Bill Cosby may be in jail. Harvey Weinstein may be in hiding. But Roman Polanski is alive and well, and planning his first movie in the #MeToo era. He even has an Oscar-winning actor attached.
French producers Légende Films confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Polanski will begin filming his next movie, the political thriller JAccuse, this fall in Paris. Louis Garrel will star as Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the real-life French-Jewish soldier wrongly accused of spying for the Germans in the 1890s. The scandal, which divided the country, concluded dramatically in 1906 when Dreyfus was exonerated after spending five years in the Devils Island penal colony for high treason. The Artists Academy Award–winning actor Jean Dujardin will star as the counter-espionage officer who vindicated Dreyfus. Mathieu Amalric, Olivier Gourmet, and Polanskis wife Emmanuelle Seigner will round out the cast. Polanski has been developing the film for the past six years, with a script from British novelist Robert Harris.
The subject matter—a man being wrongly accused and proving his innocence decades later—will likely make for interesting press conversations conducted around the time of the films eventual release. Polanski is currently evading sentencing in the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor—then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer—in 1977. In spite of the plea, Polanski has maintained a successful movie career—even winning a best-director Oscar for The Pianist in 2003.
But the #MeToo era has already affected Polanski. This past May, the filmmaker was expelled from the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as was Bill Cosby. (Weinstein was expelled from the Academy in October 2017.)
Polanski called the decision “the height of hypocrisy,” and, according to his lawyer Jan Olszewski, objected to being grouped with Cosby. (Polanskis own accuser even weighed in, calling the expulsion “ugly and cruel.”)
Back in 2012, when he first announced his plans to make a movie about the Dreyfus scandal, Polanski said the story was “absolutely relevant” given “the age-old spectacle of the witch hunt on a minority group, security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, governmental cover-ups, and a rabid press,” according to T.H.R.
This past May, Polanski described the #MeToo movement as another instance of “mass hysteria that occurs in society from time to time. Sometimes its very dramatic, like the French Revolution or the St. Bartholomews Day massacre in France, or sometimes its less bloody, like 1968 in Poland or McCarthyism in the U.S.”
“Everyone is trying to back this movement, mainly out of fear,” said Polanski. “I think its total hypocrisy.”
Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fairs website.
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