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Working With Polanski

Crissa-Jean Chappell
The Pianist
Interview with Adrian Brody 

On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp Minor live on Polish Radio as shells exploded around him—booming so loud that he couldn't hear the notes. It was the last broadcast before a German bomb shook the station and the music stopped.
 

Many feature films and documentaries have focused on the nightmare of the Holocaust, but Roman Polanski’s epic Pianist tracks the dread of Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II and its weight on one soul. In this devastating record of man's inhumanity to man, the film challenges us not to forget these atrocities, even as the physical reminders fade away. Forced to live in the claustrophobia of the Jewish ghetto, Szpilman manages to escape and hide in the bombed-out ruins of the capital. Though he lost his entire family, he survived through human resilience.

Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's 1946 memoir Death of a City, written immediately after the war and banned for decades, The Pianist illustrates the shock and numbness from a single perspective without resorting to stereotypical notions of heroism. Roman Polanski’s ambitious adaptation allows images to convey what words fail to articulate: silent moments as when Szpilman wanders alone in the snow like a thin, dark smear beside the charred husks of houses. In another scene, he takes refuge in a room with a dusty piano. He can only glide his long fingers above the keys and remember the shape of tones in his mind.
 

Adrian Brody’s (Summer of Sam) performance as Szpilman is subtle and complex. He recently spoke at the Jewish Film Festival in Miami, saying, “It was a very difficult, emotionally challenging time for me.” Slumped under the aquarium-tinted lights of the Intracoastal Theater, his droopy eyes crinkle at the surge of elderly autograph-seekers (“What is your name?” asks a gray-haired woman with bird-of-prey intensity).
 

“It has been an overwhelmingly positive reaction,” he says. “I’ve been acting for seventeen years. I’ve been in more than twenty films. I’ve never experienced anything like it. This film premiered in Cannes. It had an eighteen-minute standing ovation. The audience can be extremely critical in Cannes. I was fortunate enough to share that moment with my parents. And it was my mom’s birthday that night. It was probably one of the most rewarding times for me as an actor.”
 

Working with Roman Polanski has been an education for Brody. The renowned director of films such as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby is the son of Polish-Jewish parents who experienced the Nazi’s invasion of Krakow. Polanski lost his mother to Auschwitz and was separated from his father for a number of years. Brody says, “I feel that he had been searching…for a story that would allow him to tell these things that he knew so intimately without having to tell his own story. It’s very difficult to truthfully re-tell things that you’ve lived through. You run the risk of altering them. I felt that it was a tremendous gift for me—not only to have the guidance of a director who is as knowledgeable about the film as Roman, but the personal connection that he had…and that he shared with his family.”
 

The Pianist’s production designer Allan Starski, (who won an Oscar for Schindler's List) has reconstructed a war-torn Poland that hovers between beauty and revulsion—a city reduced to nothing but holes like the blanked-out eyes in a death mask. “They created an incredibly realistic environment,” says Brody, who has traveled all over the world promoting the film, including Israel and Berlin, where it continues to win awards.

Brody didn’t even audition for the role that may give him an Academy Award. “It was one of those roles that I would’ve killed to audition for. I was in Paris shooting a film called Affair of the Necklace and I received a call saying that Roman Polanksi wanted to take a meeting with me. And so…” He smirks. “I made time in my incredibly busy schedule to fit him in,” he says, dripping with sarcasm.

The Pianist was shot in reverse chronology because Brody had to loose an extensive amount of weight. Six weeks prior to the film, he grew a straggly beard, worked on the dialect, lost thirty pounds and learned Chopin’s Ballade Number One.  Like a true Method actor, he prepared in isolation. By the time a sympathetic Polish family makes contact with the composer, Brody found himself craving the company of other people.

“It was very meaningful…the way things transpired,” says Brody. “During the hunger and the time that I did spend alone, the one thing that allowed me to carry myself elsewhere…out of the sadness…was the music. And that is exactly what allowed Szpilman some element of hope.” 

The Pianist opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 27.