The Pianist

Polanski's film of Władysław Szpilman's memoir, written in 1945 and published in 1946, then suppressed for decades and reissued in 1998. Polanski turned down Schindler's List and made this instead, and the reason is the adaptation's centre: he survived the Kraków ghetto as a child and wanted a film from inside the experience rather than about a rescuer. That is why the film refuses almost every consolation, and why Hosenfeld, the German officer who feeds Szpilman, is given no speech explaining himself. Palme d'Or, and Oscars for Polanski, Brody and the screenplay.

Spielberg offered Polanski Schindler's List and Polanski turned it down, saying it was too close to his own childhood in the Krakow ghetto. He made The Pianist instead, nine years later, from Szpilman's memoir. The relationship reads as a correction. Schindler's List is organised around a rescuer and gives the audience someone to travel with; The Pianist refuses one, and Hosenfeld is given no speech explaining why he helps. Spielberg's film ends in gratitude; Polanski's ends with a man who survived by hiding while everyone he knew did not. Filed MEDIUM: the refusal is documented and the correction is legible, but Polanski has framed it as a subject he had to reach himself rather than as an answer to Spielberg.