Oliver Twist – A Child Who Survives

Legendary director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown) joins forces again with fellow Oscar-winning collaborator Ronald Harwood (Best Adapted Screenplay - The Pianist) to present the latest cinematic retelling of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. 11-year-old British newcomer Barney Clark plays the titular role while Sir Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Sexy Beast, House of Sand and Fog) offers his take on the sinister Fagin. The cast also includes Harry Eden as the Artful Dodger, Jamie Foreman (Layer Cake) as Bill Sykes, Leanne Rowe as Nancy and Edward Hardwicke (Love Actually) as Mr. Brownlow.

The obvious questions about this production remain – Why is it necessary to tell this story again and what are some of the challenges facing the artistic staff and crew? Depending on whom you ask, it may or may not be necessary at all and the challenges in remaking this tale are somewhat daunting. Sir Ben Kingsley who worked with Polanski before on “Death and the Maiden” says, “I think by definition it’s a classic, therefore in it’s authority as a classic it has enormous resonance. I think it was written with great care, great compassion and great attention to detail. Like a piece of great music, people don’t tend to say ‘Do you think it’s relevant to play Beethoven today?’ We listen to Beethoven every week in the radio, in the car – Mozart – these great classical composers who put notes together in a certain sequence. Dickens puts words together in a certain sequence and gives us indelible images of an endangered child in a world of adults…It’s extraordinary.” Screenwriter Harwood demurs, saying that he’s not sure he thinks it’s important or necessary. When asked then why do it he says, “Because I wanted to, thank you very much. There are 2 people involved who decide whether to tell the story again (Polanski and Harwood), but whether it’s important, that’s a sort of objective view and I can’t take that view. Necessary is something that’s never true in art. Was it necessary for the artist to paint “Sunflowers”? But it is relevant…Charles Dickens is one of the authentic geniuses of English Literature. And “Oliver Twist” which he wrote (alarmingly so) in his twenties is a most marvelous story. It’s the story of a child who survives and that’s what I think the audience finds terribly attractive about it and has since it was written. It’s read and reread and it may be, with Great Expectations, the most popular of Dickens’ novels. The reason it remains so popular – and this is a personal theory – is that these terrible things happen to this child and he comes through. At the end he actually is alive. That’s what seemed important to us and that’s what I think the director was thinking.”

Both Harwood and Kingsley acknowledge the challenge in adapting a book for film that has been done before and that everyone is familiar with. Harwood stresses the reason to take on this challenge is “To do it better.” He claims to have not seen the David Lean version from 1948 which starred Alec Guinness as Fagin, but interestingly enough, he asks about it,“ Don’t you think it’s sort of German Impressionistic with the glowering clouds and all?” He asks aloud if Guinness’ portrayal was somewhat of a caricature a la Barrymore and Julius Stryker. That question was met with some silence, as I don’t think anyone in the room was alive much less in attendance during the Barrymore theatrical performances. But I think Harwood wanted to introduce the point because of his relationship with the late Guinness and his esteem for Kingsley’s work. “Guinness was a very good friend of mine, we were neighbors for years and he was always embarrassed later about that performance. Because it is a caricature – there is something caricaturic about it. We wanted to avoid that. We just knew we couldn’t do that. Kingsley, is an amazing actor – a serious actor, he’s like a coalminer picking for the coal the way he examines the text. It’s his background in theatre. It makes the subtext so very important to him.”

The writing and characterization of Fagin delves into some murky areas which adapters must handle with some delicacy. Anti-Semitism and a suggestion of pedophilia pervade the novel. Dickens referred to Fagin throughout the original text as “The Jew”. The pickpocketing boys become members of a surrogate family of which Fagin is the paternal head. Harwood says, “Dickens scholars have always regarded the boys as rent boys. There are serious studies and articles on that.” Kingsley used these inferences to inform his work. “When I was filming ‘Schindler’s List’ I found in Krakow and bought some sepia photographs in a store in the Jewish quarter of some late 19th century Jews in Krakow. Wonderful faces, really bizarre clothes, I was very fond of them. They were part of my performance in ‘Schindler’s List’ and they are part of my Fagin too. I also had some engravings and pictures of Edmund Keane’s Shylock and was taken by how this icon was interpreted.”

“A child’s perception of things has a clarity and immediacy unmatched by any subsequent experience.” – from Roman Polanski’s autobiography Roman. It’s been reported that Roman Polanski wanted to follow up the deeply moving story of “The Pianist” with the story of another survivor, but this time he wanted to tell the tale of a survivor with a child at the center. “Oliver Twist” became the obvious choice. Polanski says, “I thought I owed my children a movie because they were always very interested in my work, so I started looking around for a children’s story and eventually landed on Dickens.” Armed with Harwood’s screenplay, his cast and many of the crew and artisans from “The Pianist”, Polanski descended upon Prague to create his singular version of an orphaned parish boy who embarks on a ‘series of adventures and misadventures’ all in the name of making it to another day.

There are clear parallels between director and hero. Polanski was an orphan himself for a time. He saw his father deported to a labor camp and his mother sent to Auschwitz during World War II. She never returned, but Polanski would be reunited with his father later in life. Oliver never finds his parents but is adopted by Mr. Brownlow, a kindly gentleman who in the novel (in what Harwood calls a “Victorian coincidence and conceit that wouldn’t be believable today” so therefore not depicted in his script) turns out to be Oliver’s grandfather. Polanski’s life would make for an over-the-top drama in and of itself full of sadness, intrigue and ultimately triumph – just like Oliver’s. If one were watching the movie of his life, it would take true suspension on the part of the audience to believe that one man could live through so much and in his spare time go on to create some of the most memorable movies in modern cinematic history. Without belaboring the major plot points of Polanski’s well documented personal history Kingsley says of his director, “It’s a miracle he’s alive…he deserves to be happy. He’s been through two Holocausts in his life.” And Harwood says with complete and utter sincerity “I know of no one in the world who has lived a life like Roman.”

Who better to bring Dickens’ classic story of a child who survives back to the screen?

Oliver Twist Opens Nationwide Sept 30th