Making A ‘Clean’ Start Isn’t Easy In Adrien Brody Drama

When he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in Roman Polanski’s haunting Holocaust drama The Pianist in 2003, Adrien Brody became the youngest actor in the Academy’s history to earn that achievement. The New York native has since amassed an impressive list of credits, and often gravitates to independent projects with meaning that are reflective of our society.

He now stars in Clean, a film he wrote, produced and composed the music for as a passion project with writer/director Paul Solet.

He plays a man (simply known by the nickname Clean) trying to overcome the violence that has pervaded so much of his life and is seeking redemption through his deeds. He earns his keep as a sanitation worker cleaning up the city’s never-ending piles of debris. Amongst the rubbish, though, he sometimes finds mechanical parts that he uses back home in his makeshift workshop to mend objects that he subsequently takes to his friendly neighborhood pawnbroker.

The one bright spot in Clean’s otherwise monastic life is an orphaned Black adolescent girl, whom he watches over protectively. He makes her lunch and tries to guard her against the troublemakers on the rough streets of the city. After witnessing a gang of hoodlums beating up a victim behind a Dumpster, Clean himself is targeted and winds up the hospital for a while. As he recovers, the young girl he’s been protecting has gotten involved with a group of youths who have set up a drug den down the street from her home, and so he has to rescue her, relying on the violent fighting skills he had hoped to never use again. Meanwhile, he also has become the target of local crime boss, who’s killed one of his associates whom he suspects is shorting him on his illegal drug supply. Clean takes it upon himself to move the girl and her grandmother far enough away from the vengeful mobster’s reach, but it’s uncertain whether that’s even possible.

Alongside Brody, the film stars John Bianco, Glenn Fleshler, Richie Merritt, RZA, Mykelti Williamson and Chandler Ari-Dupont, an up-and-coming young actress who was cast after a nationwide search.

Having grown up in Queens, the only child of a retired history professor and a Hungarian-born photographer, Brody was struck by the poverty, drugs and violence around him. With those troubling elements still prevalent in the outer boroughs of the city and even into the small towns of upstate New York and beyond, he was compelled to write Clean.

“I long to tell stories that represent those who are striving to overcome the world’s brutality,” he says.

Having previously worked with Solet on 2007’s crime thriller Bullet Head, the two set out to make an urban drama that honored the rawness, grit and danger of the dramatic contemporary films of the 1970s, with a central character staring into the abyss every day, and who, despite every effort to avoid the darkness surrounding him, is destined to fall back into it. IFC Films’ Clean premiered Jan. 28 in theaters and is available on digital and On Demand.

Just prior to opening day, Brody spoke via Zoom about making Clean, a passion project in every respect. He also reflected on the 20 years since his career-making role in The Pianist.

Angela Dawson: So many films that were made to be seen in a theater are going direct to streaming. Is it important to you that Clean is shown in movie theaters as an option?

Adrian Brody: I’m excited about Clean coming out and getting to share it with the world and that we have a theatrical component in this complex landscape. It’s no longer the universal expectation but I love the theatrical experience. That’s so much of what’s moved me in seeing movies, especially when I was young. I’m sad that it looks like younger generations will possibly not have that opportunity. They don’t currently so much and the kind of movies they’re able to see—because of the cost and all the factors involved—are very limited.

This is a dream come true for me in many ways because it’s a role I really aspired to play and it’s been difficult to attain for various reasons. It’s a type of storytelling that I love. It both honors the vengeance-thriller and the more nuanced character pieces that I gravitate to as an actor. I wanted to marry the two and provide something that was entertaining, commercial enough to be a worthy endeavor for our distributor and honor the world that we live in, and not sugarcoat the hardships that so many people in our society are afflicted by, and the inequality and oppressive forces that are particularly hard for young people, especially impoverished young people. It’s about the ability to be heroic despite your own failures. I just felt like all of that needs to be part of the creative work and to be relevant now. It needs to be meaningful for me, in many ways.

There were all these other components such as finding a place that my music makes sense and that all of this stems from these influences I grew up with. I’m from Queens and am inspired by the films of the ‘70s and ‘80s about the roughness of my city. It’s an amazing thing for all of that to feed into one cohesive creative endeavor.

Dawson: Talk to me about the inspiration for this screenplay and working with (director) Paul Solet again? Who came up with this Clean character?

Brody: It is a shared responsibility. I’ve been longing to tell a version of this story for well over a decade. Paul and I have worked together in the past and I’ve found his writing and directing to be wonderful. As a screenwriter, I found he understood the range in which I wanted this to go. I enjoyed our experience together when we worked. I pitched him this conceptually and he loved it, and immediately had wonderful ideas. We got right to work. So much of this is influenced by both of our interests, which are very similar in terms of screenwriting and caliber of artistic films that we liked in terms of style in which we wanted to tell the story. We were very aligned on that.

Musically, Paul had interesting ideas. I didn’t set out to score this and produce it—that wasn’t my objective, initially—but it came alive as I was making the film and as I continue to make music on a daily basis. What was pouring out of me, especially at that time, felt very much an extension of Clean and that world. So (the music) became an additional character that I created in the storytelling.

Dawson: Twenty years ago, you starred in The Pianist. Does it seem that long ago?

Brody: No.

Dawson: In what ways did that film shape you or has shaped you in the past 20 years?

Brody: It’s a remarkable thing. That movie has had the most profound effect on my life than any other endeavor or experience that I’ve embarked on. Before any of the accolades—which I’m eternally grateful for—it had already shifted everything and changed my perspective and given me a sense of gratitude that has not left me. It gave me a sense of responsibility in how I live my life.

I was only 27 when I made that film. I wasn’t conscious of how much I took for granted. I had said back then that my understanding of this and portraying a survivor of that horrible time in history that young people—my generation—might not understand fully because they hadn’t lived through something traumatic on that level in the United States, and how fortunate we were and how unaware we were of that kind of suffering or the potential for so much to be pulled out from under us on a national level.

But now we’re experiencing that to a degree so it’s reinforced my need to live presently and apply myself in a very focused way and to do what I feel is meaningful. To share and live more fearlessly and not get bogged down in the things that may very well be disappointing or difficult to overcome. When you look around at the vast suffering of this world, you better be thankful for every moment that it’s not affecting you or your loved ones. That’s what (The Pianist) has done for me, which I’m really grateful for, because that prepared me for a level of success that I (previously) hadn’t had as a working actor.