ALL THE RIGHT NOTES 'PIANIST' STAR ADRIEN BRODY LEARNED TO PORTRAY A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR FROM ONE WHO KNOWS - DIRECTOR ROMAN POLANSKI.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

In a year of astounding acting from some of film's greatest leading men, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with anyone who worked harder than Adrien Brody did in Roman Polanski's haunting Holocaust drama, ``The Pianist.''

Brody, 29, is probably best known for being cast as the lead in Terrence Malick's meditative war movie, ``The Thin Red Line,'' and then being nearly cut out of the film when Malick decided to make a different movie in the editing room. Brody has consistently worked with great directors - Steven Soderbergh (``King of the Hill''), Spike Lee (``Summer of Sam''), Barry Levinson (``Liberty Heights'') and Ken Loach (``Bread and Roses'') - but in movies that have been largely ignored by audiences.

That is changing with ``The Pianist,'' which won the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and has snagged its fair share of critic's prizes since its release late last year. And while marquee names like Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis have been grabbing the headlines, Brody's work is equally outstanding and deserving of any and all plaudits that come his way.

Polanski's movie is based on the memoirs of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a radio and performing star who lost his livelihood and ultimately everything dear to him when the Nazis occupied his country in 1939. Szpilman was one of a handful of Jews to remain in Warsaw and actually survive. His family died in German extermination camps.

The lanky Brody, who stands 6-foot-1 and normally weighs 160 pounds, dropped 30 pounds in order to play the gaunt survivor that Spzilman became.

``It opens you up and makes you much more vulnerable and sensitive and deprived and empty,'' the soft-spoken Brody says of the weight loss. ``It goes beyond hunger. I had to understand the thought process. I couldn't act it, anyway. You can't act being emaciated. But even more so, I wanted to go there while I was doing it. It wasn't about acting, it was about living it to a certain extent.''

Brody worked on ``The Pianist'' for eight months, spending eight weeks preparing for the part and then another six months on location in Poland and eastern Germany. For the long stretches of the movie in which Szpilman hides, Brody worked alone.

``It's a wonderful opportunity for an actor to have the stage for all that time,'' Brody says. ``But at the same time, there's never a moment to pull out of that state of mind - and it wasn't a happy state of mind. It was a very lonely, empty place.''

``What I remembered later,'' Brody continues, ``were all the Polanski films like 'Rosemary's Baby,' where the protagonist is locked in a room and being tortured by all these outside influences. And the audience becomes voyeurs, watching this person's torment in this confined space. And I was so happy that I was this guy in a Polanski film.''

And not just any Polanski film. ``The Pianist,'' says German actor Thomas Kretschmann (a key player in the movie), is the movie Polanski has been waiting his whole life to make. In many ways, the film is his story as much as Szpilman's. It's no coincidence that the movie is the best thing Polanski has done since his mid-'70s ``Chinatown'' heyday.

Polanski was 6 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. His parents were shipped off to Auschwitz a year later; Polanski escaped from the Krakow ghetto through a hole his father cut for him in the barbed-wire fence. For the next four years, he moved from hiding place to hiding place, staying with families who knew his parents.

To this day, Polanski doesn't talk much about his wartime experiences. (He declined to be interviewed for this story.) But he said during the making of the film that he wanted ``to re-create my memories from childhood'' of his life in the Krakow ghetto. Kretschmann remembers attending the premiere of ``The Pianist'' in Paris and seeing Polanski leave the theater holding hands with his 8-year-old daughter, Morgan.

``His daughter said, 'Well, papa, I guess I don't have to ask you anything anymore,' '' Kretschmann recalls. ``And Polanski simply said, 'No.' ''

``I think Roman did this film for himself,'' Kretschmann says. ``He probably worked off things he has been carrying around his whole life. And I think that's the reason Polanski doesn't want to talk to journalists about it. He doesn't want to calculate about it. It's his lifetime statement. It's all right there on the screen.''

Devil in the details

What's there doesn't attempt to capture the totality of the Holocaust. By focusing simply on one man's struggle to survive, Polanski has made it easier to grasp the inhumanity of the period. The end result is a commanding, unsentimental work that views the atrocities of war with a mixture of horror, fatalism and dark humor. Everything rings true, probably because Polanski knew the territory so well from first-hand experience.

``He'd constantly put in details that happened to him,'' Kretschmann says. ``There's a moment in the film where Szpilman is pulled out of the line for the train that's heading to the death camp. He starts to run, and the soldier tells him, 'Don't run. Walk.'' And that's precisely what his father said to him.''

Adds Brody: ``He shared a great deal with me. He gave me a level of insight that I wouldn't have had, no matter how much research I had done. After talking to him, nothing was ambiguous.''

Nothing was ambiguous about the film's set design, either. When Szpilman emerges from hiding toward the end of the movie and finds his city completely devastated, Brody didn't have to imagine the destruction. The production had been given permission to gut part of the German city of Juterbog, which had served as a military base during the Soviet occupation of East Germany.

Production designer Allan Starski, who also worked on ``Schindler's List,'' had the freedom to destroy all the old Soviet military buildings and barracks, creating a ruined moonscape that looks painfully real on film.

``It made me cry,'' Brody says. ``It was just devastation as far as the eye could see. People figure that it's computer-generated, but it's not. That I didn't have to pretend it was there was phenomenal.''

Brody has spent the last several months traveling with Polanski, taking ``The Pianist'' around the world to festivals and premieres in Cannes, Paris, Berlin, Israel, Japan, Italy and London. He calls the movie the ``pinnacle'' of his career, and says with a mixture of pride and resignation that it's going to be a difficult film to follow.

``It's hard to find something that inspires me after an experience like this,'' Brody says. ``I try to be selective anyway, but now I don't really have a choice. This has been such a gift.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) A survivor's song

Adrien Brody threw himself into the `The Pianist' body and soul

Jim Cooper/Associated Press

(2) no caption (Adrien Brody)

(3) no caption (Roman Polanski)

(4) Actor Thomas Kretschmann calls ``The Pianist'' Roman Polanski's lifetime statement.