Moviemaker Roman Polanski shot a new short film, “A Therapy,” for Prada. The three-minute mini-movie features Sir Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter. Polanski wrote the screenplay with Oscar winner Ronald Harwood. Fellow Oscar winner Alexandre Desplat added the background music (a clock ticking for the first half of the film, followed by a soft instrumental melody). The film focuses on Carter’s character visiting her psychologist, Kingsley. The stars, dressed head-to-toe in Prada, look …More

"To the average moviegoer, this may seem a rather late date to be dramatizing the details of the Dreyfus Affair, that famous case of military injustice that occurred in France some sixty years ago.” That military injustice, of course, was that a French officer of Jewish descent was falsely accused of treason in 1894 and was not amnestied for over a decade. Know, too, that those words, penned by a New York Times critic, were referring not to Roman Polanski's upcoming political thriller but of another film on …More

Earlier this week, French-Polish director Roman Polanski announced that his next film, “D,” will be a political thriller based on the Dreyfus Affair. The intrigue, however, may extend well beyond what Polanski puts on the screen. "I have long wanted to make a film about the Dreyfus Affair, treating it not as a costume drama but as a spy story," Polanski explained to the Los Angeles Times about the film, which begins shooting in Paris at the end of the year. "In this way one can show its absolute …More

In his first interview since his 2009 Swiss imprisonment, Roman Polanski expressed “regret” over having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, a crime that forced him to flee the United States. “I have had regrets for 33 years,” Polanski told Darius Rochebin of Swiss television channel TSR in a conversation that discussed both his career and the scandal that has come to define his legacy. “We mustn’t forget that I went to prison. I did my time. That’s why I left the United …More

Two years after he was arrested by Swiss Police, film director Roman Polanski returned to the Zurich Film Festival to receive a lifetime achievement award. After a standing ovation, the director of such films as “Chinatown” and “The Pianist” addressed the crowd, telling them, “What can I say? Better late than never.” In 2009, Polanski, who lived through the ghettoization of the Polish Jews during World War II, was on his way to accept the award when he taken in by the Swiss …More

Remember that bit at the end of The Pianist where Adrien Brody's character plays the piano for his Nazi captor? Didn't that make your skin tingle? Didn't it bruise your soul to think of all the cruelty and destruction of the Holocaust, and didn't the juxtaposition of the music flood you with hope at the way art elevates us all? Or maybe you were too busy thinking about the fact that the person who directed the film was guilty of having sex with an underage girl, and felt unable to enjoy something he had created. …More

Director Roman Polanski attended the funeral of fellow J-Connection and Polish filmmaker Janusz Morgenstern, who passed away on September 6. Morgenstern, who is famous for directing “Goodbye, See You Tomorrow,” “Jowita,” and “We Have to Kill this Love,” died at the age of 89. Polanski addressed the crowd at the Warsaw funeral on Monday. "For me, he was not a representative of the Polish film industry. He was simply my oldest friend. I just want to say to him: 'Goodbye, my …More