The Pianist

Roman Polanski's The Pianist won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2002 (Polanski's first major Cannes prize after over four decades of work) and went on to take three Academy Awards at the 75th ceremony in March 2003: Best Director (Polanski), Best Actor (Adrien Brody) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood). Brody's win at twenty-nine made him the youngest Best Actor winner in Academy history, a record he still holds.

The film is adapted from Władysław Szpilman's autobiographical memoir The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945, originally published in 1946 in Poland under heavy censorship and reissued in unabridged form by Doubleday in 1999. Szpilman (a Polish-Jewish concert pianist who had been the youngest staff pianist at Polish Radio Warsaw before the war) survived the entire occupation in hiding and worked at Polish Radio for the rest of his life. He died in 2000 at the age of eighty-eight, before the film entered production.

Polanski himself had survived the Kraków Ghetto as a child during the same period that Szpilman survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and the project was a deeply personal one, his mother was murdered at Auschwitz. He had repeatedly turned down offers from Steven Spielberg to direct Schindler's List (1993) on the grounds that he could not work with the material then. The film was shot in Warsaw and at Babelsberg Studios in Germany, with cinematography by Paweł Edelman and a score by Wojciech Kilar built around extensive Chopin performance. Brody actually learned to play the piano competently for the role across several months of preparation.