"That was an incredible scene." "It was fourth of July." "And, of course, that's not a holiday there so we were working." "And we were shooting an opera scene." "The camera was behind the stage, over the singers and dancers seeing the whole theatre full of the audience." "So we had like 500 extras there." "So I said, "Roll it, playback."" "And suddenly, instead of Mozart's music the American national anthem starts to play." "And out of the flies came this huge American flag that unrolled on the stage." "And 600 Czechs stood up and sang the U.S. national anthem and knew the words." "I get goose pimples when I think about it." "All the extras either sang or hummed "The Star-Spangled Banner "with us." "All stood up except 30." "Men and women, standing, panic on their faces Looking at each other, what they should do." "That were the secret police dispersed among the extras." "And I was thinking, "Good God, the army's gonna come and we're all gonna go to jail. " " Because this is an act of rebellion."" "It started when we crossed the border." "In customs they said, "You can go on."" "Milos said to me, "You' re now in Czechoslovakia, forget logic."" "Only in a taxi did I learn we were going to a play about a composer." "I thought, "I'm going to faint."" "Milos made a great fuss and said:" ""I hate biographies of musicians." "No, I'm not coming."" "In communist countries they love to make movies about composers." "Because composers make music." "They don't say anything subversive." "And they were the most boring films I ever saw." "So I was prepared for a painful evening." "The curtain went up, and there is this wonderful drama." "I couldn't believe my eyes." "I was introduced to Milos." "Peter was nervous." "I met him the first time that night." "And he said to me, with the marvellous directness that characterizes him:" ""If the second act is as good as the first, I will make a movie of it."" "I called Mr. Zaentz only to find out he already had the name of the play on his list of what to see." "And that's how it all started." "I thought it was a great play." "It really worked for me." "He said, "What about a picture?" I said, "It's not a picture."" "I said, "There's not enough about Mozart."" "And then Milos hit me on the arm, I still have the bruises though that was 20 years ago." "He said, "That's right." "It needs music, Mozart and music."" "And Milos invited me up for the weekend to his house in Connecticut." "He was just as forthright then." "We spent an extraordinary weekend in which he said to me:" ""You realize that everything will be different."" "In the theatre, everything is stylized." "Nobody pretends a tree is a real tree or a sunset is a real sunset." "So in the language when it's stylized, it's proper." "Acting is a little exaggerated and stylized, and it's proper." "Film is a photography." "In photography, everything is real." "Anything stylized would feel, you know, fake." "What we ended up doing was spending four months together in his house in Connecticut." "Monday to Friday we were locked into what we came to regard as our prison." "And then we would go back to New York on the Friday and instantly separate." "And not exchange a word for a blissful Saturday and Sunday  till he would come to my flat to collect me and drive me back to prison for the next  almost unendurable five days  when we slowly hammered out the whole script, moment by moment." "They had some bumpy bumps in the road along the way." "I spoke to both of them at different times, and both used terms you don't use in mixed company about each other." "Well, no, we had a big conflict, you know, big conflict." "Because I hated his cooking, and he hated my cooking." "I regarded both of us as the odd couple." "On the other hand, we had an enormous advantage to have the music before." "For example, every day, we spent a couple of hours just listening to the music, to Mozart's music." "And then picking pieces which would fit here or would fit there." "And that humbled Peter Shaffer." "The music humbled Peter Shaffer." "Suddenly you start to play music and you start to say the lines." "And Peter himself was, "No." "Stop talking." "Stop talking."" "I said to Milos that I did not want repetitions." "I did not want the Mozart theme." "I did not want one piece of music." "It was not in the background, cueing the emotion we should feel." "But it was, in fact, the foreground." "Peter Shaffer one day said:" ""Listen, the music is becoming the third character of this film."" "I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character." "We met in the airport in New York to discuss it:" "Peter, Milos and Saul Zaentz." "And they proposed this as a project." "I had an hour to think about it because I was moving on to catch another plane." "Immediately, apart from being slightly flattered they thought of me  I thought of it as a project which, so long as it didn't develop into a Hollywood scenario, I would be very interested in." "He said, "I would, under one condition." "That not one note of