Jean Lynch looks at disgraced director Roman Polanski's Oscar winning masterpiece The Pianist.
The Pianist is the harrowing, true tale of one of Poland's leading composers, Wladyslaw Szpilman, and how he lived as a fugitive in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. The story is told by a director whose own mother died at the hands of the Nazis. When the film won the coveted Palme D'or at Cannes earlier this year, there were those who felt that it was a sentimental vote, the jury's way of allowing the disgraced Roman Polanski back into the fold. When he went on to beat even dead cert Martin Scorsese to the Best Director Oscar, his critics were silenced and the controversial filmmaker was once again recognised as the genius most people knew him to be.
There is a sense of inevitability to audiences finally being privy to an account of The Holocaust as depicted by the Polish director, a man who knows first hand the true extent of the atrocities of that infamous time. Such an emotive subject still for Polanski, he was reluctant to directly share his own childhood experiences and instead waited until he discovered the ideal source material. The Pianist is based on the 1946 book "Death of a City", Szpilman's Holocaust memoir.
Timothy Burrill is a long-time friend of Polanski's and has produced many of his films, including Tess, Macbeth and now The Pianist. He says "Roman wanted to do a film at The War but he didn't want to make it a personal story. The book of Szpilman's memoirs actually fulfilled everything that he needed yet it was through someone else's eyes."
With the casting of the lead character being so crucial to the film's authenticity, a casting call was held in London to which 1400 candidates turned up. The search was then extended to the States where someone finally suggested the star of Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. "When I saw a few of Adrien Brody's films" says Polanski "I didn't hesitate for a moment: he was The Pianist."
Brody was about to undertake the most grueling and challenging role of his career so far. He says "This film did a lot for me, gave me a great deal of perspective. It's very easy to forget how fortunate we are. (Making the film) I was exposed to a level of sadness and suffering that a lot of people have endured, and continue to endure in other ways. There's a lot of hunger in this world, and these are things that I am fortunate enough not to have experienced and have allowed myself to experience." He continues, "When I arrived I had to go on a crash diet and lose 30 pounds. We shot in reverse chronology so the earlier stages were the most difficult because I was exhausted and emaciated, and had very little energy. Everything I did required all I had, and there was a great deal of isolation that I experienced at that time. It was better when there were other actors on set, other people to take the weight, so to speak. There was great deal of time when I was left alone."
The months of hard work were rewarded when a clearly delighted Brody was the surprise winner over Daniel Day-Lewis for the Best Actor Oscar. "It was an incredible experience for me" he says. "Not only was it an opportunity to work with Roman, it was probably the most personal film he's done. He has, I think, experienced a lot of parallels to the character I portray and was able to give me a lot of insight to what this character went through."
Polanski is a hard taskmaster but his direction elicits fine performances and positive reactions from his cast. British actress Maureen Lipman, who plays Szpilman's mother, says "He hears the whole film like a musical score in his head, so you come in on time and you play it as he wants to play it, and it's a masterly feat of direction. When I saw it, I realised why he works the way he does - he wants you to be like the character. Every director has a way or working and he is like a conductor, overseeing every single item of the film." She pauses for a moment then says, "It is so dispassionate, so unsentimental, so really rather bleak. I just hope it's sold in the right way so that people don't come along and expect Life is Beautiful, because they won't get that; what they'll get is Life is Real."
Inevitably, the Holocaust film that invites the most comparisons is Schindler's List, a film that Polanski had been offered the chance to direct but declined. Yet The Pianist acknowledges its relationship with Spielberg's retelling in that the two film's share a number of key crew yet while both films undeniably trigger emotive responses in an audience, the manner in which they achieve this differs. "I feel that Roman's film is better than Spielberg's," says Timothy Burrill. "I was very impressed by Schindler's List, except for the end. I felt he became very self-indulgent and it should have ended before it did." What comes to the forefront with The Pianist is the way in which very ordinary people were catapulted into events beyond their control and dealt with it, not because they were heroes, but because they had no choice. As Adrien Brody says "I don't think The Pianist is similar to any Holocaust film; I don't feel it is a Holocaust film, in a sense, because it's obviously the story of an individual man. It's not trying to recapture and recreated all the events of the Holocaust, it's the story of one man's survival in the ghetto."
Timothy Burrill sums up the film's impact when he ways "It's an extraordinary film. I have not met anybody who has seen it and not been moved by it. The images remain in your head forever."
Jean Lynch
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