Interview with Hugh and Anne and a new podcast
Yet another new podcast: Deadline Awards Watch With Pete Hammond, Episode 1. It's only 11 minutes long; so listen to the whole thing. Les Mis talk at: 0:00-5:00;
Entertainment Weekly has a fantastic interview with Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman (it's 7 pages long, online). Here are some of my favorite parts:
After watching the rough cut of Les Miserables, I found myself walking out of the theater and asking: What the hell do I contribute to the world?
Hugh Jackman: [Laughs.] Yeah! I found that after reading the book. I felt, ‘Wow, I’m not really measuring up here at all.’ I will never ever complain about the weather again. ...
Since [Colm Wilkinson] played Jean Valjean for years, was there anything valuable you picked up from him?
I did ask him a couple questions, but I remember him saying at one point, ‘It doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is you do it your way.’ He said, ‘I’ve been to some shows, and I see them trying to do it the way I did. And I actually didn’t do it the way it was written. In the end, the way it was written didn’t really serve me, so I changed it. And now people think that’s how it was written, when it wasn’t.’
Anne Hathaway talks a bit about her mom doing Fantine:
We talked about the song [“I Dreamed a Dream”], and she gave me a deeper understanding of it. She told me that whenever she would sing “Cosette, it’s past your bedtime / You’ve played the day away …” that she always thought of me, and kept a picture of me in her dressing room to visualize as Cossette. That’s just the coolest thing ever. Somehow knowing it was so deeply in my blood, I was able to really relax for the audition. I felt like I had almost a 20-year head-start over every other actor. …
Fantine’s misery forces Valjean to reevaluate his own existence, and try to rescue Cosette, this poor woman’s daughter. She takes doing the right thing out of the abstract for Valjean, but is that enough to prevent her story from being a somewhat hopeless one?
I’ve read a lot of criticism of the book, and a lot of critics talked about how Fantine and Cosette are just general women, that there’s not really a whole lot to each character. I take issue with that, because I was so grateful to Hugo for humanizing what can often just be an archetype - the Fallen Woman. He shows that there are layers underneath what you see in the world, without making Fantine a total victim … Well, I shouldn’t say that. She is a total victim. But the Fantine you meet when she’s a prostitute is not the Fantine you meet at the beginning. …
["I Dreamed a Dream" is filmed all in one take. How many times did you have to do it while maintaining that intense breakdown?
I did the first take - and wasn’t happy with it. I started the second take, and stopped. We had these earpieces [feeding the music], and it wasn’t my favorite thing. It was great when you had dialogue scenes. But when it’s just you and a piano, they couldn’t turn them up to a volume that would drown out your voice in your head.
Why was that a problem?
I realized I was listening to myself, and that was going to be the death of everything. We normally only wore one earpiece, but I asked for another one and I stuffed them so far down into my ear that I couldn’t hear what I was doing. And I just let it rip.
Someone on the IMDb boards shared this regarding the running time of the film:
I'm a manager @ a Regal Cinemas, and we're booked w Les Mis in order to allow us to put advance tickets on sale (alas, they're not on sale @ my location just yet). But according to the booking info in our system, the running time is 159 minutes (2 hr. 39 min.), which DOES include credits. So w the tweet someone already posted, that would make the credits 10 min long. I guess it's possible they're that long, but that personally seems a little on the long side. (source)
I have no way of knowing if the person posting is real and their information is true. But It may be.
Get a Les Mis on GetGlue.com
Entertainment Weekly has a fantastic interview with Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman (it's 7 pages long, online). Here are some of my favorite parts:
After watching the rough cut of Les Miserables, I found myself walking out of the theater and asking: What the hell do I contribute to the world?
Hugh Jackman: [Laughs.] Yeah! I found that after reading the book. I felt, ‘Wow, I’m not really measuring up here at all.’ I will never ever complain about the weather again. ...
Since [Colm Wilkinson] played Jean Valjean for years, was there anything valuable you picked up from him?
I did ask him a couple questions, but I remember him saying at one point, ‘It doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is you do it your way.’ He said, ‘I’ve been to some shows, and I see them trying to do it the way I did. And I actually didn’t do it the way it was written. In the end, the way it was written didn’t really serve me, so I changed it. And now people think that’s how it was written, when it wasn’t.’
Anne Hathaway talks a bit about her mom doing Fantine:
We talked about the song [“I Dreamed a Dream”], and she gave me a deeper understanding of it. She told me that whenever she would sing “Cosette, it’s past your bedtime / You’ve played the day away …” that she always thought of me, and kept a picture of me in her dressing room to visualize as Cossette. That’s just the coolest thing ever. Somehow knowing it was so deeply in my blood, I was able to really relax for the audition. I felt like I had almost a 20-year head-start over every other actor. …
Fantine’s misery forces Valjean to reevaluate his own existence, and try to rescue Cosette, this poor woman’s daughter. She takes doing the right thing out of the abstract for Valjean, but is that enough to prevent her story from being a somewhat hopeless one?
I’ve read a lot of criticism of the book, and a lot of critics talked about how Fantine and Cosette are just general women, that there’s not really a whole lot to each character. I take issue with that, because I was so grateful to Hugo for humanizing what can often just be an archetype - the Fallen Woman. He shows that there are layers underneath what you see in the world, without making Fantine a total victim … Well, I shouldn’t say that. She is a total victim. But the Fantine you meet when she’s a prostitute is not the Fantine you meet at the beginning. …
["I Dreamed a Dream" is filmed all in one take. How many times did you have to do it while maintaining that intense breakdown?
I did the first take - and wasn’t happy with it. I started the second take, and stopped. We had these earpieces [feeding the music], and it wasn’t my favorite thing. It was great when you had dialogue scenes. But when it’s just you and a piano, they couldn’t turn them up to a volume that would drown out your voice in your head.
Why was that a problem?
I realized I was listening to myself, and that was going to be the death of everything. We normally only wore one earpiece, but I asked for another one and I stuffed them so far down into my ear that I couldn’t hear what I was doing. And I just let it rip.
Someone on the IMDb boards shared this regarding the running time of the film:
I'm a manager @ a Regal Cinemas, and we're booked w Les Mis in order to allow us to put advance tickets on sale (alas, they're not on sale @ my location just yet). But according to the booking info in our system, the running time is 159 minutes (2 hr. 39 min.), which DOES include credits. So w the tweet someone already posted, that would make the credits 10 min long. I guess it's possible they're that long, but that personally seems a little on the long side. (source)
I have no way of knowing if the person posting is real and their information is true. But It may be.
Get a Les Mis on GetGlue.com