Mozart will be changed."" ""You have our word."" "We had no idea what the film was going to look like." "Although I knew the play, I'd seen the play  I knew that once Milos got his hands on it it would be a completely different animal." "We are rolling, stand by for speed." "And action anytime, please." " Your Excellency" " Let's cut." "Give him some water." " All right, let's" " It's fine." "It's perfect." "Casting is enormously important because that's finally whom the audience sees." "My ideas mean nothing if what I see on the screen, I don't believe." "It was an interesting situation because a lot of big names wanted to play especially Salieri and Mozart, right?" "And I somehow felt, "I don't want to see known faces." "I want people to see Mozart and Salieri."" "Both Saul and Peter, you know, agreed." ""We don't need stars." "We don't need big names." "We have Mozart and his music." "We believe in the movie."" "Mozart was tough to cast." "This man had written his first concerto at the age of 4 his first symphony at 7, a full-scale opera at 12!" "Did it show?" "Which one of them  could he be?" "When you look at the portraits of Mozart from the time  you notice an interesting thing:" "none looks like the other." "He must have had a very nondescript face that you wouldn't notice him in the crowd at all." "So he couldn't be a leading-man type, you know, a leading-hero type." "But he has to be a wonderful actor, and he has to master the music." "He was very hard on me, and he was quite gentle with the others." "Then in the process, I learned." "On one day  I spent maybe six to eight hours in a screen test." "Other actors came in, and I played opposite them all day." "And so I got to watch Milos working with a different set of actors." "Very good." "No, that's fine." "That's enough." "You still" "Oh, I walk out!" "And then I began to understand that the people who I was assuming he was most interested in  because it was clear from their work  he was treating the same as me." "And the people you felt weren't gonna be the right combination..." "Thank you, Milos." "...are the people there was a more gentle relationship with." "We auditioned over 1000 people for the parts." "I think the number we had at one time was 1263, and we weren't finished." "I know someone ran a tally, but we were not finished." "I'm sure we passed close to 1400." "It seemed like I auditioned for a year." "What we were really doing was rehearsing." "I wasn't auditioning." "I was rehearsing." "I thought I was still working to get the part." "But in that time I thought, "This is a wonderful project and he's a great director, and I'm lucky to be still here."" "Of course you start with the main characters and then you go down." "But down doesn't mean less important." "I think the small parts  are as important as the main characters." "In a certain way, I pay more attention to casting the small, bit part  because once you see them, you will never forget them." "Nothing drives me more crazy when I am watching a film and somebody appears, then disappears and then reappears." "And he looks like the guy who was just there, and I'm mixing" ""Who is he?" "Who is she?"" "Milos called me and said, "Vinnie, I would like you to be in Amadeus." "It is not a big part, but I would love you to be in it."" "One day, I was reading  F. Murray Abraham for a small part in the movie." "And he was all right." "And then I had a young actor come in reading for Mozart and I asked F. Murray, "Listen, would you just help me here." "This is just to help, read Salieri for this young man."" "And F. Murray  probably because, you know, now it doesn't matter  gave a wonderful performance." "I did one of the things from Salieri." "Then I said, "Milos, this is where he becomes an old man."" "Which I hadn't really worked on." "And he said, "Well, do the old man."" "And I did the old man." "I didn't think I was gonna get this thing." "But I still acted my heart out." "He read so beautifully that it started to bug me, you know?" "He called and said," I want you to know you' re my first choice."" "And I had been around for a while, and I said:" ""That's nice." "I'm very happy, but what does that mean?"" "He wasn't saying, "You got it," or, "There's no question about it."" "He said," You' re my first choice."" "From my point of view, that doesn't pay the rent." "I'm flattered, and I said, "Thank you." "Tell me what I have to do next because I'm busy painting my kitchen."" "Some time went by and they said, "We want to see you for this improv group."" "I said, "No, I'm not gonna do it."" "Milos said," That's the kind of guy who would be Salieri."" "And I said, "Why?"" "He said, "He's not gonna be happy about what I say. "Milos or Murray." "He says, "Well, this guy thinks that he would be a great actor if he didn't have breaks against him." "Also, I think he's Salieri off-stage as well as on-stage."" "And he was right." "So after several weeks, I told F. Murray Abraham:" ""Okay, you got the part."" "He didn't believe me, because he