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Roman Polanski
Director / Screenwriter / Producer / Actor
1933 -  
Born August 18, Paris, France
Key Production Countries: UK, France, USA, Poland 
Key Genres: Drama, Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Psychological Drama, Black Comedy, Period Film, Psychological Drama, Comedy
Key Collaborators: Gerard Brach (Screenwriter), Alastair McIntyre (Editor), Herve de Luze (Editor), Krzysztof Komeda (Composer), Pierre Guffroy (Production Designer), Emmanuelle Seigner (Leading Player), Gene Gutowski (Producer), Alain Sarde (Producer), Robert Benmussa (Producer), Gilbert Taylor (Cinematographer)

Highly Recommended: Rosemary's Baby (1968)*, Chinatown (1974)*
Recommended: Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965)*, Cul-de-sac (1966)*, Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994), The Pianist (2002)^, Oliver Twist (2005)
Worth a Look: Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Mammals (1962), Macbeth (1971), Frantic (1988), The Ninth Gate (1999), The Ghost Writer (2010)^
Approach with Caution: What? (1973), The Tenant (1976)*, Bitter Moon (1992)
Duds: The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; ^ Listed in TSPDT's 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films section.

 
 
 
Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ Roman Polanski Vision ] [ Wikipedia ] [ BBC Audio Interview (1972) ] [ Kinoeye Feature ] [ Independent Article (2005) ] [ Sony Pictures Profile ] [ Polish Culture Profile ] [ BFI Feature ] [ Brainy Quote ] [ Film Comment Article (2010) ]
Books: [ Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile ] [ Roman ] [ Roman Polanski: A Biography ] [ Roman Polanski ] [ Roman Polanski: Interviews ] [ Roman Polanski (Contemporary Film Directors) ] [ Roman Polanski (Directors) ] [ The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World ] [ Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller ]
 
Chinatown (1974)Rosemary's Baby (1968)Knife in the Water (1962)Oliver Twist (2005)
 
     
  "In addition to the mental scars of his tortured childhood, Polanski acknowledges the influences on his work of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Kafka, and Buñuel. Atmosphere is the most important element of his films and the core around which he builds his plots and develops his characters. Like Hitchcock, he considers actors as simple pawns in the game of filmmaking and reportedly subjects them to much abuse on the set, especially the actresses." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)  
     
  "People living on the ragged edge - or forced to live on it: this Polish (French-born) director's films are concerned with pressures, alienation and a succumbing to the evil nightmares lurking within us. One senses a bitterness in Polanski that the beauty of the images he often creates on screen can't gloss over." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "Polanski's work might be seen as an attempt to map out the precise relationship between the contemporary world's instability and tendency to violence and the individual's increasing inability to overcome the isolation and locate some  realm of meaning or value beyond himself...From his own isolated position - as a man effectively without a country - Polanski tries to confront the probems of isolation, violence, and evil, and to speak of them for an audience prone to their sway." - J.P. Telotte (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)  
     
  "Compelling tales which are chilling and bizarre are his trademark." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously." - Roman Polanski  
     
  "You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." - Roman Polanski  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include Pirates (1986).
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"Polanski, like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch before him, is a genre filmmaker of the classic sort. Although his contemporaries, such as Volker Schlondorff and Krystof Kieslowski, have opted for genres of voice, the moral fable, and the satire, Polanski has been far more classical, preferring to use film noir, horror films, or war films and their traditions of mixing plot and character layers in accord with the particular genre  convention." - Ken Dancyger, The Director's Idea: The Path to Great Directing

 
 
Top 250 Directors
21st Century Top 50 
Fringe Benefits 
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Claude Chabrol
David Cronenberg
Brian De Palma
William Friedkin
Curtis Hanson
John Huston
Joseph Losey
David Lynch
Jack Nicholson
Jerzy Skolimowski
Andrzej Wajda
Orson Welles
 
Roman Polanski's Favourites
The Circus (1928) Charles Chaplin, Citizen Kane (1941) Orson Welles, 8½ (1963) Federico Fellini, The Gold Rush (1925) Charles Chaplin, Hamlet (1948) Laurence Olivier, Odd Man Out (1947) Carol Reed. Source: Time Out (1995)
 
 
 
         
         

 

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