Last month, I mentioned that the arrest of Roman Polanski had put THE GHOST on hold. Filming had been completed, but editing and mixing was still needed.

Robert Harris, author of the book the film is based on, has openly said that Polanski has been letting the crew know what he wants. In the London Times, Harris said:

“He can make his wishes known from his cell. I don’t think he can make phone calls, but he can communicate. What people think of the film is another matter. Whether the film can rise above the circumstances in which the director now finds himself, I don’t know. We will test to the upper limits the notion that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

On a related note, GHOST star Ewen McGregor recently shared his thoughts on Polanski with the L.A. Times:

He pushes you quite hard and always demands that you look for the truth of the scene and pushes until you get there, until you stop acting it and you start feeling it. But he’s also got quite a brusque manner, so you have to have a thick skin.

That said, I’m very fond of him. He’s one of the very few completely brilliant directors that I’ve worked with. There aren’t really very many, I have to say, or it’s a shame to say. To be an artist in terms of what you see and what you want to feel out of each scene, a kind of master of the technique and the technicalities of filmmaking, and a master of directing actors, which is usually the one that’s missing — there are many who have no idea how to speak or to pull good work out of actors — is very rare. Roman was all those things.