True Crime Next For Roman Polanski?

He's got his eye on a New Yorker article

True Crime Next For Roman Polanski?

by Owen Williams |
Published on

No, it's not a remake of the ropey 1999 Clint Eastwood vehicle about possibly-dodgy death-row convictions. The True Crime** that Roman Polanski is apparently currently interested in is even more intriguing.

Based on a real-life case detailed in a New Yorker article by David Grann, this Poland-set True Crime involves the unexplained murder of Dariusz Janiszewski, the owner of a small advertising business, who it seemed had no enemies in the world. His body was found in the Oder river in December 2000, but the mystery went unravelled until detective Jacek Wroblewski tracked Janiszewski's missing cellphone to an eBay auction. The seller was Krystian Bala, a Polish intellectual whose sado-sexual novel Amok had been published after Janiszewski's death, and featured a plot that seemed rather to parallel the real-life killing...

Murder undertaken as an intellectual exercise puts us somewhere in the region of Rope, so it's a nicely Hitchcockian set-up for Polanski, who hasn't been averse to visiting that territory in the past. The screenplay has already been written by Jeremy Brock, who proved with The Last King of Scotland that he's more than capable of wringing a gripping thriller from a real-world horror. And speaking of horror, Brett Ratner is aboard as a producer.

Polanski has signed no deals at this stage, but the film seems ready to go at Focus Features, so it sounds as if True Crime is his for the taking. In the meantime, Polanski's Carnage, starring Kate Winslet, Christophe Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C Reilly, has just been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

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