Empathy for the Devil:
An Interview with Damian Chapa

By: Laura Lee

Some of the most surreal scenes in Damian Chapa’s bio-pic Polanski feature a spooky Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan -- or perhaps it is Satan himself -- acting as a technical advisor on the film Rosemary’s Baby. The cinematic Roman Polanski has sought this character’s input to make the personification of evil more “realistic.” As his guide to the dark side of human nature, Chapa chose Roman Polanski.

It was this “attraction to the dark side of life” that intrigued Chapa, the writer, director and star of Polanski. Although he has seen all of Roman Polanski’s films, Chapa has never been a great fan of the Polish-born director’s work.

“Polanski’s life is way more brilliant than his films,” he says. “I certainly didn’t think The Pianist was that exciting a film, but his life was so exciting to me, so interesting, so compelling to look at. I’m an artist. I make a portrait. I thought that this was a fascinating portrait to paint. People say, ‘He’s a great film maker: who are you to do a film about him?’ Well, I’m the guy that thought of it.”

Chapa’s artistic fascination with the director of Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby began in 2003 when Polanski received an Oscar nomination for the film The Pianist. Chapa was intrigued that a man who had fled the country to avoid a potential 50-year jail term for the alleged rape and sodomy of a 13-year-old could be so easily embraced by the Hollywood establishment.

“Hollywood is a strange place,” he says. “I’ve been here many years and it’s like a big high school with all these cliques. I’ve always been an outsider. I was always the kind of guy who wanted to stand up for the outsider. This guy raped a 13-year-old-girl. That’s the bottom line. But I started to see that Polanski’s not the problem here. It’s the people that allow him to be the child-like person he is. Somebody needs to tell him he’s wrong. He’s never going to say that what he did to that child is wrong. It’s like the spoiled rocker syndrome, whatever the rock star does; they don’t care as long as he’s making records. He can trash hotel rooms and that’s fine as long as he makes the records, and this creates people who are living in another world.”

Chapa says that many people advised him not to take on this subject. He even claims to have gotten calls in the middle of the night threatening him with physical harm if he made a movie that dealt with the rape case.

“A lot of people told me, ‘you’ll be giving up your career, you’ll be blackballed if you do a film about someone that’s on the inside.’ I said, ‘you know what, you can only be blackballed once.’ I was already blackballed so I didn’t care about the Hollywood system. I thought about it, and I said to myself, ‘you know, I must be doing something right if I ruffled so many feathers.’”

Given this starting point, the resulting film is a surprisingly balanced portrayal of a man with a deeply complex emotional history. Roman Polanski survived the Holocaust as a child. In 1969, his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by a member of Charles Manson’s “family.” These events are juxtaposed in an un-chronological puzzle, which leaves questions of cause and effect largely up to the audience. Chapa believes he had a responsibility as an artist to get to the greater emotional truth about his subject, and to put his initial judgments aside.

“As an American I had to say to myself, you have to give someone a fair trial before you judge them, do you not? So I started to see Polanski for what he was, and what he went through as a child, which is no excuse for what he did. As an artist I have one way of thinking. As a man I have another way of thinking. I felt empathy for a guy that I think is very sick. I gave Polanski the fairest rendition of the human being that anybody could ever do. And I don’t think like this guy does. Some people say I was too good to him, that I was too fair to him, but I gave him more emotion because I felt the emotion.”

During the making of the film, Chapa says he gained empathy for Polanski -- empathy, but not sympathy -- an emotion he says Polanski’s apologists express too freely.

“Polanski was a well-to-do child, who had everything going for him, and then he had everything taken away by the Nazis. I started to see this guy who went through the Holocaust, who went through all these emotions, and that totally screwed him up. Here’s a kid that’s all screwed up, who’s expressing himself as an artist, and he’s in this world where people are saying, ‘yeah, it’s ok to do whatever you want as long as you keep creating these great -- or what people say are great -- films. We can make money.’”

If some aspects of Polanski’s life were a challenge for Chapa as an actor; the role of controversial filmmaker is certainly not. Chapa welcomes, even seems to relish, controversy and he has a lot to say about the Hollywood that celebrates a character like Roman Polanski.

“They call themselves liberals in Hollywood,” he says, “but if you do something against what they believe, they become very conservative in their thinking. I mean, I have to have the ability to be free as an artist without feeling this politically correct pressure on my art or I will die as an artist. Art will die in itself with this political correctness. We’re living in a system in Hollywood that it unfair, unjust and un-American to the extreme. It’s getting to the point where there’s going to have to be an intellectual revolution.”

Chapa feels that there is a double standard in the way the media have dealt with Polanski and actor/director Mel Gibson, whose career has been damaged in recent years by allegations of anti-Semitism and alcohol abuse.

“I think Mel Gibson was dumb when he said some of the things that he said as a drunk one night, but is that any worse than what Polanski did? I use them as a comparison all the time, because here are two artists -- in my opinion Mel Gibson is a far superior filmmaker. If Mel Gibson were to go rape a 13-year-old girl what would happen? Do you think he would ever work again? Do you think that he would ever be part of the system of Hollywood? With Polanski they say, ‘Oh his art is wonderful and who cares what he did?’ regardless of what happened to that child. It’s an unfair system. One person gets supported because he shares their beliefs and has the same agenda, and the other doesn’t believe in their agenda and doesn’t respect it. I should be able to say, ‘I don’t agree with that guy’s personal views but the art is beautiful the painting is beautiful.’ We as Americans should be able to live together to create together to be in the so-called Hollywood system together, to create films we want, and we should be able to express ourselves. Since when did art have to be controlled by political correctness? At one time America had a people who said give me freedom or give me death. And this is how I look at things. I know I’m dramatic, but I’m a director and what do you expect?”

Critical response to the film has been as mixed as the opinions on its subject. It won an Award of Excellence in the 2008 Indie Fest, and reviewers have responded generally positively to Chapa’s work as an actor in the film, but some have questioned the research behind it and its production values. None of the feedback worries the director.

“To me it doesn’t matter what people think of it,” he says. “It really doesn’t. I expressed myself as an artist. I felt good about it. I felt fair about it. If you don’t like it, fine. I’m a controversial person. I always expect that somebody loves it; somebody hates it. Every time I wake up in the morning I expect people to treat me like that. I have people who love me and people who hate me, and I kind of like it like that.”

One person whose opinion he is definitely not seeking is Roman Polanski’s.

“You know how many people ask me, ‘What if Roman sees this? What if Roman thinks this?’ You know, I don’t care what he thinks. What do I care what he thinks? I’m not making a movie to care what he thinks; I’m doing a movie to express myself as an artist. He’s just a man -- a human being. Maybe I’m sitting on the beach and Bill Clinton goes by, and I decide to paint a portrait of him, and maybe I give him a bigger nose than he already has. Who cares? I’m an artist. It’s a portrait. The Polanski movie is just my portrait of Polanski. It’s a painting of a human being and his emotions. That’s all it really is.”