The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Mamma Mia! star Amanda Seyfried had to adjust to singing Cosette without days of prerecording and fixing to make her sound better. “This is completely me,” she says. “I had to keep my voice in shape. It was so overwhelming and liberating, it’s another level of emoting . . . It gets you to a place beyond the music.” She prepared on her own for four months and had three to four weeks rehearsal. The actors went through their voice exercises en route to the set every day.

  “They prepared like you wouldn’t believe,” says Hooper. “But you can’t be perfectionist.” Another tricky skill the actors had to master was to sing powerfully while keeping their faces relaxed and not contorting grotesquely in intimate close-up.

  Hooper showed somewhat less confidence in the performance of Crowe as Valjean tormenter Javert, who is physically threatening and adequately expresses the songs in a rich baritone, but is not shown in as much extreme close-up. Crowe, who seems uneasy and vocally constricted in his songs, plays the obsessive gendarme almost too sympathetically, making his subsequent suicide less of a shock. So Hooper pulled the camera out and had him walk along various impossibly high parapets above Paris. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter offered welcome comic relief as shady innkeepers in sequences very similar in their bawdy tone to Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd.

  Thirty-year-old London theater vet Eddie Redmayne (Red, Richard II) had worked with Hooper seven years before on TV’s Elizabeth I, in which the young actor had held his own against Helen Mirren, and learned to ride a horse—after insisting he already knew how. During his 2006 screen debut The Good Shepherd, he picked up acting tips from director Robert De Niro. And he romanced Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in the 2011 drama My Week with Marilyn.

  Hooper gave Redmayne the chance to prove himself by giving him time to improve his singing; he landed the role of Marius despite not having sung for twelve years, since his theater days. He borrowed something he learned from De Niro in order to better match the intensity of one take of the grieving survival-guilt song “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” to the other—he’d perform it three times in a row without stopping. Hooper shot twenty-one takes.

  Unlike the theater, where you can strive for perfection every night, fixing mistakes as you go, this kind of long-take filming was very exposing for the actors. After nine weeks of rehearsals—during which the writers added bits from Hugo’s novel that were not in the stage musical in order to beef up the characters, and the actors tried to figure out how to enter a song believably without signaling the audience—the cast and crew arrived on set at London’s Pinewood Studios. “It was a different type of fear,” Redmayne tells me during an interview. “You haven’t been able to sleep the night before, adrenaline is pumping, on a tiny set with three cameramen and the director behind them, with a piano playing in your ear. It creates a weird amalgam of things inside you to try to mold. You go home in the car at the end of that day, that was it, it was out of your control.”

  Hooper filmed on location in France as well as on Pinewood soundstages. One day on the 350-foot-high elaborately detailed Parisian street set, he dressed five cameramen as peasants in order to shoot live as fifty peasants and students scrambled to build the Paris barricades using pianos and furniture thrown out of windows.

  “We had ten minutes of stock in the cameras,” recalls Redmayne. “'Build a barricade! Action!’ It was anarchy. We didn’t know where the cameras were. Complete fear. It was makeshift, we pieced together what we could. It was wonderful and terrifying.” Hooper used what they built, pinning it together with nails, but shooting on it for another month, adds Redmayne, “was still a boobytrap.”

  Universal’s marketing department was more frightened than anyone of this all-singing feature, because unlike Sweeney Todd and other musicals, they wouldn’t be able to disguise its true nature. The international marketing people embraced what the film was, while the domestic people tried to hide the singing. After the April CinemaCon unveiling of the one-take clip of Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream” wowed exhibitors, the marketers suddenly recognized that the film had the potential to move people. “It emboldened them to embrace the movie,” says Langley, “to sell the movie as the movie actually is.”

