But Polanski didn’t want to use his own story–it was far too close, far too personal. For years he searched for someone else’s to adapt. He advised Steven Spielberg on the script of “Schindler’s List” but turned down the offer to direct it because it was set in Krakow. Then, at the premiere of Polanski’s “The Ninth Gate” in Paris three years ago, an old friend handed him a book called “The Pianist,” a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and classical pianist who slipped out of the Warsaw ghetto and spent the war in hiding. “He said, ‘Read this’,” the 69-year-old director told news-week. " ‘I think there’s a movie in it for you’."
There was. By the end of the first chapter, Polanski knew he had finally found the story he had been looking for. He turned it into “The Pianist,” a richly hued war epic that depicts the devastation of Warsaw and its Jewish community through the eyes of one of its few survivors, Szpilman. The film won Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or, in May, and is just beginning its worldwide release. “The exciting thing about finding this material was that it was not my personal story,” Polanski said at Cannes. “It helped me re-create the events without talking about myself or people around me.”
It also helped Polanski break out of a creative rut. His movies of the past two decades–a mere five–have been moderate successes at best. The buzz in the film business was that Polanski was washed up, his career run aground after he fled the United States in 1977 following his conviction on statutory-rape charges. Certainly he doesn’t get the kind of choice projects he did when he was Hollywood’s golden boy, directing now-classic films like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.” Even Polanski understands his exile has hurt his work. “Of course, I’d like to be able to return,” he told The New Yorker a few years ago. “Not to live… but to just be able to work in a normal fashion. I miss the logic and the efficiencies of the Hollywood system.”
But being outside that system gave Polanski the freedom to make “The Pianist” exactly as he wanted: an auteur’s view of the Holocaust, untainted by executives obsessed with political correctness, test audiences and Monday-morning box-office reports. As a result, “The Pianist” may be one of the most honest Holocaust movies ever made (review). It is surely Polanski’s most candid film, allowing him for the first time to consciously incorporate his most difficult life experiences into his work.
Though 20 years separate Polanski from Szpilman, their wartime stories are eerily similar. Both were herded into Jewish ghettos with their families, both lost parents to the Holocaust–yet each managed, almost miraculously, to survive the war while living in Poland, sheltered by sympathetic Gentiles. After Germany’s defeat, both tried to pick up where they left off. Szpilman succeeded, at least on the surface. In September 1939, as he played Chopin’s Nocturne in D minor during a state radio broadcast, the Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on the station and destroyed it. Szpilman survived–the first of a series of lucky breaks. Soon after the war, he came back to the reconstructed station to resume his performance. Polanski, upon his return to Krakow from the countryside, was reunited with his father, who had by then remarried. After clashes with his dad, Polanski, then 14, moved out and began his film career.
While Szpilman was able to leave the great traumas of his life behind, there were more in store for Polanski. In 1969, at the height of his career, Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was viciously murdered in their Los Angeles home by followers of Charles Manson. Again, Polanski had lost his family to a madman. He retreated into his work and produced what many consider his masterpiece, “Chinatown,” a ’30s-style film noir that was nominated for 11 Oscars, including best director and best picture. Just as his life looked righted, he was accused of raping a 13-year-old model during a photo shoot at his friend Jack Nicholson’s house. (He said the encounter was consensual.) Facing jail time and deportation, Polanski fled to Paris, where he has remained. In 1989, he married French actress Emmanuelle Seigner and they have two children.
For “The Pianist,” Polanski says, he didn’t want to make “a film that was typically Hollywood.” That meant he needed a relatively unknown actor to play Szpilman. He saw thousands before he came across Adrien Brody, an American who appeared in Terrence Mallick’s “Thin Red Line” and Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam.” Thin and angular with long, strong hands, Brody seemed to embody Szpilman. “I didn’t hesitate for a moment,” says Polanski. “He was ‘The Pianist’.” But the most difficult part for Polanski was reliving his past. Though he thought that he had “the perspective to deal with it,” he says, “there were moments which suddenly were such vivid memories of certain events, I felt taken aback.”
When Polanski won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the moment felt like a redemption. To a standing ovation, he bowed and thanked the people of Poland, his eyes welling with tears. Following the ceremony, while proudly clutching his award, he told reporters, “I wanted to make a low-key movie on a subject that speaks for itself.” That he did.
