For more than half a century, one of the most detailed first-hand accounts of wartime Warsaw sat almost unread in Poland. Its author was hardly obscure. Władysław Szpilman worked at Polish radio, wrote popular songs half the country could hum, and performed as a concert pianist well into old age. Yet the pages describing how he had survived the war stayed effectively unavailable to Polish readers for two generations.
Published in 1946 under the title Death of a City, based on Szpilman’s testimony, the book was pushed out of circulation by the communist authorities on political grounds. The censors had already altered the text before it reached print. The German officer who kept Szpilman alive was described as Austrian, a change of nationality that quietly shifted the meaning of the ending. The account resurfaced in 1998, when Szpilman’s son Andrzej arranged a new German edition, with an English translation following as The Pianist.
This time nothing had been softened for political convenience. The officer was named accurately as Wilm Hosenfeld, a German, and extracts from his own diaries were printed alongside the survivor’s narrative. That restored version is what director Roman Polanski read. For most of his career, the one subject he was best placed to film was the one he would not go near.
As a boy in Krakow, he had lived through the German occupation, escaped the ghetto through a gap his father made in the wire, and spent the rest of the war hidden in the countryside with a Catholic family. His mother did not survive. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg offered him Schindler’s List. Polanski said no.
That story was set in Krakow and moved through the ghetto he had escaped, putting the whole thing impossibly close. He explained later that he had always wanted to make a picture about those years, just never about that particular city. Szpilman’s account solved the problem. The setting was Warsaw, far from the pavements of his childhood, and the central figure was a grown man rather than a boy.
That distance was enough to work in. Soon after meeting Szpilman in person, with the producer Gene Gutowski, Polanski began work on the Holocaust story he felt able to tell. Szpilman, in his late eighties and still sharp, was pleased the account would finally be handled by somebody who knew that time from the inside. He gave the project his blessing and died in July 2000, months before the cameras rolled.
He never saw a frame of it. Casting required a face audiences did not recognize. An open call in London, with the advertisement making a point that no experience was necessary, drew around 1,400 people. The auditions ran through all of them, then widened to professionals.
Adrien Brody came in from New York with a modest resume and no star power. He was twenty-seven, largely unknown, and had the sort of face audiences had not assigned a personality to. Polanski watched him and stopped looking. The part demanded a two-and-a-half-hour picture carried by a man who barely speaks for long stretches.
Brody gave up his normal life to reach it. Everything he owned went into storage or out the door. The apartment was let go, the car sold, the phones disconnected. He flew to Europe with a bag of essentials and an electric keyboard, having also ended the relationship he was in.
He spent months living inside a controlled, temporary, entirely voluntary version of Szpilman’s isolation, cutting contact with most of his family and friends for the duration. He dropped around thirty pounds in roughly six weeks, arriving at starvation weight before the first day of principal photography. The film was shot backwards. The schedule began at Szpilman’s lowest point and moved backward toward the comfortable young musician of 1939, so Brody could eat normally once the late-war scenes were done, putting the weight back on gradually as the calendar moved toward the earlier, healthier version of the character.
The physical arc of the performance came out of the actor’s own recovery rather than makeup. Winter helped as well. The bleak closing stretch wanted cold light and bare trees, and February in Brandenburg supplied them. Brody has since said he came out of the job with disordered eating that lasted at least a year, followed by a long stretch of depression.
He took a year away from acting after the award season finished. The screenplay came from Ronald Harwood, chosen because of a single stage play Polanski had seen, about the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Harwood got through Szpilman’s account quickly and took the job, drawn to a voice that reported terrible things in flat, unemotional sentences and declined to editorialize. That restraint became the governing principle of the adaptation.
The first real argument was about how to begin. Harwood was stuck, until Polanski pointed out that a story called The Pianist ought to start with the pianist at a piano. Polanski kept supplying observations of that kind throughout, practical facts about how restrictions worked their way into ordinary domestic life. Which streets you could no longer walk down, what you were required to wear on your sleeve, how much cash you were permitted to keep in your own home.
