The Pianist
Short description
The Pianist follows Władysław Szpilman, a celebrated Polish-Jewish pianist whose life is torn apart when Germany invades Poland in 1939. He and his family are confined to the Warsaw ghetto as the Nazi occupation strips Jews of their livelihoods and dignity. While Szpilman takes work as a café pianist to keep his family fed, his brother Henryk chooses resistance. When the ghetto is emptied and its residents sent east, Szpilman is separated from his family and left behind, beginning a long struggle to survive alone in a city being systematically destroyed. His hiding places shrink, his health fails, and an encounter with a German officer becomes his unlikely turning point.
Roman Polanski directed the film, the fifteenth of the twenty-three features he has made, arriving between The Ninth Gate and Oliver Twist, and he produced it with Robert Benmussa and Alain Sarde from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood. The large production, with seventy-nine credited cast members and fifty-five credited crew, drew on Polish, German, British and French backing and a budget of 35 million dollars. Adrien Brody plays Szpilman, with Thomas Kretschmann as Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman as his parents, and Emilia Fox and Ed Stoppard in supporting roles.
Released in September 2002, the film had a substantial second life beyond its 120 million dollar worldwide gross: on IMDb it holds 8.5 from a million votes, on TMDB 8.4 from over ten thousand, and its critics' rating stands at 8.5 from 186 reviews, showing that critics and audiences respond to it almost identically.
What's left behind the scenes
- During the filming of the movie, in Krakow, Polanski met a man who helped his family during the war.
- Adrien Brody lost 14 kilograms for the role of Władysław Szpilman, following a diet of two boiled eggs and green tea for breakfast, chicken for lunch, and a piece of fish or chicken with boiled vegetables for dinner for 6 weeks. He initially weighed 73 kilograms (at 185 cm).
- Władysław Szpilman, a former prisoner of the Warsaw Ghetto and a real Polish pianist, died in 2000.
- The music that plays at the end of the film from the truck driving through the ruins is the Polish national anthem. That is why Szpilman understands that he is saved.
- In the deportation scenes, Daniel Szpilman—Władysław Szpilman’s grandson—played one of the children in the extras, and his father and Władysław’s son, Andrzej Szpilman, played one of the Jewish policemen.
- During filming of the scene where Brody's character had to jump out the window, despite a safety mat below, Brody hesitated and asked, "Has anyone actually tried jumping out of this window?" Everyone shook their heads. "Really, no one has jumped?" he asked again. And then Polanski just jumped. From below, he shouted, "Well, someone tried it. Now it's your turn!" Brody jumped, hitting his face hard and scraping his ribs.
- This is the first film to win a César Award for Best Film in which no words were spoken in French.
- To understand what his character was feeling, Brody moved out of his apartment, sold his car, and stopped watching television.
- The scene where Szpilman is saved from being sent to a camp and is told "Just don't run" is inspired by events that took place in Polanski's own life.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
