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  • my name's Rupert Gould, and I am the director of G, and we're gonna do a one scene breakdown off when Renee and Judy sing by myself.

  • Good luck.

  • You know, the first time I sang on a stage that was all of two years old, they say, my papa had to come and drag me off after I started singing the same song for the fifth time.

  • This is a moment where we're revealing the the true circumstances of Judy's experience at the time where she was fearful that she wouldn't have access to her instrument and she wasn't sure how her performances were going to go and whether or not she was going to measure up to what had become people's pretty extraordinary expectations of her.

  • Oh, it seems we have a band here.

  • May as well put them to use for me the whole drama of light.

  • Will she wouldn't.

  • She performed.

  • It's like a big unknown in the film, and I wanted to draw it out as long as possible, both in the journey.

  • But also is she just gonna talk all night?

  • You're gonna make jokes, go my way on myself.

  • It's an anyone because by myself isn't like perhaps the most famous.

  • You got a number, and it's not like the man who got away or get happy.

  • But what I love about it is she talks about being on her own on how difficult that is.

  • But how she's gonna conquer that.

  • That felt really kind of pertinent to the moment in the story when she's on her own away from her family.

  • For tonight's performance in this first lyric is really, really extraordinary on for a long time.

  • We actually just stayed in the tight on that.

  • Once the music has begun, it's like she's possessed by something that gives a whole different kind of movement quality, even though that's partly in.

  • Renee is moving because in the camera movements, something feeling lyrical, expose way, see so much performance on TV.

  • Now we see the American Idol, the voice of all these TV shares like How are we gonna make this different when I said we could get the camera really close to the face, and that would be really unusual thing to see this'll Performance was sort of an amalgam of Rupert's vision in terms of narrative and her own performance of this song.

  • Try to learn it in the mirror and dining room on my iPod, kind of propped it up on the dining room table and looked in the mirror on the wall and tried toe kind of.

  • Remember how she moves a microphone and where and when and how she uses it for emphasis in different places.

  • Alec Guinness said something about, like the way into a character's the shoes.

  • Well, I always felt for you like the teeth When the teeth went in, it was like a kind of character kind of popped in as well.

  • How did they feel the teeth?

  • They felt like a bit of a security blanket.

  • Yeah, just one more layer of somethingto hide behind.

  • What I would say about the mouth, though, is she is under the influence, this sort of slightly intoxicated quality, really kind of liberating thing for the song.

  • Remember, thinking would be really great if the supporting cast who were in the audience hadn't seen Rene at all, so that when she came out they were experiencing Renee as Judy unknown.

  • We had this most fantastic Cushman's article, Johnny to mean she put so much detail of the customer and like these, these kind of jule ings around the top of the dress to get in really close.

  • You will need all that detail, the airings there as well, and she did a really great job.

  • I think there were so many characteristics and qualities that were uniquely define herbal and distinguishable as Judy.

  • So it's just a matter of spending time with but the legacy for work and becoming familiar with those things.

  • And suddenly they were in the room on screen.

  • This was the kind of end of her TV period, so there were loads of TV shows from that period in the sixties.

  • What the Judy tapes, those amazing audio recordings.

  • Oh, we did a deep dive into the Internet were very greedily absorbing everything that we could.

  • And, Boy, you can spend some days on YouTube.

  • And how lucky, Because before there were, there were things that were only in people's personal libraries.

  • The one thing that is really difficult stage lighting on screen lighting is in stage lighting.

  • You do want these beams like this big central being you got here, but you don't have a try and see sources on film That's what gives you your debt for these little lights here.

  • This is accurate instance that there were tables and seating in the original venue on some of the other wider shots back in this area.

  • We added people, but these are all people who are really there.

  • This was the shape of the might that she preferred and the size for her little hand.

  • And it was interesting that she's left handed, and yet she held it in her right, but she would often pass it round on her back to her left hand.

  • She liked the cord in her left hand, which is really interesting.

  • A lot of that moving it around was actually wonderfully choreographed into the music, but it was really out of necessity so that she wouldn't step on her fall down.

  • There was this great power and her whipping that cord around, and that sometimes it seemed like a security blanket for her because she was known for throwing that thing around like she was taming lions.

  • And I get it when we're finished thing, I'm having it in my hand.

  • In some ways it's dinner theater, but really high end in it.

  • It of all of London society swinging sixties son society was in the theater at the time, and so it was a sort of performance.

  • We don't really have any more a particular kind of familiar of society coming together.

