Tom Hulce, played Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I’d really wanted the part of Younger Brother in Miloš Forman’s previous film Ragtime and had had a couple of disastrous meetings with him. When I met him for Amadeus, he had me read for an entire day against actors coming in for other parts. I noticed he was cursory with people I thought were interesting, and nice to those who I thought didn’t have a chance. I decided strategically to be a real asshole, which seemed to intrigue him. At the end of eight hours, he looked at me and just said: “Yeah. You can go now.”
I took as many piano lessons as I could stand. F Murray Abraham, who played Mozart’s musical rival Salieri, came with me to watch Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields record at Abbey Road in London. Neville invited me to crawl around in the middle of the orchestra so I had a visceral experience of being inside the music.
On camera, I’d be playing silent keyboards with the music either played on set or, if there was dialogue, relayed to me via a hidden earpiece. The scene where I’m improving Salieri’s march and talking over my shoulder, and the one where I’m playing upside down, were particularly scary. It was like doing stunt work.
John McEnroe was a character reference for me – I was looking for people who behaved in ways that meant you would never guess they had such divine abilities. The least conventional wigs were my favourites, but it was changing my hair colour that had the greatest effect on my character. When it was dyed New York taxicab yellow, I became much more extroverted. Even so, I had got through a bottle of Jack Daniel’s developing Mozart’s signature laugh. Miloš had told me the one I’d suggested wasn’t nearly extreme enough, so I tried about a million ideas before I hit on something similar to someone I knew. Mozart was really smart but when he laughed you thought: “This man’s an idiot.”
Miloš was very concerned about the scene where Mozart dictates the requiem to Salieri – I don’t think there had really been anything like it in cinema, just two characters reciting musical notation. We had Neville Marriner and one of his associates read the script for us as a demonstration and it wasn’t great. Miloš decided to use only the two-camera setup in the whole film, so whatever happened on one side was matched with a reaction shot. Without telling either Miloš or Murray, I would purposefully leave out information, which meant Murray really did struggle to keep up – that was my secret agenda.
Filming in Prague while it was still under communist rule meant we were constantly under surveillance. We’d go out to dinner and let the people who were following us know how long we were going to be in the restaurant. Originally, Mozart’s wife Constanze was to be played by Meg Tilly, and she and I got to stay for a long weekend in the actual apartment where they lived. One day we were playing soccer in the street with the crew and she ripped a tendon. There was no room to move shooting around and she had to be replaced.
Miloš wanted the Mozarts to feel like out-of-place Americans in Vienna and Elizabeth Berridge, who played Constanze after Meg’s injury, was great at that. I struggled not to slip into an English accent, which seemed more suited to writer Peter Shaffer’s rhythm and syntax. Oddly, when the movie opened, it was the US critics who found my American accent hardest to embrace. Many only knew me as the character I’d played in Animal House, and perceived my Mozart as being merely the best I could do as an American person.
Michael Chandler, film editor
My background was in documentaries, which meant I wasn’t intimidated by the sheer quantity of footage. Right from the start, Miloš said: “If I can do it myself, I don’t need you– I want you to surprise me.” It gave me the freedom to do all kinds of stuff.
He asked me to fix the beginning, which had Salieri shouting Mozart’s name from a window, and seemed too on the nose. I found all these seconds of empty, cobbled Prague streets, and used those with Salieri’s voice over the top. These shots had never been intended to be used, but it made for a much more evocative opening.
We had the opposite problem at the end – we needed to get from the sublime scene of Mozart’s funeral back to Salieri talking to the priest, which wrapped up the film. Whatever we did, Miloš was unhappy. In the end I took a snide laugh Salieri did later in the scene and moved it to the front, so the people crying, the climax of Mozart’s Lacrimosa and the dirt being shovelled into the grave are suddenly interrupted: “Ha ha ha!” The laugh insults the audience and propels us into the next scene. That’s the documentary skills coming in again – going in and finding these scraps and repurposing them.
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I would have to be the bad guy and say: “I just don’t like this scene. It’s getting in the way.” It took us six months to get to a three-and-a-half hour rough cut and then another six to get that down to two-and-a-half hours. We had to lose a lot of stunning stuff, including scenes with Kenneth McMillan as Schlumberg, whose daughter Mozart tries to teach while being interrupted by unruly dogs. Miloš called him to apologise, and later reinstated him for the director’s cut.
After we constructed the film, Miloš had the idea that in the final sequence, as the older Salieri is wheeled through the asylum backed by that beautiful piano concerto, we should hear Mozart’s high-pitched laugh one last time before the credits rolled. We didn’t have a stray laugh that would have worked in that context and had to get Tom back in. He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t!” and at first he just couldn’t find that signature sound that had come so effortlessly in production. We got there in the end.
I think the scene where the dying Mozart dictates his requiem to Salieri is one of the finest in the film canon. One moment we used was actually a mistake – something had gone wrong with the earpiece that relayed the music to Tom so he could sing to the right pitch and tempo. But it really works – it looks like Mozart’s grasping, reaching for something. Actually, Tom was waiting for his cue.
You had to keep the music in mind – always – cutting to its rhythm or against it, but keeping that flow so the music became primary. It was the greatest film experience I ever had. I got to work with Miloš, a genius. I’ve never seen anybody approach every single aspect of motion picture production with such mastery.