accepted a role in another film!" "While on the set of Scarface, I got the word that I was gonna do Amadeus." "And everyone's attitude, the stars on the show, changed toward me." "I was no longer this hardworking actor F. Murray Abraham Like so many other hardworking actors." "I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get." "And I was really scared." "Because I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk." "And it was" " For three days, I couldn't answer the phone." "I was just sucking it up, getting ready for the thing, for the mountain." "This film could only be shot in three cities:" "Vienna, Budapest or Prague." "Because only these cities have the style of 18th- century architecture." "Prague was ideal." "Prague was absolutely ideal, because..." "Thanks to communist inefficiency the 18th century was untouched, untouched." "Prague was an amazing time capsule." "You could set up camera everywhere without having to undo signs of the 20th century." "They weren't there." "There was no advertising." "You remove the electric lights, you were in the 18th century." "All you had to do was throw dirt down  put up lanterns, and you were ready to go." "You have squares and streets." "You can turn the camera 360 degrees." " You don't have to change anything." " It's an exquisitely beautiful city." "I don't think there's any other city in Europe that has such an extensive  uninterrupted core of 18th-century structures." "For me, it was a very mixed emotional experience  because I was not allowed to go back." "I was a traitor and immigrant." "When I went the first time, which was, more or less, to negotiate the making of the movie, that was very emotional for me." "Because before, I didn't hope that I would ever see  my native country and places where I kissed my first girlfriend ever again in my life." "And then I was coming back for the shooting, I was arriving January 2nd." "It was very cold, snow everywhere." "And I realize that from now on  I have to cut myself, emotionally, from my past." "Because otherwise, the work would suffer." "When I got to Prague in the beginning of Amadeus there's the scene where his assistant comes with the muffins in the snow." "And so I had written a 13-page snow alert in English and in Czech." "I wanted trucks rigged." "I wanted duplicate equipment." "I wanted maps." "They say, "What are you talking about?" "Half the people don't have phones." "We don't have trucks we can let sit."" "I said, "Just tell me when it's gonna snow!"" "We didn't have the weather reports as perfect as we have today." "So there was always a snow alert." "They phoned and said," There's no snow." "It's not gonna snow this year." "Reports say we' re not gonna have any snow." "We' re not gonna shoot you until March." "We' re gonna shoot with fake snow."" "I said, "Okay." "So you can take other work."" "Every day we had to prepare two sets." "One for in case there is overnight snowfall, and one in case there is not." "And..." "That was not my problem." "I didn't want him to know about it." "I was engaged to do an episode of Taxi on Monday." "And Saul called on Thursday, the Thursday before, and said:" ""It's snowing." "Can you come now?"" "He said, "I know." "You gotta be back." "We'll get you back on Monday."" "I said, "Sure. "He said, "We'll do the one shot in the snow and then you'll come back and we'll do the interiors."" "I said, "Okay." So I got on a plane Thursday, and I got to Prague Friday and we shot Saturday night, and I was back for Monday." "I had never been to a Soviet bloc country before." "And going at such a fantastically accelerated rate of speed  my first impressions were enormous and huge." "I felt like I was in a grade-B spy movie." "Followed everywhere, hotel rooms bugged." "The rooms in this one hotel were very ornate with a chandelier and sconces  and rugs- Kind of worn, chipped, tacky." "But the fact is they were there." "And this one guy, Frank, he said, "These guys have got this room bugged."" "I said, "Who cares?" He says, "No, man." "I'm not gonna let them." "I ' m gonna knock that-"" ""Are you gonna make a problem?" "I ' m gonna show you."" "He starts climbing around the sconces." ""No." "It's the chandelier."" "He gets up on a chair, he's climbing around. "No, it's not here."" "I said, "Let's go to dinner." He says, "No."" "He rolls the rug back and he finds a plate about this big with screws in it." "He says, "I told you, man!" "It's right here."" "He gets a butter knife." "We had kitchenettes, right?" "He takes it, and as he takes the screw out there's a large crash and the chandelier beneath us  crashes down into the apartment below." "We went to dinner like a shot." "A friend of mine, an older Czech director named Jirí Weiss gave me some pineapples and lemons for his daughter." "She came to the set that Saturday." "I had the lemons and oranges or the oranges, the pineapples and the lemons." "And I gave her the stuff and half the crew was secret police, and everybody knew it." "Afterwards, I don't remember