  • The really unusual thing about talk of the town, the venue that Judy performed in, had this sort of thrust state, and it had tables all around the edge, so that gave it a sort of gladiatorial quality.

  • And to try and recreate, that was really hard because most theaters in Britain don't have that capacity.

  • The original talk of the town is now casino.

  • This particular leaders, the Hackney Empire, allowed us to build this stage out, and that gives us different camera angles to come across the stage rather than they do everything one way that he likes the reflection here we get in the floor.

  • My reserve nerves were able to get a focus atmosphere, but once we really kind of took the sides down on dark and had this lovely sort of central block of color.

  • That lovely contrast, I felt like these great vocal performances.

  • She gives a bit like that movie free solo about the clan of the Rock face without any ropes that they're sort of almost like an operatic aria.

  • The inference by Fred Astaire talking about how he filmed is choreography, And he never wanted to cut away to reactions because he felt that sort of subliminally.

  • I guess the audience would know that they would achieve that.

  • And so I always wanted this this performance to be, although, or the meat of it to be a single take because the audience would know that Renee was really doing it for real in the moment in real time.

  • Remember Reynolds vocal coach saying, You know, you got to get somebody goes on this in a day because like, this is a big vocal test and I think that pressure gave it some of its intensity.

  • I've never sung live in front of people like this before, so this was new.

  • This was entirely new, less not true.

  • Empire Records on the roof?

  • No, actually, that might have been played back.

  • Yeah, this would be the first time this was gonna be a crane shot, but we're literally on the day we got into the theater the full stage that the tables and chairs were on wasn't strong enough to hold the way of the crane.

  • So we had this, like panic.

  • This is our big day to get our big performance short anarchy camera we can't use.

  • So this was shot on the stable I, which is like a kind of steady Rick.

  • What was going to be quite a precise camera movement became something a bit more improvised.

  • But I think, actually weirdly, that's slightly sort of floaty quality gives it some of its magic, and I just love what happens in Renee Zais garlands.

  • Eyes were very, very dark on the first continents, as we tried which were accurate, was so dark they felt like we couldn't get into you into your thoughts.

  • And so we went a couple of shades lighter toe, get this thing of these pinpricks of light here and here.

  • But that was a tricky thing, wasn't it?

  • Because the show makeup was had to be accurate to the period.

  • But yet the character is going through a very vulnerable moment.

  • I think Jeremy did a really lovely job with sort of something that is clearly dressed up for performance but allows you into the thoughts as well.

  • Sometimes the contacts would go in with great ease, and sometimes they wouldn't at all.

  • And there be a good five minutes of going almost great.

  • What you don't know is quite how the light is gonna bounce off the jewels in the moment and say, There's lots of lovely flecks of this kind of gorgeous amber like the other two funny things about actually this shot were this ring of hers here kept clicking against the microphone in the recording causes a lie vocal, and we had to kind of work quite hard to kind of our artificial version, but get rid of it when we didn't want it.

  • I don't know much about prosthetics before this, and I didn't really understand that.

  • Once you put them on, they take on a life of their own.

  • You know, Renee extension of knows.

  • It's just sort of begins like there.

  • I think on this is one of the few moments where we had to do a tiny bit of post brushing clean up because we could see a tiny bit of joy as your skin starts to kind of sweat or tried agree under the lights.

  • Yeah, that glue turns into this kind of like a milky substance that starts to bubble at what is supposed to be the seamless.

  • So, in a way, join.

  • It was an exciting mystery about when it was gonna make an appearance way quite a bit.

  • He wanted the emotion of the song not to be in my voice, but in my body completely.

  • And so he had me sing while I was trying to push a piano around the room because he wanted the energy and emphasis and the resistance of life to be palpable in the singing of the song.

  • Wait, I didn't get very far in the room, but I got what you were trying to do.

  • And then the time where you have me kicking and throwing chairs on the moments of emphasis to get the emotion out than the anger that's in the sort of subtext of the performance.

  • There's a photo of Renee and I both like lying on the floor end of the week on a black floor.

  • But there's so much joy in it in the discovery and the experimentation.

  • It was exciting when something worked through the things you talk about normally in acting, which is like what I want and what's the obstacle to getting what I want apply as much to a song as well.

  • And also just given a like a map through it, brother.

  • Yeah, to ground control points to know where we're going next and where the next term was Emotionally, it was a very nice template and wonderful parameters to kind of dance inside a very cool specific.

my name's Rupert Gould, and I am the director of G, and we're gonna do a one scene breakdown off when Renee and Judy sing by myself.

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