Latest / All The Right Movies / Amadeus (1984) | Ep. 63 - Part 1

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Amadeus (1984) | Ep. 63 - Part 1 · All The Right Movies

• 0:04
  All the right movies. Tell us about first guy Amadeus
• 0:10
  Mozart Mozart, Mozart. He creates music for the gods.
• 0:17
  He is passionate. He burns with.
• 0:19
  Fire. He is an.
• 0:20
  Angel. He is a devil.
• 0:28
  Amadeus the man, the music, the motion picture.
• 0:34
  Everything you've heard is true. Amadeus was released in 1984 and
• 0:43
  became an instant modern classic.
• 0:45
  Milos Foreman's period biopic about the rivalry between
• 0:48
  composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri.
• 0:52
  The film is an exploration of jealousy, genius and divine
• 0:55
  injustice. My name's John, and the
• 0:57
  performing monkeys with me are Matt.
• 1:00
  Tis miraculous. And Westie.
• 1:03
  Forgive me Majesty, I'm a vulgar man, but I assure you my music
• 1:07
  is not. It's the 18th century and all
• 1:10
  the right movies are in Vienna via Prague to talk the man, the
• 1:13
  murder and the myth about the music.
• 1:16
  Too many notes. Hello and welcome to all the
• 1:39
  highbrow movies. I mean, right movies.
• 1:42
  Very nice. Giggly and dirty minded
• 1:44
  creatures crawling on the floor. And the podcast on classic and
• 1:48
  hit films. That's us.
• 1:49
  This episode has been a long time coming.
• 1:52
  It has been very long for you especially.
• 1:56
  As always, we're telling the story of Hollywood 1 movie at a
• 1:59
  time, but today it's through the voice of God.
• 2:01
  It is, as we talk Milos, Mozart, the patron St. of mediocracies,
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  and Amadeus. Yeah.
• 2:08
  Sounds a lot I'm. Just going to have a nip.
• 2:10
  Sounds a lot. As always.
• 2:13
  As always. Yeah, nothing changes.
• 2:17
  Well, before we start making our all night confessions, should we
• 2:19
  plug our own divine compositions on Patreon?
• 2:22
  I'll go on then, might as well. Absolutely.
• 2:25
  Well, if you're a regular listener to our ATRM Classic
• 2:27
  podcast, you can help support what we do by becoming an ATRM
• 2:30
  patron. Patrons get access to our bonus
• 2:33
  podcast episode called Double Feature, where we talk about two
• 2:36
  films that may get the ATRM Classic treatment, and the Watch
• 2:39
  List, where we review more modern releases.
• 2:42
  And you will also gain access to our whole podcast archive full
• 2:45
  of bonus episodes and archived ATRM Classic episodes.
• 2:49
  So if you like biopics, we have The Social Network.
• 2:52
  If period films are your thing, Master and Commander is in
• 2:55
  there. It is.
• 2:57
  Hundreds of hours worth of other stuff as well.
• 2:59
  So to find out more, visit pytheon.com/all the Right Movies
• 3:03
  or subscribe directly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
• 3:07
  Please do. Definitely do look guys.
• 3:10
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• 3:12
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• 3:18
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• 3:20
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• 3:22
  that as well at all the right movies.com.
• 3:25
  That's my new shirt. But enough about us for now.
• 3:28
  Yeah, back to the Today. And it's Amadeus.
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  It is. I chose this one, in case you
• 3:33
  weren't aware. Matt, did you?
• 3:36
  Well, listening to you was like listening to the voice of God.
• 3:38
  So you first. Oh, thank you.
• 3:40
  Why are we talking Amadeus? Well, this one I didn't get to
• 3:43
  till I was well into my 20s, and I dismissed it for two reasons.
• 3:46
  Firstly, the biopic is probably my least favorite genre.
• 3:50
  They're essentially all the same, they just hit the same
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  notes, nor pun intended. And a biopic about a classical
• 3:55
  composer, the topic I've got very little interest in.
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  That was the first thing that turned me off it.
• 4:01
  But secondly, the other thing I knew about it was this was one
• 4:03
  of the big Oscar winners of the 80s.
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  Nothing that decade in particular has a pretty poor
• 4:08
  lineup of big best picture winners.
• 4:11
  You know, Out of Africa, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, all these
• 4:14
  bloated films that, yeah, the big and the epic and the
• 4:17
  sweeping, they're all a bit of a slog to get through.
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  And The Quiet Door, I thought Amadeus was just going to be
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  like that. But that's the thing in terms of
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  biopics, it turns the genre on his head.
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  And to do something genuinely different with it.
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  And then in terms of those films that were winning the Oscars in
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  the 80s, this is just so completely different because I
• 4:34
  was not expecting this to be as much fun as it is.
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  Nice. Yeah, similar for me, but I was
• 4:39
  about 17 or 18 when I first saw Amadeus.
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  I've been going through this phase where I was obsessed with
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  Mozart for some reason. Wow.
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  I think the whole musical genius thing fascinating me.
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  I mean that makes perfect. Sense.
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  Like writing symphonies at 8 years old, like Mozart.
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  Not me, obviously. Yeah.
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  And then I heard there was this film about Mozart, the Wooden
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  Lords of Oscars, and I was like, well, this sounds awesome.
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  So I was all over it. Yeah.
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  And then I watched it and realized it's not totally about
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  Mozart as much as it is his petty little mate.
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  Yeah. But it still floored me.
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  First time I was crawling on the floor like Mozart.
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  And it's still extraordinary to me.
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  Yeah. Usually I kind of play my cards
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  close to my chest at the start of our episodes, but this time
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  seems a bit pointless. So this is getting a 10 and the
• 5:27
  rest of the show I'll be explaining or trying to explain
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  why I think so highly of it. Brilliant, yeah.
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  And I think highly of it, and maybe everywhere you can think
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  highly of a film and all the ways we talk about the
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  direction, the writing, the cast, the visuals, design work,
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  all fantastic. The story of how was made is as
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  huge as the film as well. Yeah, and I mean, the music's
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  not bad, is it? I mean, it's all right, fills a
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  hole, doesn't it? It's up there.
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  And also, there's one scene in particular that might be my
• 5:54
  favorite in any film ever. OK, if you're familiar with the
• 5:56
  film, you probably know which one I'm talking about.
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  So that's coming as well. Yeah.
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  OK. And Speaking of geniuses Westie,
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  rumour has it that you hadn't seen Amadeus before doing this
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  episode. Rumour has it.
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  Been completely ignoring me for decades.
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  I know, not ignoring you, just kind of sidestepping you a
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  little bit. I'm used to that.
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  That's right. Yeah, I know.
• 6:16
  I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm not.
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  Didn't watch this until I was in the mid 40s.
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  That's not mid 20s. Yeah, this is a new one for me.
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  And it was one that again, really put me off and I don't
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  know why because I got into really pretentious films a long
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  time ago, but it seemed pretentious just from the
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  artwork. It seemed like a massive slug.
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  It was almost like looking at Metropolis or something.
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  It was like, oh right, OK, that's fine.
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  Yeah. And then I've seen Barry Lyndon
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  like 4 times and I haven't watched Down a Day.
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  It's outrageous. But I have I've seen it fair few
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  times over this over the past weeks.
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  And it that would have been a hard thing to do if it wasn't so
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  captivating, which it is. I mean, I'm not going to give me
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  score away right now, but I'm glad it's in there.
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  I'm really glad I've watched it. I just love everything about it,
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  to be honest of the sentiment of it.
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  I love the performances of it. I love the pace and I love the
• 7:02
  music. Not that I'd sit and listen to
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  Mozart, just any headphones going, you know?
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  Yeah, it makes us very anxious in some parts because it's just,
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  it's so much to it, so intricate, which we'll get into
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  all of that. It's just a really good, really
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  cultivating film and I'm very excited to talk about it.
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  I'm not too sure what me and Matt are doing here, but we'll
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  try and fit something in somewhere.
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  Get a word in that for you somewhere, I'm sure.
• 7:22
  Yeah, we'll try to. Yeah.
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  So Amadeus was produced by the Soulsance Company, distributed
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  by Orion Pictures and Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment and
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  released on September the 19th, 1984.
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  Filmed almost entirely on location in Prague,
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  Czechoslovakia, the film was directed by Milos Forman,
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  written by Peter Schaeffer, adopting his own stage play of
• 7:41
  the same name, and stars Tom Holsters, Mozart, F Marie,
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  Abraham Salieri and Elizabeth Beridge as Constanza.
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  Time to face the music then, should we?
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  And dance. Yeah, it's 1823 in a Viennese
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  society, and an old man's confession is about to change
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  everything. It's the beginning of Amadeus.
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  The beginning. Amadeus opens with a classic
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  narrative device, a suicide attempt that leads to a murder
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  confession that drops us back 30 years earlier.
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  Mid opera. It does.
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  That old chestnut. Yeah, they're going to be
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  talking about the meeting between our two lead characters
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  in Salieri and Mozart. But to start, it's all Salieri,
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  a young priest and some timeless music.
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  Vienna, 1823. I'm Antonio Salieri, once the
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  most famous composer in Europe. S prayers.
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  No prayers. Yeah.
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  Is causes off to an asylum where he confesses to murder and tries
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  to slit his own throat. He does.
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  Visited by Father Vogler, played by Herman Meckler, Salieri takes
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  us back to when he first encountered the musical
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  phenomenon that was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, tells the priest
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  to leave him alone and then doesn't shut up for the next 10
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  hours. Wesley.
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  Sounds familiar, doesn't it? So you're the perfect guy to
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  start with this opening. Yeah, yeah.
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  I mean, this opens exactly the way I thought it was going to,
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  to the point where I was like, really, just really knows
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  exactly what you'd expect. And it is, I mean, it's very
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  shocking, the reveal of Sillieri when you open that door and you
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  see him just like, what's happening?
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  Where's this going? And I love the way this is cross
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  cut at the very start with the first movement.
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  You've got people dancing, celebrating the music and
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  getting carried through as the credits are rolling.
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  So it's almost like we haven't really got time for credits.
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  Yeah, yeah. So we need to move the story on.
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  We've got to fit the credits in somehow.
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  But it sets the tone for the rest of the film of how he's
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  just so broken down and tired of everything.
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  But still, the music's being celebrated.
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  Yeah. Which is great.
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  Some great lines when it's back and forth with the priest.
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  I love that when he says, you know, your confession for God's
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  forgiveness. I think so, yeah.
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  He just needs to hear that and says, well, have I got a point
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  for you? Yeah.
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  He's got exist. And here we go.
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  And the transition to the younger Cilieri is absolute
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  magic. Oh, brilliant.
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  Really love that. And then when he starts playing
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  the music and he said, you recognize that?
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  And then he's like, no, no, no, really.
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  Can you? But you studied music?
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  Yeah. Yeah, I studied it.
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  Yeah. OK.
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  But you don't know what that is. What about this one?
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  Then he's just straight in. Then he says, I didn't know you
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  wrote that. I didn't.
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  That was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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  But the way he says Amadeus, and he looks up to the sky and he
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  says he was my idol. And then we cut.
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  Yeah, it's great. So.
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  You don't know where you stand and it's just full of regret,
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  but at the same time you don't quite know if it was his fault,
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  if he feels guilty for something, if he misses him too
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  much. You don't know where you are
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  with it. So it's a brilliant start to a
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  really brilliant narrative and a really great introduction to the
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  character. Because F Murray and Harper were
• 10:34
  going to keep going through. This is unbelievable.
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  But just this moment where you go from young to old.
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  He was my idol. Bang, we're in.
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  Yeah, I look how it just drops us right in.
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  There's no build up, old man screaming Mozart and trying to
• 10:48
  kill himself. But it does set the tone
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  distances itself straight away from your more stuffy period
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  picture. But one with the priest and
• 10:55
  Salieri, that's where it really starts to move.
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  And I think it's a pretty perfect setup for what we're
• 10:59
  going to get. Yeah, F Marie Abraham as the old
• 11:01
  Salieri is instantly magnetic. I love it when the priest says
• 11:05
  all men are equal in God's eyes and Salieri turns to face him in
• 11:08
  his wheelchair. Like, are they?
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  Yeah. Don't we know it's that first
• 11:12
  time around? But on re watches, it's massive,
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  sets up the plot. And that's one of the themes of
• 11:16
  the film. Yeah.
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  And like the rest of the film, it's inventive in its use of
• 11:20
  music. It's only a couple of minutes or
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  so before we get our first flashback.
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  You mentioned it, Westie, when we cut Salieri conducting his
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  opera. And there's no 30 years earlier
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  in the title cards. This is way too slick for that.
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  It transitions on the music as it does all the way through.
• 11:34
  Yeah. And let us know that when we
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  hear music, it's often going to be in characters heads, which
• 11:38
  works so well as we'll talk about.
• 11:41
  I find this about as an engaging of film as I've seen, and it's
• 11:43
  there kind of right from the start, I think.
• 11:46
  In Vincent Skee Valley was an actor who met Milos Foreman in
• 11:49
  the 1960s and appeared in all this Hollywood films.
• 11:52
  He plays Frederickson and Cuckoo's Nest in here.
• 11:55
  He plays Sally Aries Valley in She Valley, said before Amadeus,
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  he had made guest appearances on a few TV shows, enough to shoot
• 12:02
  in a shot where all he had to do was walk in a frame.
• 12:04
  He said Foreman shouted, cut and said from television is ruining
• 12:08
  you. Fair enough.
• 12:10
  Television is joining you. Yeah.
• 12:12
  Probably more like that. We had the Valley is trying to
• 12:15
  entice Salieri out with a big plate of food.
• 12:18
  Yeah, you'd like Salieri. I have a Creamer cake for you.
• 12:21
  I mean, that would work on me, to be fair.
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  The guy carrying it's just stuff on his face with.
• 12:26
  Disgusting. Horrible.
• 12:27
  Licking it, it's horrible. Just licking it off, yeah.
• 12:29
  And it sets up Salier with love with desserts, which is a nice
• 12:32
  touch. Yes, that's his insecurity all
• 12:34
  the way through the film, isn't it?
• 12:35
  Yeah, That's his one weakness. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:38
  And as we talked about, Salieri's room in the mental
• 12:40
  hospital was set built for the film.
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  But the scenes that take place in the corridor outside his room
• 12:45
  were filmed in Valedovna in Prague, a dormitory built for
• 12:48
  war veterans in the 1730s. And it was used until 1935 and
• 12:53
  was a museum when Amadeus came to film there.
• 12:55
  Kind of tell it there's a bit of a history there when you're
• 12:57
  going through that corridor. Yeah, it looks great.
• 12:59
  I mean, we're seeing when the priest arrives, then when he's
• 13:01
  pushing Salieri round in the final scene and he's like, I
• 13:04
  absolve you to everyone. Mediocrity.