his name  but he was sort of a smarmy cop, and obviously cop." "He said, "So tell me, so, what is this woman you meet?" "This intrigue in Prague?" "What is this?"" "And I played, like, idiot and I said, "She's the daughter of a roommate of a friend who's from here, used to make movies here." "He asked if I would bring his daughter some pineapples and lemons."" "And he said, "Pineapple?"" "I had learned the word for pineapple." "It's ananas, same as in French." "I said, "Y, ananas." And he said, "Yes, in the can?"" "I said," No, no, real, fresh ananas."" ""Fresh pineapple?" "Fresh ananas?"" "And then for the next 20 minutes, I watch it go around the set." "And they all do the same gesture." "They' re going, "In the can?"" "And the teller of the story says, "No, fresh ananas."" "And they all kind of:" "And looked at me and kind of:" "I think they were the only two pineapples in Prague that January." "When they go down the corridor of the insane asylum, that was a war museum." "The central hall where all the mad people were kept was part of a military hospital for the wounded from the 30 Years' War." "That was a funny situation." "The Communists took it." "They left only the ground floor as a kind of museum." "But it was closed for the public." "Up in the second and third floor were secret archives of the secret police." "There was a panic when they learned that they showed us the ground-floor corridors." "We were questioned very closely as to what our connections were." "After all, we could be ClA members or whatever." "They didn't much like the idea of us invading the archive." "But we persuaded them." "When we went there the first time, that corridor  had 75 two-ton cannons  all looking at each other." "And Milos says, "I love it." I say, "Yeah, I love it too." "What are we gonna do with these 200 2000-pound cannons?"" "He says, "Cannons can't be there."" "I said, "I figured that the cannons can't be there." "But we' re gonna have to get them out, and you want pristine snow."" "No snow can have footprints in it, and we got to get the cannons out." "I didn't know it's a problem." "There's some cannons there." "Take them away." "I didn't know that every cannon weighs several tons, you know?" "They had to hire an army to take it out." "The first three weeks of shooting was Salieri in the hospital room." "I was the guy that went out with him in the morning and Dick Smith, our makeup artist, at 4:00 every morning for hours of makeup before the crew came." "And he'd go out to Barrandov." "No one was there at 4:00 a. m." "And the minute you get there, "Where's my tea? "You know?" "You know, "I just got out of the car, Murray." "I'm gonna go get your tea."" "Dick Smith is the best makeup man in the world." "And when we would start working in the morning, it was 4:00." "I would get up, I'd get to the studio by 4:30." "We'd work on the makeup for four and a half hours." "As much preparation as I had made for the old man, gestures and so on the fact is after sitting for hours, at that hour in the morning you are kind of tired and slow." "Your movements are kind of like this:" "This starts to happen." "I also had lenses in my eyes which had to be removed, and my eyes had to be sprayed." "So that the pain, which was always there, would not be too much." "Once I looked into a mirror at my face  I felt like it was completely convincing." "All I had to do was believe this guy, and it was not hard." "I'm not denigrating my work, I'm a very proud actor  but with Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer..." "They've got be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written whether on film or in literature." "This was a music I'd never heard." "And that we could hear the music accompanying the words..." "Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing." "...what more can you ask for?" "It seemed to me I was hearing the voice of God." "Excuse me." "Because of the schedule, the first thing that was filmed in the shooting schedule was all of Salieri, old." "That breathtaking section of Murray's performance  most breathtaking was done in the first weeks." "But it gave us the time to work on our own." "We rehearsed a lot on our own." "We rehearsed all of the scenes before the filming began." "Initially, Meg Tilly was playing Constanze in the film and she was amazing." "Basically, at one point, Milos had said he felt like we'd done it, because the work was going so well up to that point." "And the day before Meg was to appear on camera for the first time, she got hurt in a soccer game." "She's playing soccer with some kids in the street and she tore the ligament in her leg so badly that the doctor told us  we would have to wait five weeks before she could start." "And we couldn't because Saul put together all independent money and we just couldn't afford it." "It was shocking." "Partly because we were where we were." "Behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from our lives to a significant degree  more than if we had been shooting