Something is wrong with the lamp. Roman examines it carefully. We are only a few days away from principal photography, but Roman Polanski acts as if he had all the time in the world. It is an ordinary kerosene lamp, the swinging sort you take on camping trips or you carry around the house when there's a blackout, the sort you would never give a second glance to. But Roman is giving it more than a second glance. He is spending long silent valuable minutes, observing it as if it were about to come alive and pounce on him.

We are on the set of Death and the Maiden in the studios of Boulogne, just outside Paris. The legendary art director Pierre Guffroy (a regular on many Polanski films, including Tess, for which he received an Academy Award) has painstakingly recreated a Latin American beach house down to the last detail. It is what Roman loves in Guffroy's work, enhanced and fine-tuned during a career at the service of Cocteau, Bunuel, and Breson: the set is a character that whispers, shifts, lies in ambush, assists the protagonists, betrays them, comments on their blindness and hopes. And every object in that house -- all the props that Roman is now inspecting with an unrelenting gaze -- must blend into that atmosphere, must be consistent. Polanski puts the lamp down, then picks it up again, touches it, turns it around. It is almost as if he suspects the lamp of trickery, as if it were about to pull a fast one on him, like a fraudulent second-rate actor trying out for a starring role when he doesn't even deserve to be an extra. Roman looks up at the four or five people who surround him, who have been watching him watch the elusive lamp. He does not want help. He intends to figure this one out by himself. Briefly, his eyes fall on me. But they do not ask anything, do not confirm or interrogate. Has he guessed that I happen to know what's wrong with the lamp? Not because I am especially good at visuals. In fact, overly devoted as I am to words and literature, I tend to be extremely, almost stubbornly, inept at images. If I understand how this particular lamp should look, it is only because, as a Chilean, I have seen countless replicas of it in my own country. In every beach house like this one, far away on that savage Pacific coast, lamps like this one await the night: except they display an added nuance of gray, are more banged up, more tired looking. The lamp that Roman is scrutinizing is a shade too bright, untinged, perhaps clean cut to a fault.

"The silver tint needs to be darkened," Roman declares finally. "It shouldn't shine like this."

He's right, of course. But how can he know? How can he possibly perceive something that subtle?

Polanski has never been to Chile, never stepped into the beach houses where I have spent months, never seen a photo of the sort of sad and tarnished lamp that occupies my mind. It is not research that gives him the right clues. He can, quite simply, grasp how the lamp should look, because for the last few months -- and indeed for several years now -- he has been imagining, object by object, board by board, the haunted and yet strangely ordinary place where Paulina will encounter and put on trial the man she thinks raped and tortured her fifteen years before. Now that the film is nearing the end of pre-production, he is taking his obsession with making everything coherent, inhabited, perfect, to unlikely extremes. Just to give one crazy example: Paulina's simulacrum of a kitchen is lined with closed cupboards. In them, filled to the brim, are mountains of authentic Chilean food staples in Chilean bags and tins imported specially from Santiago, halfway across the world. There is not one shot that calls for one of these cupboards to ever be opened, for the contents to be even remotely glimpsed through the shadows. But Roman needs them to be there, filling the corners of the unseen, lurking beyond the mere surface of perception, beyond what the camera captures, making the house breathe, secretly telling the characters where they are and who they have been and what they have eaten. It is this mania of Polanski's, the extended construction of a reliable imaginary, that warns him that the lamp with its healthy look would stand out, given all these other details, these billowing curtains, this light brown loaf of bread, these threatening knives, this sort of old-fashioned telephone, this Neruda woodcut, this stained table; that the lamp would call excessive attention to itself, would divert attention from what really matters: the madness and dissonances and troubles that are just underneath the surface of the world and that are about to explode. What really matters: human beings are trapped in that house with that lamp and with everything else in their lives, and we are going to watch them during the next few hours trying to escape from the tyranny of that reality, we are going to watch them try and bend that world to their desires, we are going to watch them succeed and we are going to watch them fail.

