Polanski interviewed by his old friend and producer Andrew Braunsberg about his whole life and the highs and lows, one of which was his mother being killed in Auschwitz.
Having as a boy (he was unluckily born in 1933) been separated from his father, who was taken to a concentration camp but miraculously survived - he often had this image that some presence in the distance would be him - and it even pops up in his first short film, Mammals. Also recounted how after the Krakow ghetto when living in the Polish countryside (weirdly near Auschwitz), he was randomly shot at by a soldier when blackberry picking and ran like hell for his life into the woods. Also in Krakow he'd seen a middle aged woman in a line of prisoners stumble to the ground and shot in the back by a Nazi.
He didn't look back too kindly on Repulsion but thought Cul-de-Sac much more like it.
A useful corrective on his legal problems. He had in fact served 42 days in prison undergoing a psychiatric report, and the prison discharged him as a free man. But the Judge then decided to change his mind and said Polanski would go back to prison until he decided, which is of course illegal. So Polanski fled. He did not 'skip bail' because at that point he was a free man.
He was then also held under house arrest in Switzerland for nine months pending a US extradition request.
Photographed in Gstaad by Pawel Edelman, music by Alexandre Desplat.
He said the one film he'd most want to be remembered for was The Pianist.
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