should not presume to terminate somebody's life.

[Q] Playboy: Then you oppose the sentences?

[A] Polanski: You're asking a very difficult question. A very difficult question. Because I really don't know. I feel very often a need for revenge. I suspect revenge may be one of the most important motives in human progress and in seeking justice. But it remains to be determined how the revenge should be performed. If the criminal kills eight people and is captured and tried, is it moral or immoral to take his life? I think it's immoral. Capital punishment is just another brutalizing aspect of modern life.

I don't know if I'm being clear. If you ask me should there be capital punishment, I say no. But if you ask me about a particular case of someone who engineered a murder--and remember, my emotional state is involved--in a jurisdiction where capital punishment exists within the system in which he was judged, then I would say to give him anything less than the maximum that exists is immoral. Who should be given more? I think Manson did the utmost, and within the set of rules that exists, he should be given the utmost sentence. He committed his crime while capital punishment was still the maximum sentence that could be handed out in California. At one point, I was asked to make the gesture of asking for clemency for him and I said I wouldn't do that. I think that would be an act of hypocrisy on my part; but I do ask for abolition of capital punishment for everyone, not just for Manson.

[Q] Playboy: Was it an act of hypocrisy for Ted Kennedy to ask clemency for Sirhan Sirhan?

[A] Polanski: Yes, I think so. That's precisely what I was thinking of when I said I wouldn't be willing to do that. I wouldn't be against siding with Ted Kennedy, saying that we are against capital punishment as part of the system of law. But I think it's phony nobility to go to bat, as it were, for your "pet" murderer, the one who caused you so much suffering.

[Q] Playboy: You said earlier that your experiences during the war had taught you that family ties end in tragedy. After a little more than two years since the murders, do you feel they were yet another lesson that one's happiness will always be snatched away?

[A] Polanski: You mention the word lesson. Unfortunately, there is no lesson to be taken. There is just nothing. It's absolutely senseless, stupid, cruel and insane. I'm not sure it's even worth talking about. Sharon and the others are dead. I can't restore what was.

[Q] Playboy: But has the experience changed your vision of life?

[A] Polanski: I don't know. I wouldn't call myself a fatalist, because those are people who just sit and wait for whatever will happen to them, and I'm not like that. I have always been sentimental and not a cynic, and that hasn't changed, but these are wounds that don't leave you without scars. I think I was probably a better human being before. It's difficult to define, but I think I was more gentle with people before. I don't think my emotional state now would permit me to develop serious new emotional ties with anybody.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you appear to have feeling for, and ties with, those around you.

[A] Polanski: You don't change your character drastically. It's only a note that changes. There was more youth in my feeling for people, more naïveté. I don't even know if the change is visible to my friends. I think it is.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you give the impression of having adjusted. You seem a happy enough man.

[A] Polanski: How could you even suspect me of such a thing? How could I be happy? There must be something that makes you happy.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to enjoy your friends, and your women, and your work.

[A] Polanski: These are things that give me pleasure, even make me content. But there's nothing that really makes me happy. Not anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Then what keeps you going?

[A] Polanski: I'm asking myself that question. What is it in the human being that makes him overcome practically everything and keep going? I don't know. There are endless people with tragedies more atrocious than mine, and they keep plowing away, too. After a period of mourning, they somehow restore their way of life. But I tell you, I know myself and I feel there's something gone. I don't have the same desires, the same dreams I used to have. I don't know why. It's something that's troubled me for quite some time now. It must be connected somehow with the death of Sharon, but also I think it's partly the fact that I have already achieved what I always dreamed of.

[Q] Playboy: You mean that having achieved major success as a film maker, you're not as driven as you once were?

[A] Polanski: Precisely. Throughout the years, my basic engine was the desire to make films. I dreamed of doing films, and somehow I don't feel this overpowering urge anymore. I first noticed the symptoms of my loss of enthusiasm when I went to Hollywood to make Rosemary's Baby. The first day I went onstage with 70 people waiting for me, I remembered the day I had first gone on location to shoot Knife in the Water. Then, I'd had butterflies in my stomach and that incredible feeling of anticipation that prevents you from going to sleep the whole night before. Now, here I was in Hollywood, in the place that belonged more to my dreams than to my reality, at the threshold of where everything would be handed to me, and I felt absolutely no thrill. I felt I was just going to work for the day--work I loved doing, but there was no thrill in it. Do you understand?

[Q] Playboy: Yes. But how, then, did you turn in your best work? Or did you?

[A] Polanski: I did a good job, but not my best work. Maybe it's just pride in craft. Maybe that is the way to achieve the maximum in what you do. I care about what I make. It's a dear thing to me and I think it remains so because it's a part of human nature to want to do something durable. Who was the Pharaoh who built the biggest of the pyramids? He must have been quite persistent, making these people put one stone on top of another for years in order to create something that would last. I'm quite persistent myself, only lately I am asking myself sometimes: "Why bother?" Maybe it's just that I am more sure of myself and my abilities. Maybe that's it. Or maybe I'm just more relaxed. But, on the other hand, a cow is relaxed. Maybe I should ask some maharishi. Maybe he would tell me that I have become wiser. I would hate to become wiser, but I think that, in a way, that's what has happened.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you resist wisdom?

[A] Polanski: Because wise people are boring and they usually lack the enthusiasm and spontaneity to make things come together. I'm afraid it's inevitable that the more experience you acquire, the more you lose your desires, your dreams, your fantasies. It's the same thing in sex. I just don't enjoy it as much as I used to. It's getting a bit repetitious. It's very much like making films; your wisdom and security and experience bring your craft up to a high standard, but you get less thrill out of it as an individual.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe your ordained role is to serve as a craftsman, bringing pleasure to moviegoers and women.

[A] Polanski: I like that idea. I wish it were true. They say that happiness is seeking the fulfillment of our desires, and usually people spend their lives seeking that fulfillment. But I am at a stage where I'm seeking the desires. Have you got any ideas? Help me. Tell me what is the problem here. If not for the sake of the interview, then at least maybe I'll get something out of it.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps you're just suffering from the onset of middle age.

