Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski was six when the war began. By David Thompson's text he fled the bombardment of Warsaw with his father and rejoined his mother in the Krakow ghetto; then, like the musician his film is about, he survived through non-Jewish protectors of shifting loyalty. Thompson writes that, for The Pianist, he declared himself at last able to filter his own wartime childhood through a story of survival in the ghetto. At Cannes the film was given the Palme d'Or, which by that text did him few favours; many critics took it for a conventional Holocaust narrative and missed the uncanny, absurd agility they expected of him. Philip Strick, writing on The Ninth Gate, faults the adaptation instead: it makes do with half the novel and creates trouble for itself by cutting everything to do with Alexandre Dumas. He has won the directing César five times, forty years between the first and the last: Tess in 1980, The Pianist in 2003, The Ghost Writer in 2011, Venus in Fur in 2014, An Officer and a Spy in 2020.