  While Langley would have happily booked the film into festivals had it been done in time—the studio pushed back the release by a few weeks to accommodate the filmmakers—the no-holds-barred tearjerker of a dramatic musical was an instant huge Christmas hit all over the world, despite its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Hooper’s goal was to pull every audience member into every tic of feeling. It’s too claustrophobic for some folks—including film critics, who have both embraced and resisted the film. They sang the praises of the film’s strong performances (especially Hathaway’s and Jackman’s), and admired the successful hybridizing of the musical with the Victor Hugo source material, but the emotional intensity of Les Misérables didn’t work for everybody; for some the film is grandiose and sags under its own bombast. But luckily for the filmmakers, Universal and Working Title, critics represent neither worldwide moviegoers nor Academy voters, who were more likely to recognize the film’s degree of difficulty and sheer audacity. And musicals have historically done well with the Academy, from Oliver! to Chicago. The movie scored at the box office with $441 million worldwide.

  What made the film work? “I think there’s a hunger for quality and a hunger for authenticity,” says Langley. “Les Mis is about very archetypical themes, writ large, and it is about people expressing their emotions. We’ve experienced that people really do love it, even if they don’t love musicals. There is something about the experience of Les Mis, from the story themes and the music, that is moving to people.”

  DJANGO UNCHAINED

  Also a late arrival in the holiday season is Quentin Tarantino’s latest opus, which from the start was a long shot to get finished in time for its December 25 release date. Tarantino went over on shooting, negotiating for three extra weeks on the final sequence by agreeing to let the company recoup the extra money he spent before he would receive his share of the profits.

  Tarantino takes his time between movies. Unusually among writer-directors in Hollywood, he enjoys a patron relationship with indie mogul Harvey Weinstein that goes back to 1994’s Pulp Fiction. When Tarantino pulls back from hanging out with pals—I’ll never forget one exhilarating marathon session at the Hotel du Cap at Cannes with actor-director Tim Robbins, documentarian Marina Zenovich, and photographer Jeff Vespa—the fast-talking Luddite gets down to business. While he used to retire to the seclusion of a city like Amsterdam to write out his genre-inspired, character-rich, intensely violent scripts on yellow legal pads, followed by lengthy hunt-and-peck sessions on the old Smith Corona he’s used since Reservoir Dogs, he now actually goes out to scribble in a notebook on the balcony of his home in the Hollywood Hills, followed by a swim during which he asks himself, Hemingway-style, “How can I make it better?”

  Tarantino is a rare bird: he has refused to succumb to the temptations of the Hollywood studios, which tend to wave around large sums of cash to try to lure away the best writer-directors from the painful act of summoning original screenplays. Tarantino has turned down, among other things, Men in Black, Speed, and the James Bond film Casino Royale. He creates his movies out of his own head. At a time when knock-offs are the rule, Tarantino is an original.

  That’s because the filmmaker, who turned fifty in 2012, cares deeply about his legacy, about having his films—Django Unchained is his eighth feature—stand the test of time. Since he wrote the 1993 film True Romance, directed and changed considerably by Tony Scott, and Natural Born Killers, helmed by Oliver Stone, he has directed his own scripts. Indie hits followed, including Reservoir Dogs; Palme d’Or winner Pulp Fiction, which also earned Tarantino an Oscar for cowriting the screenplay with Roger Avary; bounty hunter drama Jackie Brown, starring Robert De Niro and Pam Grier; Kill Bill volumes I and II, starring Uma Thurman as a sw
ord-wielding samurai; the uber-violent car-screeching actioner Death Proof, which, while well reviewed, upset him greatly when it did not fare well at the box office; and his homage to World War II movies and fifth Cannes entry, Inglourious Basterds, which grossed $120.5 million domestically—his biggest hit until Django Unchained.

  Always reliant on flamboyant, distinctive dialogue (except for the almost-silent Kill Bill films), Tarantino builds his projects around novelistic rather than cinematic structures. The $70 million Inglourious Basterds was broken into five separate chapters, each shot in a different film style. “I create mosaics, following this story and that story, and eventually they all converge,” he tells me on the phone after Inglourious Basterds’ debut in Cannes, “unless you’re dealing with Reservoir Dogs or Death Proof, which have straightforward storytelling.”

  The opening sequence of Inglourious Basterds, an intense face-off between Jew hunter Colonel Landa (multilingual Austrian actor Christoph Waltz won his first Oscar for the role) and a French farmer (Denis Ménochet) seeking to protect his three lovely daughters, was inspired by Sergio Leone westerns as well as the opening sequence of Heaven’s Gate. (Tarantino thinks his writing in this scene tops his personal best: the Sicilian speech in True Romance.)