[A] Polanski: I do start feeling that now, and I'm very surprised, because I thought it would never happen. Being a born optimist, who never thinks he's going to fail in anything he undertakes, I'm caught off guard by it. But I don't think it's going to last long. It's just a passing stage that will go away as I grow younger.

[Q] Playboy: In the meantime, you seem to be doing a successful, if not inspired, job of living the life of what you would call a hedonist.

[A] Polanski: I don't know whether I'm a hedonist. It's just my reputation. If I am, I work harder than any other hedonist I've ever met. I'm quite spartan in some ways. I get up early, I exercise to keep myself in shape; I rather like the boy scout, sportive way of life. Yet I do love everything life has to offer; so I don't reject luxury if I can afford it, and I don't reject any source of joy that you can acquaint yourself with in your lifetime--particularly sex.

[Q] Playboy: Would one be correct to attribute your refusal to deny yourself any of life's luxuries or pleasures to your childhood during the war, when you were deprived of them?

[A] Polanski: No. What if I had had a marvelous childhood with rows of lackeys and nannies bringing me hot chocolate and chauffeurs driving me to the cinema? Then you would say I am this way because I had such a luxurious childhood. The truth is I am just this way. Period. But I will tell you, I did have sexual problems as a youth.

[Q] Playboy: What kind?

[A] Polanski: I had an absolute patent on masturbation when I was 12. I thought I invented it. But it made me feel terrifically guilty, and each time I was doing it, I was promising myself it was the last time, definitely the last time I was touching it. Until the next morning. I didn't make it with a chick until I was 17-1/2, which I think is very late.

[Q] Playboy: According to the press, you've certainly made up for lost time ever since.

[A] Polanski: I found out I like sex. How about that? I like fucking. You remember Kafka's story about the man who fasts professionally in a circus? He was breaking his own records, fasting longer and longer, and finally he fasts so long that everybody forgets all about him. They even forget to mark on his little blackboard the number of days of his fast, which already was incredible. Finally, a cleaning man comes and finds him agonizing under a pile of straw, and he leans down and asks, "Why did you do it? Why?" And with his dry lips and his fading voice, the faster says, "I hated food!" It's beautiful. There was no other reason for fasting. I'm the opposite. I screw because I like screwing. That's all there is to it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you concern yourself with the moral issues involved with sex?

[A] Polanski: Of course. I don't want to sound pompous, but in a way, I'm actually a moralist. I cherish certain qualities of a civilized mind, qualities that are very difficult to measure or describe, because they have quite flimsy names like nobility, loyalty, etc. This applies, for instance, to my friends. Friendship to me is a very Sicilian thing. It's a matter of life and death. I would do absolutely anything for my friends, and I demand the same in return. Because friendship is a form of love. I separate love from sex. For many people, fornication is immoral. Strangely enough, it seems supremely moral to me to have sex with a girl I've met in the harbor at St.-Tropez. Sex is beautiful. No one gets hurt. Just the opposite. It's simple, isn't it? So if it's true that I'm a playboy, it's only in this respect. The rest of being a playboy doesn't have much attraction for me.

[Q] Playboy: Does it ever bother you that some people are more interested in your image as a playboy than in your films?

[A] Polanski: I think it's great.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you rather be known as a film director whose personal life is of little curiosity?

[A] Polanski: Do you mean like Walt Disney? My only disappointment is that people created this conception of me as a decadent man of excess without my active participation. In the beginning, I resented it, but finally I thought, so what? People never know the truth about an individual, anyway. Among all the movies I've seen, I like Citizen Kane the most, not only for the way it's done but for what it says. It says that you never know the real truth about anyone. So who cares? This image of a hard worker laboring all day doesn't go well with me. It doesn't help me in my social life. People would get bored with me if I told them, "Hey, listen, guys, I really work very hard. I get up at seven in the morning and I rush from one place to another on business and I don't have a spare minute to take a holiday." I only tell people I'm a busy man when I want to get rid of them. Like a Playboy interviewer, you understand? Otherwise, I prefer to seem frivolous, a guy who socializes all the time. For one thing, I realized that this reputation helps me in my relations with women. I've noticed that as my reputation grows worse, my success with women increases.

[Q] Playboy: How do you account for this?

[A] Polanski: When I meet a new girl, she's already prejudiced against me. She's put off by my image and she thinks, "I'll never make it with him!" She wants to prove something to herself. She doesn't want to lower herself to the level of, let's say, her predecessors. But she's intrigued and she wants to know me as an individual, and underneath there is something difficult to describe--a kind of curiosity about me. People are intrigued by the Devil and attracted when they discover that on top of having horns and a tail, he's also charming. So you see, she meets me and she's tremendously surprised that I'm not at all the way she thought I was, and already she begins to switch her attitude. She's thrown off guard. I know all this talk about women sounds pretentious and arrogant and megalomaniac. Jesus, it begins to sound that way even to me.

[Q] Playboy:Are you a megalomaniac?

[A] Polanski: Of course. Haven't you noticed? But I do have some good qualities.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Polanski: I don't smoke tobacco. In fact. I am more admirable than our friend Doug Rader, the Houston Astros' third baseman, who says he is better at smoking than anything else. "I smoke good and I smoke consistent," he says.

[Q] Playboy: What have you got against smokers?

[A] Polanski: They don't bother me if they want to ruin their own health. It's their problem, and I'm not one to force the issue, but what bothers me is that they stick their cigarette butts everywhere. You find them in the washbasin, in the toilet, all over the house, in the back yard, burns in the curtains, the smell of smoke in your own hair. They take some perverted pleasure in uglifying their own closest surroundings by sticking these butts even into their food--into eggshells, in the cucumbers, in the mashed potatoes, in the half-empty bottle of beer, everywhere. Sometimes I'm afraid to screw.

[Q] Playboy: Sorry we asked. So much for smokers. Let's get back to women. Kenneth Tynan, your friend and co-writer of the screenplay for Macbeth, implied in a recent article that your attitude toward women approaches the feudalistic.