in Western Europe or someplace closer to home." "Suddenly, she was just gone and in a hospital." "So in a very short amount of time, they had to find an actress to take over the part." "The casting director who was brought on to hire the new Constanze..." "This woman called my acting teacher and said:" ""Can you recommend anyone?" He said, "Elizabeth Berridge."" "She said, "She's too weird and introverted..." "And she's too quirky for this outgoing, bubbly girl. "Which I was." "We flew to New York for a weekend and it was extraordinary." "Friday night, we went:" "Prague, Paris." "And Saturday morning we took the Concorde to New York." "So we went to Milos' apartment and they had 60-odd girls lined up for us to see." "I saw, like, 60 girls." "Sunday I read, like, 12 of them." "Out of these 12, two were- I couldn't decide between them." "So Saul decided, "Let's bring them to Prague and let's do a screen test with them there."" "It felt like calamitous, like it had gone so badly." "I said to my father, "If I can't speak, how will I ever get a part?"" "Because speaking is required in that line of work." "Then I got a call: "You' re flying to Czechoslovakia for a screen test." "And there's you and another contender."" "So I had no passport." "And this was, I think, the next day." "Milos went back to Prague Sunday so he could shoot on Monday." "And I went over there on Monday, went back with the two girls Monday." "And that was some ushering job, being with two girls up for the same part." "I kept saying, "I love you both."" "We were flown over and we tested." "And they did the hair and the makeup." "Meanwhile, they' re filming the movie and you really wanna not start to feel like you' re part of the thing, because, in my case  I knew I was getting back on a plane the next day." "Apparently, they couldn't decide, so they said:" ""There's gonna be another test tomorrow. "So we came back and went through all the hairdos and the gowns..." "And this went on for a week." "The other woman and I hung out every night." "We would have dinner." "I was always nervous." "She'd say:" ""No, you look lovely in that wig." "I'm sure you did great."" "And I was preparing to, "Okay, how do I say thank you for having me and for considering me and for this first-class ticket to Prague." "Thank you so much, and bye, and good luck with your movie."" "And Milos said, "Essentially, you both have the part, you know it's impossible to decide between you and one of you is simply too pretty to play Constanze." "So Elizabeth, you have the part."" "And I was like, "Thanks, that's..." "Well, I have the part." "That's good."" "As much as I love Meg Tilly, I think, as a personality  Elizabeth Berridge was more right because Constanze was a landlady's daughter." "She was a street kid, you know?" "So I got to stay and had packed clothes probably for three days." "I was there for six months and started work the next day." "And that was it." "I was Constanze." "Frau Mozart?" "I remember the first day the first scene I shot was the "nipples of Venus" scene  where I come to see Salieri." "I had to eat a million of those..." "Go on, try one!" "They' re quite surprising." "Marzipan!" "It was foul." "I don't know, it's just awful." "And I remember getting ill and Milos was like:" ""Oh, it's her job."" "It wasn't exactly working in a mine, but eating a million marzipan balls" "I didn't know I didn't have to eat it all." "At 20 years old, I didn't know:" ""Oh, you can spit it out at the end."" "We' re going again?" "Okay." "It's funny how that can be the only thing on your mind." "But I couldn't" "They' re wonderful!" "The first scene that I did, in making the movie, was the march of welcome." "Meeting Mozart for the first time." "I had to learn to play the piano accurately, and badly." "Even though the harpsichord- The piano was unhooked the hands had to be in the right place." "Light, then strong!" "They had provided me with several versions of pre-recorded music and I had to learn to do it as recorded." "Which was fun." "I had a good time." "Then I got to be very good at it." "m worked on it too." "Tom had a piano in his room and he worked on it all the time." "The keyboards that I played on in front of the camera were all silent." "All of the music was recorded before we started." "So the sequence was done with the music played out loud in the room or in my ear, if there was dialogue that had to go on." "In the scene where Mozart first meets the emperor and Salieri has written this march, it was a surreal experience." "It was staged so that the actors were behind me." "The keyboard is here:" "Because there's dialogue, the music is played in a tiny transistor in my ear." "The keyboard is silent." "I'm looking away so when you lose your bearings, you can't find it." "So it truly was a kind of schizophrenic situation." "When we met, the only instrument he ever played was guitar." "He never played piano." "He was spending like three or four hours a day for several months  practicing the pieces he had to