  Tarantino tells me that the trick to keeping his movies modern and, yes, hip, so that they hold up well into the future, is to play it risky, not safe. On Inglourious Basterds, he got away with the reflexive use of titles, musical cues from iconic octogenarian Ennio Morricone, an unidentified narrator (Samuel L. Jackson), and multiple film references. There’s no knowing what he’s going to do, from charming us with heroic, charismatic World War II–era Germans, like the one actor Daniel Brühl plays in Inglourious Basterds, to killing off the characters we like. “I want to do a movie that pushes you in, and pulls you out,” he says.

  With Django Unchained, which throws the revenge theme of Inglourious Basterds into a provocative pre–Civil War Southern setting, when the slave economy was in full swing, Tarantino offers up a meaty dish to be savored and interpreted, crammed with movie references and rich performances from a wide range of great character actors. He deepens his homage to the 1960s spaghetti westerns of Italy’s two Sergios, Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Corbucci (Django). In fact, the world of Corbucci helped Tarantino figure out how to do Django Unchained. While writing a critical essay on the filmmaker and listening to spaghetti western music the first scene came to him: a man riding up to buy a slave off a Texas chain gang.

  “His was the most pitiless west that a character could walk through,” Tarantino tells Taylor Hackford after the film’s first L.A. screening at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) on December 2. “They’re cruel movies; their characters are capable of cruel actions; they were comments on Fascism left over from World War II. And exciting stories can happen inside of that landscape. I was trying to find an equivalent of Sergio Corbucci no-man’s land, where life is cheap and people are pitiless. Being a slave in the antebellum South, that would be life is a dime. I always wanted to tell that story anyway, and from that moment on everything fell into place.”

  As with many of Tarantino’s projects, Django had been bubbling on the back burner for a while, thirteen years, he tells a packed, cavernous Hall H at Comic-Con in July. “I’ve always wanted to do a western,” he says. “Spaghetti westerns have always been my favorite. The violence, the surrealism, the cool music, and all that stuff. The initial germ of the whole idea was a slave who becomes a bounty hunter and then goes after overseers who are hiding out on plantations.”

  Tarantino says that adding the long-missing ingredient—slavery—to the familiar western tropes makes it fresh, finally. The crowd loves it when Tarantino describes the movie as a prequel to Shaft: “Broomhilda and Django will eventually have a baby and then that baby will have a baby and that baby will have a baby and one of these days, John Shaft will be born. John Shaft started with this lady here. They’re the great-great-great-great-grandparents of ‘Shut your mouth!’ ”

  Eight years ago one of the film’s producers, Reggie Hudlin, was explaining to Tarantino what he didn’t like about a particular movie about slavery: it wasn’t as empowering as he had hoped it would be. He told Tarantino, “Look, this is a movie obviously made with the best intentions, yet at the end of the day, for black folks watching it, it’s not half as empowering as The Legend of Nigger Charley.”

  “I understood exactly what he meant,” Tarantino says to Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. during an in-depth interview in The Root. “It was a diamond bullet of reality. I took it in, and then I said, ‘I have to make that movie one day.’ The Legend of Nigger Charley is an empowering movie. And it stands alone.”

  Antebellum slave dramas have not been turned into many movies at all. Tarantino was pouring an 1858 slave drama into the western genre mold; that required research. “I can understand people being uncomfortable with slave narratives,” he says to Hackford. “It’s the ugliest time of this country, and we haven’t gotten over it yet. Nevertheless, everyone talks about: there’s no stories, there’s nothing left to tell, especially westerns, I’ve seen every type of western. There’s all kinds of stories that could be told in a slave narrative that have never ever been touched. Let this be the first rock through the window!”