[A] Polanski: Ken, who is a good friend, knows absolutely nothing about my emotional-sexual relationships with women. He is a left-wing intellectual who feels he must support liberation movements, including the one by women, so I very often tease him by saying something about how reactionary I am on the subject. This causes complete outrage on his part, so you shouldn't treat seriously what Ken says about my feelings toward women.

[Q] Playboy: In what way are you reactionary about them?

[A] Polanski: Well, you must admit that most women one meets do not have the brain of Einstein. I have a very firm theory about male and female intelligence. It causes an absolute outrage if you say that women on the average are less intelligent than men, but it happens to be true. Since society is becoming more and more democratic about these things, though, we'd better not mention that.

[Q] Playboy: That's a highly debatable allegation, but in any case, Tynan wrote that you also dislike bright women. His exact words, as we recall, were that Polanski feels the only two acceptable positions for a woman are sitting down and lying down.

[A] Polanski: That's a marvelous line, but it's complete crap. First of all, my wife, although people may not know it, was an extremely bright person. But she would never be pushy about her intelligence in order to show people how clever she was. She knew it's feminine to not try to compete with men and seem dominating. But I must admit that I rarely find an intelligent female companion with whom I can get along, for the reason that most women who are smart try to compete with the man, and I can't stand the competition of a female.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Polanski: Because that brings our relationship onto the wrong level. It becomes like between a man and a man, a masculine relationship. I'm too sensitive about a woman's behavior, and there are too many things that can put me off. Sometimes the most beautiful woman can put me off completely by doing something ungraceful. I'm certain, by the way, that a sensitive woman feels the same toward men. I think even more so. Sometimes I'm charmed by the fact that there are women with whom you can discuss the molecular theory of light all evening and at the end, they will ask you what is your birth sign. But there is nothing more enjoyable than a genuinely brilliant female companion who doesn't turn the relationship into a contest of ego.

[Q] Playboy: In short, you simply prefer to dominate them.

[A] Polanski: I do dominate them. And they like it! I know, I know, this is regarded today as a Neanderthal attitude. But I know one women's lib leader who, friends tell me, is a great cock-sucker. By the way, what exactly is the women's lib position on fellatio? That it's OK, but only on an equal-time basis? And why do women sometimes use words like, "He's a real man"? It doesn't mean that he knits well or that he looks after the kids well. It has always meant a man who is more creative, more aggressive than a woman, because these are the qualities that have always been essential for the survival of our kind.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything about women's lib with which you would agree?

[A] Polanski: Anyone with a civilized mind endorsed the concept of equal pay for equal results long before women's lib, and I endorse that concept. The problem is that women's lib wants equal pay for equal work. What if the results are not the same? What if the man is better at the job? He should be paid more. And vice versa. On abortion, however, I agree absolutely with women's lib. They should have control of their own bodies. That's obvious. But I have noticed that many of these women who want to control their own bodies don't even like their bodies. They are women who don't like being women. Or at least they don't like being feminine.

The basic premise of women's liberation is that they are in some kind of slavery or subservient position. Even the name of the movement implies they are enslaved. Well, this premise sounds quite absurd to me, because sex isn't a social class; it divides humanity horizontally, not vertically. A woman proletarian can become a woman capitalist, but a proletarian woman cannot become a proletarian man. The women's libbers argue that they weren't given equal opportunities, but what I want to know is what were they doing when the opportunities were given? Were they just passed out one fine day? Or did it happen that men have dominated women for centuries because they were superior in the areas necessary to dominate the other sex? It isn't by accident that we are called Homo sapiens. If you look at the history of our species through science, you realize that in order to survive, we had to divide into two parts, one that brings the offspring, the other that brings the means of survival. And once the functions were divided, it was inevitable that the abilities would come to be divided, and I see this as the source of the differences.

[Q] Playboy: Women's lib theorists would maintain that the social structure of prehistoric man is hardly relevant anymore, since times and sex roles have changed along with the nature of society.

[A] Polanski: I think men and women are still and will always be fundamentally different, even though they belong to the same species. Just look at men and women: They are physically different, their organs are different, their muscles are different, their behavior--even as infants--is different. How can their brains also not be different? If you saw another species in which the female role was one of strong dependence, you wouldn't say that something was wrong with the species, would you? If you observed the female spider eat the male after copulation, you wouldn't say there was something fundamentally unjust about that species. That's the nature of some spiders. You wouldn't try to "improve" their relationship. Somewhere along the line, it became necessary for their survival to evolve this way. It is a built-in characteristic.

[Q] Playboy: Some readers may be concluding that Tynan was right about your feudalism on the subject.

[A] Polanski: Listen, in many ways, I'm more progressive than a lot of liberal intellectuals. I give women complete freedom to come and go as they please, and I don't make them do anything they don't want to do. I want it to be clear that even though I don't say all the things I know I'm supposed to about this subject, I'm in some ways a greater admirer of women than those who do. I love women! I really love them. As people, I hasten to add, not as playthings.

[Q] Playboy: Does it frustrate you, or offend your male ego, when you meet a woman you want who seems to take no interest in you? Or has that ever happened?

[A] Polanski: Once, I think, it happened, many years ago. No, it doesn't bother me at all, as long as she doesn't try to play games with me.

[Q] Playboy: For example.

[A] Polanski: To give examples, for me, is more or less like the effort of writing a screenplay. I have to sit and think, but if I were doing a screenplay, people would pay me for it.

[Q] Playboy: No deal. You were talking about games people play.

[A] Polanski: Let's say I meet a girl and she tries to give me the impression that she desires to go to bed with me that same evening, although I can sense immediately that it's not her intention. That's what I call games, and it lasts about ten minutes. Then I simply lose interest. I don't mind if she doesn't want to have sexual relations with me. Here you must believe me, because most males say that. But I really don't mind as long as she states it clearly by her behavior.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you see yourself as different from most males in that regard?

[A] Polanski: Because I can't demand every female to want me. I'm just being realistic about it. Or maybe it's because enough of them do want me that I don't feel rejected in general.

