Feature: 'Pianist' writer says it was easy

LOS ANGELES, May 27 (UPI) -- "The Pianist" is about surviving severe brutality, but screenwriter Ronald Harwood said making the movie couldn't have been a smoother, more pleasant experience.

"I said to (director Roman) Polanski a couple of weeks ago in Paris, I've never known a film go so easily," said Harwood in an interview with United Press International. "I wrote it. He directed it. It was released, and it was well received. And there didn't seem to be these terrible crises and panics that you often see with movies."

To say that "The Pianist" was well received is putting it modestly.

Polanski won the Oscar for Best Director. Harwood won for Best Adapted Screenplay for his adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir "Death of a City." And Adrien Brody won for Best Actor for his performance as Szpilman -- a Jewish concert pianist who eludes capture by the Nazis during the occupation of Warsaw during World War II.

"The Pianist" was named best film and Polanski won the David Lean Award for best direction at the 2003 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. The movie won seven Cesar awards -- the French equivalent of the Oscars -- including best film and best director.

Harwood said the movie's success owes a great deal to the fact that producers largely left Polanski, cast and crew alone.

"In a movie if you leave it to the creative people, you get a better movie," he said. "Producers will never hire me again (for saying that), I suppose."

That was a joke. In truth said Harwood, his Oscar win led to an immediate flurry of offers from producers to write for them.

"I got 15 offers on the Monday morning after the Oscars," he said. "And I guess my money might go up, I don't know."

On the promotional trail to support the DVD release of "The Pianist," Harwood was willing to talk about anything except the legal difficulty Polanski has faced in the United States since the late 1970s -- when he fled the country to avoid prison for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Now in her mid-'30s, the victim -- Samantha Geimer -- said in February that she thinks Polanski should be permitted to return to the United States without threat of being thrown in jail. She described the 1977 incident as "not consensual sex by any means ... scary ... creepy." But she said it wasn't as bad as the treatment she got from the press, or the treatment Polanski got from a Los Angeles judge.

When "The Pianist" was in theaters -- and being touted for Oscar gold -- much was made of Polanski's personal relationship with the story of a man who survives on the run. The reference was not to his legal trouble in California, but to his experience as a Holocaust survivor.

Still, Harwood said he never got the sense that the project was in any way cathartic for Polanski.

"Never once can I remember him being moved by the work," he said. "He's very very concealed. Enchanting company, most wonderful company, but when it comes to him personally, it's very guarded."

On the other hand, Harwood said making "The Pianist" seemed like something of a religious journey for Brody.

"He starved -- Polanski put him on a very strict diet," said Harwood. "He got rid of all of his possessions. He wanted to know what it was like to be bereft. He was hungry all the time. He was not of this world. Later when I saw him he was a different person."

Has winning the Oscar turned out to be a life changing experience for Harwood?

"It's made me very happy," he said. "I don't know if that's a change. I'm always jolly. People say I'm unbearable."

Harwood did go out on a limb and say that the Oscar is, in some ways, better than the being honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999 as a Commander of the British Empire.

"The CBE is very official," he said. "That's a wonderful ceremony, but there's something about this being worldwide, with the Academy Awards being seen by 1 billion people. That's quite a lot of people. I was extremely proud to get the CBE but this is so much more high-profile, is the word I think -- the current cliché."