• 13:07
  People just like chained to the wall by the neck.
• 13:09
  Brutal are all horrible. Yeah, yeah, no cameos from
• 13:12
  Cookie's nest, which would have been nice.
• 13:14
  That would have been nice. I think it might have just been
• 13:16
  a bit too on the nose. Yeah, and the music at Salieri
• 13:19
  face the priest and says that was Mozart.
• 13:22
  It's a serenade called Einheim Nax Music.
• 13:25
  It's one of more talks about well known pieces today, and he
• 13:28
  wrote it in 1787 around the time he was writing Don Giovanni.
• 13:31
  But it wasn't actually published until 182736 years after he
• 13:36
  died, when Constanza sold it to a German publisher.
• 13:39
  Yeah, it's a bit of beat to put in Don Giovanni, I think Most
• 13:42
  Miserable or Forever and the Siever.
• 13:46
  Salieri and the Priest are set in 1823, so 4 years before that
• 13:49
  music was even published, meaning the Priest couldn't have
• 13:52
  known it, right? So form a decision to favour art
• 13:55
  over historical accuracy. Something else we'll be talking
• 13:57
  about that's there from the start of the film as well.
• 14:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then after this, we'll make
• 14:02
  the man himself. And it's such a great setup
• 14:04
  because who could this Mozart look like?
• 14:06
  And let's face it, Salieri is expecting someone who's regal
• 14:09
  and refined is himself. But what I love about it, for
• 14:12
  all his preenin and pomposity, as soon as he spies a chance to
• 14:15
  get stuck in a food without someone seeing, he's straight in
• 14:18
  there. Yeah, yeah, I chopped the ball.
• 14:20
  Yeah. Great.
• 14:20
  Yeah. Yeah, but I genuinely think this
• 14:22
  is one of the best character introductions in cinema because
• 14:25
  you put yourself in Salieri shoes and you have to pretend
• 14:28
  you don't know. Because this guy, this vulgar
• 14:31
  fool Colin, stands there. A shit wit and all that nonsense
• 14:34
  backward talk. Just an absolute idiot.
• 14:37
  And I think it's also worth bearing in mind Foreman doesn't
• 14:39
  move the camera in any extravagant way that caught
• 14:42
  attention to itself unless he's got a really good reason to do
• 14:45
  so. So when this idiot who we think
• 14:47
  he is says oh, to play my music and stands up in realized this
• 14:51
  is Mozart and you get that push in on Salieri's face, just a
• 14:56
  ghast. It's so effective.
• 14:58
  Yeah, yeah. It definitely is slightly
• 15:01
  strange guy Salieri, I think, creeping around this party,
• 15:04
  staring at everyone's faces. Are you web?
• 15:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is a great way to
• 15:08
  introduce a title character. Like you said, Mark, we are like
• 15:10
  Salieri, but probably expecting to see Mozart show up as some
• 15:13
  smart, well spoken genius, not some giggling man boy like he
• 15:16
  does. Yeah.
• 15:17
  My favorite bit, though, was after the concert, when Salieri
• 15:20
  comes across Mozart sheet music. We hear the music in Salieri's
• 15:23
  head as he reads it, and we get the first scene of all Salieri
• 15:26
  describing Mozart's music, and it's glorious.
• 15:30
  Where he's like, like a rusty squeeze box grey, and then
• 15:34
  suddenly, high above it, an oboe.
• 15:37
  Yeah. And we hear exactly what he's
• 15:39
  describing as he describes it. I'm not doing it justice there
• 15:41
  because it's stunning the way they put it all together.
• 15:44
  Yeah. And this is like what, 8 minutes
• 15:45
  in or something? What's great as well though is
• 15:48
  how it develops the Mozart Salieri rivalry.
• 15:50
  Like straight away. It's not just simple jealousy.
• 15:52
  Salieri's excited to meet Mozart at first.
• 15:55
  The anger only comes when he realizes Mozart isn't what he
• 15:58
  expected. A musical genius should be
• 16:00
  dignified and classy like Salieri, not this bubbling sex
• 16:04
  crazy idiot. If anything it tells us more
• 16:06
  about Salieri than Mozart. He's pretty narcissistic I
• 16:09
  think. And Elizabeth Barrett said a
• 16:12
  film in the scene where Constanza and Mozart are
• 16:14
  crawling around on the phone wasn't easy.
• 16:16
  She said every time Tomaholz dragged her along the floor, the
• 16:19
  carpet friction caused her dress to slide down and exposed her
• 16:22
  chest. She did cover herself up
• 16:23
  performing, kept telling. Rush out and keep going.
• 16:26
  You look great. Not the point, Milos.
• 16:29
  To be fair, it's. Really not the point.
• 16:32
  I think that seems a good inroad of Constanza as well.
• 16:35
  Stands here to our pals. That's what I'll be calling her.
• 16:37
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 16:37
  But within seconds to sing them together, I'm thinking, how does
• 16:40
  she tolerate this guy? Yeah.
• 16:42
  Shit and fart jokes. Awful.
• 16:44
  Yeah. And a patient obviously just
• 16:46
  wear thin later on. Yeah, historians have studied
• 16:49
  letters written by the real Mortar and said he did seem to
• 16:52
  have the same kind of humor we see on the film.
• 16:55
  He would often sign off letters with trism, which was Mozart
• 16:57
  backwards, and when he was in Vienna he wrote a piece of music
• 17:01
  called Lekmidan Ashfin Richt Son Sober which translate to lick my
• 17:08
  arse nice and clean. Nice talk, sugar mouth.
• 17:12
  Yeah, lovely, lovely German there as well.
• 17:14
  Musty. Oh.
• 17:15
  Thanks, but. That moment when he's talking
• 17:17
  backwards is when we find out that he's Mozart.
• 17:19
  He's got his head like in Stanzi's chest, and we hear the
• 17:21
  orchestra starting up and he suddenly transforms, stands up,
• 17:24
  and he's like, my music great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:28
  And the camera pushes right in on Salieri as he realizes it's
• 17:31
  one step away from Jaws. Like a Dolly zoo, I.
• 17:33
  Know that, doesn't it? Yeah, and that's the opening to
• 17:37
  Ahmed is suicidal Salieri and a foul mouth, but genius Mozart,
• 17:42
  the composer. Battle lines are drawn.
• 17:44
  Time to meet their boss, I think.
• 17:47
  OK. Having established Salieri's
• 17:51
  hatred for Mozart pretty much instantly, we now see them
• 17:54
  thrown together in the Imperial Viennese court, summoned by
• 17:58
  Emperor Joseph the Second, played by Jeffrey Jones.
• 18:00
  Mozart's commissioned to write an opera.
• 18:02
  He accepts and sits himself down at the old Joanna, humiliating
• 18:06
  Salieri in the process. Yeah, there it is, Westie.
• 18:10
  Yeah. How's the Emperor and Vienna?
• 18:13
  This really stood out for me, this scene.
• 18:15
  Yeah, it's just fantastic, isn't it?
• 18:17
  It's just exactly what you want to happen.
• 18:18
  It happened so well. There's so many bits.
• 18:21
  The just let him in, let him in slowly.
• 18:23
  Can I have a try of it? Emperor is amazing.
• 18:26
  Yeah, of course he can't. But then he said he doesn't play
• 18:29
  like lightly, then strongly. Is it really funny?
• 18:32
  He's really, really just panicking.
• 18:33
  It's like, oh God, it's the first time Mozarts going to hear
• 18:36
  this and it's like so badly done.
• 18:38
  But it's really, really great because he comes in and when
• 18:41
  they start actually when this arguing over it, whether it
• 18:43
  should be in German or whether it should be in Italian and
• 18:46
  there's just this real pompous nature to them all.
• 18:48
  And Mozart, it's just like, just make it like this.
• 18:50
  It's great. It's going to be excellent.
• 18:51
  I know what I'm doing. This real sense of people trying
• 18:55
  to just use him for his talent, but they're going to take the
• 18:58
  all the benefit from it. They're going to take all the
• 19:00
  all the reward from his actual talent, which I think is a
• 19:03
  really good touch. Honestly, It just rips the piss.
• 19:05
  It's superb from that moment. And then he said the rest is
• 19:08
  just the same, isn't it? If you play somebody's music
• 19:11
  with him, that's probably the worst thing you could say.
• 19:13
  Then it's so belittling. It's so in your face.
• 19:15
  Well, it's just the same over and over again.
• 19:17
  Imagine I'm playing some always the songs.
• 19:20
  Yeah, I know. It's fine.
• 19:22
  And it's absolutely brilliant. And then he just makes it
• 19:24
  better. Did you try this?
• 19:25
  What about this? Like, shall we try this?
• 19:27
  And then just makes it miles, miles better.
• 19:29
  It's just a great scene because I kind of talk about it
• 19:31
  chronologically because there's so many things that I love about
• 19:35
  actors jump backwards and forwards in my head.
• 19:37
  It's just absolutely brilliantly played out.
• 19:39
  Yeah, I agree. It's one of the most memorable
• 19:41
  scenes in the film, I think, and it's really well constructed.
• 19:44
  Yeah. It starts with Salieri writing
• 19:45
  his welcome March for Mozart, where he looks at his crucifix
• 19:48
  and goes, glad C seniority. And it's a little tune.
• 19:51
  I quite like it. Yeah.
• 19:52
  There's nothing wrong with it when Mozart plays it, obviously,
• 19:55
  yeah. And we get the conversation
• 19:58
  about whether more thoughts opera should be in Germany or
• 20:00
  Italian, and the way that conflict with the Emperor's
• 20:02
  court advisor. As a start, great when Mozart
• 20:05
  says loves a German virtue and Savieri like love.
• 20:08
  Of course, in Italy we know nothing about love.
• 20:11
  Yeah, and that guys like, just like Jabba the Hood.
• 20:16
  He looks like him as well. He does, yeah.
• 20:20
  So it's a really good scene in terms of character narrative.
• 20:23
  And then Mozart plays Salieri's welcome March back to him, and
• 20:26
  he does just start taking the piss.
• 20:27
  Yeah, he does. That doesn't really work, does
• 20:29
  it? Yeah.
• 20:30
  Did you try this or what about this?
• 20:32
  All while giggling away. And Salieri is totally gutted.
• 20:35
  Yeah. But it's quite interesting.
• 20:37
  Historians say that from studying certain documents, it's
• 20:40
  pretty obvious that the real Mozart had perfect pitch under
• 20:43
  photographic memory. Right, Because playing tunes
• 20:44
  back instantly is something he could really do, apparently.
• 20:47
  So that's where the scene comes from.
• 20:49
  But I think it's superb, and we end by cutting on Mozart's huge
• 20:52
  laugh and Salieri back with the crucifix, now furious Grassi
• 20:55
  seniority. It's really good.
• 20:57
  Brilliant, yeah. And at the start of the film,
• 21:00
  Mortard is in service of Prince Archbishop Hieronymous Color
• 21:03
  Reed or of Salzburg, played by Nicholas Capros.
• 21:07
  Mortard and Archbishop not getting on is based on reality.
• 21:10
  Mozart letters from the time describe the Archbishop as
• 21:13
  authoritative, not caring for more Todd's music and thinking
• 21:16
  he have no decorum. Right, yeah, apparently, and
• 21:19
  this isn't in the film, but it could have been, I think.
• 21:21
  Apparently when Mozart resigned from the archbishop's court to
• 21:23
  go to Vienna, he had a meeting with the archbishop's chamber
• 21:26
  clerk, and he was so furious with Mozart that he threw him
• 21:29
  out by kicking him in the pants. Right.
• 21:32
  I wonder if that's why we get that moment when the
• 21:33
  Archbishop's chamber guard closed the door.
• 21:35
  Then he bends over. As he's bowing, yeah.
• 21:37
  Yeah, just missed a bit where he just took a run and kicked.
• 21:42
  Your father, Ted. Yeah, Salieri's Welcome March
• 21:47
  was actually written for the film, but music that Mozart
• 21:50
  adapts it, it was written by the real Mozart.
• 21:52
  It's called Non Pure 3 for Full Amaroso and it's from The
• 21:56
  Marriage of Figaro. It's funny when the emperor's
• 21:59
  like, let's have some fun, sits down to play it and he's a
• 22:02
  rubbish plinky plunking away like Eric Malcolm.
• 22:07
  And so, yeah, he's like, come on, man, It's great.
• 22:11
  And the first person cast as Emperor Joseph was Ian
• 22:14
  Richardson, who was known as the Shakespearean actor, but he had
• 22:17
  to pull out because of schedule and conflicts.
• 22:19
  Geoffrey Jones was also known as the stage actor at the time, and
• 22:23
  Foreman's custom team saw him in an Off Broadway a British 2
• 22:26
  actor player called Cloud 9 and recommended him to Foreman.
• 22:29
  Yeah, he's really good. Yeah, Jeffrey Jones.
• 22:31
  But he was cancelled into oblivion in 2002 when he was
• 22:35
  arrested for something disgusting.
• 22:37
  Google it if you're interested. Yeah, but on that note, back to
• 22:41
  you, Matt. Thanks.
• 22:41
  We've got no point to talk about.
• 22:43
  Yeah, the abduction from the Seralio.
• 22:45
  I do because this is the scene that always comes to mind.
• 22:48
  First to me about this film is when the emperor gets up on
• 22:50
  stage. Really.
• 22:51
  Yeah. Just that attempt to critique
• 22:53
  Mozart. Do any nopes?
• 22:56
  Because this is still such a relevant scene because everyone
• 22:59
  thinks they're an expert these days.
• 23:00
  Everyone has social media. So everyone has an opinion.
• 23:03
  And the thing that opinion has to be heard.
• 23:05
  And it reminds me, you know, when you watch them, like,
• 23:07
  talent show on TV and you might get a really, really good
• 23:09
  singer, and then you've got, like, Simon Cowell sat there,
• 23:13
  who's never sung or written a song in his life.
• 23:15
  Or Amanda Holden. Or Amanda.
• 23:17
  Holden even worse, trying to judge them tell them what's good
• 23:20
  or not in Jeffrey drawn to mention there.
• 23:22
  Obviously he and his individual books so good in this so shallow
• 23:26
  and when he's on the spot thinking he's got to have some
• 23:29
  opinion because everyone is hanging on his every word.
• 23:31
  But he's struggling because he just can't even conceive of
• 23:34
  music and he's just how shall one see a director like puts all
• 23:38
  the pressure on him because to him he's just making small talk,
• 23:41
  but because the more thoughts pride in his work.
• 23:44
  This is important and just that line exactly if I will put too
• 23:47
  many notes, just a pointless criticism.
• 23:51
  It really is. And the area that we hear from
• 23:53
  the opera, that is absolutely massive.
