Adrien Brody Gained Gravitas by Losing Weight

Polanski attended film school and made his early movies there before setting out for an eventful career (and life) in Hollywood and later Europe. The director waited 40 years to return to his native country to make another film.
It may have been worth the wait. "The Pianist" has resounded among audiences with unexpected power, the first Latex Catsuits�Polanski film to do so in a long, long time. "The Pianist" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and received standing ovations at film festivals across Europe and in Israel.
For Brody, the warm response is especially gratifying, since the role of Szpilman (whose name, in one of those oddities, translates in Yiddish as "the man who plays") represented a real turning point in his own emotional life. His performance has been nominated for a Golden Globe and he was named best actor by the Boston Film Critics Awards. He's considered a front-runner for an Oscar nomination.
If the performance had a rare power, hunger was one of the reasons, and Brody still dwells on the topic. "There is a level of desperation, loneliness that comes with starvation," he says. "You feel a sense of emptiness that's unimaginable. It's a total psychological shift. It's not something I could have done [otherwise], no matter how good an actor I was."
That wasn't all Brody was willing to endure to inhabit the role, though it was the hardest. To become Szpilman he put his life on hold, giving up an apartment in New York, selling his car and moving to Europe with no forwarding address.
"I just left," he says simply. "I became this guy." He did not want, as he puts it, "a base," a support system to which he could retreat. He stopped listening to hip-hop, electronica or any other music past 1940. He immersed himself in piano lessons, playing three and four hours of classical music a day, before filming and throughout the shoot. The opening scene of Brody playing as bombs fall really is the actor playing.
It helped, too, that the six-month shoot took place in Warsaw, its war-era streets re-created with heart-rending verisimilitude. At night, after shooting wrapped, Brody stayed on his own, and did not go out or hang around with other cast members.
"Everything fueled the intensity and the reality" of the role, he says. "Six months of this -- you rarely get that opportunity. It was probably the most difficult experience of my life."
It changed him, "profoundly," he says, "as a human being. It changed me as an actor. It gave me a taste of what it could be like. How fortunate we are as young people in America not to experience that level of destruction and suffering on our soil."
It seems a little odd to hear Brody express these sentiments dressed the way he is, in such an opulent setting. The actor has about him Latex Fetish�the brash egoism of youth and talent. He grew up in New York with artsy-literati parents; his mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a well-known photographer, his father a teacher and now painter. Brody began acting from the age of 12, and attended New York's prestigious High School for the Performing Arts, emerging with lofty expectations for himself and his career.
He has found complex character roles in small, sometimes excellent films, among them Steven Soderbergh's "King of the Hill," Elie Chouraqui's "Harrison's Flowers," in which he plays a photojournalist in the midst of the Bosnian war, and Terrence Malick's war epic "The Thin Red Line," in which he had a principal role that ended up largely on the cutting room floor (though Brody was not alone in this fate).
The role in "The Pianist" is by far the most important, most acclaimed performance of his career. But it was not a role he sought, or expected.