One of the most-technically-accomplished directors of the post-war period, and one of the most-controversial people in the history of mainstream cinema.
Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933 to Polish-Jewish parents who returned to Kraków in 1937. He survived the Holocaust as a child by escaping the Kraków ghetto and being hidden by Polish farming families; both of his parents were sent to concentration camps, where his mother was killed. He attended film school in Łódź, made his first feature (Knife in the Water) in 1962, moved to the West, and became one of the most-acclaimed directors of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Polanski's filmography is one of the most-distinguished of the post-war period. Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979), The Pianist (2002). He has won the Academy Award for Best Director once (The Pianist, 2003) and the Palme d'Or at Cannes once (also The Pianist, 2002).
Polanski's personal life is the other unavoidable fact about him. His wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family in August 1969 while she was eight months pregnant. In 1977, Polanski pleaded guilty to statutory rape involving a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. He fled the United States before sentencing and has lived in France since. He has been credibly accused of additional assaults by multiple other women across the subsequent decades. He was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Any serious discussion of Polanski's films now has to hold both facts at once: he is one of the most-significant directors in modern cinema history, and he committed at least one crime serious enough to make recommending his subsequent work a personal ethical choice that the reader has to make. We have included him because the films exist and have to be discussed; the reader will make their own decision about whether to watch them.
Almost every Polanski film is interested in confined spaces and the psychological effects of confinement. Rosemary's Baby unfolds almost entirely within one Manhattan apartment. The Tenant is set within a Paris apartment building. Chinatown moves between Los Angeles offices and houses. Knife in the Water takes place on a single sailboat. Repulsion (1965) is structured around one woman's progressive collapse inside her sister's London flat.
The technique is, in part, an inheritance from Polish theatre training; in part a consequence of Polanski's early-career low budgets; and in part a consistent thematic interest in characters whose interior states are warped by the spaces they cannot leave. The choice has been imitated by many subsequent directors interested in psychological horror — David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, Yorgos Lanthimos all show clear Polanski influence.
Polanski's contributions to a film's ending are often documented as decisive. The famous bleak ending of Chinatown — Evelyn Mulwray dead in the street, her daughter taken by her own father, Gittes powerless — was Polanski's choice over screenwriter Robert Towne's preference for a less-final resolution. The ending lands harder for the choice; the film is one of the most-respected American films of the 1970s in significant part because of Polanski's insistence on the bleak conclusion.
The Pianist's ending — Wladyslaw Szpilman playing Chopin's Grande Polonaise for an empty concert hall and a small radio audience after the war — is structurally Polanski's specific gift. The film refuses the triumphal closure most Holocaust dramas reach for; the survivor plays his piano because there is nothing else to do.
Polanski is, by general assessment, one of the most-technically-precise directors of his generation. His shot composition, his use of available light, his blocking of multi-character scenes inside small interiors — all are at a level of craft that working directors in subsequent generations have studied closely. Rosemary's Baby's apartment-party sequences and Chinatown's office scenes are particular study examples.
He has worked extensively with cinematographer Pawel Edelman in his late career (The Pianist, The Ghost Writer, An Officer and a Spy). The collaboration has produced some of the most-controlled European-style cinematography in any working filmography of the past twenty years.
If you've never watched a Polanski film:
Polish theatre and film of the 1950s, French New Wave (particularly Godard), Alfred Hitchcock (Polanski has spoken extensively about Vertigo as a foundational text), Henri-Georges Clouzot, and the Polish post-war literary tradition.