Richard LaGravenese wrote The Fisher King, The Bridges Of Madison County and The Horse Whisperer, so he knows about high emotions. As the director of projects like Living Out Loud, P.S. I Love You and Beautiful Creatures, he’s had less success conveying that sort of impact – until now.
His first musical, The Last Five Years, brings the highs and lows of Jason Robert Brown’s stage show – in which a couple sings the story of their relationship, he moving forward from the start, she working backward from its end – is a full-on swooner, with Anna Kendrick giving a dazzling performance as the heartbroken Cathy and Jeremy Jordan making an impressive breakout as her bright-eyed beau, Jamie.
Hours before the film’s world premiere at TIFF, I sat down with LaGravenese to discuss the challenges of adapting a two-person “monologue play” into a whole movie.
The Last Five Years isn’t quite like any movie musical I’ve seen. It’s really intimate and small, and laser-focused on the characters’ emotions rather than blowing the songs up into great big production numbers. Except for a couple of times, when it deliberately does that. How did you settle on the format?
I just wanted to do something that hadn’t been seen before. I’ve been very bored by the culture lately – not only the culture, but also what I’d been contributing to it. I know not everyone’s going to get it, but those who do are the people I’m shooting for.
What attracted you to the material?
I’m a musical theatre fanatic. I love theatre, I love musical theatre. And I fell in love with the score. I’d never seen the original production. I’m one of those people who found the score and just listened to it over and over and over.
Did it lend itself to a film adaptation?
You know, the stage play was sort of a monologue play: the singers sing out to the audience. But I didn’t see it that way, and I thought a camera would add a whole other layer, because the song in each scene becomes a playable scene. The song isn’t just the singer’s, it also belongs to the person being sung to their reaction adds an extra layer of what male-female relationships are about – how men and women sing different songs, and hear different songs, often in relationships. So I was just obsessed with this.
And how did you convince them to let you do it?
I was making a movie called P.S. I Love You, and Sherie Rene Scott came in to audition. I’d been listening to her for years on the score. So I jumped around, I got excited, and she introduced me to Kurt Deutsch, who produced the cast album, and he brought me to Jason Robert Brown. Because we were all doing this for free, we were just passionate about it, we just did it, never thinking it was gonna actually get done. And then our producers were able to raise money, plus private investors, and now we’re here.
This is a project that, more than most, really lives or dies on the casting. How did you land Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan?
Anna heard about the project but did not know this musical. She loved Jason’s Parade – that’s her favourite show. She did not know this score, so we sent her the script and then she read the score, which was odd, because I kept telling everyone, “Please read the script while you’re listening to the score or it won’t make sense.” But she did it in a different way, which was interesting, because I had written what’s happening to the listener [in a given number] as well as to the singer. We met in a hotel in L.A., the Sunset Tower, had a drink at the bar and completely bonded over 1930s and 1940s movies.
Of course you did. She’s a total movie nerd.
Anna isn’t just an actor, she’s a filmmaker she understands film. And she was just so excited. The deal I had with Jason was that I would pick [actors] that I knew could act it, because it had to be acted. They couldn’t just be singers. So I needed someone who could act it, and then I would send [the actors to Jason] so he could sing them the score. She was my first [choice] – I wanted her, I sent her to him, she sang the score, that was set.
And for Jamie?
The men were a little more difficult because Jason was also putting together an off-Broadway revival of the show, so he was auditioning a lot of guys – but not all of them were camera-ready. So I went through a few of those. But Jeremy was at the top of my list. First of all, he’s got an incredible instrument his voice is just a knockout. If you understand how singers do what they do, what Jeremy does is a little supernatural. He can access breath from any position his body’s in, in a way that most singers can’t. He can lay down, he can sit up, and just access this sound, which is extraordinary. I had him audition with If I Didn’t Believe In You. I thought, “If he can do this song, a key song for the character, then I want him.” He could, and he did.
How much preparation did they have to build their relationship?
We had rehearsals for about five days in April before we started shooting in June, and I felt they had a chemistry. I needed to believe that these two young people had sex, that they had an attraction for each other and a hunger for each other. That was important to me. And that’s how we got it.
Not only are Cathy and Jamie going through the entire emotional arc of their relationship, backwards and forwards, but they’re also doing it while singing. And literally so most of the songs were recorded live, right?
All of it’s live, except for three songs. It had to be live, because of what it’s about: the emotion and the honesty. I wanted it to be honest and real, and I’m asking an audience to buy that these two characters sing instead of talk. That’s why I wanted to shoot it in a very raw, low-budget, small, intimate way. So they sang those songs live, yeah, except for Moving Too Fast – although the bedroom scene, when he’s getting out of bed and singing to her, that’s live. Summer in Ohio was pre-recorded, and I Can Do Better is pre-recorded, because I imagined those as songs that I was breaking out of the space, and I needed to move them around. But every other song, and particularly the more emotional songs, are all sung live. If I Didn’t Believe In You, which is a song I shot in one continuous take? Jeremy sang that 14 times. And The Schmuel Song we did from 8 in the morning until 10 at night, him singing every part live. And I think Anna did Still Hurting, like, 17 times. They were just incredible. And I became a total geek, because I was like [clutches chest, gasping].
I can imagine.
They were playing to an earwig, and I was listening to them singing live. And it was just so exciting for me. This was the greatest experience I’ve ever had.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
