Behind the scenes of Les Misrables, the new movie.
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Working with legendary vocal coach Joan Lader helped too. "Ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to sing Jean Valjean's part," says Jackman, who has starred in major productions of Beauty and the Beast and Oklahoma! and won a Tony for his turn as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. "Whatever technique I used to have was no good. Mainly I learned by waiting in the wings and just copying all these great singers. But Joan got me to open my range at the top end by four or five tones and at the bottom too. It changed the whole way my voice came out."
Pianist Jennifer Whyte accompanied most of the actors from a soundproofed box offstage, following their lead on a monitor. "The songs are so established and precious, but part of what Tom wanted was to improvise," Whyte says. "I could extend things, change the color and texture. I found tiny things to do, like a little twinkle on the piano, to tell the characters who they were."
The actors' improvisations were caught from every angle, because Hooper had as many as six cameras rolling at once. He often settled on long, single takes, he says: "When you have found actors at this level, you kind of sit in the cutting room and go, You know, why edit?"
Though the performances differed from take to take, the actors were still singing the same well-known, time-tested songs. Hooper says he had fleeting moments of doubt about the contemporary resonance of Les Miz: "Is it still relevant? The thing that struck me is that we're living at a time when a lot of people are hurting around the world because of economic and social inequity, and there's tremendous anger about the system."
"The prophecy of Hugo has not budged," says Boublil. "Nothing he prophesied 150 years ago has become irrelevant today."
"Fantine is not just a character that lived centuries ago," says Hathaway, who spent months researching the lives of women who sell sex. "Women are having sexual experiences for less than a dollar a day so their children can eat. There's someone like her a block from us right now. And that should be to our collective, mutual outrage and shame."
But Fantine lives vividly for Hathaway in happier ways as well. "The second time I ever saw the show, my mom [Kate McCauley Hathaway] played Fantine," she says. "It was the last role she had before she gave up acting to be a mother. I grew up a precocious, musically inclined youngster, and so I of course imagined myself in the show, but as every character but Fantine. It sort of felt off-limits."
But fate or God or Hollywood had its own plan. "When the film came around, I found out I was too old to play ponine or Cosette--which I handled with astonishing grace." (Hathaway just turned 30.) That left Fantine. "I was like, Whoa. That song? My mom's part? Gracious! But she had the coolest response. She told me that when she sang, 'Cosette, it's past your bedtime,' she would imagine me."