Now there are reports he will direct “The Palace,” with an ensemble cast set in a Swiss hotel. The film will have to shoot in France, and it’s being funded by Italian media giant RAI. Polanski has secured backing from Italian media giant Rai Cinema for The Palace, a drama Polanski has co-written with fellow Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski.
Rai Cinema’s CEO Paolo Del Brocco said that Polanski carries some controversy, but we are interested in the artistic side. The quality of the stories, not the personal story. Polanski was expelled from Ampas in 2018 “in accordance with the organization’s standards of conduct”. He subsequently lost a court case that would have forced his reinstatement.
The Palace” is set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, “which is the epilogue of an entire millennium,” said RAI Cinema chief Paolo Del Brocco. The film is situated “in a big hotel immersed in the Swiss Alps where the lives of the guests and those who work for them intersect,” the exec added, noting that he only recently received the screenplay and isn’t allowed to say more.The Polanski pic is being lead-produced by Italian actor-producer Luca Barbareschi via his Eliseo Entertainment company.
Barbareschi was also a producer on Polanski’s “An Officer and a Spy,” which launched in 2019 from the Venice Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize and subsequently won three Cesar nods in France, though the embattled director did not attend the ceremony. Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, after pleading guilty to the rape of a 13-year-old girl, has since lost his bid to be reinstated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which expelled him in May 2018.
Skolimowski, a film director, screenwriter, playwright and actor considered the preeminent figure of the Eastern European New Wave that started in the 1960s, previously collaborated with Polanski as a writer on his 1962 Oscar-nominated “Knife in the Water.”