This is what Polanski does, has done, in film after stunning film: Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Macbeth, Tess, The Tenant, Frantic, Bitter Moon. Put us inside, deep inside the world he has created, on the frontier where illusion and pain meet, at times separate, and at time merge. And this is the paradox: Roman builds each space, each universe, to be as absolutely, incontrovertibly recognizable, unflinchingly familiar, horribly believable, so as to explore what is hidden, what is bizarre, what is absurd, so that the grid of reality can be tested against the inner demons of his characters, so that we can experience the liquid terror of being that person in that room, in that story, so that we can accompany that protagonist as he, as she, tries to change a destiny that has been imposed from somewhere else. Roman has spent his life mastering and using the techniques of realism in the service of the unspeakable.

So the lamp is there in order to help us understand what the lamp does not know, what cannot be seen immediately through its glow: the almost inaccessible world of the mind and the heart, desperate for love, unable finally to touch other deeply enough to break out of solitude or delusion. And Polanski, once he has launched us on this voyage, will not relieve us with conclusive answers: his endings are almost invariably ambiguous, his heroes and heroines (if they may even be called by that name) haunted by the bite of uncertainty even as they dash their heads against the mirror of life. At times, as in Repulsion or The Tenant, they end up lost in insanity. But most of the time, as in Knife in the Water or Tess or Death and the Maiden, they end up lost in the bitter opposite of insanity: they end up lost in awareness, learning how vulnerable they are (they always were), how difficult it is to be moral, to be loved, in a world controlled by more powerful others. Donald Pleasance on his lonely rock in Cul-de-Sac and Mia Farrow alone with her devil's child in Rosemary's Baby or Jack Nicholson finally understanding who owns Los Angeles in Chinatown, all of them face-to-face with who they are, what the world is. The ferocious pull of Polanski's best films comes from his ability to implacably place us inside the impossible fantasies of his feverish protagonists and simultaneously force us to acknowledge them coldly, from afar, from the outside, from the history they cannot change. It is a vision Polanski rehearsed in his first short, Two Men and a Wardrobe, where the two Beckett-like fools emerge from the sea with their enormous wardrobe, are rejected by everyone as they wander the cruel city, and, unable to fit their oversized burden of the imagination anywhere, return to the waters and are swallowed by them.

Except that Roman was not swallowed. The waters did not close over him. In his art, he found the one possibility not open to his characters: a way of turning his vision away from the abyss of hallucination or the blind alley of frustration and into the shared and joyful realm of communal experience. This he has done at great personal expense, paying for the consequences of his independence, aggressively and often rambunctiously rejecting all compromises, refusing to apologize for the mystery of what he was seeing or the tangle of what he was communicating or the transgressions he lived, treading the dangerous line between the commecial and the artistic in a century that has not been kind to visionaries.

That is why Roman Polanski is the ultimate survivor: he has earned the right to inflict this vision on his spectators because he has always been willing to inflict it on himself.

Now, here, on the set of Death and the Maiden, he hands the lamp that is too pleasant and cheery to the prop master so that it can be darkened, so that it can help entice millions of eyes into his dreams, so that he can then close the door and not let those eyes out until they have caught a terrifying glimpse of what Roman's mind and life contain. He picks up some ropes. He looks at them for a while. He handles them. He ties them into a knot. He unties them. He makes a different knot. In a few more weeks, Sigourney Weaver will be using them to tie Ben Kingsley's hands. Are the ropes the right color? Are they too long? Are the edges too frayed? Would they be the sort a woman would have in her kitchen drawer at a beach house? He looks around at us. His eyes squint at me, at all of us. He is looking at me, but also through me, past me, somewhere else. He turns back to the ropes.

"There's something wrong," Roman says. "But you know, I can't figure out yet what it is, what's not right."

He will. He will.