During the shooting of the movie, while scouting locations in Krakow, Roman Polanski met a man who had helped Polanski's family survive the war.
Director of Photography Pawel Edelman slowly drains the color out of all the scenes as the film progresses to signify the deterioration of the city and of Szpilman himself.
Adrien Brody became the youngest person to date to win an Academy Award for Best Actor when he won for this film at the age of 29.
The film is based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman. The director Roman Polanski tried to make the film as faithful of an adaptation as possible, with additional inspiration coming from events that happened to him while he was a boy during the war.
Roman Polanski himself experienced the Holocaust. His parents were sent to two different concentration camps: his father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived the war, and his mother to Auschwitz where she was murdered.