1,400 actors attended London auditions for the lead role in Roman Polanski’s 2001 film The Pianist .
But none of them caught the director’s attention.
Polanski wanted Joseph Fiennes for the lead role.
The latter, however, declined the offer, preferring at the time to concentrate on the theatre.
The casting director in charge of the film then offered Polanski a young actor of 27, virtually unknown, whose only claim to fame was his participation in Terrance Malick’s The Thin Red Line (where he was originally supposed to play the lead role before Malick changed his mind and cut almost all of his scenes).
After several auditions, however, Polanski was impressed by Brody’s talent and offered him the role.
The Pianist is the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewish composer, thrown into the horrors of World War II.
To prepare for filming, Adrien Brody decided to invest himself entirely in the role.
A follower of Stanislavski’s “method”, he sacrifices everything to get into the skin of his character.
As his character loses his home, his family, and everything that made up his daily life, Brody sheds all the comforts he enjoyed as well as all his social connections.
“I moved out of my apartment, sold my car, disconnected my phones and left,” Adrien Brody told the BBC in 2013. “All I took with me was two bundles of stuff and my piano keyboard to practice playing.”
To cut himself off from the world, the actor even goes so far as to leave the woman he had been living with for years…
He then left for Europe where he spent weeks wandering in the Polish countryside.
As he plays the role of a great pianist, he also practices several hours a day playing the piano, in particular the pieces by Chopin that he will perform in the film.
Brody’s final sacrifice for the film was to lose 17 kilos to shoot the scenes that take place in the Warsaw ghetto, when his character was starving.
“There’s an emptiness associated with hunger that I’d never experienced,” Brody said. “I needed to know that for this role. I knew grief, loss, the sadness of life, but I’d never known the despair that hunger brings.”
Since the actor is relatively thin by nature, losing 17 kilos in such a short time will cause him intense fatigue. At the end of his extreme diet, he weighs only 62 kilos and constantly lacks energy.
“It was a very difficult time. I had nothing comforting in my life anymore. No food, no loved ones to talk to. I was constantly reading the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, my character. I was deeply depressed by the horrors he had been through.”
The actor’s investment in the role pays off. The Pianist is a superb film and Brody’s performance is remarkable. He will also receive the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance.
But all the sacrifices made by Adrien Brody will have a cost.
“During filming, I was afraid that I had gone too far. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to get out of this character when it was over. I wondered if I was going to lose my mental health.”
By his own admission, it took him six months to return to normal life after filming ended…
Was it worth the risk?
According to Adrien Brody, yes.