[Q] Playboy: When you tell people things like that, do they consider it arrogant?

[A] Polanski: Certainly. But it's really just a kind of optimism, a belief in yourself, which in itself seems an arrogance to many people because of this code of behavior in our society that demands you to be humble. Boasting about your abilities makes you regarded as an arrogant individual, like Cassius Clay, when he was running and screaming, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," and saying that he was the greatest, the fastest, etc. But this is essential to success, at least in certain endeavors, like film making or seduction. It's like a war. It's necessary when you attack to be convinced that you're going to take the town, to be convinced that you're superior to the foe and that food and drink and women are in the town. It's inconceivable to take the town when your commanding officer tells you that you may take it, but then again, you may not, and even if you do, you may have to go on to the next town before you find something to eat. So, especially when I'm making a film, I have to prepare myself for victory.

[Q] Playboy: How do you do that?

[A] Polanski: I run around shouting, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Unfortunately, I end up different not only to the people I work with but to my friends as well. I don't think I could do it any other way. I go through a complete state of mental preparation. It's not a deliberate thing, as though I said, "OK, now I change myself." It's automatic, and the moment I start a film, I develop this certainty in myself. I boost my ego, I warm myself up by telling myself that I'm the best, the most talented, the genius of film making. I believe the film is going to be a success, and this changes my attitude toward people. I ask of them things I would never ask otherwise. It projects to all areas of my life--"Do this, give me that." And I've learned that it must be said without the slightest hesitation in your attitude, or they won't put up with it. They'll tell you, "Go fuck yourself."

The problem with this is that it's impossible to shift gears twice a day, at eight-thirty a.m. and at seven-thirty in the evening, when you leave the set, so it's an attitude I must live with for a year or more at a time, and when I finish a film and I have to become normal again, the withdrawal symptoms are painful, and I'm undergoing them right now. People are starting to hate me by this time. Toward the end of the film, I have so many enemies that I consider whether I should flee the country. But this ballsiness that everybody is accusing you of is necessary to deflect all the vicious attacks that people will make on your film, from its start to its finish. If you're in a normal state of mind, you may find yourself yielding, so you have to make yourself psychologically invulnerable. If I've learned one thing about film making, it's that it requires not only talent but the stamina to resist all these attackers.

[Q] Playboy: Who are all these attackers?

[A] Polanski: Everybody. The actors have their own ideas of what their parts are about, the prop man has his own problems, the producers have their financial statements to worry about. Then comes the interviewer, who wants you to sit around and answer questions like this, and you're in the middle of these vicious, inhuman attacks, sometimes for a year. They all say that you're a stubborn, narrow-minded bastard who doesn't accept any criticism. They're right. I already told you I'm a megalomaniac. You have to be one to make a good film, because you have to believe that whatever decision you make, you're right. Even if I'm wrong, I'm right! Because it's my film. And the decision has to be mine. When a painter is painting a picture, whatever he does, it's his picture. You can like it or not, but you can't stand behind him saying, "No, you shouldn't make this stroke like that. Make it a little more to the left and put some red in it."

You must understand: You have a certain goal when you make a movie. The goal is to materialize your idea of the film, which is somewhere visualized in your mind. At that moment, it's the cinema of one person, and I'm the only one who knows how to bring this vision into reality. If you allow yourself to be vulnerable to what these people suggest, the movie will end up as a mongrel, or you'll simply abandon it and drop out with an ulcer. Both these solutions are not in my character. I'm afraid I have rather a shark's character in that sense. When it grabs something, there ain't no going back. Incidentally, the shark is one of the oldest species on earth and most perfectly suited to survival: all teeth and no brains. That's why, when all of these people transform themselves into obstacles, I don't let them interfere with the route I'm taking. I can't.

[Q] Playboy: But surely some of these people have good ideas, perhaps worth listening to and incorporating into the film.

[A] Polanski: It's very difficult to be so narrow-minded as to stick to your own ideas and at the same time to be an objective critic of your own work. This doesn't mean that I don't accept criticism. Often I listen to somebody and it occurs to me that he's right, and I accept the criticism, but I accept it because I think it's right, because his criticism improves the film by my standards, not by anybody else's.

I really think that people seriously suspect there is an element of malice in the way I insist on everything being done exactly the way I want it; but if there were malice, I can assure you, it would be an acute case of masochism, because nobody suffers more than the director in his struggle to get what he wants. Often you know that something is not as it should be. You can't put your finger on it; you just know there is something missing in a scene, often a tiny detail, but you know it's wrong and won't fit with the entirety of the movie. Yet the people around you can't understand why you keep repeating a scene, making more and more takes. Sometimes, at the 15th take, they start getting a bit irritated and nervous. I don't want to tell you what happens when you get to 55 takes.

[Q] Playboy: When did that happen?

[A] Polanski: It's happened to me on, well, I think several occasions. It's not that I'm cavalier at other people's expense. The reason for it is that some scenes turn out with better potential than I had anticipated, and that causes them to be more expensive. Say you need to film a brief insert of a cigarette held between a man's fingers. Some directors would stick a cigarette between a man's fingers and film it, and that would be that, and this would take a few minutes. But maybe the shot could be made more interesting if the cigarette had a long piece of ash that fell at the right moment, and you could see the smoke better if you lit the scene differently, and maybe there is a table in the background, and maybe you could get something to happen at that table--a woman's hand toying with a glass--and maybe there is a piece of floor visible behind that hand, with maybe a dog playing on it. Both these things, the woman's hand and the dog, the goddamn dog, may be connected with the rest of the action and make it more interesting. You can increase the tension by having all these things happen within the one second, or one and a half feet of film, of that insert. But the odds are that these will not all coincide on the first 50 takes, so the scene is much more involved and time-consuming. And who foots the tab? Hefner! Everyone says what a perfectionist I am, but I'm not a perfectionist. I just demand the minimum. You know what I mean?

[Q] Playboy: This minimalism of yours always seems to take you unnervingly over budget.

