Behind the scenes of Les Misrables, the new movie.
In June 1832, a group of students, immigrants and insurrectionists took to the streets of Paris, demanding change. The fervor of the French Revolution had withered amid vast economic inequality, food shortages and a cholera outbreak. The rebels occupied half the city using makeshift barricades: trembling stacks of stolen saplings and planks. While the insurgency ended overnight, it lasted long enough for novelist Victor Hugo to be caught in its crosshairs, pinned to a wall as bullets flew.
The events would inspire Hugo's masterpiece, Les Misrables--which, 118 years later, inspired Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schnberg's musical. Since its Paris premiere in 1980, the star-crossed epic of good vs. evil has won eight Tonys, been translated into 21 languages, been seen by more than 60 million people in 42 countries and launched untold thousands of high school productions. It's largely responsible for Glee. It's almost entirely to blame for Susan Boyle.
Now it's a Hollywood blockbuster-in-waiting, opening Christmas Day. Early reviews are ecstatic, and there's talk of Oscars for stars Hugh Jackman (as the thief turned saintly savior Jean Valjean) and Anne Hathaway (as the doomed mother Fantine, whose poverty drives her to prostitution). And if the film doesn't entirely match Hugo's furious cry of class struggle, it may well launch a different kind of film revolution.
In director Tom Hooper's iteration, all the singing is live, to the camera: no lip-synching, no overdubs. Wearing radio microphones hidden in their costumes, the actors sang to live piano accompaniment, improvising first to find their way into the songs. Only after filming was the orchestration added. According to the filmmakers, Les Miz is likely the first musical in movie history to pull this off.
In surprising ways, Les Miz is a continuation of Hooper's Oscar-winning work on The King's Speech, about George VI's struggle to overcome his stutter. "The sound guys initially, and responsibly, cleaned up the dialogue tracks on The King's Speech, but what they hadn't realized was that Colin Firth was making a whole load of tiny noises--little clicks and gasps. The noises were so subtle and enmeshed in other sounds, but they were the record of his stammer," Hooper says. "That gave me a whole new respect for the power of live recording."
This power is on display perhaps most stunningly in Jean Valjean's wrenching "What Have I Done?" shot in a medieval chapel in London. Sound mixer Simon Hayes managed to record not only Jackman's every whisper and keen but also the echoes of those whispers and keens, rattling around and haunting the apse.
To sing live to the camera, "we all needed to build up stamina," says Hathaway. (Audiences should build up stamina to recover from her ragged, raging performance of "I Dreamed a Dream.") "There are high stakes here. We could have fallen flat on our faces." It helped that the cast--Hathaway and Jackman (who famously duetted at the 2009 Oscars), Russell Crowe as obsessed Inspector Javert, Amanda Seyfried as lovable Cosette, Eddie Redmayne as the naive rebel Marius, Samantha Barks as the pining ponine--spent nine weeks in rehearsal, a rare luxury even for a big-budget, all-star production.