• 23:57
  I think it's one of the best pieces of music we hear in the
• 23:59
  film. Something I recommend actually
• 24:01
  in watching this film is to turn the subtitles on during the
• 24:03
  opera scenes, right? Because they've all been
• 24:05
  translated into English from German or Italian so you can
• 24:08
  read the lyrics. Oh nice.
• 24:10
  And some of them are dog as hell, right?
• 24:11
  This one's called torture of all kinds and just singing about
• 24:14
  dying a horrible death. Yeah, so you might like a
• 24:16
  Wesley. I mean, not the motor arts.
• 24:19
  Conducting gives that away. He's loving it, that move,
• 24:22
  swinging his arm side to side. Yeah, if I was a conductor, that
• 24:26
  would be my only move. Yeah, I think the music might be
• 24:29
  a bit different if that was your only move, but.
• 24:37
  As a spectacle, I think it's fantastic.
• 24:39
  We'll talk a bit more about the operas as we go, but the
• 24:41
  choreography, the production design, the lighting, it's all
• 24:44
  like world class still hasn't aged today.
• 24:47
  Yeah. The soprano who stars in The
• 24:49
  Abduction from the Seraglio is Katarina Cavallari.
• 24:53
  She was one of the most famous singers in Vienna at the time
• 24:55
  the film was set. She really did appear in More
• 24:57
  Thoughts Opera and did study under Antonio Salieri and may
• 25:00
  have actually been his lover. Right.
• 25:03
  The old dog the creature had, my darling girl, Salieri says.
• 25:07
  She didn't have a relationship on what's on in real life,
• 25:09
  though. That bit is made-up, apparently.
• 25:11
  Right. And she's played by Christine
• 25:13
  Ebersole, and she'd appeared on Broadway being an SNL and had a
• 25:17
  part in Tootsie informed Teddy cast her because she was so
• 25:20
  versatile as an actress, which he knew Katarina needed to be.
• 25:23
  But her singing voice was dubbed for the film by a real Irish
• 25:26
  soprano called Suzanne Murphy. Well, she's got some serious
• 25:30
  pipes on a suicide. Murphy blows the roof off.
• 25:33
  It's absolutely nuts. Yeah, and Christine never saw
• 25:36
  it. You're wondering who she is.
• 25:37
  She also plays Leah Belfort, Jordan's mother, in The Wolf of
• 25:41
  Wall Street. Wolf of what?
• 25:42
  You're right. Ah.
• 25:43
  Right, OK. Yeah, well, that's all clicking
• 25:46
  into. Place, yeah, not quite as much
• 25:47
  thinking in that one. Not enough?
• 25:50
  Enough. And the moment after the opera
• 25:53
  when the emperor goes backstage and tells Mozart there was too
• 25:56
  many notes is based on reality. A biography of Mozart published
• 26:00
  in 1798 said that after he saw the opera, the Empress said to
• 26:03
  Mozart, that is too fine for my ears.
• 26:06
  There are too many notes. And Mozart replied, there are
• 26:09
  just as many notes as there should be.
• 26:11
  Lovely. It's all great.
• 26:13
  It's the way he says it. He's like, how should one say a
• 26:15
  director? Too many notes, Your Majesty.
• 26:17
  Very well put. Too many notes?
• 26:20
  Yeah, there's kind of few and it'll be perfect.
• 26:22
  It's like, which ones you want us to cut then?
• 26:24
  Yeah, it's great. But that story we apparently is
• 26:27
  a well known one in the like law of Mozart.
• 26:29
  So nice to see it in there. It really works as well.
• 26:32
  It does work really well, yeah. And we meet all of the emperor's
• 26:35
  advisors in the opening scenes too, and they are mostly based
• 26:38
  on real people. So the director of opera is
• 26:41
  Count Franz Zieva, Wolfgang von Orsini.
• 26:44
  Rosenberg, it's easy for you to say much.
• 26:46
  Well done though, glad you didn't give me that bit.
• 26:51
  Would have been here a while. Would be West.
• 26:56
  And he really did. Of course, more Todd wanting to
• 26:58
  turn operas from Italian into German.
• 27:00
  And he's paid by Charles Kerr. Right.
• 27:03
  Yeah, so all the aristocracy have like, posh English accents,
• 27:05
  and the main characters were all American.
• 27:07
  That was done intentionally by Foreman.
• 27:09
  Bit of a classic kind of trick, I think, isn't it?
• 27:10
  Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
• 27:12
  And in the original Broadway, a player, Rosenberg had been
• 27:15
  played by Patrick Hines and he plays couple Meister Bono in the
• 27:18
  film. Job by the hood, that's what you
• 27:20
  call. Him job by the hood, yeah.
• 27:22
  Unfairly, but he is great. Yeah, they're all great.
• 27:25
  They're all hateable as well. That's why they're so fantastic.
• 27:28
  Massive caricatures of hateful people.
• 27:30
  Yeah, he's one of the biggest ones, I think.
• 27:32
  Yeah, it doesn't know where he's coming or going.
• 27:33
  Laughs at everyone's jokes. Yeah, doesn't got a clue what's
• 27:36
  going on. No and Patrick Hines.
• 27:38
  He passed away not long after the film came out, sadly.
• 27:40
  Oh, really? Yeah.
• 27:41
  All right. And then Baron Gottfried van
• 27:44
  Sweden is the advisor who first mentions Mozart to the emperor
• 27:48
  and he's played by Jonathan Moore and he played the same
• 27:50
  character in the stage version. And when Mozart died, he
• 27:53
  arranged the funeral, which is why he was seeing him at Mozart
• 27:55
  funeral at the end of the film. Right.
• 27:58
  He's easily the most likeable of your advisors I think.
• 28:00
  Yeah, yeah, very much. There's a nice deal like around
• 28:02
  him as well. Apparently the real Van Sweden
• 28:05
  played a big role in popularizing Bach and handle in
• 28:08
  Vienna, which is why he says about Mozart.
• 28:10
  It's the most promising work I've heard in years.
• 28:12
  Not ever. Because he said some serious
• 28:16
  that guy. And then Count von Strack was
• 28:19
  played by a playwright and actor called Roderick Cook, and he was
• 28:22
  one of the few characters in the film who wasn't based on a real
• 28:25
  person. He was invented by Peter
• 28:26
  Schaffer. Yeah, he gets one of my favorite
• 28:29
  line deliveries later on when Mozart stays in front of the
• 28:32
  emperor. That opera characters sound as
• 28:33
  if they ship marble and Von Strack goes govern your tongue,
• 28:37
  Mozart, how dare you? It's great.
• 28:43
  And that is the beginning of Amadeus.
• 28:45
  We've met basically every character.
• 28:47
  The bitter Salieri, the giggling Mozart, the charming Stanzi, the
• 28:50
  nice but slightly dim emperor. We've seen the genius of one
• 28:54
  European wizard. Should we talk a bit more about
• 28:56
  the one behind the cameras? Let's do that.
• 28:59
  Definitely. The director.
• 29:06
  Amadeus was directed by Milos Foreman.
• 29:09
  This was his seventh feature film as director, and by this
• 29:12
  point he'd already won an Oscar for one, flew over the Cookie's
• 29:14
  Nest, and established himself as a significant name in Hollywood
• 29:17
  music and drama. With films like Taking Off Hay
• 29:21
  and Ragtime. Oregon Mental Hospital to 18th
• 29:25
  Century Vienna must quite the shift.
• 29:27
  Yep. How does Foreman handle it?
• 29:29
  I think his greatest achievement here is making something that's
• 29:32
  fundamentally very, very stagey become completely cinematic and
• 29:36
  it leaps off the screen. Some of that's do the
• 29:39
  cinematography, which we'll talk about later.
• 29:41
  But you have moments like when young Salieri sees his father
• 29:44
  choked to death in front of him, which he's actually quite happy
• 29:46
  to see, and then you get that cut to him in the coffin.
• 29:49
  That's really funny and you couldn't do that on stage that.
• 29:52
  Wouldn't work. No, I wouldn't.
• 29:54
  I think his decision to cast Americans is very, very bold,
• 29:58
  but it really works because it makes Mozart and Stanzi more
• 30:01
  relatable. Yeah, that's the idea, isn't it?
• 30:03
  I think, yeah. There's the idea because of
• 30:05
  contrast to the slightly stuffier performances he get
• 30:08
  from all the English and European actors.
• 30:10
  So his eye for how to make this cinematic is pretty incredible.
• 30:14
  And ultimately the biggest test that this film passes for me is,
• 30:17
  as I said, the top. Not really a fan of classical
• 30:20
  music, but Foreman makes this conflict between 218th century
• 30:23
  composers just completely enthralling.
• 30:27
  I agree. I mean, following up from Cookie
• 30:28
  was Nest like what, nine years earlier?
• 30:30
  And Foreman films in between that and Amadeus are largely
• 30:33
  praised as well. But I doubt anyone thought he
• 30:35
  was coming close to the height of Cookie was Nest again.
• 30:38
  And here to me, he surpasses it to be honest.
• 30:40
  Right. I think what might surprise
• 30:42
  people when they say this is how dark it goes at times.
• 30:44
  It starts to someone trying to kill themselves.
• 30:46
  Mozart becomes an alcoholic. He has some pretty major mental
• 30:50
  health issues, largely going back to his insane childhood, it
• 30:53
  seems to me. And this isn't some scientist
• 30:55
  costume drama. It's pretty raw and it has some
• 30:58
  edge to it, but obviously it is the music.
• 31:01
  It's a film about a legend of music showcasing his music.
• 31:05
  It explores music. So music, music, music.
• 31:08
  But Foreman, like you're saying, but somehow turns it into one of
• 31:11
  the most cinematic films I think I've ever seen.
• 31:14
  Even smaller things like moving between scenes, some of the
• 31:16
  transitions. Not me sideways.
• 31:19
  We talked about Katarina and the Seralio earlier and that moment
• 31:22
  where we cut from Katarina warming up with Salieri to her
• 31:24
  performing on the stage and the naughty hits carriages across
• 31:27
  the scenes. How good's that?
• 31:29
  Yeah, there's loads of, like, great moments I mentioned as we
• 31:31
  go. But Foreman's taking music and
• 31:33
  doing things with it that you can only do in cinema.
• 31:36
  And when the music's Mozart, it's kind of irresistible.
• 31:39
  Yeah. But I mean, it doesn't end
• 31:40
  there. Foreman creates a harmony Mozart
• 31:42
  himself would have been proud of, between like, performances
• 31:45
  and costume design, production design, the screenplay, the
• 31:48
  makeup, there's so much in there.
• 31:49
  It's all exceptional and formed at the centre of all of it like
• 31:53
  a master conductor. Yeah, get a pink wig on.
• 31:56
  Yeah. I've said before that I think
• 31:58
  2001 A Space Odyssey might be Hollywood's greatest work of
• 32:00
  art. I'm not going back on that.
• 32:02
  But honestly, Amadeus is right in there in the running for
• 32:05
  number 2 for me for it's cinematic presentation of
• 32:09
  stunning music. Yeah, and Foreman did it's
• 32:11
  sensational job directing it in my eyes.
• 32:14
  I mean, you're allowed to change your mind, John, if you want.
• 32:16
  I know you're so close. You're not like you're convinced
• 32:18
  yourself. Yeah, I'm not going back on
• 32:20
  that. Regret saying that now.
• 32:24
  Mulash Foreman is like you've said, you've took the words on
• 32:27
  your mouth. He's the conductor of this film.
• 32:28
  He makes the film like it is an opera itself.
• 32:31
  It he cuts like you will cut music.
• 32:33
  He cuts from scenes as if you were cut to a different
• 32:35
  instrument. You could go to Mulash Foreman
• 32:37
  and say to him, there's too many shots in this and he's like,
• 32:39
  tell us what take out and you would have that exact reaction.
• 32:44
  There's nothing you can take out of this.
• 32:46
  It's got exactly the right amount of shots in exactly the
• 32:48
  right places. It's almost like Mozart's music.
• 32:51
  And again, from the stage play, it's what he leaves out, not
• 32:54
  what he puts in that makes it again, accessible in cinematic,
• 32:58
  but not like stuffy cinematic. Like I'm going to appreciate
• 33:01
  cinema and show you what I can do.
• 33:02
  It seems like it's all naturally relevant for the rhythm that
• 33:05
  he's creating and it's just such a great use of framing.
• 33:09
  There's a great use of pace and there's a great use of
• 33:12
  authenticity, even though you can see through the cracks.
• 33:15
  But we're not tearing this apart like with Tear Braveheart Apart
• 33:18
  or Tear, you know, and anything else.
• 33:19
  It was meant to be based on something real, but there's a
• 33:22
  lot of loopholes in this way. You go, well, that didn't really
• 33:24
  happen, But what he does, he makes it so that you don't care
• 33:27
  or you can't really tell and he just kind of masks over it a
• 33:31
  little bit. He's using kind of up to date
• 33:33
  masking tape on something that's quite old school, so you cannot
• 33:36
  notice the cracks. What he's doing with ease.
• 33:39
  It takes Baz Lehman five years of shouting about to make
• 33:44
  something like a stage play as cinematic as this, as
• 33:46
  appreciative as this, and as a little about Milos Foreman as
• 33:50
  possible and as most about the characters and the crew.
• 33:53
  It's kind of even put everybody 1st.
• 33:55
  And it's not like a Milos Foreman film.
• 33:57
  It's Amadeus. Yeah.
• 33:58
  And that really hits home for me.
• 34:00
  I agree you can't see him in there though, can't you as well?
• 34:02
  Oh, 100% you can. But I don't think he cares about
• 34:05
  that. No, and that comes across in the
• 34:07
  film. He's telling a story, and the
• 34:09
  story is first and foremost. It's really showing off, but not
• 34:13
  telling anyone who's done. It's a Batman.
• 34:15
  Yeah, it's both. You're right, it's selfless and
• 34:17
  showing off at the same time. Selflessly showing off.
• 34:21
  I don't think anyone else has done that before.
• 34:24
  Well, Amadeus was based on a famous stage play, as I
• 34:26
  mentioned, so as usual, we're going to quickly tell the story
• 34:29
  of how it made the trip from stage to screen.
• 34:31
  And as usual, Matt insisted to be the one to tell that story.
• 34:34
  Yes, I did. So, Matt thought, take it away.
• 34:38
  Matt thought yes. Very nice.
• 34:41
  Peter Schaefer was an English playwright known for Echoes, the
• 34:44
  psychological drama that had been adapted for the screen in
• 34:47
  1977 by Sidney Lumet. He was a fan of classical music
• 34:51
  and had always been fascinated by the difference between the
• 34:53
  beauty of Mozart's music and the vulgarity in his letters.
• 34:56
  So his play Amadeus debuted in the London National Theatre in
• 34:59
  1979 and then went to Broadway in 1980.
• 35:03
  Have you heard who the cast was in that original Broadway run?
