THE FUGITIVE film director Roman Polanski has teamed up with Robert Harris, the thriller writer, to re-create the final days of Pompeii in the most expensive film ever made in Europe.

The £100m epic will be based on Harris’s novel Pompeii, which recounts the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Naples in AD79 and the deaths of 2,000 people under collapsing masonry and hot choking ash.

A Hollywood film star, not yet named, will play the aqueduct engineer Marcus Attilius Primus, who notices the geothermal warnings and tries to alert the Romans to the looming catastrophe.

Despite his Hollywood exile following a rape conviction in 1977, Polanski has continued to work with American actors, such as Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar for his performance in Polanski’s war drama The Pianist, made in 2002. If Polanski returned to America he would face jail.

The 73-year-old director, who lives in Paris, said that the European film business is now big enough to take on Hollywood-scale movies, adding that he is going to create a special effects spectacular to rival recent blockbusters such as Superman Returns — “only with a stronger story”.

Polanski, who made his name with films such as Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 and Chinatown in 1974, has asked Harris to write the script in eight weeks, with a request to boost the role of a well-born Roman girl, Corelia, to make it more appealing to younger audiences.

Harris, however, laughed off suggestions that he might include decadent sex scenes.

Previously he has admitted he is “not that good at writing sex”.

The writer, a former Sunday Times columnist, said he turned down two Hollywood offers to buy the rights to his book when it was first published in 2003, but only learnt of Polanski’s interest a couple of weeks ago.

“It happened very quickly. Roman said he liked the book, we met in Paris and the deal was done. I am back in Paris this week to start sketching it out, and the filming will start in the summer,” said Harris.

Harris said he wrote the book as a “techno-thriller about global warming, or at least a warning not to take the Earth for granted. But, since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, there has also been more general interest in the Roman era, whose politics have so many parallels to our own”.

Harris said Polanski had not told him who would be playing the engineer-detective, although he favours ex-Gladiator Russell Crowe.

But the beefy Australian will be busy playing a villainous Robin Hood in a revisionist take on the Nottingham legend.

Harris has already sold 10m books, starting in 1992 with his startling vision of a victorious Adolf Hitler in Fatherland.

Born in a rented cottage, he now lives in a Berkshire vicarage with his wife Gill Hornby, like her brother Nick a writer, and drives an Aston Martin.

Polanski’s life, by contrast, has been shaped by extremes of tragedy and scandal. As an orphaned child Polanski hid for two years from the Nazis occupying his native Poland. He was a Hollywood luminary in 1969 when acolytes of Charles Manson, the cult leader, broke into his home and murdered his pregnant wife, the starlet Sharon Tate, and four other people.

That tragedy was followed by scandal when the 5ft 5in director was convicted of raping a 13- year-old girl. He fled the country before sentencing.

In exile he has made some popular films, such as Tess starring Nastassja Kinski, and flops such as Frantic with Harrison Ford, but European bankers have always queued up to fund his movies A financial colleague said this weekend: “Roman wants to make a big bang for European cinema, something that shakes everything up. He loves Robert’s writing, but right now he is like a schoolkid just playing computer special effects. He says if old Clint Eastwood can use the latest boys’ toys for his war movies, then so can he.”

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