Roman Polanski’s criminal troubles seem to be on hold at the moment, and so he’s busy planning his next film, which Variety reports will be called D, and based on the Dreyfus affair ofthe late 19th Century. Robert Harris, who worked with Polanski on The Ghost, will write the script.
D is about a 1894 incident in which French Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of passing along secrets to the German enemy. Dreyfus was one of the few Jewish officers in the French Army at the time, which added a whole new angle to a scandal that had him wrongfully imprisoned for 12 years.
While Polanski is Jewish himself and therefore has some personal connection to the story, there will undoubtedly be some who will wonder whether he’s looking at the imprisonment and persecution of Dreyfus as an allegory for his own legal troubles, which most recently saw him under house arrest in Switzerland, awaiting deportation to the US on underage sex and fugitive charges. He was eventually freed, although he’d still be locked up if he ever goes back to America.