play." "I began, as the months went on, to believe the illusion a bit." "It was always distressing to hear what I really sounded like on a sounded keyboard." "The practice room, where my piano was was right over the room where Milos hung out." "Imagine what a nightmare that was for him." "The one day he said that I was improving was the day that my teacher was demonstrating to me." "Neville Marriner, after seeing the film, said:" ""He never hits a wrong key." "Even when he plays backwards."" "Now you play it backwards!" "There was just no way to be able to do that without being able to do it." "It's one thing to play to a playback it's entirely different to do it upside down behind your back." "In the way of stunt work, you learn what the assignment is and some chemical gets released, and you actually can do it." "It was a big thrill for everybody that we were going to film in  practically the only wooden opera house left in central Europe and also the most perfectly preserved." "It had undergone many alterations, but they were minor and architecturally, the place was intact." "The first time I arrived in Prague for location, and they showed us the theatre, we were there with Peter Shaffer and Saul when suddenly, I realized Peter Shaffer disappeared." "Where's Peter Shaffer?" "We found him in the corridor, hidden, crying  because there he learned that he is standing exactly at the place where Mozart himself in person, conducted the world premiere of Don Giovanni." "I tell you, we felt awed the first time we stepped on that stage and realized that our hero had been in that very spot." "I think this fact gave a lot of humility and respect for the place  to every actor, dancer and everybody there." "There's something that happens when you do it in the place, the atmosphere." "I'm not crazy about the spiritual ghosts and things." "I'm not, but I don't deny them." "Suddenly, the reality of the place and the moment really enters into you which is why it was a great idea to do it there instead of building a set." "It was brilliant." "But again, thanks to the neglect during the communist era, it was a powder keg." "It was in danger of burning down." "It still had gas lines in it." "They lit it with gas." "They used to have limelight in it." "It really hadn't been modernized." "Now we are going there to light millions of candles!" "All those candles in a wooden opera house, in a wooden dome." "When the chandeliers were lit, I held my breath for what seemed like days." "And there we were, all these extras, all these wigs and all this flammable stuff in this tinderbox-dry theatre where Don Giovanni had had its premiere." "That theatre we were in." "Amazing." "Imagine the trust of the opera house, allowing us to be there." "We had every day like 30 or 40 firemen everywhere, standing there." "But they were absolutely- I will never forget Don Giovanni." "At a certain moment, Don Giovanni moves to the table, does this:" "And he has a hat with huge plumage, you know, a feather Like a peacock feather, right?" "And leans like that and talks to the commodore." "We rehearsed." "Everything was fine." "Okay, let's shoot." "So light the candles." "We didn't realize that there on the table is this small candelabra, which now is lit." "Okay, camera roll it, playback." "We are shooting." "And the actor is performing like that." "He leans and suddenly we see that this feather caught fire." "The fire is going up and up and up, but he's in the ecstasy of performing." "He doesn't even notice." "And everybody is staring and nobody- We have 40, 50 firemen around there." "And his head starts really flaming." "Finally, one fireman dared to lean from the wings and says:" ""Excuse me." "Excuse me, Mr. Forman, will you please stop the cameras?" "Your actor is on fire!"" "When the camera is rolling, everything is sacred." "My impression, never having done a movie that size" "I had done a horror film- That if things went wrong one should just stop." "When we did that scene where we' re playing under the table  I don't remember if it was a take or rehearsal, but I came out of my dress." "Which I was barely in to begin with." "And there was Milos, "Keep going!"" "I was like, "Really?"" " Stop it!" " I am." "And Milos looks for the- He'd love life coming in accidentally." "There." "You see?" "Milos can be a bit abrupt." "That's kind of a pleasant way to put it." "But he's never wrong." "On Amadeus, after this incredible journey to get to Prague through the night and all of this remarkable stuff  I'm suddenly standing in 18th- century costume, in the snow in Prague, in the middle of the night." "Then I have to walk down the street and he says to me, "Vinnie, television is ruining you!"" "He meant my walk was terrible." ""Television is ruining you!"" "Then we did a second take a moment later." "He said, "That was wonderful!"" "I don't know what changed." "We were six days or five days into shooting the first scene I was in and Milos wasn't really saying anything." "I was starting to feel more