• 35:06
  No. So Tim Curry was Mozart?
• 35:09
  Oh fantastic. Salieri, Ian McKellar and
• 35:14
  Constanza G and Seymour. Wow, sounds pretty good.
• 35:17
  Yeah, wow. And then Milos Forman saw the
• 35:20
  play at the London premiere and poor to Beta Sheffield in the
• 35:23
  intermission and told me he's going to make a film of it.
• 35:26
  Doesn't hang about, does Forman, apparently, he said.
• 35:28
  It's a wonderful drama and would even be wonderful if Mozart and
• 35:32
  Salieri were not in it. I mean, would it?
• 35:34
  What would it be about? Right?
• 35:37
  Totally different, Julie. He's lost his mind.
• 35:40
  He doesn't care so. Foreman then spoke to Salt
• 35:43
  Sands, who would produce 1 proof of the cookie's nest, and told
• 35:46
  them they should get the right. Sands agreed and shopped their
• 35:49
  idea around Hollywood, but no studios were interested and in
• 35:52
  the end, the Salt Sands company produced the film entirely.
• 35:55
  The production budget ended up being $18 million and it was
• 35:58
  distributed by Orion Pictures, as we've mentioned on our
• 36:01
  Terminator episode. We did mention that, and James
• 36:05
  Cameron was furious, obviously. Yeah, but you know where he got
• 36:09
  his money from to fund his movie career?
• 36:10
  Soul Zanz. No.
• 36:12
  So we owned Fantasy Records, who Creedence Clearwater Revival
• 36:16
  signed to in the 60s, and they made him a boatload of money
• 36:20
  cashing in on Bad Moon Rising and fell out.
• 36:23
  I think Zanz made a lot more out of credence than they did out of
• 36:25
  him, and then he plowed it all straight into how it is.
• 36:28
  Right. The advantage of Sans putting up
• 36:31
  all the money was that it meant he and Foreman had complete
• 36:34
  control over the production, and Foreman told him that only three
• 36:37
  cities still had the architecture they needed to
• 36:39
  create the authentic 18th century Vienna.
• 36:41
  Budapest, Vienna. A Prague.
• 36:44
  Foreman said that his home city of Prague was pretty much
• 36:47
  untouched due to communist inefficiency, so they decided to
• 36:50
  film there. Communist inefficiency.
• 36:52
  There's a selling point for your tourist board.
• 36:55
  Yeah, get. On your T-shirts.
• 36:58
  Well, I think this is pretty cool.
• 36:59
  In the whole film, all the locations we'll see, and there's
• 37:02
  a lot. We only ever see four sets, so
• 37:04
  almost all of it is real, right? So the scenes in the Archbishop
• 37:07
  and the Emperor's palace, as we talked about, both filmed at the
• 37:10
  Grace Beck Palace in Prague. And there's some even more
• 37:13
  amazing places that got into as well that we'll talk about as we
• 37:15
  go, right? But I mean, that's one of the
• 37:17
  reasons it looks so authentic. It kind of was.
• 37:19
  Because it is, yeah. The locations are mostly real,
• 37:22
  yeah. The filming in communist
• 37:24
  Czechoslovakia brought problems or the production crew was often
• 37:28
  followed around by the SDB, the Czech secret police, partly
• 37:31
  because Forman was considered a traitor for becoming an American
• 37:34
  citizen. And on the 4th of July 1983 they
• 37:38
  were filming one of the opera scenes.
• 37:40
  And to celebrate Independence Day, the crew had a huge
• 37:43
  American flag unfold on stage and to play at the national
• 37:45
  anthem. And Forman said there were 600
• 37:48
  extras and about 30 of them didn't stand up for the anthem
• 37:50
  because they were members of the secret police.
• 37:53
  Gives you game away, doesn't. It sounds a bit tense.
• 37:57
  Not very secret anymore. No, Yeah, well, Foreman said
• 38:00
  that he thought was all going to kick off, but it didn't,
• 38:02
  thankfully. Right.
• 38:04
  The production designer was Patrizia von Brandenstein.
• 38:07
  She'd worked with Foreman on Ragtime and her reputation for
• 38:10
  authentic historical set design. The four sets we talked about
• 38:14
  that were created were Salieri Hospital Room, which said that
• 38:17
  at the start, Mozart's apartment, the Stairway outside
• 38:20
  Mozart's apartment, and the Volts Theatre, where Magic Flute
• 38:23
  plays for Amadeus von Brandenstein became the first
• 38:27
  woman to win an Oscar for Best Art Direction.
• 38:29
  And fucking deservedly so. Because if you ask me which are
• 38:32
  the four sets, I couldn't tell you.
• 38:34
  Absolutely not. Yeah, fully deserved.
• 38:36
  And you know what else she designed which you have on
• 38:38
  Brandenstein. It could be anything, as long as
• 38:41
  it's fantastic. Well, it is.
• 38:43
  I think it is anyway. Yeah, well, obviously our
• 38:45
  talents, no, no bounds, but she's doing this definitely.
• 38:48
  You could see anything. And I go, Yep, I believe.
• 38:50
  It well, she also designed John Travolta's white three piece
• 38:53
  suit for Saturday Night Fever. There we are, amazingly iconic.
• 38:58
  If Sally wants to outdo Mozart, just get our thing on.
• 39:01
  Exactly. And the production use real
• 39:04
  antiques provided by the Czech government and Ministry of
• 39:06
  Culture. These included museum pieces, PV
• 39:09
  furniture and French tapestries dating from the 1750s.
• 39:14
  I mean, the production design is ridiculous.
• 39:16
  It is any shots. When we see people walking
• 39:18
  through a courtyard or through streets or anywhere, it feels so
• 39:21
  authentic. I'm pretty sure they might have
• 39:23
  actually shot this in the 1780s. And Theodore Pistek was a Czech
• 39:30
  artist with reputation for being an expert in historical costume
• 39:33
  design. The foreman hide him his costume
• 39:35
  designer and he created about 700 costumes by basing them on
• 39:39
  the work of 218th century French painters Jean Honore Fragonard
• 39:44
  and Jean Antoine Wattor and his team created about 1500 weeks
• 39:49
  that cost $500,000. What was that?
• 39:53
  I like how Mozart's current state of mind is usually shown
• 39:55
  in his choice of wig. When he's happy.
• 39:58
  Pink wig. Yeah, Yeah.
• 39:59
  Things start going badly, like unkempt white wig.
• 40:01
  And then when he's completely off the rails, dirty brown wig.
• 40:05
  Yeah. We talk about visual
• 40:06
  storytelling quite a lot on this.
• 40:07
  I think this is the first time I've seen wiggle storytelling.
• 40:13
  And probably the last I would have thought.
• 40:15
  I know. I'd love them to bring that
• 40:16
  back. The old wig for your mood.
• 40:19
  It's just a bowl cup for me everyday.
• 40:23
  Well, before we sign off on Milos Foreman, we're going to
• 40:25
  ask and answer our first Patreon question.
• 40:28
  OK, So as well as all those great benefits we mentioned at
• 40:30
  the start, if you sign up to be coming into your own Patreon,
• 40:33
  we'll answer your questions on the show as well.
• 40:36
  We have the first now. It is on the director and it
• 40:38
  comes from Michael Smith. Hello, Michael.
• 40:41
  Hello, Michael. So Michael says, if Amadeus
• 40:44
  still feels strikingly modern, how much of that is down to
• 40:47
  Milos Foreman's direction, and how does it compare to how other
• 40:49
  directors have approached historical subjects?
• 40:52
  Does Foreman bring something distinct in tone to structure
• 40:54
  that film makers like Paul Thomas Anderson or David Fincher
• 40:57
  also tap into? Great question from Michael.
• 41:01
  It is a great question, yeah. What do you think, Westie?
• 41:03
  How does Foreman do when delivering the 18th century to
• 41:06
  us, always to it? Yeah, I think we've touched on
• 41:09
  it a little bit there, talking about the production design.
• 41:11
  I think we'll get into it further, but I think there's
• 41:13
  this real lack of weight to what you're seeing on the screen.
• 41:16
  It seems like it's effortless and it's not stuffy.
• 41:19
  It makes it accessible. Like I said at the start, I
• 41:21
  think it's the dialogue, the way that's delivered.
• 41:24
  I think it's the use of the accents.
• 41:25
  The lighting doesn't seem stuffy.
• 41:28
  And of the period, yes, the locations are, but I think
• 41:30
  they've been lit separately to make that a little bit more
• 41:33
  accessible, not look like a set, but it's something that you're
• 41:35
  familiar with as a modern audience.
• 41:37
  And Paul Thomas Anderson did that, especially in Boogie
• 41:39
  Nights. Even if you look at the costumes
• 41:40
  of Boogie Nights, you don't go, all of these were made.
• 41:43
  You just think this is the 70s and there's camera movements in
• 41:46
  this, the zooms that are in this that you're familiar with.
• 41:48
  We're talking about Salieri at the start when that zoom comes
• 41:50
  in, you're familiar with that by now.
• 41:52
  You know what's happening there. There's a lot of centre framing
• 41:55
  in this that I'll get into later on that makes it very accessible
• 41:58
  for the audience. It seems modern despite the
• 42:01
  content, and I think that's the point.
• 42:03
  I think the filmmaking techniques really complement
• 42:05
  what you're seeing on the screen and work with it instead of
• 42:08
  against it. And if you look at something
• 42:10
  that's hard to get into that I'll stand by something like
• 42:12
  Barry Lyndon, the weight of that, you couldn't even quote
• 42:16
  it, but you remember what it looks like.
• 42:18
  What he does is he combines all of these elements to give what
• 42:20
  I'm going to coin. Maybe it's it's probably out
• 42:23
  there somewhere. But a modern timelessness, yeah,
• 42:26
  that's what this brings, right? There's a modernity to it.
• 42:29
  But again, it's like it could be at any time.
• 42:31
  But like you said, John, it's like they've gone back in The
• 42:33
  Time Machine, filmed it, and then just came straight back.
• 42:35
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 42:37
  Well, I think Michael's pushed on something quite important.
• 42:39
  I'm a day is a set between about 1760s to 1820s or something, and
• 42:44
  it feels authentic to that. But it does also feel modern.
• 42:47
  And I think a huge part of that is Foreman's approach.
• 42:50
  I think what he does is that he treats the period with respect,
• 42:52
  not by saying, look how beautiful it is, but by saying
• 42:56
  look how relatable it is. Yeah.
• 42:57
  Mortaz making vulgar jokes. Salieri is, like, jealous and
• 43:02
  petty. Compare that to your classic
• 43:03
  period film at the time, something like maybe a man from
• 43:05
  all seasons a few years earlier. Very steadily, very theatrical,
• 43:09
  kind of keeps the audience at arm's length a bit.
• 43:11
  Yeah. But Foreman doesn't do that.
• 43:13
  He's making a film about humans first and foremost, just as much
• 43:16
  as he does in Cookie was Nest. Yeah.
• 43:18
  And I agree that, yeah, you definitely can see this
• 43:20
  approach. Film makers like PTA and
• 43:22
  Fincher, They Will Be Blood has that modern timelessness that
• 43:25
  you're talking about. Westie.
• 43:26
  Yeah, yeah. The narrative structure of The
• 43:28
  Social Network, an unreliable narrator telling the story in
• 43:31
  flashbacks almost identical to Amadeus.
• 43:34
  I think Forman showed that you can make a three hour costume
• 43:36
  drama that feels alive and as alive as like a modern thriller
• 43:40
  a lot of the time. Yeah.
• 43:42
  Yeah, I agree. Thinking of lot of it is done
• 43:43
  the form and like I said, his decision to cast Americans, it
• 43:47
  stops us feeling dated and awfully stuffy.
• 43:49
  The editing, the piercing of this is down to him.
• 43:52
  I think the biggest compounds for me is exactly the one the
• 43:54
  Wesley pointed out. It's Barry Lyndon and what Cubic
• 43:57
  did on that because that is so deliberately pierced in that
• 44:01
  whole film. It feels like it's shot behind a
• 44:03
  pane of glass and you can't touch it.
• 44:05
  I feel like I can touch this film.
• 44:06
  You know, Cubic was going for complete and total realism.
• 44:10
  I don't think Foreman is. I think he's much more relaxed
• 44:12
  about this. And because of that, this
• 44:14
  doesn't feel distant or overly reverent at all.
• 44:17
  I really understand how these characters are feeling, which I
• 44:20
  don't really have with Barry, Linden, Nikes here.
• 44:22
  That's the biggest comparison for me.
• 44:24
  Yeah, if Barry Linden is a world that's hard to get into, Yeah,
• 44:27
  Amadeus is a world that's hard to get out of.
• 44:30
  Tell me about it. Well, for his work on Amadeus,
• 44:36
  Milos Foreman was nominated for Best director at the Oscars and
• 44:38
  won his second after one Flew over the cookie was Nest.
• 44:42
  The film was also nominated for Best Picture and won that too,
• 44:45
  beating out The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in
• 44:48
  the Heart and A Soldier Story, Right?
• 44:51
  Two Oscars in 10 Years of form and then and for us, some great
• 44:54
  direction. And Amadeus.
• 44:56
  Brilliant work. Some brilliant direction.
• 44:57
  Yeah, the cast. Milos Foreman's casting choices
• 45:06
  for Amadeus were unexpected. I think it's fair to say, yeah,
• 45:10
  yeah, I still have our big names and stars, relative unknowns,
• 45:13
  and that's what we're getting into now.
• 45:15
  We're going to be talking about Elizabeth Burridge as Mozart's
• 45:17
  long-suffering wife Constanza. But we should probably start
• 45:20
  with the two men at the heart of the rivalry.
• 45:23
  Definitely, yeah. So, starting with the title
• 45:25
  character, Tom Halls plays Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the
• 45:29
  vulgar genius at the center of our story.
• 45:31
  We follow Mozart from his arrival at the Viennese court
• 45:34
  through his triumphs, his marriage, his decline, and
• 45:37
  ultimately his death at just 35 years old.
• 45:41
  A boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy, Matt.
• 45:45
  And so was Mozart. So how is Tom Halls?
• 45:48
  And you heard of us going? And Volfi.
• 45:53
  I think Holtz is the most brilliantly inappropriate
• 45:57
  casting I think I've ever seen. Because to cast him, who
• 45:59
  throughout this doesn't look like a composer, Yeah, in the
• 46:02
  way that Abraham does with that hair, he looks like he should be
• 46:06
  like the front man in some new Romantic group from the 80s.
• 46:09
  Yes, Adamant. Yeah, yeah.
• 46:12
  Yeah, totally. Or John, John, whoever.
• 46:14
  The fact that he's so out of place in this world and amongst
• 46:17
  everyone else and it's the obvious shock of the film.
