The Screenwriter and Oliver Twist
Posted on October 10, 2005
Roman Polanski doing Oliver Twist? No one really knew quite what to expect from Polanski's film version of the Dickens classic. Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood was selected to do the adaptation and classicists are already howling at Harwood's version. Harwood is the sole screenwriter credited with the adaption on IMDB.
Harwood talked to https://www.jewishexponent.com/2012/12/29/screenwriters-straight-talk-on-oliver-twist/The Jewish Exponent about the challenge of adapting Dickens to the silver screen and how he approached the character of Fagin.
Says Harwood, "Polanski and I are both Jews," and we actually never discussed" the stereotypical renditions of Fagin's past.The film stars Barney Clark, Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Swift. The reviews of Oliver Twist have been mixed according to Rotten Tomatoes. We haven't seen it yet. Here's the trailer that includes the famous more porridge scene:Certainly, Dickens "had to be true to the period in which he wrote the novel, and it was an anti-Semitic period."
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"I'm drawn to outsiders," says Harwood of "Twist" and the twist of fate that made the Polish-born Polanski - who lost his parents to Mauthausen and Auschwitz during the Holocaust - one himself.
Harwood, whose roots are firmly planted in the iconography of Judaism, is a wordsmith who feels the lure and lull of language - and loathes its misreadings. "I've never been a victim of anti-Semitism, but I feel the anti-Israeli language I hear today is anti-Semitism in disguise."