The movie Adrien Brody considers his “greatest triumph”
The name Adrien Brody is one of the most iconic of a generation. For nearly 30 years, Brody has offered his talents to the cinema industry and has starred in some of the best movies during that time, including Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Brody’s acting talent is widespread, though, and he’s featured in a wide-ranging catalogue of genres, including movies such as The Thin Red Line by Terrence Mallick, Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen and Blonde by Andrew Dominik. Quite simply, Brody is one of the greatest actors of his era.
While many of Brody’s personal acting efforts comprise several of our favourite cinematic moments, what about the actor’s own favourite movies? Well, thankfully, we can get closer to understanding Brody through a feature he did with Criterion in which he named the films that changed his life.
It may not come as a surprise that the film Brody considers his “greatest triumph” is Roman Polanski’s 2002 biographical war film The Pianist, based on a World War II memoir of the same title by the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer and Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpliman.
“The Pianist was the greatest triumph on so many levels, and not just for my career — but as a man, understanding the work that was required to portray Szpilman,” the actor began. “To represent loss at that magnitude and to be a part of the enormity of a film like that.”
He continued: “It unsentimentally represents all that can go wrong in the civilized world, and has gone wrong historically. I think for young people to have a work like that existing is a remarkable thing. It’s a remarkable honour to be a part of that, to contribute to an understanding of how hatred and bigotry, if left unchecked, can just devastate humanity.”
The Pianist won the 2002 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and was equally successful, if not more so, at the Academy Awards the following year, where Brody won ‘Best Actor’, Polanski won ‘Best Director’ and screenwriter Ronald Hardwood won ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
Brody feels forever indebted to the film for allowing him the opportunity to win the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar. “The pinnacle of an actor’s career,” he said. “It’s a tremendous honour,” he added. “I was the youngest recipient of the ‘Best Actor’ award. My peers were all tremendously talented actors that I had great admiration for and they were welcoming of me.”
The actor signed off by saying: “I’d been working for 17 years, but I was still just a working actor. I wasn’t known, so that was the one film that I would say transformed most aspects of my life and career.”
Check out the film’s trailer below to get a glimpse of Brody’s brilliance.