comfortable and I said:" ""Milos, do you have any suggestions?" And he said, "No."" "I said, "Well, I mean, is it okay?" "I mean, should I do more or less?"" ""No, you' re doing fine." I said, "You haven't said anything."" "He said, "If there was anything wrong, I'd have said so."" "I was fine, so he said nothing." "Less you talk, less you confuse actors' heads." "If you cast wrong then you have to work and usually, you' re in trouble anyway." "A director is little bit of everything, but a good director always for every part of his work, must choose people who are better than him." "For me, the operas were not difficult at all." "Because it was, first of all, beautifully recorded." "Beautifully cast by Twyla, and she did all the choreography." "So for me, it was just a question, you know, how to" "Where to place the camera and how to shoot it." "It was hard to work in Prague." "There were no materials." "Everything had to be brought in and everything was improvised." "They had no properties, no wardrobes, no fabrics." "Nothing to build with." "But they had an ingenuity, a humour, and a force to their imagination that more than repaid the lack of materials." "I really enjoyed and had great fun shooting the parody in the theatre the parody of Mozart's operas." "Milos only talks about doing things extremely and broadly." "That is one of his charms." "You can't go over the top with Milos." "It's not possible." "I like that." "Peter enjoyed very much writing this scene." "The parody, words, learning new lyrics." "I had never done anything like that." "I'm not sure Milos ever directed anything like that." "I'm sure Twyla had never choreographed anything like that." "I'm sick to death of that tune!" "There was a pure joy." "We just put every silly thing in, the dwarves..." "It's very inventive, a very Milos scene." "You feel it in the man." "The thing that gives him the greatest pleasure is that kind of theatre." "The guy who is in the back of the horse, right?" "Because he has to reach out and give out a dove." "When the horse moved, he had to walk backwards." "That was probably the most difficult thing in the film." "There were so many extras, we were hard-pressed for enough wigs and enough costumes." "Makeup and hair and wardrobe for 500 people..." "It was like a..." "It was like a battleground." "Once these people were dressed, they were on their own." "And they wandered the halls and ate their lunch and made phone calls and all in their clothes." "I think that had a tremendous amount to do with the way they came across." "It was life." "They lived in these clothes for as long as it took to complete this scene, just as they did in the 18th century." "And I think there is a great deal of authentic life in them and in the clothes." "They were in the clothes long enough that they were not a costume." "The costumes succeeded because I had a hard head." "When I didn't like something, I had it redone again until it was right." "Even the producer couldn't interfere when it was costing more." "I'd redo it until I'd say, "That can go in front of a camera."" "The worst thing is to compromise." "It compromises the entire production." "It's every woman's fantasy, I think, for about five minutes to wear something like that and feel like a princess." "And then it gets old." "It's very uncomfortable." "It was literally like being squeezed and coming out at the top like toothpaste." "Eighteenth-century costumes, it really" "It really informs how you stand, how you walk what your posture should be." "Eighteenth-century clothes have very tight shoulders." "They keep you back." "You keep your shoulders back and your head erect." "That's the pose." "That's what the clothes tell you they want you to do." "What surprised me was that because my hair  had gotten dyed a kind of gold colour  I'd get up and that image was so different to me that it actually triggered the part of me that was more extraverted." "As people would show up for their sequences in the film  I found that I had an urge to take them out and to be the kind of social director  in a way that isn't my natural inclination." "He was so much in Mozart's head." "After the movie was done we shared a living space together and he's a very different man than he was." "He was transformed into Mozart." "I hadn't thought about this in a long time  but as Salieri, I was separate from the rest of the cast for the first 31/2 weeks." "I was only doing the old man." "I separated from the cast because that's the kind of man Salieri was." "I'm not that way." "I love parties." "I love a good time." "I really do." "But I was extremely solitary." "It was me against everyone else." "What I didn't realize was that this was infecting how others felt about me." "Whenever there were parties  I wasn't invited because I wasn't there." "Also, I was always too busy." "If you refused for 31/2, four weeks, people don't invite you anymore." "I began to be like that character." "I didn't like being separate  but in a way, that contributed to the success