Roman Polanski and Darius Khondji, ASC, conjure up a devilish mystery set in the world of rare books.
Roman Polanski’s new thriller, The Ninth Gate, opens in darkness to the scratchy sound of a pen scribbling on paper. As the picture fades in, we see an elderly man writing a note at an ornate desk, amid the elegant trappings of a stately, private library lined wall-to-wall with dusty tomes. With slow deliberation, the camera dollies back from the desk, pans left and tilts down, where it lingers curiously upon a footstool placed rather incongruously in the middle of the dimly lit room. After a pregnant pause, the camera tilts up toward the ceiling to reveal the sequence’s brilliantly morbid payoff: an ominous shot of a homemade noose dangling above the footstool. In an instant, the serene, book-filled sanctuary has been transformed into the lurid setting of an imminent suicide.
With nary a word of dialogue or even a single edit, Polanski has effortlessly piqued the audience’s curiosity about the forthcoming tale — and reminded us of the sheer pleasure of first-rate cinema. “That opening scene is pure Roman,” attests the film’s cinematographer, Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC. “He lined up the whole scene without any [narrative] interference or compromise. For me, that shot is very representative of Roman’s sensibility. His filmmaking is beautiful and classical, but at the same time, it’s twisted!”
Based on Arturo Perez-Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas, The Ninth Gate trails unscrupulous New York book appraiser Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) across Europe, after he is commissioned by wealthy collector Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to track down and secure the two other existing copies of a mysterious, 17th-century text that can reputedly be used to conjure up Satan. While carrying out his mission, Corso encounters a succession of the inimitable eccentrics and deviants who inhabit many of Polanski’s films — from wealthy devil-worshippers to ill-tempered secretaries to an enigmatic French beauty (known only as The Girl, and played by Polanski’s real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner) who seems to anticipate Corso’s every move.
A sly cross between two of Polanski’s undisputed classics, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), The Ninth Gate blends horror with an abundance of the director’s mordant wit. The film also explores one of Polanski’s perennial themes: the ubiquity of evil, and the disturbing ease with which one can fall prey to its temptations.
For the highly influential and much-sought-after Khondji, The Ninth Gate offered the chance to collaborate with one of the world’s most respected cinematic stylists and to tackle a film genre he has long held dear. “Roman is one of the true originals of cinema,” he states. “Also, I’ve always wanted to make a movie with a witchcraft or supernatural subtext — I love those kinds of stories. Roman is obviously one of the best directors in the world to work with in that genre.”
When reading a script, Khondji waits for what he has referred to in past interviews as “The Big Bang” — a strong first impression of a film that inspires his ideas about the cinematography. “When I read The Ninth Gate, my initial images of the story were mixed,” he describes. “It starts out as a dark, urban film in America and then travels to Europe, so there’s a balance of the two continents. I thought of it as a modern story, but at the same time as a very old, classical film about books. I saw Dean Corso as a character who could be in a Jean-Pierre Melville film — uncompromising, with ice-cold eyes. He’s also very cynical, like the main character of Melville’s Le Samourai. In interpreting the cinematography of a film, I always try to enter into the story through the eyes of the main character.”
While hunting for visual inspirations during preproduction, Polanski and Khondji found themselves hard-pressed to unearth many films set in the hermetic world of antiquarian book dealers, so the duo instead referenced similarly themed pictures. “Roman kept reminding me about Touch of Evil by Orson Welles,” Khondji says. “We watched that film together, and we both liked its sense of darkness; we decided that that feeling was one side of The Ninth Gate. I also watched all of Roman’s films again; when we started working on the film, some of his ideas for camera movement reminded me very much of Rosemary’s Baby. There was also a bit of The Name of the Rose in the story — a mystery amid the world of books. I thought that was a fascinating world in which to set a film.”
Khondji expounds at length when asked about the visual philosophies that distinguish Polanski from the other high-profile directors he’s worked with so far, among them Danny Boyle (The Beach, see AC Feb. ’00), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Alien: Resurrection; see coverage of the latter film in AC Nov. ’97), Alan Parker (Evita, see AC Jan. ’97), Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty, see AC June ’96), David Fincher (Seven, see AC Oct. ’95) and Neil Jordan (In Dreams). “I feel that as both a cameraman and a person, I’m somehow different since working with Roman,” he says. “It’s not even very clear what I learned from working with him, but I find that I don’t line up shots the same way I used to! Roman has very acute, very sharp eyes in terms of things like camera angles. I never got the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick, but I often thought that collaborating with Roman must be similar, because he has that same kind of taste and approach. Roman has a very methodical, scrupulous way of filming things — every single detail in the frame is equally important to him.”
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