  While Tarantino was writing the script, his Inglourious Basterds Oscar winner Christoph Waltz came into town and read what the director had completed thus far. One night, before Waltz took Tarantino to see the second installment of the L.A. Opera production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, he took him out to dinner and told him the story of the opera. “There was nothing like Christoph telling you the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde, he was born to do that, he was terrific,” recalls Tarantino, who had already named Django’s wife Broomhilda. “While I was watching the second opera, I realized the stories were parallel. The daughter of Wotan is the daughter of all the gods—that’s Bruce Dern—the mountain is Candieland, Candie is the dragon, the circle of hellfire is around her, and Django is Siegfried. It would be wonderful to see Christoph telling the story. I like bringing a fairy-tale aspect to the story, anyway.”

  Tarantino finished the script on April 26, 2011. This time he adopted a straightforward narrative centered on one through-character for us to follow from beginning to end, a superhero origin story about the freed slave Django, an angel of vengeance who learns to “kill white people and get paid for it,” Tarantino tells LA Weekly critic Karina Longworth. “Fastest gun in the South.”

  Waltz tells me a Tarantino movie is “a living organism. The script is a point of departure. Shooting takes care of collecting material for the edit. We had sixty-four days to shoot. In Germany on Inglourious Basterds the schedule was tighter and the budget smaller. Here we were on home turf, emboldened by the experience and success of Basterds. This was a little more expensive [$83 million], the leeway was broader, here a lot of things changed, according to necessity. He sees stuff long before they really make their presence felt. He thinks ahead. He’s the author, not so much the director. He started out in his head, and it will end in his head. The thing is to transpose what’s in his head via the material he’s shot through the edit, through the film.”

  While Waltz was on board from the start to play German bounty hunter King Schultz, speculation about casting dogged Tarantino, as various actors were in and out of the eighteen-week production, from Kevin Costner, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony LaPaglia, and Kurt Russell to Sacha Baron Cohen and Idris Elba. Will Smith turned down the title role, he later told Entertainment Weekly, because it wasn’t the lead. He saw Waltz’s sophisticated European, who trains Django, as the leading role. And while Smith admired the script, he didn’t want to hold up Tarantino by trying to fix it.

  So Tarantino turned to Jamie Foxx, the respected Oscar-winning star of Ray, who boasts considerable range, from action and comedy to drama. Foxx sold Tarantino, the actor tells me at Comic-Con, partly by promoting his skills as a horseman. Th
e actor had grown up playing cowboys and Indians in Texas, complete with a green Bonanza jacket. “I got a couple horses,” he told Tarantino. “Let me ride my own horse. She’s able to handle the stunts.”

  As Foxx dealt with the dramatic evolution of his character, the slave who goes from being number six on a chain gang to sitting on top of a horse as a free man, so his horse Cheetah learned to handle a noisy film set. When they visit the plantation run by Big Daddy (Don Johnson), Schultz has Django ride up wearing a frilly Blue Boy costume. “I wrote that scene in the script,” says Tarantino. “And Jamie said Django should choose that outfit: ‘I want that fly shit. That should be Django’s choice.’ Sounds like a good idea.

  “I couldn’t have made this movie with a Django who didn’t see eye to eye with me, who didn’t understand the story we wanted to tell, why we were doing what we were doing, how to nail the humor. And Jamie in this movie was a true lead, and a lead actor leads by example. That’s what he did, for the whole cast and the crew, he was just wonderful. But he had that extra little ingredient: he trusted me. There were moments, like, ‘Wow do we need to do this?’ and I’d say ‘Well, it really is the trick,’ and we’d talk about it. And, ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’ ”

  Tarantino was open to letting characters develop in extensive rehearsals and on set, according to Foxx: “He’d change this over here, he was open to things. He’d rewrite the script on a dime; sometimes the changes would be fantastic. He goes to lunch and comes back with four pages. We’d shoot it.”

  On-set rewriting is usually about “massaging,” Tarantino says. “You write a scene in your bedroom six months earlier, then getting ready to do it on the day, you realize things have changed. On an epic movie like this, yeah, you have the script, you’ve done the first half, you know what you have, what you need, what you don’t need to spend time on anymore, so it’s adjusting and massaging like that. I try not to come up with too many pseudo-fabulous ideas in rehearsal, that we all think are great, and I end up shooting, but they never make the movie. I love all those fun times exploring it, but it never makes the movie. Every once in a while they do.”