HUGH GRANT. Extreme Measures. September 25, 1996
  • Golden Globe Awards

Oral History: Hugh Grant’s Polanski Experience

For over 40 years the HFPA has recorded famous and celebrated actors, actresses and filmmakers. The world’s largest collection of its kind – over 10,000  items- is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Margaret Herrick Library.In this excerpt from our archives, Golden Globe winner Hugh Grant describes how it was working in Roman Polanski‘s 1992 film Bitter Moon – with Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner as the co-star. (More on Grant and filming Bitter Moon in our HFPA in Conversation podcast series).“Roman Polanski’s marriage to actress Emmanuelle Seigner is like a ship with two mates and no captain. I think they’re having a marvelous time! Roman’s temperamental in the old-fashionedtradition of the maestro director. It was fun to watch him lose his temper, particularly with Emmanuelle. There was a lot of that. He would storm off the set saying, “No, I’m not shooting anything today.  No, no, forget  it.” And she’d say, “Oh no, come back, come back. I’ll try harder this time.” Emmanuelle ’s very naughty as well. I remember doing a standard film kiss, which is really quite chaste, and she kept breaking away and saying, “What are you doing? You put your tongue in my mouth!  Don’t do that!” Which, I promise you, I wasn’t doing.  She was  just trying to create  trouble with  Roman.”