Ronald Harwood,

scriptwriter of The Pianist and now Oliver Twist,
tells Jasper Rees about his friendship with the remarkable

Roman Polanski

Telegraph.co.uk, 30 September 2005

A few years ago, Roman Polanski saw a play in Paris about the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler's relationship with the Third Reich. He had already acquired the rights to the memoir of Wladislaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who through resilience and luck managed to cheat the Nazis of one more victim. The play he saw, which ran in Paris for a year, was Taking Sides. Its author, Ronald Harwood, was promptly approached.

Barney Clark as Oliver with director Roman Polanski

"I've always said to him, 'You're so unimaginative, Roman, because it's so obvious'," says Harwood now. "He thought, this is a play about Nazis and music: perhaps this is the guy to write The Pianist."

The Pianist somehow contrived to lose out to Chicago as best film in the 2003 Oscars, but Harwood, Polanski and the actor Adrien Brody all acquired statuettes. In the longer term, the writer and director's prizes were an opportunity to do it all over again. Polanski decided his next project would be to make a film his two children with the actress Emmanuelle Seignier could see (and, it turns out, have a cameo in).

A year passed. Harwood was doing an interview when the phone rang. "It was a Thursday. He said, 'Ronnie? Roman. I'm going to say two words. Oliver Twist.' I said, 'Terrific,' and put the phone down." They announced it the next day. On Monday, the money was in place, and Harwood started stripping the tedious sub-plots out of Dickens's early novel.

That was two years ago. The two men have much to be thankful for in their late-flowering friendship. "We were both in our mid-sixties and we became friends instantly. Which is rare at our age. We are more cautious." He is conscious of the difference from his relationship with the great Hungarian director István Szabó, who has also filmed two recent Harwood screenplays - Taking Sides and Being Julia. "Szabó is much more withheld. I'd be cautious of being too confiding in him. Roman is very out-going, much more explosive, which suits my character. We have a hell of a good time together."

Bizarrely, their first good times together came when Harwood and Polanski met to revise the script of The Pianist. "Roman used to say, 'How many Jews did we kill today?' I'd say, 'About 10 or 12.' 'Not enough!' And then we'd fall about like children. It was our defence mechanism. The material is bleak." Their bond derives not only from Jewishness but also from a shared rootlessness. Polanski has famously lived everywhere. Harwood's people, as revealed in his epic genealogical novel Home, came from Poland via South Africa. He arrived in Britain to train as an actor in 1951.

They never discussed Fagin's ethnicity. "In the novel, no one calls Fagin a Jew except the narrator. I think it's probably accurate. There were probably Jewish fences in the East End of London. Fagin is a very complex figure in the book, and much simplified in other versions." Fagin was the cause of Polanski's infidelity to Dickens. Harwood, now based in Paris, insisted on ending the film with Oliver visiting the prison where Fagin is held to pray for him as he awaits the gallows. "He always starts with the end of a script," says Harwood. Did he resent the interpolation? "No! He's a great filmmaker. My God, I'd be stupid to resist."

Before they met, Harwood was familiar with Polanski's work but, he says, "Polanski didn't know mine very well. He loves The Dresser. He wanted to play the dresser, which I'd love him to do." (Polanski still acts - he has played Mozart in Amadeus in French and Polish. Harwood gave up, but got a play out of it.)

Until The Pianist, Polanski had struggled for years to match the impact of Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and Tess. Has Harwood been integral to his creative renaissance? "I tell him I have been but I don't know if he buys it. The Pianist must have released something in him."

And yet when they were adapting Szpilman's memoir, Polanski's memories of the Kraków ghetto went largely unmentioned. "Occasionally, he would say, 'I tell you what happened to me,' but it's always as if it happened to someone else. He doesn't dwell. He doesn't indulge."
The flavour of autobiography seems just as present in Oliver Twist, another picaresque narrative in which a small orphan wanders through a malignant universe. And when Sykes bludgeons Nancy to death, it is hard to imagine that Polanski was not in some way reliving the 1969 Manson murders which claimed his wife Sharon Tate. "That hadn't occurred to me to this moment," says Harwood. "One thing is for certain, we didn't discuss that."

Recently, Vanity Fair alleged that Polanski made a pass at a woman while stopping off in New York on the way to Tate's funeral. This summer he sued the magazine's London edition and won. But as he is still unable to travel to this country owing to the UK's extradition treaty with the US, where he has long been wanted in connection with allegations of sex with a minor, he gave evidence by video link.

"I sat with him all through that. It was fun. It was bloody nerve-racking, actually. But it was fun that he won. Vanity Fair published a grotesque untruth about him, and why they were so shocked is they thought he didn't have a reputation to damage… No one I know has had a life like Roman. No one. That's the beauty of Roman: he's a survivor, and he has survived well."

Meanwhile, Harwood's Indian summer continues apace with adaptations of Love in a Time of Cholera and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. "I'm going to be 71 this year, I'm working more than I've ever worked in my life before, and I'm certainly getting paid more." Can cinema-goers expect the final part in a trilogy of collaborations? "We haven't found anything. He always says, 'I'll know when I have the next subject, I'll get an erection.' He's 71 now. It may take some time."