• 46:19
  How can such glorious and beautiful music come from this
• 46:22
  idiot because he is such an over endorsed child.
• 46:25
  Like when he's being LED in to see the emperor and he's hopping
• 46:28
  about and he's trying to walk faster than the guards, he's
• 46:30
  trying to peek over the shoulders.
• 46:32
  It's like he's like, have 200 smarties and it's all just
• 46:34
  kicking off in his head and all about the ears and nightmare to
• 46:38
  spend time with. So maybe Hulse's biggest triumph
• 46:40
  is I end up liking him. Well, then I probably should.
• 46:43
  And I think that is downhills. And I think if you can give a
• 46:46
  performance that has one aspect to it that people still talk
• 46:49
  about too this day, then you've done a great job.
• 46:52
  And if nothing else, Holtz is laughing.
• 46:53
  This is iconic. Once you've heard it, you'll
• 46:56
  never forget it. Yeah.
• 46:59
  Tom Hulse, Thomas Edward Hulse. I've got some questions.
• 47:03
  First of all, who is he? Secondly, why is he here and how
• 47:09
  is he so good? Because he's outrageously good
• 47:13
  as Mozart. I mean, yeah, he's playing a
• 47:14
  great character, huge historical figure and the writing is
• 47:17
  superb, but he's not a passenger tumbles.
• 47:19
  You bring stuff to this for me, Yeah.
• 47:22
  There's times he's playing a giggling child and I believe it.
• 47:24
  He's playing a torture genius and I believe it.
• 47:26
  We get humour, drama, sadness, tragedy, romance.
• 47:31
  He nails all of it to the door like Martin Luther and then went
• 47:35
  right. That's enough of that.
• 47:36
  You're not seeing me again. It's nuts.
• 47:39
  Yeah, yeah. And there's brilliance in the
• 47:40
  writing. Mozart's written as kind of the
• 47:42
  antagonist in his own biopic. We experienced the story through
• 47:45
  Salieri's eyes, and Mozart is essentially the villain who
• 47:48
  destroys Salieri's life just by, like, existing.
• 47:52
  And great choice by Peter Schaeff and the writing because
• 47:54
  that means you can explore genius, like, from the outside
• 47:56
  looking in, which is how we experience it in real life.
• 47:59
  Yeah. So we don't get Mozart internal
• 48:01
  monologues. We've seen through the eyes of
• 48:03
  someone who understand he's a genius and literally explains to
• 48:06
  us, the audience, why. And basically he's a genius
• 48:09
  because he doesn't just write great music, he can write it all
• 48:11
  in his head and more depth of Mozart.
• 48:14
  He's a contradiction. When he criticizes Saudi Aries
• 48:17
  March, he says funny little tune, but he yielded some good
• 48:19
  things. It's brutal.
• 48:21
  But I don't think he's being malicious.
• 48:23
  He just doesn't understand that that would hurt someone's
• 48:25
  feelings. Yeah.
• 48:26
  I think Mozart was musically pitch perfect, like we said, but
• 48:29
  the writing makes him, like, emotionally torn deaf, which is
• 48:32
  great. Yeah.
• 48:33
  So there's loads going on. And in capturing the essence of
• 48:35
  the character, I think Hulse might get the best line when
• 48:38
  mortal seats of the emperor. Forgive me Majesty, I'm a vulgar
• 48:41
  man, but my music is not brilliant.
• 48:43
  Line and Hulse brilliant for some reason in the role.
• 48:48
  Yeah, yeah. I think he's brilliant in the
• 48:51
  fact that he's not playing the lead and doesn't try to, and
• 48:55
  there's no pretension in that whatsoever.
• 48:57
  He's wonderful in every scene with Marie Abraham.
• 49:00
  He's absolutely. But they're both electric
• 49:02
  together, and it's there. It's the way they work off each
• 49:04
  other I think really helps the characters because there's an
• 49:07
  irony to this performance. And he is so childlike.
• 49:10
  It's pretty unlikeable in places, but at the same time,
• 49:13
  really fucking captivating. Yeah.
• 49:16
  And for Holtz, it's the one that really stands out.
• 49:19
  You don't doubt he's a genius that's really hard to pull off.
• 49:22
  Yeah, it's really hard to pull off.
• 49:24
  And the fact that his performance is not only
• 49:26
  musically but emotionally are just seem absolutely not
• 49:30
  perfect. It's iconic.
• 49:32
  But there's a huge irony, like I've said, because Salieri could
• 49:35
  have really helped him. That could have really helped
• 49:37
  each other because Salieri could have taught him about an emotion
• 49:40
  and the way to be around people. And he could have taught Salieri
• 49:42
  more about music that they're always battling off each other.
• 49:45
  And Holtz, as Mozart doesn't realize there's a battle going
• 49:48
  on. He's.
• 49:49
  So. Unengaged with it.
• 49:51
  He's got no clue what's going on.
• 49:55
  About anything really, apart from like there's too many
• 49:58
  notes. That's all he's thinking about
• 49:59
  is the notes, yeah, nothing else.
• 50:01
  And it really, really works. He's really charismatic.
• 50:04
  He's really brilliant on the screen and electric with anyone
• 50:07
  he's in and doesn't steal a single scene.
• 50:08
  I don't think he's just part of it all.
• 50:11
  Well, the casting directors on the film were Mary Goldberg and
• 50:14
  Maggie Cartier, and they said that Foreman told him that he
• 50:16
  wasn't interested in stars. Mozart and Salieri were the
• 50:19
  stars, and he wanted to find the perfect actors.
• 50:21
  So they held about 1400 auditions, apparently.
• 50:25
  And right, Lord of names. Well, for the part of Mozart, do
• 50:28
  you know any of those names? Was Curry back?
• 50:31
  Do you know Matt? I do know Foreman said that when
• 50:34
  Sol Sance was shocking the film around Hollywood, once studio
• 50:37
  said the word from the film on the condition, but Foreman cast
• 50:40
  Walter Matthau is Mozart and former said no Yeah.
• 50:45
  John Lemon and Salieri Linguini on the walls.
• 50:50
  Surely Michael had 40 more. Mozart died when he was 35.
• 50:54
  I would have already been 60 odd at that point, yeah.
• 50:58
  He could have done Salieri though I guess, but you would
• 51:00
  have put younger makeup on him as opposed to older mega.
• 51:04
  And at the time Foreman was casting the part, the stage play
• 51:07
  was running on Broadway, and Mozart was being played by Mark
• 51:10
  Hamill. And he did meet with Foreman,
• 51:11
  but said he was all very early on.
• 51:13
  Right. Foreman had no intention of
• 51:14
  casting him. Yeah, Howell said that Foreman
• 51:17
  told him people will not believe Luke Spacewalker as Mozart,
• 51:21
  right? Savage.
• 51:25
  You can see a bit of that performance in his Joker though
• 51:27
  for the animated Batman series I think.
• 51:28
  Yeah, yeah. There was a histrionic laugh in
• 51:31
  that as well, isn't there? So maybe something from that,
• 51:33
  yeah. Yeah, and other big names
• 51:35
  auditioned, including Tim Curry, like I mentioned, and Mel
• 51:38
  Gibson. Kenneth Branner was in the
• 51:40
  running and later said he thought he had the part in the
• 51:42
  bag until Foreman decided the part had to be played by an
• 51:44
  American. Right.
• 51:46
  Yeah. So Tim Curry, Yeah, he played it
• 51:48
  more on Broadway, like we said. And Branner I could see, I
• 51:51
  think. At that time, yeah.
• 51:53
  Gibson, not so much. Yeah, he was mullet.
• 51:58
  Wouldn't need the wig anywhere at least.
• 52:01
  Mad Motor. And the child Mozart.
• 52:04
  We see him playing piano and violin at the start of the film.
• 52:07
  He was played by Miroslav Sakera, a nine year old
• 52:10
  professional Czech pianist. Right.
• 52:12
  Yeah, singing that little boy playing piano, and it's clear as
• 52:14
  day that he's actually playing. Yeah, I think it adds so much
• 52:17
  credibility. It looks great.
• 52:19
  It does. Yeah, massively.
• 52:21
  And Holtz threw himself into the part.
• 52:23
  As we've discussed, he knew how to play the guitar before
• 52:25
  shooting, but spent six hours a day for six months learning how
• 52:28
  to play a piano as well. The music we hear was recorded
• 52:31
  by session musicians, but Holtz learned how to play every piece
• 52:34
  of music in the film so we could recreate it on screen.
• 52:37
  And you can really tell. Oh.
• 52:38
  You really can. Apparently music professors have
• 52:40
  studied the film and they've confirmed that every time we see
• 52:43
  one of the cast playing a piece of music, what they're playing
• 52:45
  on the screen is exactly what we're hearing in the film.
• 52:48
  Right? And how that includes the bit of
• 52:50
  the party where Mozart players like Bach were lying on his back
• 52:54
  backwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:56
  Backwards. Exactly.
• 52:59
  Horses playing all the right notes.
• 53:01
  And as mentioned, one of the most memorable things about
• 53:03
  Mozart in the film is his laugh, but it's debated how accurate it
• 53:07
  actually is. Some sources have said that
• 53:09
  letters written between two women who knew Mozart described
• 53:12
  his laugh as being infectious, giddy, and like metal square
• 53:15
  being glass. The musicologist, called Robert
• 53:18
  Marshall, carried out research in the Mozart, though, and said
• 53:21
  he could find no evidence to describe how he did actually
• 53:23
  laugh. Yeah, Robert Marshall said the
• 53:26
  laugh was created as a dramatic device for the film.
• 53:28
  They represented God's laughter, which is what Salieri says.
• 53:31
  Yeah, yeah. That wasn't more to our loving
• 53:33
  Father. That was God loving.
• 53:35
  Yeah, I think it's from Salieri's point of view as well,
• 53:38
  when we see the laugh. Yeah, the first time.
• 53:40
  And I think it continues through the film that it's it's his
• 53:42
  interpretation of that. Yeah, it pisses him off it.
• 53:45
  Gets worse as it goes on, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 53:47
  Yeah. And Tom Holtz said that Formant
• 53:49
  asked him to create something extreme for more Todd's laugh,
• 53:53
  and he said he based it on a director he knew or he's never
• 53:56
  said who that director was. And he also said he practiced
• 53:59
  the laugh in public by bursting into it in the middle of
• 54:01
  department stores to see how people would react.
• 54:04
  Right. I mean, it's basically like a
• 54:06
  sound effect for Foreman to use. It's a great characterization
• 54:09
  for Mozart. There's times that it's funny,
• 54:11
  there's times that it's obnoxious.
• 54:12
  There's times that it's sad performing.
• 54:14
  Like he uses a transition between scenes.
• 54:16
  He even ends the film on it. Yeah, it's a great cutting
• 54:18
  device. Yeah.
• 54:20
  And Holtz also said he based the character on John McEnroe,
• 54:23
  particularly Mcenroe's mood swings and outbursts.
• 54:26
  He studied footage of Mcenroe's encore tantrums and used that to
• 54:29
  create some of Mozart's childish behaviour.
• 54:33
  You cannot be serious, Matt. Yeah.
• 54:35
  Too many notes. You cannot be serious.
• 54:38
  Mozart in a redhead band. Just that white wig, redhead
• 54:41
  band, little shorts on wooden racket.
• 54:43
  Furious. His performance as Mozart.
• 54:47
  Tom Holt was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars.
• 54:50
  We let you know he won in a few minutes.
• 54:52
  But for us, in making Mozart both divine and very human, some
• 54:56
  pretty good stuff from Tom Holtz.
• 54:58
  Yeah, wonderful. It's almost like he's not a real
• 55:01
  person. From 1/2 of our music rivalry to
• 55:06
  the other and F Marie Abraham who plays Antonio Salieri, court
• 55:10
  composer, devout Catholic, and the man who may or may not have
• 55:13
  made that Mozart. We follow Salieri from his lofty
• 55:16
  position at the height of Viennese society through his
• 55:18
  dissent in the jealousy, plotting and ultimately old age.
• 55:23
  So Wesley F Marie Abraham is Salieri.
• 55:26
  Yeah. Is he the patron St. of
• 55:27
  Mediocrities? I mean, not his performance, no,
• 55:31
  it's anything but It's absolutely incredible.
• 55:33
  And if you, if you want too many notes, that's my sheet of paper
• 55:35
  right now, just on F Maria. But honestly, I just kept going
• 55:40
  and kept going. I said that Tom Holst doesn't
• 55:42
  really steal a scene. He's just part of it.
• 55:44
  And that really works. F Maria Abraham steals every
• 55:48
  single scene he's in. He absolutely nails it to the
• 55:51
  wall, even when he's got no dialogue.
• 55:53
  His look of rejection, his look of loss and pain.
• 55:57
  He's been betrayed by God himself.
• 56:00
  And you fucking feel it. You kind of go.
• 56:02
  He really has. Yeah, I get that.
• 56:05
  But it's just so many times he's just heartbroken and he's just
• 56:09
  so confused and there's such a regret in this performance.
• 56:11
  And there's a consistency to the character being in the older
• 56:15
  version, the younger version. He's got the same take
• 56:18
  throughout no matter which version of Salieri you're
• 56:20
  watching. And this misplaced faith at the
• 56:22
  end of the film in that he just had faith in something.
• 56:25
  And if he just had faith in music and himself, I think his
• 56:30
  life would have been so, so different.
• 56:32
  Yeah. And you can tell that from the
• 56:33
  end. And there's nothing wrong with
• 56:34
  being mediocre. You've just got to appreciate
• 56:37
  that and work on it. He didn't want to work on it.
• 56:39
  He wanted a gift from God. Yeah.
• 56:40
  And you can tell that in the performance.
• 56:42
  He's really longing for the easy way out.
• 56:44
  He wants to just be given something, and that's why he
• 56:47
  takes a lot of desserts. He doesn't want the main course,
• 56:49
  he doesn't want the start. He doesn't want to work through
• 56:51
  anything. He wants the thing at the end.
• 56:53
  He wants the glitz and the glamour and every single note on
• 56:56
  that character that I've just said F Marie Abraham delivers
• 56:59
  every single time, in every single scene.
• 57:03
  It's an incredible performance because I was waiting for at
• 57:06
  some point to go right. Well, the mask going to slip
• 57:09
  here. He's going to have to run out of
• 57:10
  steam at some point and he never, ever knows.
• 57:13
  In a three hour runtime. It's fantastic and I honestly
• 57:15
  wanted to see more of them. I mean, F Marie Abraham, I've
• 57:21
  got some questions. Here we go.
• 57:24
  Why is he here? What's going on?
• 57:27
  Who are these guys? I mean, where to start with
• 57:30
  Salieri? Firstly, he loves his scheme,
• 57:34
  doesn't he? Always scheming, cooking
• 57:36
  something up? Yeah, but as a character, he is
• 57:38
  kind of the lead. It's a Mozart biopic, tool
• 57:41
  through his eyes, which works brilliantly.
