And then they can cut it.īut Stephen insisted. You can sort of memorize what you did, timing wise, and hew as close to that as you possibly can. I thought I would then come in, like I did on “Mamma Mia!” most of the time, and sing along to a track. So we went into Abbey Road, Simon and I, for a week, and we had a very, very jolly time. We were shooting with three cameras, so if you cut between things that don’t match, it gives the editor heartburn. It’s easier for cutting if you have a regular click track, so you can work the tempos. That was the original plan, and the way they normally do this. I lost my voice.Īlso Read: Meryl Streep in Talks for Disney's 'Mary Poppins' Sequel They thought, “F-, what are we going to do now?” It even changed my speaking voice. You warm up in order to sing it, but nobody sings that aria over and over.Īnd I sang it eight times on Monday, eight times on Tuesday and then half the day on Wednesday. Renée said to me, “Nobody sings ‘The Queen of the Night’ more than twice a week.” You don’t do that. And they promised me that that wouldn’t happen. Were the performances in the movie all done live? It wasn’t how bad she was, it was how close she came to being good that made it ultimately heartbreaking and horrible when she went off. I thought everything sounded pretty good. In fact, as we went on in the film, I lost all sense of when it was bad or good. So I thought, “I will learn these arias the best that I can possibly do them, and then screw around in the moment injecting Florence’s own style, the specificity of her tremulous joy and her desire.” Because that’s what’s in front of all the singing. This is something I have in common with Florence, in that I have friends - Audra McDonald, Renée Fleming - and I know what real singers sound like. The job was not to copy her, but to rather get to capture the essence of her aspiration to sing. Playing this part, was it important not just to sing poorly, but to sing poorly in exactly the same way that the real Florence sang poorly? It’s pointed out regularly.Īlso Read: Meryl Streep on the Rise of Donald Trump: 'What's Wrong With Half of Everybody?' In fact, you will get more and more aware of how clueless you are about everything. If you have children, you will remain humble all your life. I have a built-in critical committee at home. Do you have to guard against that yourself? A cat may look at a king, but nobody else. It’s the danger of pre-eminence, right? That you don’t have people around who will tell you the truth. You look at Florence and you see a woman who is at a level where nobody close to her would ever say, “Maybe you shouldn’t do this.” There are lots of people in public life like that … And I remember hearing the real Florence after we made the film and thinking, ‘My God, Meryl was very, very close.'”įrears also admitted that he asked Streep to sing more frequently than he should have – which the 19-time Oscar nominee (and three-time winner) admitted in her conversation with TheWrap.Īlso Read: Democratic Convention Day 2: Meryl Streep, Debra Messing, Alicia Keys to Take the Stage “But it was obvious to me that we should have Meryl’s versions. “We did have a conversation about, ‘Should we use Florence’s real recordings, or will Meryl do it?'” the director recalled. “Some days things just work, and you wonder why it can’t always be like that.”Īlso Read: 'Florence Foster Jenkins' Review: Meryl Streep Achieves Greatness as an Awful Singerįrears said the production was easy, with Streep and Hugh Grant as a couple in mid-1940s New York and Simon Helberg as the young pianist roped into helping Florence achieve her dreams of singing in public. I said, ‘Fine by me.’ We sent it to Meryl and she said yes almost immediately. “I said, ‘Who do you want to be in it?'” he said. Solomons called the movie “a fine, funny and moving film tribute to the efforts and passions of its titular heroine, a woman who lived out her dreams, at any price.” And director Stephen Frears, whose other films include “Philomena,” “Dangerous Liasons,” “High Fidelity” and “The Queen,” told TheWrap that the choice of leading lady was a no-brainer. Playing a real-life society grand dame who sang with enormous enthusiasm but only the vaguest acquaintance with things like pitch, timing and tone, Streep’s Florence is monumentally awful but awfully entertaining as Jason Solomons wrote in a review for TheWrap, “it is very hard to sing that awfully on purpose, and her twinkling commitment to the part is, as ever, a thing of wonder.” Meryl Streep has sung well in films like “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Postcards From the Edge,” “Into the Woods” and, I suppose, “Mamma Mia!” But her operatic warbling in Stephen Frears‘ “Florence Foster Jenkins” is something else entirely.
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