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27 August 2015

I jumped at the chance to interview Roman Polanski – but it didn’t end well

Was I projecting my own disturbance on to him? If so, it felt like a void that I could not bear.

By Suzanne Moore

I am not proud to recall that I jumped at the chance to interview a well-known rapist but the truth is that I did. In the early days of my journalistic career, I was always being asked to do interviews. Women are. I was constantly being told that I was “a people person” and offered actors to try to squeeze some interest from. Then, as now, I was a terrible snob and thought that actors only interested each other – but directors . . . Directors were gods.

It was Roman Polanski. He’d just made Bitter Moon, an S&M oddity starring Hugh Grant. This was not a masterpiece.

Although Polanski was viewed by the world as “an evil, profligate dwarf” – or so he wrote in his autobiography – he was and is a giant of cinema. As a woman, as a feminist, as someone with a vague grip on the moral compass, I should find it easier to dismiss his work. But it’s not easy. Chinatown, The Tenant, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby are profound works of psychic disintegration.

I was sent to see him in Paris at one of the grandest of hotels and had been told not to ask him about Sharon Tate. It remains a primal memory for me: creeping downstairs to read my mother’s tabloid when those murders happened. My mother said that I must not read “that sort of thing”. Therefore, I consumed every detail of the slaughter.

As an adolescent, I went on to consume everything I could about Charles Manson, who stood in a courtroom telling a horrified America, “My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system . . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”

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Now I was taking tea with the man whose wife and child Manson had murdered and he did talk to me about it. “The only sense that I can make out of it is that it doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Polanski’s mother had died in Auschwitz. There was nothing but darkness in his past, yet I tried hard to see some light. He was unfailingly polite and utterly explicit about only wanting young women. He was about to become a father for the first time with the then 26-year-old Emmanuelle Seigner. He told me that, all through his life, the line between reality and fantasy had been “hopelessly blurred” and said I should stick around while the photographer took the pictures.

A good journalist would have done so but I could not. All I wanted to do was to get away from him. Was I projecting my own disturbance on to him? If so, it felt like a void that I could not bear.

I went to a bar to meet an old friend and I drank too much. Some guys offered to take us somewhere else. I needed some light relief. The barman called me over.

“Do not leave with them. They have knives. I know what those men do.” Everything was hopelessly blurred.

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This article appears in the 26 Aug 2015 issue of the New Statesman, Isis and the new barbarism

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com Our Thursday ideas newsletter, delving into philosophy, criticism, and intellectual history. The best way to sign up for The Salvo is via thesalvo.substack.com Stay up to date with NS events, subscription offers & updates. Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. The best way to sign up for The Green Transition is via spotlightonpolicy.substack.com
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