By Sean Chavel

Adrien Brody has done terrific work in "The Thin Red Line," "Summer of Sam" and "Harrison’s Flowers," but has now given a performance in Roman Polanski’s "The Pianist" for which he will most likely never top no matter how long he decides to work in movies. Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs, the film is harrowing journey of Holocaust survival after the invasion of Poland. The recently deceased Szpilman had a one-of-a-kind survival story, he stayed in hiding in the heavily Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghetto while other lives around him were stripped, tormented and exterminated.

Brody’s dedication and immersion into the role is impassible. The first thing he had to learn how to do is learn how to play the piano. “Yeah, I did have a basic knowledge of piano. I’ve studied off-and-on for years, but I’m definitely not a concert pianist. I had six weeks to learn how to play the [main] pieces,” Brody said. Of course, it didn’t end there. Greater preparation was required in order to master the role.

“Within those six weeks, I had to lose a tremendous amount of weight. I had to grow that beard, work on the dialect, and learn the piano with four hours of lessons a day. I had a six month movie [shoot] ahead of me, and I was starving myself,” he said. Brody’s strict diet included a couple of boiled eggs in the morning, a precise two hundred grams of grilled chicken meat for lunch and a small piece of fish and a few vegetables for dinner.

In the meantime, Brody spent most of his time in isolation or was accompanied by his piano teacher. One of the difficulties for Brody was reading the music sheets. His own approach was more satisfying for him. “I don’t read music very well. I learned on memory. It took constant practicing.” Although a master dubbing was used over the soundtrack with a professional pianist’s playing, Brody still had to mimic the work of a real concerto pianist.

Brody explains, “Not only did I have to play it, I had to play with a style that was played then. But I had to play it at the pace that they were playing it. They can’t cut in sound-wise. You’re lip-syncing, but you’re really singing – you have to hit the right notes. You are playing. It’s a very complicated procedure.”

The most extraordinary shot of the movie was surprisingly shot on the first day of production. The ghetto is devastated by bombings and artillery fire, and Brody’s character has to scale a wall to lead to his escape. In one wide angle shot, he struggles to get up the wall while on the other side is an endless sight of a demolished city in ruin. “Day one, I had to climb over the wall and witness the destruction of Warsaw,” Brody recounts. “I had been confined to my room, and had been working on the stuff I had been describing. I had no energy. I hadn’t eaten, and I hadn’t eaten much in six weeks.

“I had no energy, and I tell Roman that I had no energy. He says, ‘You don’t need energy. Just do it.’ That was ideal [after all] because I connected immediately, and psychologically, to this state of isolation and deprivation that this character had.” Brody continues to discuss the self-imposed commitment leading up to the shoot, the pains and sacrifices of method acting. Judging his demeanor, Brody is completely at ease at making sacrifices in order to create an honest performance.

“Before I left home, I gave up my apartment in New York. I sold my car. I got rid of my phones. Because I thought, ‘Hey, this character loses everything. Why don’t I be very dedicated and do this.’ When I got to the [shooting] location, I thought, how stupid. I didn’t need to do that. I’m already going to go through hell here,” Brody said.

He discusses our human nature’s inclination to complain, our frivolous attachments and our dependence on materials, but then he goes on about his approach to his work. “It would have been nice to have a place to go home to. I should have someone I could call. But then I felt, I shouldn’t have a place to call home… At that point, I was completely changed. And that was day one. And I could barely climb over the wall. It was freezing. The muscles were gone. In retrospect, I made it through it. I had a responsibility in my portrayal, and I had to do it as honestly as I could.”

This was an on-going commitment for Brody, but he never strayed from the regimen. “It was a long shoot to say the least. There was a month-and-a-half where there wasn’t another actor on the set. That was part of the experience. I was away from everything. My culture, my family, my girlfriend at the time. Everything.”

Whether Brody sees awards or not in the coming months for his astonishing performance, the making of the film is undoubtedly his greatest personal achievement. “It puts so much in a perspective for me that I can’t even tell you how I would feel today without this experience. Hopefully, it will do that for people who see the film – getting a glimpse of what kind of suffering one individual endures and how fortunate you are to not have to go through that.”

“That suffering has existed for many, many people and still exists. On a simple level, it’s made me appreciate to be able to eat, be with friends, having shelter. These are things that I have taken for granted, and that we have all taken for granted,” Brody acknowledges. He moves onto an anecdote, discussing one of the film’s pivotal scenes where Szpilman has gone many days without eating, himself fasting before the shoot. “I cried because I smelled the bread. I hadn’t had any carbohydrate, any, any, any period. It was a loaf or real baked bread, Eastern European thick hearty bread. I kept thinking what it was like to feel to get this bread. Szpilman was probably more hungry then I ever could have been.”

Although the film is based on Szpilman’s story, the film is probably the most personal film ever made by Polanski who has made such classics as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski notes how he survived the bombing of Warsaw and the Cracow ghetto during his childhood, before his family managed to escape. “Roman survived Cracow during that time. Not only do I have a director do I admire, that I’m confident in, but he knows what my character went through.”

For the role Szpilman, Polanski had organized an open casting call in London. More than fourteen-hundred people showed up. Polanski still couldn’t find the right person for the part, so he broadened his search. He received a referral from a fellow director that Brody was a versatile talent, and was invited to a special screening of Harrison’s Flowers in which the actor portrayed a wartime photojournalist in Bosnia. It was an especially good sign when Polanski offered to take the actor out for a drink afterwards. Soon the part was Brody’s.

“Roman never made me audition, and I appreciate that,” Brody said. “This is a role I would have died to audition for to get. He auditioned many people, non-actors, but he gave it to me. I love the guy for that. He gave me a lot of respect. I’ve had to audition for things that are effortless for me.”