In Exile : It’s Been 10 Years Since Roman Polanski Set Foot in Hollywood. Now He Has a New Movie--and Friends Are Quietly Trying to Arrange His Return to Los Angeles

“THE U.S. HAS this wonderful Constitution,” says fugitive movie director Roman Polanski, gulping a luncheon of oysters and white wine in a Paris restaurant recently. “But it is troubled by other things that it has to get under control. The puritanism.”

Polanski laughs aloud on recalling a recent newspaper cartoon that showed evangelist-politician Pat Robertson proclaiming that his baby was conceived before his marriage: “It’s a miracle.”

“Such hypocrisy,” the director says of the gap between public and private mores in America.

At 54, Polanski is outrageous, obscene, a bit dangerous, ambitious, nervous, embittered, frantic, unrepentant, and at least a little happier than he was.

He is also back--cinematically speaking, at any rate. Only weeks ago in France, Polanski finished shooting a thriller called “Frantic” for Warner Bros. Set for a February release, the film is his first major studio effort since he made “The Tenant” for Paramount in 1976.

In purely physical terms, of course, he may never dare to step across the United States border--although even that appears open to negotiation these days: Word has seeped through Hollywood that friends are very tentatively seeking to resolve the threat of a prison term that has kept Polanski from these shores ever since he jumped bail after pleading guilty to a felony morals charge 10 years ago.

Polanski himself claims to have no burning interest in making his peace with United States authorities. “I’m more ready than I was. But I’m not ready,” is all that he will say about the possibility of return.

As a film maker, however, the director--as brilliantly problematical as ever--is knocking on America’s door.

Polanski has a Hollywood agent now, his first in five years. And Warner Bros. is sufficiently pleased with the rough cut of “Frantic” to be talking already about the next Polanski film. Among other things, the director is pondering a love story set during World War II. It would, he says, recall the “sense of separation” he experienced as a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto.

If Hollywood is newly intrigued with Polanski, it is partly because it’s become accepted movie-industry wisdom that aging audiences want fewer whiz-bang pyrotech nics and special effects, and more of the sophisticated characterization that Polanski, Stanley Kubrick and a few maturing peers can deliver.

“It has something to do with his ability to see character in things that other directors would miss. He’s not simply after kinetics,” offers Harrison Ford, the all-American star of “Frantic.”

And if Polanski is edging toward the mainstream again, it is mostly because he is older and wiser--and is eager, according to one close friend, to re-establish his flagging professional reputation by making “two or three bravura” films in the next 10 years.

By his own account, the director was beaten black and blue by the difficulty of assembling “Tess” and “Pirates”--his only two movies during the last decade--in the brutal world of independent-movie finance.

“You learn not to care,” he says. “(Producers) get you sucked in when they see how much you care. Pretty soon, you’re spending your own money.”

Not that Polanski--living near the Champs Elysees with Emmanuelle Seigner, an actress who turned 21 last June--has lost the wicked edge that kept studio executives from taming him even when he had an office on the Paramount lot.

At dinner the same evening with Seigner and film-distributor friend Paul Rassam, Polanski raises a toast to director Michael Cimino for his suicidal courage in cutting all the hot action from “The Sicilian,” allegedly to spite his troublesome producers.

“Wouldn’t you (do the same thing)?” challenges Polanski.

He gropes momentarily for an image vile enough to capture his feelings about the more loathsome producers, studio executives and film financiers with whom he has done business.

“They are like voyeurs ,” the movie director finally spits out.

Never one to leave a sexual metaphor unexhausted, he continues, “They rub themselves up against your film. It’s obscene.”

In the next breath, however, Polanski concedes his relief at coming home to a major studio and its resources after struggling to make films away from Hollywood’s well-financed companies. “It’s the first time since film school that I remember why I wanted to make movies,” he says with regard to the pleasure of simply directing . “You want a piece of equipment, whatever, it’s just there.”

IT WAS IN February of 1978 that Polanski, on an adrenaline-driven impulse, grabbed the last available seat on a British Air ways flight out of the United States rather than face sentencing in a Santa Monica criminal court. He fled before he was forced to make what he believed would be a choice between prison (he had already undergone a 42-day psychiatric evaluation in the California Institution for Men at Chino) or deportation for moral depravity. (Polanski was born in France to Polish parents, but grew up in Poland; he became a French citizen in 1976.)

