its
Entertainment
The Prime
Of Adrien Brody
Actor's Oscar-worthy performance in Roman Polanski's
Holocaust film, "The Pianist," hits all the right notes.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
0
n a bitterly cold day in February 2001,
actor Adrien Brody struggled to scramble
over a wall into a nightmarish moonscape
of a destroyed city.
It was the first day of production on Roman
Polanski's powerful Holocaust drama, The Pianist,
based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's . 1946 memoir, but
30-year-old Brody wasn't acting.
Previously slender at 6-foot-1 and 160 pounds,.
he'd dieted to 130 by subsisting for weeks on scraps
of eggs, chicken and fish. By the time he arrived on
the set in an abandoned Soviet army barracks dyna-
mited into rubble, he felt he was becoming the
Jewish virtuoso who eluded the Nazis by hiding in
and around the Warsaw ghetto. When Polanski —
himself a Polish Holocaust survivor — ordered him
to scale a wall for a complex crane shot, Brody
could hardly clamber over.
"My muscles had wasted away," he said softly,
looking like the dapper, pre-war Szpilman in an ele-
gant tweed suit and gray silk tie during a Los
Angeles press appearance.
The radical weight loss was just one example of
the lengths to which Brody went to shoot The
Pianist, which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at
the 2002 Cannes International Film Festival and is
generating Oscar buzz for the actor, who has
already been nominated for a Golden Globe for his
role.
To empathize with a character who loses every-
thing, Brody also let go of his Manhattan apart-
ment, sold his car, got rid of his cell phone, put his
belongings into storage and didn't see friends for six
months.
"My intention was to feel a longing for these
things and not to have a safe place to call home,"
he said, an earnest expression on his angular face.
The drastic measures worked. The success of The
Pianist hinges largely on Brody's haunting portrayal
of Szpilman — from a dapper, collected musician
to a disheveled skeleton cowering alone in bombed-
out ruins.
Standout Performance
"It was mesmerizing to see the little gestures he
would make as his character was becoming hungrier
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and lonelier," said Pianist Co-Producer Gene
Gutowski, a Polish Holocaust survivor who pro-
duced some of Polanski's earliest films.
"I remember his mouth moving at one point as if
he were chewing on his own tongue. During anoth-
er sequence, he was so compelling that the entire
crew was crying."
His performance is the centerpiece of a drama that
stands out amid the Holocaust-themed fare that has
emerged since the 1993 hit Schindler's List, whose
set designer, Allan Starski, and costume designer,
Anna Sheppard, contributed to the Polanski project.
With a script by British screenwriter Ronald
Harwood (ne Horwitz), what sets The Pianist apart
is its lushly gorgeous depiction of shockingly brutal
violence with a dispassionate point of view. It
matches the objective tone of Szpilman's memoir.
"Roman was always telling me he wanted less,"
Brody recalled of the shoot. "He wanted me to
refrain from any sentimentality."
Comfortable On Camera
The actor said he related to the subject matter partly
because of the Polish-Jewish heritage of his father,
Elliot, a retired public schoolteacher (Brody comes
from the name of his ancestral town).
His Hungarian,born Catholic mother, longtime
Village Voice photojournalist Sylvia Plachy, also had
Jewish relatives who suffered in the Holocaust.
"I was raised with both their heritages," said
Brody. But "with the level of suffering [depicted in
the film] and the kind of loss you feel — I would
feel a responsibility to telling that story whether I
had any connection to it or not."
Plachy, who fled the Hungarian Revolution in
1956 at age 13, made her only child the subject of
many of her photographs during his youth in
Woodhaven, Queens.
So the teenaged Brody felt comfortable enough in
front of the camera to pursue a film career early on.
After working in a few Off-Broadway productions,
he landed his first television role in the 1988 PBS
Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman: "The Pianist' is not just a film but a reminden” said the actor.
Inset: The real Wladyslaw Szpilman, in a photo taken for his identity card, 1942. Szpilman wrote his memoirs
just after the war. "It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and five his mind and
emotions to continue with his life," wrote his son Andrzej Szpilman in a foreword to the 1999 edition that
inspired survivor Roman Polanski to make the first Holocaust film of his career.