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In few scenes, you can see street signs with inscriptions in Polish, for example "Ulica Lubanski" (Lubanski's Street). In fact, because of the Polish language's plural forms, the inscription should be "Ulica Lubanskiego". See more...

Trivia

Adrien Brody could not play the piano. The film producers hired four professional piano teachers to teach him the song from scratch. See more...

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Movie Mistakes blog

The Pianist (2002) - 5 corrections

Directed by Roman Polanski, starring Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann (add more)

Genres: Biography, Drama, Music, War

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When Szpilman is walking down a sidewalk, he passes two German soldiers. One turns and addresses Szpilman as "Sie". Then he says, "Was machen Sie?" German soldiers never addressed Jews with the polite form of you (Sie), they always used the informal "du". The officer changes to "du" when he tells him to walk in the gutter. [Yes but they probably wouldn't have used 'du' either. Du is used very informally, when either talking to children or close friends.it's likely that when the Nazis addressed the 'enemy', they simply would have used the command form if commanding ie: "Komm hier" rather than "Kommen Sie hier". If asking a question, however, I would have thought using the "sie" form would have been used, simply because "du" is too friendly.]

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Correction Edit text Duplicate X

When Szpilman escapes from the hospital because the German soldiers are burning the building with flamthrower, he open the window twice and the window changes between shots. [Szpilman actually opens two separate sets of windows. The first is a set of cloudy windows, the second a set of clear windows. The first camera angle is looking from the side as he opens the first set, then it moves behind Szpilman as he opens the next set. If you look closely, you can see the cloudy windows continue to swing after the camera changes.]

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Correction Edit text Duplicate X

When Wladek is on the bus, he starts drumming his fingers on the barrier between him and some officers. Notice how long and skinny his fingers are. However, whenever he starts playing the piano, his fingers are short and stubby. It is obviously someone else playing. [Adrien Brody did quite a bit of his own playing on the piano, and the man who did the rest is a professional pianist, and has long skinny fingers just like Brody does. At no point in time do the fingers appear short and stubby.]

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Correction Edit text Duplicate X

In reference to the scene where the Nazis on the balcony dump the old man from his wheelchair onto the street, they didn't drop the old man WITH the chair - just the old man. Two scenes later, the old man is shown dead on the street ON TOP of the wheelchair. [The Nazis dump the man WITH the weelchair.]

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Correction Edit text Duplicate X

There is a scene where an old man in a wheelchair is thrown out of a window and the rest of his family is forced to run away in the street, only to be gunned down by the German soldiers. In the last shot, the German soldiers are driving away, and you can see one of the people who is suppose do be lying dead on the street slightly move out of the way of the car (to avoid being actually run over). [Given that the truck runs over one person who is obviously still alive, given that he screams, it's possible that not everyone the Germans shot was killed right away.]

Edit Corrected by Krista

Correction Edit text Duplicate X