of the performance." "In some way, I feel like the work relationship that I had with Murray was supported by the fact that we didn't  become so close that we knew too much about each other." "Tom and I have great respect for each other." "But during the film, we were living a little bit like those two characters." "There was always that element where we never knew each other so well that we could tell exactly when the other one was telling the truth or not." "It happens." "When you embody a character as we did it happens that you carry it over." "Crazy, but it's true of any actor who does a part for a length of time." "And these parts meant so much to both of us." "It was only right that we had this antagonism." "It's too soon." "Can I...?" "Could I help you?" "Would you?" "The dictation of the Requiem by the dying Mozart, seems to me to overturn every piece of wisdom I was ever told." "The words are, in themselves, not particularly interesting." "They don't even look like a movie script." "They look as if they will never play." "They are dull." "C sharp, E flat, bar 14, this, that, the other." "It's several pages of musical direction." "One guy's in bed and the other is writing at the end." "And nobody moves." "It's daring to have a whole sequence of composers dictating music to each other." "And they had set us up, before we started filming with Neville Marriner and his assistant." "They had them do the scene for us to let us see what real musicians would be like." "And forgive me, Neville, it was awful." "It was awful." "They' re not actors." "Any film school would tell you this is not for movie." " Come, let's begin." " We ended in F major." " Yes." " So now, A minor." "There's one sequence early on in the scene where Mozart is fairly delirious and trying to find the phrase that he's looking for in the dictation." " A minor." " Yes." "Confutatis." "A minor." "In reality, what happened on that day is there's a little" "John Strauss is in the corner pressing the buttons on a cassette player." "We have little hearing aids in our ears which are playing like an AM radio the musical phrase, so that we can be on tempo and pitch for when all the music gets laid in afterwards." "And there was some mishap, so there's a moment where I' " "Me, the actor is- I'm genuinely lost." "But because of the kind of trust and connection that we have the whole sequence is in the film." "A minor." "Start with the voices." " Basses first." "Second beat of the" " Time?" "Common time." "Second beat of the first measure." "There were two cameras set up, so we didn't overlap." "And most of that is improvisational  because he was acting as though he were very sick." "Consequently, he began to lose certain things and I would guide him." "It was a real symphony between the two of us, a duet." "Later on, I don't know if told Murray, but I would skip information." "First bassoon, tenor trombones, with the tenors." "I'd leave out information that I knew he needed to go to the next place." " You go too fast." " Do you have it?" " Bassoon to trombone, what?" " The tenors." "So he'd have to stop me and Salieri would seem not smart enough." "Trumpets and timpani." "Trumpets in D. Listen." " I don't understand!" " Listen!" "You can do that because there were cameras on both of us and also because of a superb partnership between two players." "The thing that most amazed me was the artistry of every person in every job that worked on this film  and the extraordinary storytelling that happened from every point of view." "I have the deepest gratitude to that crew  because they gave everything, everything they had." "In most cases, the film would be a biography of Mozart and it would be what happened and what happened." "To take the circumstances of that incredible life and put it in the context of this other man and his argument  with his god, is genius, I think." "I don't really care what it is about  because it moves me and makes me think." "It makes me laugh." "It makes me cry a little." "And whatever you think about, that's what it is about." "I don't see that the movie has aged." "It's a timeless story, and it's beautifully told and beautifully shot." "I'm sure you'll hear this again and again  but we were part and parcel of something that was greater than we were." "I remember the stunned silence of those long, long main titles at the end while the piano concerto was still playing." "Extraordinarily, people waited until the end of the main titles." "Then the applause at the end as if they'd been to a concert." "And then you got the first sense that perhaps this was going to be an unusual movie and that perhaps the music had won." "The thing that pleases me almost more than anything else about the whole enterprise is the number of people, young people  who discover the man I think is the greatest composer in the world." "So many people were introduced to Mozart as a composer, compared with just doing it in concert halls." "It'd have taken 100 years to reach as many people as the film did."