Mr. Polanski sent him the book. "It has a very objective view," Mr. Harwood said, adding: "Although it's autobiography, it's as if the man is writing about someone else. We were determined to keep that approach."

Mr. Harwood won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. After it was written, he and Mr. Polanski locked themselves away in a house outside Paris to edit and refine. On the DVD Mr. Polanski says that although they were determined to remain faithful to Szpilman's account, the book was like a journal and needed some dramatic shape. "Polanski's a very good actor; I'm not a bad actor, so we acted out scenes," Mr. Harwood said last week.

Mr. Polanski was shaken by his own graphic re-creation of horror. For him, he says, memories of children being ripped away from their parents are the worst. On the DVD's documentary, file clips of death and destruction in the Warsaw ghetto melt almost directly into scenes from the movie. "You study the films, the archives, the photographs, and you say, `This is very hard,' " Mr. Polanski says. "Better you have someone for a writer you want to go through this with."

Of Mr. Harwood he says: "First of all, he has a great sense of humor. We'd laugh all the time. It was great fun." Humor was one defense, but the documentary is very good at conveying the sense of careful modulation that permeated the filming. Excessive emotion was squeezed out of the process, as were distracting departures and experimentation. "Step aside with your bright ideas and just tell things as they were," Mr. Polanski says.

Adrien Brody won the Oscar for best actor as Szpilman. "Adrien understood right way that it wasn't going to be a showy performance," Mr. Polanski says. "It has to be very flat, very realistic."