[A] Polanski: Billy Wilder once said, "Did you ever hear of someone saying, 'Let's go to the Roxy. They're playing a movie that was made within its schedule.'?" The Polish proverb is: "The better you make your bed, the longer you sleep." There's something in my character that appears to all my financiers as something bad--which is that I care. Whereas some other directors, the ones who give up and yield to these attacks, do not care. The other guys who make good films, as God is my witness, go over budget as much as I do. Only they don't feel bad about it. With me, it's a trauma. I don't sleep, I'm sick, I'm tired, I'm a nervous wreck. You should ask my friends, because what I'm saying is maybe not plausible, as I have a reputation as a nut case, anyway, but ask people who work with me. I wish I could say I don't give a damn, but I can't. I just refuse to maim my films. The pressure I had on Rosemary's Baby was so tremendous that I had my usual dilemma about whether to get it over with and produce something mediocre or to withstand the pressure and produce something very good.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about it.

[A] Polanski: Bob Evans, the creative head of Paramount, and Bernie Donnenfeld, who ran the business end of their productions, were receiving unbelievable heat from New York, where they were all panicky. In corporate headquarters, they didn't know what was going on and they couldn't understand what the film was all about, anyway. Already, they were up to their tonsils in bills, and then suddenly they realized it was getting up to their eyeballs, so they had Bob and Bernie meet with me. Bernie said, "Listen, Roman, we can't take it any longer. The rushes are terrific, we couldn't be more pleased, Mia is doing a fantastic job, it's going to be a great film--but what can we do to go faster?" And I said, "You think you can't take it? I can't either. Let's not talk about it anymore. You want me to go faster? OK, I go faster. I know how to finish the last fourth of the script in about three days. If you go onto the back lot, they're shooting a television series, and if you watch for just fifteen minutes, you'll realize how easy it is to go fast. I know how they do it. They say, 'OK, guys. Set it up. Lights. Act fast. One take. In the can.' We can do a whole bunch of scenes every day that way. Then what do you do with it when it's finished?" At that point, Bob turned to Bernie and said, "We're masturbating." He said, "Roman, why don't you go back onstage and do what you've been doing? Just make a good movie." And that was the last time we talked about it. He stuck his neck out for me and showed himself to have quite a courage. You know, when they all scream "Faster, faster," it reminds me of the story about the guy who comes to a resort for a weekend and wants to seduce this girl he's dancing with. He says, "Miss, I don't have much time. I only came for the weekend." And she says, "Well, I'm dancing as fast as I can."

[Q] Playboy: As Tynan tells the story, you brazened out an episode during the filming of Macbeth when the English insurance company was ready to jerk you for being so slow. What would you have done if they had shut you down?

[A] Polanski: I would go home. I thought you were going to ask me what if the picture had not been good as a result.

[Q] Playboy: OK, what if it hadn't been good, as a result?

[A] Polanski: It's as if you were asking Christopher Columbus what if there hadn't been land after flogging and starving all those seamen who were afraid of falling off the end of the world. What kind of question is this?

[Q] Playboy: You make up your own question, put it in our mouth and then complain because we ask it.

[A] Polanski: You know how to do an interview. I don't. To express my ideas about life is not my profession. I'm a dilettante at it, so it's not easy for me. I've never given a good interview in my life, although I did literally hundreds of them before I learned how simple it is to say no to most of them. As I told you before--but you won't listen--I'm not a verbalist. I never was and never will be. I never tried to develop my speech, and the way I communicate is rather by suggesting something, some atmosphere, some feeling. I've always had rather visual and graphic talents, and it was these that I developed. I don't speak well, although when I'm with friends and there is an animated conversation, I have no difficulty in conveying my argument, you know, by gestures and mimicry.

But you asked what would I do if they had thrown me off Macbeth. I would have made another movie. There are people who know how to run corporations and others who know how to make films. I am one of the latter. If they took a film away from me, I wouldn't be crushed, because I believe I could do dozens of others just as well or better, because when I do something good, it isn't a fluke. I don't think most people have any idea how much work and effort are being put into a film. You go to the cinema and see a film like Macbeth set in medieval times and you just assume that certain things were there all along. You're not aware that every single thing you see on that screen has been devised, starting with the actions of the characters, going through the costumes they wear, the set where they move about, the lights with which they're lit, the sound they produce, the music, the wind that whispers in the trees. Even the titles. And it's not just one long scene but hundreds of pieces stuck together and then printed in color.

Some directors, people with rather documentary or Nouvelle Vague or underground backgrounds, resent all these crews and equipment. I don't. I know how to deal with it. It's like one of those big yellow machines larger than bulldozers that look like gigantic insects and have this sort of claw that can fumble through tons of earth and pick up two little stones. When you watch one of those, you understand about film making. I wouldn't know where is the end and the beginning of such a piece of machinery, but when you watch the operator who sits behind all those levers and with the utmost virtuosity and speed picks up these two little stones from tons of earth, you know how I feel running a movie machine. I know how to use this machinery to transform a vision of my own into a film. I know how to deal with the technical problems.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about them.

[A] Polanski: More examples? All right: One of my favorite ones was that I always had great difficulties getting onto film exactly what I had seen through my view finder before the camera has been set up. I always had these problems with my camera operators. All directors who have firm visual, graphic views have these problems, but I had it especially bad. Besides explaining exactly what I had in mind and trying to convey it to the operator and get our ideas conformed, there was always something missing, and I couldn't find out what it was. Finally, on Rosemary's Baby, it was working very well and I realized this important detail: Besides this cameraman's willingness to understand me and follow my ideas, he was hardly any taller than I am. And then I understood: He was on the same altitude above sea level as I am. It's important that his camera sees exactly what I see. On Macbeth, you can know that I have a camera operator exactly my size, and that works wonders, because it means he sees the world the way I see the world.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any larger, metaphorical point to that?

[A] Polanski: I don't think of any, but you're a journalist, so I'm sure you would be able to make one.

[Q] Playboy: Now why do you have to say that?

