Polanski called to witness

REVIEW: The Pianist

Roman Polanski telephoned me from Paris in the spring of 2000. He'd seen the French production of my play Taking Sides and thought I might be the right person to write a screenplay of a book called The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman.

The book arrived the next day. I read it in one sitting. It is without doubt the most original and extraordinary account of survival that I have seen. Szpilman was a well-known Polish pianist before the Second World War. After the German invasion he was, together with his family, herded into the Warsaw ghetto. He describes the process of degradation, the hunger, the filth, the cruelty, the unbearable suffering. What makes his story so compelling and unusual is his point of view. It is as if he is writing about someone else. Whether he is describing death or torture or the driving of the Jews into cattle trucks, he preserves his distance. He never confesses his own feelings, never once imparts his pain or despair. There is not a word of complaint in the entire book.

Szpilman is rescued from being sent to Treblinka by a Jewish policeman. Somehow he survives and is for the most part a passive victim. Finally, near to starvation, he is saved by a German army officer.

The moment I finished reading, I called Polanski and told him I wanted very much to write the screenplay. We met in Paris where he lives and I have a flat. We had never met before, but became friends at once and have remained so to this day.

At that first meeting we discussed how we should approach the film. We both agreed that our obligation was to be true to Szpilman's story and to preserve the coolness of his style. We were not going to employ a voice-over, nor was I going to introduce some sort of companion to whom the pianist could talk. We would witness events, as we do in the book, ruthlessly from Szpilman's point of view. We would invent only where the film demanded it.

I returned to London to begin work but for two weeks found myself unable to begin. I was nervous of having to keep my distance from events and people, something I have never had to do before in writing plays and novels. My instinct is to dramatise and here I was being asked to keep that instinct at bay.

Polanski called from time to time to find out how I was getting on. At first I lied, but then confessed. "What do you mean, you can't begin?" he barked. "Just begin!" So I did, and after two months the first draft was finished.

Polanski was suitably encour-aging, but a film is the director's medium and his input in terms of what he wants to see, what he wants to shoot, is not just essential but obligatory. He decided that we should be ensconced in a house near Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, until the work was done. It was one of the most fruitful collaborations of my career. For six weeks we discussed, argued, acted out the scenes and laughed a lot. Laughter was, I suppose, our defence against the tragic events we were describing.

Polanski was himself a survivor of the Cracow ghetto and his recollections infect much of the film. He managed to escape and was hidden by peasants until the end of the war. But this is not his story. At the Cannes Film Festival last week, journal-ists asked me over and over again how personal the film was to Polanski and did he seem to suffer from these memories. All I can say is that we told Szpilman's story, which Polanski tested against his own experiences. If he suffered pain he did not show it, at least not to me. But then he is a very private person, almost reticent, and tells you about his extraordinary life only if he remembers something funny.

Of course, there are events and characters not in the book. At our first meeting, Polanski said he wanted to add something to the incident where Szpilman is hidden in a flat with an upright piano but is ordered not to play for fear of drawing attention. Polanski wanted him to sit at the piano, open the lid and flex his fingers. We would then hear music and think that Szpilman had taken leave of his senses and was actually playing. But then we would reveal that his hands were just dancing inches above the keyboard and that the music was only in his head. The scene is in the film.

In Cannes, at an interview with two journalists, I was asked by one whether I thought the film was important. Before I could answer, the second man, a Serb, jumped in and told us with deep regret that he had been present when a Swiss hack who hated the film had said he didn't think the Nazis had killed enough Jews and he hoped Israel would cease to exist.