Production team and cast quotes from The Pianist (2002)

View Quote I always wanted to make a film about that period and I had a very hard time finding the proper material. When I read "The Pianist", I knew right away that, that's something I wanted to.. to do. And the reason was that the description of the events was extremely accurate. And that's because it was written immediately after the war. I don't think that somebody who writes a book about the events 20 or 30 years later can have the same type of recollections, the same type of detail which was vividly true to me, a child of the same period.

View Quote The book is written with astonished and called objectivity. There are good Jews and bad Jews in the film. And that's how it was. There are good Germans and bad Germans. There are good Poles and bad Poles. And above all the book is tremendously optimistic. The victim survives. Survives thanks to his passion for the.. for the art and for the music in particular. Thanks to his willpower. It's an optimistic and uplifting book in spite of the horrors that it describes.

View Quote From what I can deduct from his memoirs at the point where the story takes place, he was just a.. a very outgoing kind of good-hearted young man. Everything was taken from him and everyone else. But what I learned about Szpilman after surviving all this is that he grew to have a very long life with a lovely wife who l've met and he had a family and continued to compose and contribute all kinds of wonderful things. And Roman had a lot of similarities. So I got to envision Szpilman like Roman.

View Quote It's a dreadful of historical event and you can't start glamorizing it. You can't start trying to soften it. You have to tell it as you believe it is. I mean there is no ultimate truth of it because nobody can really we can't explain it in anyway. So the truth is very difficult to get to. But whatever the truth is in you of that subject in one you have to be true to that truth.