(Jorge Arévalo / For The Times)
Over the past year, studio marketing departments seemingly have gone to great lengths to hide the musical elements of their movies (we’re looking at you, “Mean Girls” and “Wonka”). So it’s kind of refreshing that four new out and proud additions to the genre are set to make their mark this awards season. Michael Gracey, who helmed the word-of-mouth wonder “The Greatest Showman,” understands the continuing appeal of musicals to filmmakers.
“I always say you sing when words no longer suffice,” Gracey says. “You want the scene to emotionally take you to a high point. And when you can’t express that joy or that euphoria in any other way, you break into song. The same is true the other way. You go down to the depths of despair, and in that moment of pain and that moment of anguish, singing is the only way to express how you feel.”
The Australian director cements himself as a true master of the musical number with his latest endeavor, “Better Man.” Centered on the life of Robbie Williams, the movie differs from many of the recent biopics as the global pop star is portrayed through motion-capture CG in the form of a monkey. It’s a bold creative choice that elevates the narrative, but it wasn’t even the most difficult aspect of making the film. That occurred when Queen Elizabeth II died when filming was about to begin for what turned out to be an incredible number set on London’s Regent Street.
“We had to get new money in to invest in that one musical number because we had to wait for the funeral,” Gracey says. “It was another five months before we got back onto that street. And, of course, there are those who were saying, ‘Just cut it, you don’t need it.’ And you’re like, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand.’ But that’s every director, right? Every director thinks that every one of their sequences is the make-or-break sequence of the film.”
For Jacques Audiard, his make-or-break for Cannes winner “Emilia Pérez” was the movie’s first scene. That number, “El Alegato,” finds Rita, portrayed by Zoe Saldaña, breaking into song as she walks the streets of Mexico City. Speaking through an interpreter, the celebrated French auteur, who had never shot a musical, admits, “Of course I was nervous.
“If I have a choice, I like to start my shoots with the most complicated scene,” Audiard says. “So, starting with that market scene was a way for us to know where we were at. And the shoot in that sense informed us even in terms of the tone, the light, there was something very important to put in place, which is that the entire beginning of the film is at night.”
Audiard plays with cinematic form by often plucking his characters from the real world in the middle of a song. It’s notable in “Bienvenida,” featuring Jessi, played by Selena Gomez. Audiard explains, “There were two levels of reality. There’s Jessi in her bedroom, and then, very suddenly, we go elsewhere. The name that we had for this sequence among ourselves was Dark Ideas, i.e., Jessi’s Dark Ideas. You have this girl talking, and suddenly she goes into her subconscious, and her subconscious is wild and furious.”
Joshua Oppenheimer, an Oscar nominee for his documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” made the unusual choice to make his narrative feature debut an original musical. Set in a postapocalyptic world where a rich family survives in a hidden bunker, “The End” finds its characters expressing their internal feelings through songs. But Oppenheimer made specific choices. Unlike “Better Man” or “Emilia Pérez,” there are no backup dancers or visual effects in the context of the scenes. Actors such as Tilda Swinton and George McKay carry these numbers on their own.
“I knew I was going to avoid the sort of post-MTV rapid cutting [aesthetic]. I was going to go back to the golden age of longer takes,” Oppenheimer says. “The songs are basically in single takes unless there’s a location change that I did not anticipate. Even if it’s not yet dance, it’s still choreographed because there’s a musical rhythm to everything that’s happening.”
Much of the choreography was figured out on set, often in a real salt mine. For one of McKay’s major numbers, a blow-up windsock man you might see promoting a business on the side of a freeway was an unexpected inspiration.
“They collapse suddenly and then inflate and collapse suddenly — that was kind of the basis of the choreography,” Oppenheimer recalls. “We then timed those collapses or those deflations to the moments where truth bursts the son’s bubble, which is moments of realization. That is the realization that everything he’s learned from his parents is a lie.”
Unlike his peers, Jon M. Chu had a much different challenge. His job was to adapt the beloved Broadway musical “Wicked” to the big screen. But as he notes, when you have an iconic song like “Defying Gravity” to work with, it’s “the greatest gift a filmmaker can have.”
Chu says, “You got ‘Defying Gravity’ as your closer, like, ‘Great, cool.’ But in a weird way, having the scope of flight and having the intimacy of the words when you’re doing it as a movie is so precarious because you make the wrong [choice] and you lose the power of the song.”
Moreover, as a fan of the original production, Chu didn’t want to lose too many of those integral “bible” moments. Then again, he acknowledges, “Sometimes I would think it was bible, and then we’re like, ‘Actually, that doesn’t matter. Let’s go with what we’re feeling here at this moment.’”