Also this issue:

Piano Forte
Roman Polanski's The Pianist finds strength in quiet.
-Cindy Fuchs

Almost Perfect
In Talk to Her, Javier Cémara's attentive nurse seems like the perfect guy -- with just one huge catch.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

January 2- 8, 2003

movies

Playing His Part

Adrien Brody tunes up.

by Cindy Fuchs

Adrien Brody wears silvery sneakers with his black suit. He looks slightly weary, and awaits his pancakes. Aside from time out for making a music video with Tori Amos, for 'A Sorta Fairytale¨ (in which he spends most of his onscreen time as his head attached to a hand), Brody has been traveling during the past year, promoting The Pianist.

Based on the 1946 memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and composer/pianist who hid in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, in and around the Jewish ghetto, Roman Polanski's Palm d'Or-winning film also incorporates some of his own memories of the ghetto, from which he escaped at age 7.

While the 29-year-old New York native has worked on any number of rewarding and difficult films in the recent past -- including Spike Lee's Summer of Sam and Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights, Ken Loach's Bread and Roses and Elie Chouraqui's Harrison's Flowers -- few had the effect on him of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), from which most of his part, initially reported as the lead, was cut. This after spending months shooting in Australia.

For The Pianist, Brody committed himself wholly, learning to play Chopin and speak Polish, losing 30 pounds to shoot the final ghetto scenes, when Szpilman was starving nearly to death, working for months in an abandoned Soviet Army barracks in Jöterbog, a former East German town outside Berlin. Remembering these months, he looks pensive, a little sad. Unlike most filmmaking experiences, he says, this one changed me, profoundly, in a way that I've noticed.

For one thing, he laughs, I feel bad, sort of, asking if I can get some syrup for my pancakes. I should just eat them and not complain. Along those lines, his sense of perspective is shifted. When the film's premiere in L.A. some weeks ago was canceled for technical reasons -- after everyone, including Jack Nicholson, had arrived -- Brody hardly took time to worry about it. It occurred to me, considering what this man endured, and really what this film stands for, this [cancellation] is so insignificant.

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That's not to say that Brody was ever a Hollywood star, or even aspired to be one. I look for material that's somewhat inspirational. And I'm fortunate that I'm able to hold off and not necessarily do things just for the sake of working. Though thus far he sees that he is not a commodity enough to compete for some roles that more successful actors might want, he also appreciates the patience and decent values learned from his parents, photojournalist Sylvia Plachy and New York public schoolteacher Elliot Brody. They raised me with a sense of what's really important. I haven't lived an excessive lifestyle. I've kept my expenses to a minimum so that I have the freedom to wait.

He waits for material, he says, that will inspire me or educate me about some social issue that I don't know enough about, about struggles I haven't had to endure. That gives you a greater understanding of the suffering and also the joy that exists in the world.

Surely, The Pianist taught him something about suffering. It's hard to describe it, Brody says. For one thing, we shot in reverse chronology, and it was hard to be completely connected with [Szpilman's] end state of being. When he lost the weight, he recalls, it was at first for a technical reason, but then he came to understand this emptiness that real hunger encourages. For the film's early scenes, shot later, he says, I had to eliminate all of those feelings that I had cultivated over time, and then make it seem as though, not only had I never experienced them, but they were infeasible for him and everyone around him.

He leans in. What's remarkable is that the character is somewhat detached from everything, and isn't typically heroic. There were extended periods of silence, where I was just called to react. There's no moment to escape being immersed in that state of mind. No moment whatsoever, on set and off. Roman doesn't even like using a stand-in! He laughs again. I've never worked this hard in my life. And it makes everything else that comes my way so much easier.

One thing he does not want to lose, but can see slipping away as his face becomes more recognizable, is the capacity to go unnoticed. I like taking the train to see something about someone's character, observe and retain it. I have an intense curiosity, and it would be a shame if I lose the ability to do that.