SOURCE: Polanski, Roman, and David Thompson. “‘I Make Films for Adults.’” Sight and Sound 5, no. 4 (April 1995): 6-11.

In the following interview, Polanski discusses his body of work, cinematic techniques, and the process of adapting Death and the Maiden from stage to screen.

There are three characters—two of them a married couple, the other an outsider—in an isolated dwelling by the sea: it could be Cul-de-Sac, the 1966 film Roman Polanski has often cited as his best, when the setting was the castle on Holy Island, the unlikely couple Donald Pleasence and a coquettish Françoise Dorléac and the outsider Lionel Stander, growling like a Hollywood gangster in a B-movie plot. But it is also the dramatic situation in Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's much-vaunted recent play about the legacy of political torture, Death and the Maiden. Now the setting is a South American country just after...