1,400 actors attended London auditions for the lead role in the film The Pianist by Roman Polanski, in 2001.
But none of them caught the director’s attention.
Polanski wants Joseph Fiennes for the lead role.
The latter, however, declined the proposal, preferring at the time to concentrate on theater.
The casting director in charge of the film then proposed to Polanski a young actor of 27 years old, almost unknown, whose only claim to fame was his participation in The Red Line by Terrance Malick (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 the Second World War.
To prepare for filming, Adrien Brody decides 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 has lost his home, his family and everything that made up his daily life, Brody gets rid of all the comforts he enjoyed as well as all his social connections.
“I left my apartment, I sold my car, I disconnected my phones and I left,” Adrien Brody told the BBC in 2013. /span>All I took with me were two backpacks with a few things 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 with whom he had lived for years…
He then left for Europe where he spent weeks wandering 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 Chopin pieces that he will perform in the film.
The final sacrifice that Brody will make for the film will be to lose 17 kilos to film the scenes which take place in the Warsaw ghetto, while his character is starving.
“There’s an emptiness associated with hunger that I’ve never experienced,” Brody said. I needed to know this for this role. I knew grief, the loss of a loved one, the sadness of life, but I had never known the despair that hunger brings. »
The actor being 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 weighed only 62 kilos and was constantly lacking in energy.
“It was a very difficult time. I no longer had anything comforting in my life. No more 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 gone through. »
The actor’s investment in the role pays off. The Pianist is a superb film and Brody’s performance 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 sometimes afraid that I had gone too far. I started 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 sanity there. »
By his own admission, it will take him six months to return to normal life after the end of filming…
Was the game worth it?
According to Adrien Brody, yes.