He had pleaded guilty to one felony count of having sex with a minor. The plea had been entered under a bargaining arrangement in which prosecutors dropped five additional counts of sexual abuse of and supplying drugs to a 13-year-old Woodland Hills girl whom he had taken to Jack Nicholson’s empty home, ostensibly to photograph for a planned pictorial spread in the French magazine Vogues Hommes.

The girl was never publicly identified, but in “Roman by Polanski,” his 1984 memoir, Polanski called her Sandra. In the book, he maintained Sandra had plenty of experience with both sex and drugs. When he asked how she was enjoying their ill-fated sexual encounter, her jaded reply, by his account, was simply: “It’s all right.”

The director concedes that he wants to lift what he calls the “cloud” of illegality that hangs over his name; and he would like to visit friends in the United States. But he fiercely resists the notion that he needs physical access to the United States in order to recapture his reputation as a premier director. “Nobody talks that way about Kubrick (who lives and works in England). He doesn’t make headlines.”

He doubts he could return without serving some additional jail time, however, and he is fearful that he would be killed if he returned to prison even briefly.

Even so, a small group of Hollywood friends is gingerly probing for a way to resolve the director’s legal problems, perhaps allowing him to visit or work in the United States without facing prison.

In recent months, according to several sources, ICM chairman Jeff Berg, who became Polanski’s agent within the last year, asked Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to review Polanski’s legal status. Berg sought to determine what position prosecutors might take if Polanski asked the court for an arrangement--say, probation--that would preclude his doing further jail time.

Reiner asked Berg to relay the request through an attorney. Soon afterward, Arthur Groman--a lawyer with the prestigious firm of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp--contacted Reiner. According to one source, the D.A. took no position but agreed to have his staff conduct a review that was still incomplete as this was written.

Reiner couldn’t be reached for comment on the calls, and Berg declined to comment. Groman also declined to comment on his efforts in behalf of Polanski. “I just don’t think it would be appropriate to say anything,” Groman said.

Coincidentally, criminal lawyer Howard Weitzman--following his victorious defense of auto magnate John DeLorean--within the last year separately contacted Polanski to offer help in brokering a possible return. One source familiar with that episode claims that Polanski’s friends discouraged Weitzman, largely out of fear that his flashy style might work to the director’s disadvantage. Weitzman declined to discuss any involvement with Polanski.

A factor that might work in Polanski’s favor is that Judge Laurence J. Rittenband--whom the director has publicly excoriated for what Polanski describes as his unfairness on a number of occasions--removed himself from the case soon after Polanski’s flight. Rittenband specifically denied claims that he was biased, but disqualified himself to avoid delays in the case.

But any attempt to square Polanski’s account with the law would be severely complicated not only by the court’s presumably dim view of bail jumpers, but by potential problems with immigration authorities--Polanski’s United States visa was revoked soon after he left--and by an apparent tightening of America’s public mores in the last several years. Polanski himself appears to believe that this last factor is the strongest bar toward his ever reaching an accommodation with authorities.

“It becomes too intense a TV thing,” agrees Robert Evans, an independent producer who worked closely with Polanski as a Paramount executive.

Evans believes that Polanski should not even attempt to return, so great would be the outcry against him.

He says: “It’s not the justice factor. It’s the media factor. Even if a judge wanted to do the right thing, the pressure would be too great. He wouldn’t last five days in jail. No one’s going to give him an airtight agreement.”

WELL INTO middle age, Polanski remains as trim and vigorous as an adolescent. His eyes are as restless as ever; his dishwater-blond hair is disheveled and long.

For Polanski, the simple business of living is complicated by nervous energy.

He shows up late and bleary-eyed for a luncheon appointment, explaining vaguely that he hasn’t been home to his Avenue Montaigne apartment (just a few blocks away), but spent the night “across town, somewhere else.”

Dressed in blue jeans and black leather jacket, the director seems badly out of place among the gray-suited Parisian businessmen. His conversation is brisk and clever but punctuated by diversions. “Did you see that Iranian woman walking with the child? She comes by here every day. I wonder what is her story?” he muses.