[A] Polanski: Just a wisecrack, because people who write are usually inspired to think of metaphors on their own terms, not on the terms of the person telling the story. The fact that you asked if there is a metaphor implies that there is a strong possibility you will be inspired to find one.

[Q] Playboy: All right, let's ask the question a different way. Is there anything of the Napoleonic about you--of the short man proving himself?

[A] Polanski: My height must have some effect on me, but again, I don't psychoanalyze myself to discover it. I actually look smaller than I am. How tall do you think I am?

[Q] Playboy: Five feet, six?

[A] Polanski: Incredible! You are the first ever to give me extra height. I am five feet, five, which is a good size for a female. Maybe I should have been born a girl. Newsmen usually describe me as even shorter than I am. I barely reach four feet in these articles they write. Little do they know that from my point of view, it doesn't seem that I'm small. In fact, it seems to me as if I'm a giant. The terrible thing is that if people didn't tell me I was short, I would never notice. I once had this Yorkshire terrier, a wonderful little dog, and an Irish wolfhound--the largest dog in captivity--and the Yorkshire absolutely terrorized the wolfhound. I'm quite sure the terrier didn't realize he was smaller.

[Q] Playboy: You're also something of a physical-fitness nut, with your exercises and karate kicks, and wheat germ and yoghurt. How did that begin?

[A] Polanski: One day when I was 14, I looked at myself in the mirror and I said to myself, "Jesus, what is this?" So I took a pillowcase and went down to where they were building a road and filled it up with cobblestones and started exercising. I wanted to make something of myself, so I wanted to be strong. At the same time, I started bicycle racing and skiing. Any kind of individual competition. I was totally uninterested in any kind of team effort like football. I like the drama and the glory of racers. They are individuals, and dreamers. To me, an appealing character is Jackie Stewart, because he has a lust for glory and he fulfills it.

You see sometimes men in their 20s who have let their bodies deteriorate, and they look like they're 40, and they look extremely tired and bored. These are the people who probably never had dreams they believed could be fulfilled. As a representative of a capitalist society, you must forgive me for quoting Lenin, but he said that the essential quality of a revolutionary is to be able to fantasize. To create revolution, you must be able to imagine its success. The same is true of films, and I was always dreaming of making great films.

[Q] Playboy: When you were a boy, you mean?

[A] Polanski: Yes. Even as a child, I always loved cinema and was thrilled when my parents would take me before the war. Then we were put into the ghetto in Kraków and there was no cinema, but the Germans often showed newsreels to the people outside the ghetto, on a screen in the market place. And there was one particular corner where you could see the screen through the barbed wire. I remember watching with fascination, although all they were showing was the German army and German tanks, with occasional anti-Jewish slogans inserted on cards. When I escaped from the ghetto, the first thing I looked forward to was the cinema. It was very cheap, since the Germans wanted people to go see German films, and I made the ticket money selling newspapers. It was regarded as something very low to go to the cinema, and the audience was mostly youngsters who weren't aware of their patriotic duty not to go. You could read slogans on the wall--only pigs go to movies, etc. But I didn't really care too much about being called a pig as long as I could go.

[Q] Playboy: How do you explain this fascination?

[A] Polanski: I don't know why, but I just loved it. Maybe the liking for cinema is no more mysterious than my liking for suspense; the show business and drama of cinema thrilled me as much as the purely technical aspect of lanterna magica--being able to project a picture on the wall and make it move.

[Q] Playboy: How did you set about getting started in films?

[A] Polanski: Right after the war, I got a job broadcasting on the radio as a child actor and, through that, I got a lead in a successful play in the theater. It was kind of a big splash for a kid. Later, I tried to get into acting school, but I didn't make it. Some of the professors were actors who knew me, and they thought I was too cocky. Already I was quite different from a majority of the applicants, who were scared and running around the corridors of the drama school with diarrhea and showing all the symptoms of submission and humility. I didn't have any of those symptoms, so they thought I wouldn't be good material to mold, and, thank God, I wasn't, because I would have ended up in some provincial theater in Poland making 2000 zlotys a month. At the time, I wasn't seeing much future in films, because my father ran a small plastics company, which the government considered "private initiative." That meant my political background was not the best, so the State School of Filming in Lodz seemed an impossible dream, because there was a tremendous number of applicants, and your political background was terribly important.

[Q] Playboy: But you did get into Lodz, which had the reputation at that time of being probably the finest film school in the world. How did Poland, with a drab political regime and a poor economy, come to have such a school?

[A] Polanski: I suspect that the school has lost its quality, but from a few years before I went until two or three years after I left, it was definitely the best film school in the world. I think it was just a happy conjunction of certain elements. There was a group of progressive, extremely talented film makers in Poland who were in terrible difficulties before the war, when Polish cinema was one of the lowest, producing only cheap exploitation films that took about four days to make. Some of these film makers went to the Soviet Union during the war to work on the propaganda films, which had a high priority, and when they came back they were asked by the government to start a center, because this was an industry that was needed by the government. Luckily, there is another line in Lenin saying that among all the arts, cinema is the most important for the Communist state. And since the Communist system clings to dogma, they gave big resources to these men to create an institute.

[Q] Playboy: The curriculum at Lodz required five years for a diploma. Was it worth while to spend that much time studying instead of getting on-the-job training?

[A] Polanski: When you analyze it, you see how advantageous it is to study cinema for five years. Besides all the practical training, like editing, camera operating, etc., you had courses in the history of art, literature, history of music, optics, theory of film directing--if such a thing exists--and so forth. The first year was very general and theoretical, and you got to know intimately the techniques of still photography, which is essential, I think, for anyone who later wants to be an expert in cinematography. The second year, the students made two one-minute films of their own. The third year, a documentary of eight to fifteen minutes. The fourth year, a short fictional film of the same length; and then in the fifth year, you made your diploma film, which could go up to 20 minutes. Mine ran 25 minutes and was over budget; already they were screaming at me to dance faster. It was called When Angels Fall, a kind of fantasy about an old lady who is a public-toilet attendant. And on top of everything else at the school, we also saw an incredible number of films--and not only each other's.

[Q] Playboy: Including films from the West?