A screenwriter can research a decree. Knowing which of them landed hardest at a kitchen table is a different kind of information. Somebody in the room had been there. Months before a camera turned over, the department heads spent their preparation time in front of a projector, working through surviving film and photographs of occupied Warsaw, much of it shot by German propaganda units inside the sealed district.
Historians were brought in, and so were people who had lived behind those walls. The production designer’s department could work from a picture of the exact corner it was rebuilding. The cinematographer could see how a real street had looked under real winter light in 1942. Polanski and Harwood cut a documentary from that archive, screening it for the extras and bit players before any of them worked a day.
One sequence was made to match a surviving photograph frame for frame, a staging of German officers observing the suppression of the uprising, with stunts, explosives, military vehicles, several hundred extras, and controlled fire, all arranged to serve a fixed historical reference. The film refused a heroic rewrite. The central character spends most of the running time doing nothing that would be recognized as action. He hides.
He watches. Other people save him. Chance saves him. Harwood’s position was that survival itself was the action, and that stripping out the luck and the help from other people would falsify the only thing the account was actually reporting.
Conditions worsen gradually and almost casually, without the picture ever pausing to mark a turning point. Polanski’s own experiences, Harwood said, were what ensured the film was rooted in realism and authenticity. The production moved across two countries over five months of filming. France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom were all official co-producing partners, working to a budget of around thirty-five million dollars.
Principal photography ran from February to July of 2001, moving between the Babelsberg backlot where a district of wartime Warsaw had been constructed, condemned Soviet barracks at Jüterbog south of Berlin, and a long stretch of locations in Warsaw itself. The real capital had been rebuilt sixty years earlier, so the destroyed city of the second half had to be found elsewhere. The abandoned barracks were dressed into destroyed thoroughfares and then damaged further as the story required, structures blown apart on camera because there was no reason left to preserve them. An abandoned hospital complex at Beelitz, left empty after the Soviet garrison withdrew, provided the damaged Warsaw hospital with real corridors and genuine decay that no designer had to fake.
On the night of 23 March 2003, the film took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, followed by seven Academy Award nominations. Adrien Brody won Best Actor, making him the youngest winner in that category’s history at twenty-nine years old, a record that still stands. Ronald Harwood won for adapted screenplay, and Roman Polanski won Best Director. Polanski was not there to collect it.
He had left the United States in 1978 during criminal proceedings brought against him and had not returned in the twenty-five years since. Harrison Ford accepted the award on his behalf. The German captain who feeds Szpilman in the last act vanishes from the film almost without explanation, with closing text noting only that he died in a Soviet camp. The full story was stranger.
Wilm Hosenfeld, a school teacher from Hesse who joined the Nazi Party in 1935, served in occupied Poland and used his position to issue work permits to Poles and Jews who needed cover. Szpilman was not the only person he helped. His diaries, which survived, record a man moving from patriotic service into open disgust at what his own side was doing. The Soviets took him prisoner in January 1945 and sentenced him to twenty-five years.
Szpilman spent years trying to get him released, approaching anyone he thought might carry influence, while others Hosenfeld had helped petitioned on his behalf. It came to nothing. Hosenfeld died in captivity on 13 August 1952, aged fifty-seven. Recognition arrived more than half a century later.
Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in November 2008, long after the man it honored had died waiting for somebody to believe him. What reaches the screen was assembled out of parts. The spine is Szpilman’s own testimony. Into it went the small humiliations Polanski remembered from his childhood under occupation, an actor who had genuinely altered his own body, thoroughfares copied from surviving photographs, wreckage found in condemned buildings, and a camera restricted to two focal lengths so it never tried to be cleverer than the thing it was pointed at.
The film leaves Szpilman unheroic in the usual sense. He survives on luck, on music, and on the decency of people under no obligation to help him, a far less comfortable story than a studio would have chosen, and a far more honest one.