Roman Polanski may soon be permitted back into the U.S., but he's made some of his most compelling films while in exile from the Hollywood machine. As he collaborates with artist Francesco Vezzoli on a commercial for a fictional perfume starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, the director talks about the Perils of the movie world and the pleasures of skiing drunk at night.
When Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli went looking for a director to help him make his latest artwork, he went straight for the biggest. Vezzoli's productions have always served up larger-than-life spectacles studded with Hollywood mythos and celebrity. His piece, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005), which starred luminaries Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren, Milla Jovovich, and Courtney Love, was an orgiastic "preview" for the 1979 film Caligula. For his live play reading at the Guggenheim of Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in 2007, Vezzoli cast actors such as Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, and Diane Wiest. This time, he had his mind set on creating a commercial and an ad campaign for an imaginary fragrance called Greed (heavily indebted to Marcel Duchamp's own fictional perfume piece, 1921's Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette). The artist selected two leading Hollywood beauties who pointedly did not already have fragrance contracts—Portman and Michelle Williams—to be the faces of the perfume. He had Miuccia Prada specially design the costumes. He had art dealer Larry Gagosian produce the project, which will be exhibited at Vezzoli's show at Gagosian Gallery in Rome this month. Naturally, for a work this overloaded with talent, he could think of only one man to direct: Roman Polanski. Last October, in a suite at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, the 75-year-old director shot his glamorous testament to a substance that everyone wants but no one can ever get their hands on because it doesn't actually exist (the metaphor couldn't get any better, could it?).
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