The director is supposedly expected to spend the afternoon editing his film at the Studio du Boulogne, about 10 miles distant. As the luncheon grows long, however, he decides that it is necessary to meet his friend Rassam.

After a brisk walk to Rassam’s nearby office, it turns out the purpose of the visit is only to swap stories about producer Dino De Laurentiis--currently a Polanski bete noire because he tried to force the director to re-edit “Pirates.”

“Dino is incredible,” says the director, matching raspy-voiced De Laurentiis impersonations with Rassam.

“I was 30 seconds over (contractual length) on ‘Pirates,’ and he screwed me. Do you know that?” he says of De Laurentiis’ effort to wrest control of the film from him. Eventually Polanski found new financial backers and ended his involvement with the producer.

Polanski is clearly embittered by his recent experiences as a film maker. In the past 10 years he has made only two movies. Neither, in the eyes of the world, was an unalloyed success.

“Pirates,” a farce that was written by Polanski and starred Walter Matthau, was released last year by Cannon Group to disastrous reviews and audience reaction. For the film’s failure, Polanski largely blames MGM/UA, Paramount and Universal, all of which blew hot and cold on the project for nearly a decade before the film was finally made with independent financing.

“By the time it got made,” maintains Polanski, “audiences didn’t want to see that kind of ‘fun’ movie any more.”

The director appears to harbor a deeper sort of resentment over his difficulties with “Tess.” A 19th-Century period piece based on Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” the movie went without an American distributor for more than a year after its European release; Columbia finally agreed to give it a limited release in 1980.

During the course of a day, Polanski comes back repeatedly to the protracted “Tess” struggle, during which United Artists offered a paltry $200,000 for rights to his independently financed epic, and Columbia executives initially rejected the movie as “not romantic enough”--only to see it win six Academy Award nominations.

With the completion of “Frantic,” Roman Polanski will have made 12 feature films in a career that began with “Knife in the Water,” an arty drama that he directed in 1961 after leaving the Lodz Film School in Poland.

Only two of those movies--”Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown”--have been major commercial successes. Yet they were the kinds of successes Hollywood executives most treasure: films in which cinematic art and good business converged. “Roman touched magic,” is how Evans puts it.

Earlier films such as “Cul-de-Sac” and “Repulsion” were often too “foreign” for American audiences. Other films were either too obscure or too personal (“Fearless Vampire Killers,” which starred Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate) to connect at the box office.

Polanski identifies “Vampire Killers” as his favorite among all his cinematic offspring. “It marked a very happy time in my life,” he says of it--although he is careful to note that he refers only to his own version, not the producer’s cut that was released by MGM in 1967. Only a year later, Tate and four friends were massacred by the Manson family while Polanski was in London. The crime marked the end of what Polanski would later describe as an era of “innocence” in his life.

Thom Mount, a former Universal executive who has become a close friend of Polanski’s and who produced both “Pirates” and “Frantic,” maintains that the director’s career hasn’t been unduly damaged by his exclusion from the United States. “It hasn’t really hurt him. It’s just not fun to have a major section of the world be a place where you can’t work,” says Mount.

Still, Polanski’s collision with justice initially cost him a job as director of Dino De Laurentiis’ remake of “Hurricane.” It also began what Jeff Berg describes as “an eight- or nine-year period of eclipse.”

“Of course it hurts him,” Evans observes of Polanski’s banishment. “I would love for him to direct ‘The Two Jakes.’ But how do you shoot ‘The Two Jakes’ in Paris?” Evans asks, referring to an off-again, on-again “Chinatown” sequel that he now plans to make with Paramount--and without Polanski.

POLANSKI maintains that he is artistically better for having been forced out of the mainstream. “Hollywood wasn’t good for me,” he says. “I lost myself there. Lots of people lose their gifts.”

He also claims to have learned to live more soundly: “Money matters less to me now. I have less. I do with less.”

Between films in the 1980s, Polanski starred on the Paris stage as Wolfgang Mozart in “Amadeus,” and he is scheduled next January to play the role of Gregor Samsa--the man who turned into an insect--in a stage version of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” At least twice during his French residence Polanski has directed TV commercials.

