“The Pianist” and “King Kong” star Adrien Brody spoke at the Red Sea Film Festival Friday about a wide variety of creative pursuits, including making music from popcorn in the 1990s.
“I liked the sound of the kernels of popcorn hitting the aluminium lid of the pan and so I set my microphone up and recorded it and then I sampled it and put on some reverb,” he told the audience in Saudi Arabia. “It went pok-a-pok-a-pok.”
Something of a prodigy, he was cast as a lead in a TV movie “Home at Last” when he was only 15 and later became the youngest actor to win the best male lead Oscar.
Hailing from Queens, New York, the child of a celebrated photographer and a painter, Brody’s love for acting was kindled when he was enrolled by his mother in an acting school — the American Academy of Dramatic Arts — where she had been photographing. “You do what these kids are doing all day,” she told him.
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Subsequently, he attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, made famous by the Alan Parker film “Fame.” Applying for art as well as acting, the decision was made for him when his art application was turned down.
Roles followed in films by directors such as Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee as he made a name for himself in the independent cinema scene. “It was a wonderful time in my life. They were making so many interesting, independent films, with auteur filmmakers. These films would get actual proper theatrical releases,” Brody says.
Élie Chouraqui’s “Harrison’s Flowers” was shown to Roman Polanski as he was engaged in an open casting call for “The Pianist.” “He saw the film and took me out for a beer afterwards. I didn’t have to audition for that movie. It was a miracle,” Brody says. “Wladyslaw Szpilman was the most challenging role I’ve ever played.”
In order to prepare, Brody went on an extreme diet and memorized two piano pieces though he couldn’t play the piano prior to the film. The two processes interacted. “The insight it gave me with the language of music and how it changed with the extremes and the emotion, and how it soothed the hunger,” Brody recalled.
Winning the Oscar was unexpected, partly because he hadn’t won any of the awards in the run up to the Academy Awards. Also he was facing off with Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Nicolas Cage and Daniel Day Lewis. “To be in conversation with those actors, it was … delicious,” he said.
Acting in “King Kong” provided the challenges of working on a blockbuster action movie but Brody found that Peter Jackson was essentially the same kind of indy filmmaker he was used to. “Have you seen ‘Meet the Feebles’?,” he asked the audience.
Sustained applause came at the mention of the five films made in collaboration with Wes Anderson. Brody described the peculiar circumstances of his first collaboration with Anderson on “The Darjeeling Limited,” where the set was a working train. “You had to get to the train before 5:30 in the morning. Or you missed the set. It would just leave.”
Nowadays, Brody is painting more than ever, making music including the soundtrack for a film he produced, “Clean,” and producing and writing as a way of passing on some of the knowledge he has gained of his craft. “But that doesn’t take away from the yearning to act,” he said.