• 57:43
  He's kind of the villain and the hero at the same time.
• 57:45
  It is. And so there we used to explore
• 57:47
  some of the main themes of the film, like jealousy and
• 57:49
  religion, faith. What's tragic is that he's got
• 57:53
  just about everything that he wants.
• 57:55
  He's wealthy, he's successful, he's respected, but he doesn't
• 57:58
  have more thought. Genius and it drives him
• 58:01
  literally mad. He is a narcissist.
• 58:03
  He sees everything is being about him.
• 58:05
  His dad dies, God's accepted his deal.
• 58:08
  Mozart shows up, God's mocking him.
• 58:10
  He could have taken it as God put him in Vienna to facilitate
• 58:13
  Mozart's genius to help bring this beautiful music into the
• 58:16
  world. But no, it's all about Salieri,
• 58:19
  which makes him a great tragic character and the acting, it's
• 58:23
  ridiculous. Abraham's great all the way
• 58:26
  through, but it's a scenes as all Salieri where he's
• 58:30
  breathtaking, to be honest. Yeah, he's clearly having a
• 58:32
  whale of a time is the old fella, and rightly because the
• 58:35
  dialogue he's been given is magnificent.
• 58:37
  But the delivery's there as well.
• 58:39
  Yeah, he's got loads of great moments.
• 58:41
  My favorite might be where he reveals his plan to the priests
• 58:44
  to have Mozart write a requiem for his own funeral.
• 58:46
  Yeah, he's like Mozart's little coffin.
• 58:49
  And in the silence, music and the death must start to play.
• 58:53
  It's massive. He goes through like reverence,
• 58:56
  joy into anger, and then he's all calm and calculated all in
• 58:59
  about 30 seconds. And it's like, well, that's some
• 59:02
  of the best acting I've ever seen then.
• 59:04
  And I have no idea at all why that's not put up there in the
• 59:07
  great movie monologues, because I find it totally mesmerizing.
• 59:10
  And honestly, with the level of the writing and the acting being
• 59:14
  as high as it is when you're talking greatest Hollywood
• 59:16
  characters, Salieri's in that conversation for me.
• 59:19
  I think he's incredible. I think, I think that
• 59:22
  monologue's not in there because it's a stand out moment of the
• 59:24
  film, whereas I think he's so consistent.
• 59:26
  Every moment's a stand out. So his monologue would have to
• 59:29
  be every single line he says. Yeah, I know.
• 59:31
  Yeah, you're probably right. As you said, that's some of the
• 59:32
  best act I've ever seen. I'm like, I don't even know if
• 59:35
  he's acting. I have no idea.
• 59:37
  There's such an elegance in precision to this performance.
• 59:41
  Abraham is somebody who's very theatrical and he'd be amazed as
• 59:45
  he on stage, but he knows how to take all this dialogue and sell
• 59:48
  it on screen. And I think he's the most
• 59:50
  British American actor I've ever seen.
• 59:52
  There's something very like Laurence Olivier or John Giel.
• 59:55
  Good about him. Yeah, very classic, isn't he?
• 59:57
  Yeah, really classic and just an absolute gift of a part.
• 1:00:01
  There's so much to sink your teeth into with Salieri as an
• 1:00:04
  actor. And I think maybe the most
• 1:00:06
  striking thing for me is so much of this performance is Salieri
• 1:00:10
  being really Hacked Off with more thought.
• 1:00:12
  The amount of times Foreman cuts to Abraham and he's got a face
• 1:00:15
  like a bull. Permanently scowling, constantly
• 1:00:20
  furious, constantly biting back this eruption of Heydrid.
• 1:00:23
  He's got boiling way inside. But Abraham's performance always
• 1:00:27
  finds a different way to show this.
• 1:00:28
  It never gets boring. I never feel like I've seen this
• 1:00:31
  bit. Come on, do something else.
• 1:00:33
  Like this performance could really be overshadowed by the
• 1:00:36
  mania you get from water, but it never is in Abraham.
• 1:00:39
  Always make sure you feel slightly sorry for him.
• 1:00:43
  No matter how nefarious he gets in his pants, is always had a
• 1:00:46
  little bit of empathy you have for I think that's all down
• 1:00:49
  Abraham. I mean it's the same character
• 1:00:52
  traits and the same furious nature is Basil.
• 1:00:56
  Faulty. But the way that he delivers it,
• 1:00:59
  he's just constantly frustrated and pissed off.
• 1:01:02
  But it's a completely different take.
• 1:01:03
  It's unbelievable. Well, according to Foreman,
• 1:01:06
  every major star wanted to be Salieri at the time he was
• 1:01:08
  casting, and there were a few big names auditioned for the
• 1:01:11
  part, if you'd care to hear some.
• 1:01:13
  Yeah, so Burt Reynolds was nearly candidate.
• 1:01:17
  Right. Wow, massive Tash for Salieri.
• 1:01:20
  Lovely that. Really hairy chest.
• 1:01:22
  Yeah, Mozart be jealous of Salieri's Tash of.
• 1:01:24
  Course he will. Salieri and the Bandit.
• 1:01:28
  Donald Sutherland read for the part, as did Sam Waterston.
• 1:01:31
  OK, Al Pacino apparently wanted the part and lobbied for it.
• 1:01:34
  Right? What would you think of Pacino
• 1:01:36
  Salieri kicking off? Yeah, that would have been good.
• 1:01:41
  Well, another worldwide star lobby for the part as well.
• 1:01:43
  So would you like to have seen Salieri played by Mick Jagger?
• 1:01:50
  Surely. Not.
• 1:01:51
  No, I wouldn't. Jagger and boy, you're prancing
• 1:01:54
  about. I would like to see that like a
• 1:01:57
  short film, maybe in a music video.
• 1:01:59
  That would have been good. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:01
  And Abraham originally auditioned for the part of Count
• 1:02:04
  Rosenberg, who we mentioned earlier.
• 1:02:06
  During one audition session, Foreman asked him to stay back
• 1:02:09
  and read with other actors are Salieri.
• 1:02:11
  And Foreman was so blown away that he told Abraham he was his
• 1:02:14
  number one choice to play him instead.
• 1:02:16
  Yeah, Abraham apparently said to him, number one choice.
• 1:02:19
  I mean, great, but what does that mean?
• 1:02:21
  Have I got the part or not? Yeah, but he hadn't prepared
• 1:02:24
  anything as old Salieri, so apparently he just had to make
• 1:02:26
  it up on the spot. So it must have been good.
• 1:02:29
  Yeah. And then Foreman told Abraham he
• 1:02:32
  wanted to get him back in for more auditions.
• 1:02:34
  Abraham said no, I'm paid in my kitchen.
• 1:02:37
  And probably, Foreman said to Saul's ants.
• 1:02:39
  This guy thinks he's a great actor, eases up, breaks against
• 1:02:42
  him and not Salieri, and that's why he was cast.
• 1:02:45
  Yeah, yeah, Forman must have seen some potential in him
• 1:02:48
  playing Salieri, I think, which is why, yes, understanding in
• 1:02:50
  the auditions, just to see what he was like.
• 1:02:54
  Ridiculously good, as it turns out.
• 1:02:56
  Yep. Abraham said that he and Tom
• 1:02:58
  Halls respected each other but weren't friends.
• 1:03:00
  During filming, Holtz was in another hotel with the rest of
• 1:03:03
  the cast and they would throw parties and stopped inviting
• 1:03:06
  Abraham as he never showed up. And Abraham said he was jealous
• 1:03:09
  of Holtz because he got on so well with the rest of the cast
• 1:03:12
  and crew. Which that's pretty perfect,
• 1:03:14
  isn't it? Let's be honest.
• 1:03:14
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I bet Forman was loving
• 1:03:17
  it, the turning into the character as kind of yeah.
• 1:03:19
  Yeah, like leaving Matt Damon out when they're doing the boot
• 1:03:21
  camp on Saving Proud Ryan. Yeah, yeah, so there was.
• 1:03:24
  Said the opposite of that, isn't it?
• 1:03:26
  Yeah. Before filming started, Abraham
• 1:03:29
  learnt to read and conduct music for the role and he went through
• 1:03:31
  a lot to become old Salieri. The makeup on the film was Dick
• 1:03:35
  Smith and it took 4 1/2 hours every day for him to turn
• 1:03:38
  Abraham into a 75 year old man. Smith's ageing makeup for
• 1:03:42
  Salieri was 8 separate formal latex pieces that covered his
• 1:03:46
  whole face except for his nose. He also had contact lenses that
• 1:03:49
  gave the eyes a faded appearance.
• 1:03:51
  Liver spots were added to his skin and he wore ball cup with
• 1:03:54
  thin and white hair. As we said, it took 4 1/2 hours
• 1:03:56
  to apply it every day in revolutionized ageing makeup in
• 1:03:59
  Hollywood, where One Piece masks tended to be used before that.
• 1:04:03
  Right. Yeah, Dick Smith makeup legend
• 1:04:06
  turned Marlon Brando into the Godfather, didn't he?
• 1:04:08
  Yes, that's right. Yeah.
• 1:04:10
  Apparently he created the Salieri prosthetics working all
• 1:04:12
  alone in his basement, and then flew into Prague with all the
• 1:04:14
  makeup himself. And the Abraham said getting
• 1:04:17
  into character was pretty easy because all you had to do was
• 1:04:19
  kind of look in the mirror. I mean, it does look fantastic
• 1:04:22
  as Old Salvieri. Yeah, it's unreal.
• 1:04:24
  Yeah, for his performance, Al Salvieri F Marie Abraham won the
• 1:04:28
  Academy Award for Best actor, beating out Tom Holtz.
• 1:04:31
  Yeah. Have you seen his acceptance
• 1:04:32
  speech though? Yeah, it's fantastic.
• 1:04:34
  It's really good. He praises Foreman in the
• 1:04:37
  writing and everything, and then he says the only thing missing
• 1:04:40
  is I should have Tom Hall standing by my side.
• 1:04:42
  Yeah, classy. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:45
  Wonderful. It would have been great if
• 1:04:46
  given that they're both of them. That would have been.
• 1:04:49
  Perfect, Yeah. And for us, an Oscar worthy turn
• 1:04:52
  from F Marie Abraham and Salieri A. 100%.
• 1:04:56
  And then some. The last, but by no means least
• 1:05:01
  cast member we're going to talk about is Elizabeth Berridge, who
• 1:05:03
  plays Constanza Mozart NI Weber, the landlady's daughter who
• 1:05:08
  captures Wolfie's heart. Stansey marries him, then stands
• 1:05:11
  by him through poverty, alcoholism and death.
• 1:05:15
  A charming young lady, according Ambra Joseph Matt.
• 1:05:19
  How was Constanza and Elizabeth Berridge in the role?
• 1:05:22
  I think her performance really works because Holtzer's
• 1:05:25
  performance really works. They are repairing this.
• 1:05:28
  If the cast runner like we mentioned, she wouldn't work at
• 1:05:31
  all. No.
• 1:05:34
  Please, your choice be probably cast Emma Thompson or maybe
• 1:05:37
  Helen Mirren back then. Yeah, I was going to say it
• 1:05:39
  would need to be Helen Mirren on Meryl Streep.
• 1:05:42
  But because it's halts with this undisguised American accent,
• 1:05:45
  almost planted like a jock, at some point you can have beverage
• 1:05:48
  with her accent almost being like a cheerleader.
• 1:05:51
  I think she's very like, well, I think she does fit in.
• 1:05:53
  Yeah. If someone wants to see it.
• 1:05:54
  She's the weak link in the film. I probably agree.
• 1:05:57
  Not be too harsh. The whole wealthy thing just get
• 1:06:00
  a bit annoying. Yeah, but like I say, she comes
• 1:06:02
  as a pay withholds and that's why she works so well.
• 1:06:06
  Yeah, as far as the cast goes, I think Stanley's kind of the
• 1:06:08
  secret weapon in the film, dominated by these two huge
• 1:06:11
  characters. She kind of grounds it.
• 1:06:13
  Yeah. It's nice to see a character
• 1:06:14
  who's actually like a normal human being because he that too,
• 1:06:18
  are away with the fairies where Mozart's bang on about magic
• 1:06:21
  flutes stand. He's like, we don't have any
• 1:06:24
  money. You're lunatic.
• 1:06:25
  She's all into the world in a lot of ways.
• 1:06:28
  And food stands, he would see different sides to Mozart.
• 1:06:30
  We'll see him as a husband, as a father, as a son.
• 1:06:33
  Now we have limitations in all those areas, like most people
• 1:06:36
  do. It makes him human.
• 1:06:38
  And I buy that stands he falls from because she's not just the
• 1:06:40
  put upon wife. We do see moments where they're
• 1:06:42
  getting along, like the intro that we talked about or when she
• 1:06:45
  says about chicken aid as money. I want to hear in my hand and
• 1:06:48
  motor goes, I'll put it in your hand.
• 1:06:50
  She loves a dirty joke, Stanzi. So she's got the right guy.
• 1:06:54
  Yeah. And Elizabeth Beverage, I think
• 1:06:56
  she's really good. She was only 21 when the film
• 1:06:59
  this. And I mean, look at what she's
• 1:07:01
  dealing with. Milos Forman at the peak of his
• 1:07:03
  powers, 2 actors who were juking it out at the Oscars, the music
• 1:07:07
  of Mozart. And I think she holds her own.
• 1:07:09
  She has a few great scenes, but I like her.
• 1:07:11
  At the end, she comes back to the apartment and the place is
• 1:07:14
  trashed. Mozart needs her, so by the time
• 1:07:16
  she returns, he's a wreck. Salieri's there for some reason.
• 1:07:19
  Yeah. And she just sort everyone out.
• 1:07:22
  Locks the Requiem away in the case and tells Salieri to sling
• 1:07:24
  his UK. That's it, yeah.
• 1:07:26
  An essential character in the writing and also in what
• 1:07:29
  Elizabeth Barrett brings anchors the whole film for me.
• 1:07:31
  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
• 1:07:33
  It's just this anchored performance.
• 1:07:35
  I think you can tell that she loves Mozart and his talent is
• 1:07:38
  almost secondary. Oh yeah, kind of additional to
• 1:07:40
  who he is. She has an innocence and a
• 1:07:42
  strength at the same time she does.
• 1:07:45
  She's very innocent and that she wants to know what's going on,
• 1:07:47
  but she keeps him grounded. He would just be away with it.
• 1:07:49
  Like he would absolutely fly away.
• 1:07:52
  You'd have no chance. She is perfect between the two
• 1:07:54
  of them and I think you can see that throughout the whole film.
• 1:07:57
  I think she's wonderful. She really plays it well.