“Frantic” is designed to pull Polanski a little closer to Hollywood, and mini mize the awkwardness of what friends sometimes call his “exile.” As with “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” the story is one of danger and suspense. Written by Polanski and long-time collaborator Gerard Brach, the movie follows Richard Walker, an American doctor played by Harrison Ford, as he is sucked into an alien world when his wife is kidnaped during a visit to Paris.

Polanski dismisses as “producer’s drivel” the notion, advanced by one associate, that the film recalls his own sense of loss after Tate’s murder. But he concedes that he devised the story--and cast Ford, the most down-home of male leads--with an eye toward making the great American audience feel at home.

Obviously eager to connect with the “commercial” side of Polanski, the film’s producers quietly hired Robert Towne, who wrote the original script for “Chinatown,” to help polish the “Frantic” script. They also retained veteran film editor Sam O’Steen--who also edited both “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.”

Nestled in the cluttered editing room after a frantic drive across Paris (“There are no rules,” Polanski mutters, narrowly missing a gendarme near the Arc de Triomphe), the director seems suddenly transformed from a hyperkinetic child to a craftsman with astonishing powers of concentration.

Working back and forth through the footage of a scene in which Ford fumbles with a Marlboro carton in search of some lost clue, Polanski is suddenly exasperated at a missed opportunity. “Look at the way he fumbles,” he snorts. “I should have had him cut it with the knife. He is a surgeon. Zip!”

Soon, his excitement with Ford’s performance bubbles over. “He is one of the few actors who can play in a role, the way he does here, or next to a role, the way he does in ‘Indiana Jones.’ Do you understand? Cary Grant was great, but he played next to his roles. Maybe Jimmy Stewart could do it both ways.”

“Frantic,” if it succeeds, will peel back the beautiful skin of Paris to reveal a much darker city that Polanski knows as few Americans ever will. “You are stuck in the Paris of ‘Irma La Douce.’ I’m trying to get rid of all that,” he says. A key character in the exploration is Michelle, played by Seigner.

Ford describes the character as a “child of the ‘80s, Paris-style.” She is, he explains, “disillusioned. Possibly amoral, but not immoral . . . . In other words, a real cute kid.”

In real life, Seigner--a teen-age model, a former street mime and the granddaughter of Louis Seigner, a famous actor with the Comedie Francaise--has been Polanski’s lover for at least two years.

She is as exotically beautiful as was 18-year-old Nastassia Kinski when Polanski, then Kinski’s lover, cast her in the title role of “Tess.” Seigner’s English is weak, and she has never had a major film role, although she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Detective” in 1985.

According to Ford, the actress nonetheless “did a good job” in “Frantic.” According to several of Polanski’s friends, moreover, she has had a surprisingly settling effect on the director. The couple talk vaguely of having a child, and Polanski says that he “wouldn’t rule out” the possibility of marriage.

Perhaps so.

But there is nothing settling about Seigner’s effect on the diners in Boeuf sur le Toit, a chic Parisian brasserie , as she joins Polanski midway through an evening meal. Seigner looks 18 and every inch the amoral child that Ford describes. Her eyes are dark, and her hair is a mottled, golden brown. Defiantly casual, wearing jeans and a sweat shirt amid the surrounding sport coats and dresses, the actress curls up in the booth to nuzzle playfully with Polanski.

There are embarrassed pauses as Polanski attempts to translate for her snatches of conversation that turn on the woes of a current Hollywood star.

“Blackmail? What is blackmail?” Seigner asks.

“ Chantage ,” Polanski explains.

The embarrassment spreads to nearby tables when a giggling Polanski graphically gestures the details of the star’s alleged sexual scandal for Seigner--details she stubbornly refuses to understand.

MUCH later, and back in the United States, Harrison Ford mulls the question that so many of Polanski’s Hollywood friends--Jack Nicholson, Robert Evans, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman--have periodically debated over the last 10 years: Is America ready for Polanski again?

“I would certainly like to see him back,” says Ford, who accepted the role in “Frantic” after being charmed by a two-hour Polanski disquisition on the story while the director was working with Ford’s wife, Melissa Mathison (screenwriter on “E.T.”), on another screenplay.

“But I think Roman would have to make expressions of remorse,” Ford continues. “And somehow you like him a lot better for not being remorseful.

“He’s not defiant. But he’s not remorseful.”