[A] Polanski: Almost anything. The school was tightly connected with the Polish film archives and we could see anything we wanted. An important part of our education was a baroque wooden stairway where we would sit for hours arguing about films, which sometimes we were screening all day and all night. Occasionally, the discussions became rather heated. In fact, I have a scar under my eye from one of them. There were schools of cinema within the school. My school was Citizen Kane, and the school of the older students, the ones who were about to graduate when I was a cocky beginner, was The Bicycle Thief, and the postgraduates who were still hanging around were the Soviet Socialist Realism school--films like Potemkin. It was a fantastic place and I left it with very firm aesthetic ideals about films.

[Q] Playboy: Can you express them in words?

[A] Polanski: I'll try. For me, a film has to have a definite dramatic and visual shape, as opposed to a rather flimsy shape that a lot of films were being given by the Nouvelle Vague, for example, which happened in more or less the same period. It has to be something finished, like a sculpture, almost something you can touch, that you can roll on the floor. It has to be rigorous and disciplined--that's Citizen Kane vs. The Bicycle Thief.

[Q] Playboy: When did you make Knife in the Water?

[A] Polanski: In 1960. But it took a long time. After we wrote the screenplay, it was rejected by the government film bureau, so I went to France, and when I came back two years later, it was a better period politically, so I submitted it again and they accepted it and gave me a very limited budget--which I went over, of course.

[Q] Playboy:Knife in the Water was an original, and unusual, screenplay. Where did you get the idea for it?

[A] Polanski: It was the sum of several desires in me. I loved the lake area of Poland and I thought it would make a great setting for a film. I was thinking of a film with a limited number of people in it as a form of challenge. I hadn't ever seen a film with only three characters, where no one else even appeared in the background. The challenge was to make it in a way that the audience wouldn't be aware of the fact that no one else had appeared even in the background. As for the idea, all I had in mind when I began the script was a scene where two men were on a sailboat and one fell overboard. But that was a starting point, wouldn't you agree?

[Q] Playboy: Certainly, but a strange one. Why were you thinking about a man falling out of a sailboat?

[A] Polanski: There you go, asking me to shrink my head again. I don't know why. I was interested in creating a mood, an atmosphere, and after the film came out, a lot of critics found all sorts of symbols and hidden meanings in it that I hadn't even thought of. It made me sick.

[Q] Playboy: You went back to Paris and stayed on there for a couple of years--even after Knife had its big success in America. Why?

[A] Polanski: The fact that the film was a success didn't make me in such great demand by American producers. But it did make me think that I should seek the Anglo-Saxon world rather than remain forever in France, where the film was a total flop. But those were good years in Paris. I was writing with my friend Gerard Brach, and we wrote Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac during this period, though we couldn't find anyone to produce them. In France, they aren't looking so much for new talent as for established figures. So Gerard and I were living in miserable conditions. I didn't make any money on Knife in the Water and we were penniless and living in little hotels and places like that. Once we were stuffed together in a broom-closet sort of room where in the 18th Century, I think, they used to stash one domestic--because two wouldn't have fit. It was virtually a cupboard. But I think of those years with tremendous nostalgia. Whenever we got together 100 francs, we were as happy as kings. The first thing was to run to the cinema to see a movie. The second thing was to have dinner in one of the little restaurants of St. Germain des Prés. And the third thing was to try to pull some girls. Whenever I return to those cafés and see the same characters sitting at the same tables in the identical positions--only much older--I have a very mixed sensation, and these are moments of fear, because I think, "Christ, I could have been sitting here still."

[Q] Playboy: Was it more difficult for you to "pull" the girls then, before you had celebrity as well as notoriety, not to mention money?

[A] Polanski: It was much harder, not only because of the lack of notoriety but also because I didn't have the necessary experience. I wasn't so cool. I was too eager, and I think that's the case with every young man.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide to leave Paris and go to the U. S.?

[A] Polanski: Events precipitated themselves suddenly. In late 1963, I was invited to the New York Film Festival, where Knife in the Water was being shown. The United States used to be a very popular country in Europe, so it was in my dreams to go there.

[Q] Playboy: What was your first impression of New York?

[A] Polanski: I had somehow imagined the streets of New York to be very wide, very clean, with a very even surface, and surrounded by bright, shiny buildings. I found it dense and dirty and not smooth at all. At the time, that felt familiar and stimulating. The theaters, the restaurants all seemed exciting, and a lot of the New York intellectuals, who didn't seem so left-wing and tiresome at the time, I found very exciting--maybe because I didn't speak a word of English. As you may have noticed, I still don't. I also found the constant competition--the rat-race, you call it--very exciting. But now it's to an extreme that is unbearable. In those days, the rats were still eating each other; now they're eating themselves. That makes it less exciting. Anyway, not long after that trip, I was called by Gene Gutowski, later my business partner, and he suggested that I go to England to try something there. So I made Repulsion in London. It was quickly a financial and critical success. You know the rest.

[Q] Playboy: After Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac, you drew extraordinarily strong comment from the reviewers, who either loved you or hated you. Do you pay much attention to them?

[A] Polanski: In all honesty, I must say they were helpful to me in the beginning because of their sympathetic treatment of Knife in the Water. But a common thing among critics, many of whom are frustrated film makers, is that they like to discover young people, and then when the young person becomes popular, the critic feels betrayed and puts him down. So now, when someone I regard as good writes a favorable review, I read it. Otherwise, no, because hardly ever do I read a critic on somebody else's film when I agree with what he says. I read it and I think the man is obviously an imbecile who didn't understand the film, and how could he not like it? Or vice versa. Then later, if I read a review of my own film by the same man, there are only two alternatives. Either he gives me a good review, which means I'm really in trouble and I wonder where I've gone wrong, or he gives me a bad review, which is a good sign, but it's not pleasant reading. So I (concluded on page 126)Playboy Interview(continued from page 118) don't bother. The breaking point for me was Cul-de-Sac, which in my opinion is the best thing I've ever done. If I'm remembered for something I've done in the cinema, it will be for this film. But it got terrible reviews.