• 1:08:00
  She really knows that place. She doesn't go too over the top
• 1:08:03
  on the scenes, but she absolutely weighs everything
• 1:08:05
  down and she's the humanity of the film and plays that really
• 1:08:08
  well. She does for sure.
• 1:08:10
  And the first person Foreman thought about casting as
• 1:08:13
  Constanza was Amy Irving, who had played it in the Broadway
• 1:08:16
  version of the player. But she wasn't keen on flying to
• 1:08:18
  a communist controlled Prague for six months.
• 1:08:20
  It would sort of client. Foreman then went through a
• 1:08:23
  casting process. Rebecca Damoni and Elizabeth
• 1:08:26
  McGovern both auditioned. Right.
• 1:08:29
  Elizabeth McGovern. She'd been in Ragtime Foreman
• 1:08:31
  film before this but obviously must have felt she wasn't right
• 1:08:35
  here for whatever reason. OK, yeah.
• 1:08:37
  And then after auditioning, Foreman then cast Meg Tilly
• 1:08:40
  because he liked her performance in Psycho 2.
• 1:08:43
  She did table reads and dress rehearsals, but the day before
• 1:08:46
  filming was due to start, she was playing football with some
• 1:08:48
  locals in the street and Prague and Torah ligament in an A
• 1:08:51
  meaning tried to be replaced. Nightmare.
• 1:08:55
  Yeah, same injury that Ronaldo got in the 90s apparently, so
• 1:08:58
  she must have been good. I'll stick the movies.
• 1:09:00
  Psycho 2 is meant she's great and two.
• 1:09:03
  But yeah, that's devastating. This image didn't make till you
• 1:09:05
  are standing with Tom Holes as well, and she looks the part,
• 1:09:08
  right? Yeah.
• 1:09:08
  And Hill said she was absolute dynamite in the rehearsals as
• 1:09:11
  well. Yeah, I'd love to have seen her.
• 1:09:13
  Did it say was the day before? Yeah.
• 1:09:14
  Day before ohh. Nightmare.
• 1:09:16
  Say don't do sports, guys. There you go, there's your
• 1:09:20
  proof. There's your proof.
• 1:09:22
  So an emergency custom session had to be held and form an
• 1:09:25
  audition. 60 actresses at short notice and chose 2 possible
• 1:09:29
  replacements, Diane Franklin and Elizabeth Berridge, who is
• 1:09:32
  recommended to the casting directors by our acting teacher
• 1:09:35
  Warren. Robertson yeah, apparently
• 1:09:38
  neither Franklin nor Beverage had auditioned the first time
• 1:09:40
  round, so seems a choice by Foreman.
• 1:09:43
  But I mean it worked so. And then both actresses spent a
• 1:09:48
  week in Prague with Foreman, and he made his decision by saying
• 1:09:50
  to them, you both have the part, but one of you is just too
• 1:09:54
  pretty to play Constanza. So I'm going after cast
• 1:09:56
  Elizabeth. Yeah, Elizabeth Berridge said
• 1:10:00
  she felt like she won the booby prize.
• 1:10:04
  But also Diane Franklin was to be like, hang on, I look no
• 1:10:07
  different now to how I did before You brought me all the
• 1:10:10
  way to Prague for a whole week. So.
• 1:10:12
  The real Constanza came from the musical family herself.
• 1:10:15
  She was a trained soprano and would rehearse with Mozart, and
• 1:10:18
  her sisters Josepha and Aloisa were Sopranos who performed in
• 1:10:21
  Mozart's operas. Yeah, we don't see any of that
• 1:10:23
  in the film, Stanley's musical background.
• 1:10:26
  Not sure if it would work quite as well if we did.
• 1:10:28
  It's good that she's not musical, I think.
• 1:10:30
  Yeah, it would have complicated things.
• 1:10:32
  You know what's his recognition for Elizabeth Beverage for
• 1:10:34
  playing Constanza, but a good supporting turn for us.
• 1:10:38
  Great. Yeah.
• 1:10:39
  And that is the main Amadeus cast.
• 1:10:41
  Tom Halls bringing Mozart to giggling life, F Marie Abraham
• 1:10:44
  creating one of cinema's great tragic villain slash heroes, and
• 1:10:48
  Elizabeth Beverage grounding it all with some warmth and
• 1:10:50
  humanity. Definitely three very different
• 1:10:52
  performances that mesh together very well for us.
• 1:10:55
  Yep. Indeed.
• 1:10:56
  Yeah, absolutely the middle. Heading into the middle of
• 1:11:05
  Amadeus and the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri intensifies.
• 1:11:09
  We're going to be looking at the scenes around The Marriage of
• 1:11:11
  Figaro, one of Mozart's most famous works.
• 1:11:14
  But first we've got a couple of big character sequences to get
• 1:11:17
  into. We'll do so.
• 1:11:19
  With Mozart established at court, Constanza visits Salieri,
• 1:11:22
  hoping to secure a royal appointment for her husband.
• 1:11:25
  Then Mozart's father Leopold, played by Roy Dutras, turns up.
• 1:11:29
  Mozart takes into a masquerade party, plays piano and Mox
• 1:11:32
  Salieri, not realizing the Italian maestro is also there.
• 1:11:36
  Yeah, yeah. Matt ready for some nibbles of
• 1:11:39
  Venus? Always because when Stanzi shows
• 1:11:43
  up with more taught originals to argue his case, I think it's one
• 1:11:48
  of the best scenes in showing all of Salieri's character
• 1:11:51
  because from his perspective, there's no way this little girl
• 1:11:55
  in his eyes is going to tell him what to do or make demands of
• 1:11:58
  him. Which no, you have to read this
• 1:12:00
  now. You have to read this now.
• 1:12:02
  And the fact that he's just trying to win it over with those
• 1:12:04
  sweets that just tells you what he thinks of first.
• 1:12:07
  It's just a child in his eyes. And it's this full on charm
• 1:12:10
  offensive. You know, dog called me
• 1:12:11
  Excellency. I was born in a small town, you
• 1:12:14
  know, so desperate to get these Mozart original to try and
• 1:12:17
  sabotage from somehow. But the thing that's fascinating
• 1:12:21
  to me about Salieri is his love of music and how he appreciates
• 1:12:25
  it. It always wins out over the
• 1:12:28
  jealousy he has from what sort. So when he starts reading that
• 1:12:31
  music, he can see how sickened he is because it's so good.
• 1:12:35
  As he says, not one, not out of place.
• 1:12:37
  Remove one phrase and the whole thing would collapse.
• 1:12:40
  And he is just off in this reverie of what it sounds like
• 1:12:43
  in his head. And I think one of the best
• 1:12:44
  things his film does is making us, as an audience who may not
• 1:12:48
  have an appreciation of what truly is brilliant about this
• 1:12:50
  music, understand it all the same.
• 1:12:53
  Because of Salieri's reaction to it and my chord at the top, it
• 1:12:57
  is miraculous. He just can't deny it, and that
• 1:13:01
  makes it even worse for him. Yeah, yeah, it absolutely does.
• 1:13:05
  I think almost everything that makes Amadeus brilliant is right
• 1:13:09
  here in this scene. The music, acting, performances
• 1:13:13
  and form and kind of weaving all together into a story.
• 1:13:16
  How charming is Stanzi? Her reaction when Salieri tells
• 1:13:19
  her the cakes are called Nipples of Venus and she's like shocked.
• 1:13:22
  And then she eats one and she's like, she's great.
• 1:13:27
  But the stand out is obviously the music.
• 1:13:29
  When Salieri reads more thoughts manuscript and we hear the music
• 1:13:32
  in his head again, we're cutting from one piece of music to the
• 1:13:34
  next to Salieri like tears through the sheets.
• 1:13:37
  Brilliant. But also it's like, feel like a
• 1:13:39
  lady Salieri. She told you the originals.
• 1:13:41
  God six. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:13:42
  And then at the same time, we're cutting back and forth to old
• 1:13:45
  man Salieri explaining why it's also brilliant.
• 1:13:47
  It's it's all well put together and the dialogue, as Salieri
• 1:13:51
  describes Mozart's work, music finished as no music is ever
• 1:13:55
  finished, displaced one note and there would be diminishment.
• 1:13:58
  It's outrageous dialogue and it works so well.
• 1:14:02
  I just can't get enough of it. To me, the filmmaking here
• 1:14:05
  matches the brilliance it's describing Mozart as having, and
• 1:14:08
  not for the last time either. It's fantastic.
• 1:14:11
  Yeah, the nipples of Venus that were mentioned that Salieri
• 1:14:14
  gives to Consanza weren't made-up.
• 1:14:16
  They were real Italian chocolates at the time.
• 1:14:19
  But when they filmed it then we were made from Marza pancakes
• 1:14:22
  and Elizabeth Barrage didn't know that she could spit them
• 1:14:24
  out between takes so kept swallowing them.
• 1:14:26
  She later said they were disgusting and made us sick.
• 1:14:30
  Huge dump some miles upon would make you sick, yeah.
• 1:14:32
  Definitely would, yeah. But Sal, yeah, he's munching on
• 1:14:34
  cake and shot that all the way through the film, isn't he?
• 1:14:37
  Yeah. So he's taking off our celibacy
• 1:14:39
  in exchange of God giving him musical talent.
• 1:14:41
  So that desire comes out in his sweet tooth is the idea, surely.
• 1:14:45
  Yeah, yeah. Lovely touching the character
• 1:14:47
  writing that. Yeah, it's great.
• 1:14:49
  And this the director's good of the film.
• 1:14:50
  And that came out in 2002. It's 20 minutes longer than the
• 1:14:54
  theatrical version and has a few extra scenes.
• 1:14:57
  And the biggest difference probably comes in this scene
• 1:15:00
  because when after Sallieri has looked over Mozart's music, he
• 1:15:03
  tells Constanza to come back up that night, and if she sleeps
• 1:15:06
  with him, he'll give Mozart the job.
• 1:15:08
  Constanza does come back, but Sallieri hasn't thrown out
• 1:15:11
  instead. Right.
• 1:15:12
  Yeah, I prefer it without that scene.
• 1:15:14
  Salieri goes way too far. You totally humiliate Stanzi,
• 1:15:17
  and then after that it's like, hang on, you still didn't get
• 1:15:20
  Mozart the job. What a bastard.
• 1:15:22
  Yeah, so Mozart's taking Leopold to a party.
• 1:15:26
  That's what I'm going to talk about because this is a great
• 1:15:28
  party, this. It looks this is fantastic.
• 1:15:30
  It's nuts. It's great.
• 1:15:32
  It's straight out of eyes, wide, short.
• 1:15:34
  Yeah, it is a bit. Just a little bit easier to
• 1:15:35
  watch. There's musical chairs in there.
• 1:15:38
  I love that. He's then says to him, I want
• 1:15:41
  you to come back to Salzburg with me.
• 1:15:43
  No, you've got to do something that's in the room.
• 1:15:45
  And he's just completely missed the point of how serious that
• 1:15:48
  is. It's like, I want you to leave
• 1:15:50
  all this about me. He's like, no man, it's going to
• 1:15:52
  be now. It's going to be in the room.
• 1:15:54
  The way he just starts turning stuff down.
• 1:15:57
  Oh, no, no, that's too easy. What's next?
• 1:15:59
  What's next? What's next inside to play
• 1:16:00
  Salieri? And he's like, that is a
• 1:16:02
  challenge. That is a challenge.
• 1:16:04
  And he's just rising to it. He just loves the theatricality
• 1:16:06
  of everything that's going on and loves being in the center of
• 1:16:09
  attention and loves having the spotlight on him.
• 1:16:11
  But you can tell as well from Salieri, just from his eyes,
• 1:16:14
  just the way the darting around the room from behind that mask,
• 1:16:17
  he's raging again. It's a great, great scene.
• 1:16:20
  Really, really beautifully shot as well.
• 1:16:22
  Like the production design on this is wonderful.
• 1:16:24
  The use of colors and this is incredible.
• 1:16:26
  You really buy into it. Great, great scene, great party.
• 1:16:29
  Yeah, more thoughts that arrives.
• 1:16:31
  Leopold. Absolute misery.
• 1:16:33
  Guts of a man. He really is the most dramatic
• 1:16:36
  arrival of a father. Going to see his son ever.
• 1:16:38
  Huge black coat at the top of the stairs.
• 1:16:41
  Yeah, he's like Batman, but fatherhood like another theme
• 1:16:44
  with the film when that comes out here, Leopold, this
• 1:16:47
  overbearing stage dad who pushed Mozart into music and has been
• 1:16:50
  living through him since he was a kid.
• 1:16:52
  And Mozart kind of rebels against it by being outrageous,
• 1:16:55
  which is dad hates. Yeah, I'm on.
• 1:16:57
  Salieri is the opposite. His father stopped him playing
• 1:17:00
  music and then died. And Salieri spent his whole life
• 1:17:03
  trying to prove his father wrong.
• 1:17:04
  And God then becomes a kind of proxy for his father.
• 1:17:07
  So when Mozart rebels against too much of his dad's attention,
• 1:17:10
  Salieri is kind of desperate for some.
• 1:17:12
  Yeah. And at the masquerade party,
• 1:17:14
  there is some great visual storytelling.
• 1:17:17
  Leopold's wearing the comedy tragedy mask.
• 1:17:19
  Mozart sees the back of Leopold's head, the tragedy
• 1:17:21
  side, and thinks, Oh no, he's not happy.
• 1:17:24
  Then Leopold turns round, smiling the comedy side, and
• 1:17:26
  Mozart laughs. But when he takes the mask off,
• 1:17:28
  he's actually frowning. It's quite a funny moment, but
• 1:17:31
  also a great way to show us the Mozart can't read his father at
• 1:17:35
  all. He wants his father's approval,
• 1:17:37
  but has no idea how to get it. And it's all shown in those
• 1:17:40
  images and then Mozart impression of Salieri total
• 1:17:43
  humiliation and obviously said something Salieri very the same
• 1:17:47
  mass Leopold ways laid out a freak Mozart out, which works a
• 1:17:51
  treat as we say yeah. Yeah, Leopold Mortard is paid by
• 1:17:55
  Roy Doctors, and he was mostly known as the stage and TV actor
• 1:17:59
  at the time. And the film's portrayal of
• 1:18:01
  Leopold as Domini when is largely accurate.
• 1:18:03
  Apparently he really did try to control his son's career and
• 1:18:06
  finances and didn't approve of his marriage to Constanza.
• 1:18:09
  And the real painting of Leopold that Mozart has in his apartment
• 1:18:13
  is based on a real painting of Leopold Mozart, but being
• 1:18:16
  recreated to look like Roy Dutress.
• 1:18:18
  Yeah, the most judgmental painting I've ever seen.
• 1:18:21
  Now all but looking down on Mozart.
