Roman Polanski was inspired to direct the film due to his interest in the source material, an autobiography of the same title by Wladyslaw Szpilman, and by his own personal experiences as a Polish Jew under Nazi control. Indeed, Polanski lived part of his childhood in the Krakow Ghetto after his mother died, and escaped to a barn outside the city until the end of the war, at which point he was reunited with his father, who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Filming began in 2001 in Germany and continued in Poland. In an interview about why he wanted to make the film, Polanski said, "I can tell you I always wanted to make the picture, a picture about those things in that period in particular. But I didn’t want to do it about Krakow—it was just too close to home...When you make a movie, you always superimpose the movie set over the real streets and the movie characters over the people that you remembered. … I would never do it.”
Roman Polanski won the Academy Award for his straightforward and masterful direction of The Pianist. Polanski was not present at the ceremony, as he is an international fugitive wanted for statutory rape, but the audience gave him a standing ovation in his absence.