[Q] Playboy: How do you explain that?

[A] Polanski: First, because it was ahead of its time in a way, like Dr. Strangelove, which is one of the cinema's classics but came out two or three years too soon. And second, because critics are in general dumb and didn't understand the film. And third, because the more a reviewer can get stuck on his own piece and admire it, the happier he is. He's more interested in showing his own brilliance than in seriously assessing a film for the reader.

[Q] Playboy: You said Cul-de-Sac is your best work. Why do you think so?

[A] Polanski: I think it is the most cinematic of all my films, and remember that in a way, I see myself as a technician, so that's very important to me. It's the most cinematic because it's a piece that's virtually untranslatable into any other medium. Popularity and reviews mean nothing in this judgment. The films that are considered masterpieces, like Citizen Kane or L'Avventura or A Space Odyssey, when you look back and start going through the reviews to find out how they were received at the time, you're often surprised to find that it was not that well. Somehow certain films make their reputation throughout the history of cinema despite the critics and often despite the public, and sometimes despite both. I think Cul-de-Sac is already on the way, from what I hear about it whenever I talk to young people or cinema buffs. Cul-de-Sac is going to be a very durable movie.

[Q] Playboy: For all those who've panned you, there are some writers in the film journals, especially in Europe, who rank you among the handful of the world's great directors. Would you agree with them?

[A] Polanski: Guess! There aren't very many great directors. I think about five or six, like Fellini, Kubrick---- No, wait a minute. I can either say that I'm one of the five or six best directors without naming the rest or I can name my five or six favorites without telling you that I think I'm a part of this group, because to do that would seem too presumptuous. Which do you prefer?

[Q] Playboy: Both. Before we finish this interview, there's one subject we haven't even touched on: politics. Though you crossed the Iron Curtain to live and work in the capitalist West, nothing you've said has indicated even a passing interest in affairs of state.

[A] Polanski: I vaguely follow politics, but I don't think a knowledge of it is essential to lead an intellectually satisfying life. You can be involved with society without being at all interested in politics. I used to be quite political, but I quit when I understood that I couldn't do much about the situation. I'll tell you exactly my motivations, because this one I know the answer to. You know already my character. You know that I'm determined when I set out to do something, and when I'm determined, I do it. I set a goal and I desperately try to achieve it. When I'm not able to achieve what I want to, I become desperately angry and frustrated, and that's the feeling I have for politics. When I was in my 20s and living in Poland, I was concerned, and gradually I understood that all my efforts were so futile that I was reduced to some kind of mental masturbation. So I just stopped trying. I think that if I had chosen politics for a full-time career, I would certainly not only talk about it but I would do a lot about it. In general, though, I think that people who go into politics are a pretty stupid, uninspired race. I suspect that politics is quite easy, and the fact that the results are so poor everywhere is primarily because mostly second-rate people go into it. Really talented and ambitious people are usually interested in other fields of life.

My perceptions of this occurred about the same time I understood one other thing that I think also kept me away from politics, and that is the essential problem of human character, as explained so well by Oscar Hammerstein--that too many people are too early in their lives too certain of too many things. So they are ready to die or kill for these things. You gradually come to understand that whichever side they're on, it's only by accident. The same baby who grew up as a Protestant in Ireland could just as easily have grown up as a Catholic in Ireland, so this man is fighting against someone he could have very easily been himself. My point is that what fucks up the world is idealism. Idealism is usually associated with the good guys, but I'll tell you, whoever is the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is as much an idealist in his mind as anyone else who believes deeply in his convictions and is willing to die for them or have others killed for them. These people don't expose their prejudices to a healthy doubt.

[Q] Playboy: You hardly seem one to criticize others for lack of self-doubt.

[A] Polanski: My self-confidence has to do with creative activity, not political activity. These political idealists I'm talking about are the do-gooders who want to do their number for the best interests of other people, not themselves. I do it for myself, not for some ideal of what I think is best for other people and for future generations. There is a whole world of difference.

[Q] Playboy: Before we leave the subject, can we persuade you to give us some general idea, using at least broad conventional labels, about whether you consider yourself on the left or the right?

[A] Polanski: I definitely don't identify with the right wing in America, but that doesn't mean I have any nostalgia for communism. Come to think of it, I do know one certainty about politics: Communism is a system that doesn't work. Terrible things happen when you start going against human nature, and having lived under communism, I can say that this is exactly what it does. It's basically structured on the assumption that everybody will be performing according to good will, according to the needs of the society, which is absolutely divorced from any conception of human nature. The result is expressed in another contemporary Polish proverb: "Czy sie stoi czy sie lezy 2000 sie nalezy"--which I'll bet is the first Polish sentence that Playboy has ever published [It is.--Ed.]--so don't misspell it. It means: "Whether you're standing up or lying down, they still pay you your 2000 zlotys." Most people are lying down.

I'm more sympathetic to capitalism, because it's not an artificial system that was invented by a group of brilliant people. It's a stage to which people naturally evolved. It's not the ideal system. Far from it. Anyone with any feeling has to be outraged by things like Vietnam, but I don't think there is anything about it that's peculiar to capitalism. I always hear that this war made America lose her virginity, but the truth is that this war buggered America. If the Soviet Union found herself in a similar situation, I can assure you she would deal with the problem the same way--only faster, as it happened in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. God, politics is so vague. I don't want to talk politics. I really only do it when it's thrust upon me, mostly by intellectual friends, and I end up spending my energy in unnecessary arguments. So let's talk about something else--or nothing else.

[Q] Playboy: One more question: What are your plans, now that you've finished Macbeth?

[A] Polanski: I don't like to make plans, I don't know what I'll be doing. I'll make another film, but I don't know what. There's only one thing for sure: There will be no castles, no crowd scenes, no special effects, no horses, no costumes--preferably no clothes at all. Just two people on the beach! And perhaps not so much dialog as in this interview. As I told you, I'm not a man of words, and I've run completely out of them. I'm drained. Enough said, Playboy. OK?

[Q] Playboy: OK.