• 1:18:25
  Roy Dobry is as good as Leopold, though.
• 1:18:27
  Like disapproving father. Yeah.
• 1:18:28
  I think this film is largely Standy telling loads of
• 1:18:30
  different guys to, like, secure their shit.
• 1:18:33
  Great from beverage When you get Leopold told and she's like, I'm
• 1:18:36
  sick to death of it. It's great.
• 1:18:38
  Yeah. Some big moments in the film
• 1:18:40
  there then. So yeah, we discovering more
• 1:18:42
  Mozart genius and Mozart trying and failing to impress his
• 1:18:45
  father. The rivalries heating up nicely.
• 1:18:49
  Yep, even more humiliation. When is this going to stop?
• 1:18:52
  Yeah, from privacy humiliations to public triumphs.
• 1:18:58
  Sort of. We head into the marriage of
• 1:19:00
  Figueroa, one of Mozart's great operas.
• 1:19:03
  First we see Count Rosenberg literally removing the ballet
• 1:19:05
  from the peace before the emperor puts it back in, then
• 1:19:08
  struggles to stay awake during the performance.
• 1:19:11
  Matt ready for some imperial meddling?
• 1:19:13
  Always. Oblige me.
• 1:19:15
  These scenes where it's the removal of the ballet to
• 1:19:18
  sabotage Mozart, it's so good because it's worth remembering
• 1:19:21
  Salieri is not acting on his own here.
• 1:19:23
  They're all dislike him, but all want to bring him down, and they
• 1:19:27
  all want to humiliate him. And it looks like, oh, this is
• 1:19:29
  how they're going to do it. This is how they're going to
• 1:19:30
  win. And it's really funny when after
• 1:19:32
  it's been taken out, a Mozart goes off in a stroke, even turns
• 1:19:35
  up at Salieri's place and tells him he's so angry he nearly
• 1:19:38
  burned the pages, but his wife saved them.
• 1:19:41
  And Salieri just goes really sarcastically, thank God.
• 1:19:48
  And then you have the follow up with the emperor.
• 1:19:49
  And I think this proves in terms of what the characters believe.
• 1:19:52
  But God must be on more outside because why is the emperor
• 1:19:56
  turned up for the rehearsal? Yeah, And it obviously looks so
• 1:19:59
  ridiculous without the ballet. And it's another really funny
• 1:20:02
  lie from Jeffrey Jones when he just goes, well, look at them
• 1:20:05
  like you. Can't.
• 1:20:06
  Believe how stupid this looks and it's very funny.
• 1:20:09
  So the ballet is back in and Mozart just given that little,
• 1:20:12
  like, wing to Salieri because he thinks he helped the decision.
• 1:20:15
  Yeah, Yeah. And Salieri just gives that wave
• 1:20:17
  or to defeat, like, whatever, just get on with it.
• 1:20:20
  I'm giving up trying to sabotage you.
• 1:20:24
  God is on your side. Mozart is protected from on high
• 1:20:28
  and they can't do anything to. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:20:30
  You know, you're watching a story being told.
• 1:20:32
  Well, when a guy ripping pages out of a book feels like the
• 1:20:35
  most devastating thing you've ever seen.
• 1:20:37
  Yeah. And Rosenberg being impeccably
• 1:20:39
  polite while doing. It's great.
• 1:20:41
  Like, yeah, I'm taking you out what you should never have put
• 1:20:43
  in. And like, our Foreman shows as
• 1:20:45
  what it looks like on the stage as well.
• 1:20:47
  The dancers prancing about in silence.
• 1:20:49
  Again, a story about music but always being told visually.
• 1:20:52
  Yeah. And in reality, the ballet was
• 1:20:54
  never removed from the March of Figaro.
• 1:20:56
  But the idea for the scene is rooted in reality, the real.
• 1:21:00
  But Joseph did give out instructions that forbid ballet
• 1:21:02
  and operas unless they were in tackle to the action.
• 1:21:06
  Yes, though apparently this wasn't anything to do with Marie
• 1:21:08
  Antoinette, who the film references.
• 1:21:11
  Slightly crowbar in reference that.
• 1:21:14
  Just a bit. Yeah, it was because the real
• 1:21:15
  Joseph was trying to promote German theatre, so frowned upon
• 1:21:18
  ballet which originated in Italy.
• 1:21:20
  Right, so I've got the actual performance of Figaro, which the
• 1:21:24
  music here for a start is absolutely beautiful, it really
• 1:21:28
  is wonderful. But some of the dialogue here is
• 1:21:31
  absolutely fantastic. Making my defeat more bitter
• 1:21:34
  with every passing bar is so heartbreakingly brutal, but at
• 1:21:39
  the same time so defeatist in his attitude.
• 1:21:42
  And just that, you know that maybe this is the point now
• 1:21:45
  where Salieri is just going to stop until the embryo ONS and
• 1:21:50
  he's back. He's back.
• 1:21:51
  He's back in the game year ago because he knows the rules of
• 1:21:54
  this. Then he says, with that yawn, I
• 1:21:56
  saw my defeat turn into a victory.
• 1:21:59
  Absolutely brilliant. And then it gets to that point
• 1:22:02
  where the composer could still get 9 and it just cuts back.
• 1:22:06
  It's just another great moment where I just said, how long is
• 1:22:08
  this humiliation is going to last?
• 1:22:10
  It's Salieri singing more so humiliated.
• 1:22:12
  I don't know. He's going to be, and he's
• 1:22:14
  looking forward to it. But the actual performance of
• 1:22:16
  Figure, I think it's just beautifully staged.
• 1:22:18
  Music is unbelievable. And there's just this real
• 1:22:21
  element of heartbreak and then this element of actually, I feel
• 1:22:24
  quite good for Salieri. No, I don't.
• 1:22:26
  I'm so conflicted. And that's the point of the film
• 1:22:28
  where you start wondering who to fight for a little bit and where
• 1:22:31
  it's going. So it's a great middle of the
• 1:22:33
  film where it twists itself around.
• 1:22:35
  Yeah, the marriage of figure role like Mozart is best one of
• 1:22:38
  the most famous operas ever. Salieri can't believe the
• 1:22:40
  brilliance of what you're saying.
• 1:22:42
  Yeah, in the emperor just wants to go to bed.
• 1:22:44
  Too many demands on the royal. Yeah.
• 1:22:46
  Yeah. But what we'll get straight
• 1:22:47
  after this, which I think we do need, is we'll finally see
• 1:22:50
  Salieri in action with his opera.
• 1:22:52
  Yeah, actually, A King of Ormus, it's called.
• 1:22:55
  And not that I know anything about opera, but I think it's
• 1:22:57
  pretty good. And the emperor bloody loves it.
• 1:23:00
  Can't get enough. The greatest opera yet written,
• 1:23:02
  my friends. Yeah.
• 1:23:04
  And there's a Singing in the Rain reference here, if you've
• 1:23:06
  noticed. Is there?
• 1:23:08
  So the Emperor tells Salieri he's the brightest star in our
• 1:23:11
  musical firmament, right? Right.
• 1:23:12
  In Singing in the Rain, Lena Lamont calls herself a
• 1:23:15
  shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament, right?
• 1:23:18
  OK, that's too close. It can't be a coincidence,
• 1:23:21
  surely? For the use of the word
• 1:23:22
  firmament, I think gives it away there.
• 1:23:25
  But what starts feedback? Not just a genius comboza, he's
• 1:23:28
  a master of the backhanded compliment as well.
• 1:23:30
  I never knew music like that was possible.
• 1:23:32
  What can you say but Salieri, you might as well have just
• 1:23:36
  went. It was shit made to be honest.
• 1:23:40
  And it's around this time when Salieri sends the maid LOL to
• 1:23:43
  work at Mortot's apartment so she can report back to Salieri.
• 1:23:47
  And she wasn't in the original play.
• 1:23:48
  She was added for the film and played by Cynthia Nixon, who
• 1:23:51
  would later become famous for Claim, Miranda Hobson, Sex and
• 1:23:54
  the City. That's right, she's only 17 at
• 1:23:56
  the time and still at school, so her parents had a written into a
• 1:23:59
  contract that if she didn't shoot for two days in a row,
• 1:24:02
  should be sent home and form and agreed to those terms.
• 1:24:05
  Right. Yeah, my tradition as a
• 1:24:07
  character though, I think, isn't she?
• 1:24:09
  I think she's fantastic as well. Great, I.
• 1:24:11
  Think so. She doesn't have loads to do,
• 1:24:13
  but I think she's really good. She's got the acting talent,
• 1:24:15
  clearly. So no surprise she went on to be
• 1:24:17
  successful. Yeah.
• 1:24:18
  Yeah. Must have been some School
• 1:24:19
  Report as well. I've been in Prague shooting
• 1:24:21
  that film that won the Oscars. Yeah.
• 1:24:23
  Work experience, yeah. And that's the middle of
• 1:24:27
  Amadeus. We've seen Salieri discover
• 1:24:29
  further depths in Mozart's genius and his all hatred of
• 1:24:32
  him, and the pieces are in place for a tragic final act.
• 1:24:36
  Before that, though, should we talk about some of the other
• 1:24:38
  talents behind the production? No, absolutely.
• 1:24:41
  Spirit. The crew.
• 1:24:48
  Milos phone wrote for the talent of crew and Amadeus, and it's
• 1:24:51
  time to discuss some of those people now.
• 1:24:52
  OK, we're going to be talking about the music by Mozart
• 1:24:55
  himself and Miroslav Andre, Czech Workers director of
• 1:24:59
  photography. But first let's discuss the
• 1:25:01
  screenwriter. So Amadeus was written by Peter
• 1:25:05
  Schaeffer, adapting his own Tony award-winning player.
• 1:25:08
  This wasn't Schaeffer's first rodeo in film.
• 1:25:11
  He previously adapted another of his own plays, Equus, in 1977,
• 1:25:15
  but Amadeus would become his most successful screenwork.
• 1:25:19
  Peter Schaeffer's writing. Yeah, Matt, how is it?
• 1:25:23
  I think the right on this goes way beyond what you'd expect
• 1:25:26
  from a biopic and there's so much depth to it.
• 1:25:29
  It does sound superficial to see it, but the main theme is
• 1:25:32
  jealousy. But I've never seen jealousy
• 1:25:34
  examined in so much detail, no in the such a twist to it.
• 1:25:38
  Because Salieri's jealousy exists on different levels.
• 1:25:41
  It would be one thing to be jealous of the music, but for
• 1:25:44
  the music to come from this man, it's 1000 times worse.
• 1:25:47
  And I think that's what really eats Salieri up inside is that
• 1:25:51
  this rivalry is entirely 1 sided like we've been seeing until his
• 1:25:55
  death. Waltad has no idea of Salieri
• 1:25:58
  true feelings about him, and I honestly think it's easier to
• 1:26:02
  deal with being jealous of someone if there's a mutual
• 1:26:04
  dislike. Because there's kind of a
• 1:26:06
  release to that even. Like I know that guy hates me
• 1:26:09
  and I'm I'm kind of glad he hates me because I hate him.
• 1:26:12
  But he there's no release for Salieri, not even when Mozart
• 1:26:15
  dies, because it's still eating away them that even in death,
• 1:26:19
  Mortar has more fear and more adoration than he ever will.
• 1:26:24
  And then this all calls into question Salieri's faith and
• 1:26:26
  relationship with God and how that twists and sours and all
• 1:26:31
  because he just can't accept this one man is better than him.
• 1:26:34
  And that's just one of the themes exporting the writing.
• 1:26:37
  Like I haven't even touched on the idea of art and is it a good
• 1:26:40
  idea or not to venerate artists? Because he could see this whole
• 1:26:44
  film is like 1 long examination of This is why you shouldn't
• 1:26:47
  meet your heroes. There's just so much he can pick
• 1:26:49
  out of this in terms of the writing.
• 1:26:51
  There is. I mean, going into this film for
• 1:26:53
  the first time, I think anyone's going to be expecting the music
• 1:26:56
  to be great, and they wouldn't be making the film if it wasn't.
• 1:26:59
  You'd probably be expecting the direction to be of a certain
• 1:27:01
  level. Milos Forum was already an Oscar
• 1:27:03
  winner, but I'm not sure anybody could have been reasonably
• 1:27:06
  expecting the writing to be as good as it is.
• 1:27:08
  No, we've talked about quite a lot of it already.
• 1:27:10
  Telling the story through the eyes of Salieri, not Mozart.
• 1:27:13
  To let us see what genius looks like to everybody else is
• 1:27:16
  inspired. The amount of themes it explores
• 1:27:19
  to a level deep enough to be interesting is ridiculous.
• 1:27:22
  The notion of genius and how much of its nurture versus
• 1:27:26
  nature, the idea of religion and God being unjust, envy,
• 1:27:30
  obsession. Even more modern themes like
• 1:27:32
  whether we should separate the art from the artist, that's here
• 1:27:35
  as well. Yeah.
• 1:27:36
  So it's pretty impressive. But what I want to touch on a
• 1:27:38
  bit more is the narrative structure because I think the
• 1:27:41
  decisions Schaif has made and how it tell the story are really
• 1:27:44
  interesting. I mean, coming at this huge
• 1:27:46
  biopic, even if you have a passion for Mozart, like Peter
• 1:27:49
  Schaeff, I did, where do you start?
• 1:27:52
  What do you leave out? And he leaves out a lot.
• 1:27:54
  Obviously you have to. But his way of structure in the
• 1:27:56
  narrative is incredible to me. I feel like he's gone, right.
• 1:28:00
  What major events have to be in a Mozart film?
• 1:28:03
  Marriage of Figueroa, obviously, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute
• 1:28:07
  obviously is death. His life is the childhood
• 1:28:10
  prodigy. There's more and all these kind
• 1:28:12
  of many stories form the spine of the narrative.
• 1:28:15
  And then Schaefer weaves all the important relationships of
• 1:28:18
  mortars, life in and out of those events.
• 1:28:20
  So the rival with Salieri, the love story with Stanzi, his
• 1:28:24
  father, it turns it into this incredible narrative like
• 1:28:28
  tapestry. And then when they ramp it up
• 1:28:30
  further by using these relationships to explore themes
• 1:28:32
  like the ones I just mentioned, I think it's a stunning piece of
• 1:28:35
  screen writing. Perform and take Schaefer script
• 1:28:38
  and make it cinematic as hell, like we've been talking about.
• 1:28:40
  But what Schaefer gave him to work with, I think is the kind
• 1:28:43
  of script that talent the directors dream of getting their
• 1:28:45
  hands on. Yeah.
• 1:28:46
  Yeah. About some great adaptive
• 1:28:47
  screenplays over the decades. We've taught some of them,
• 1:28:49
  either Godfather or Casablanca, Chinatown Spring to mind.
• 1:28:53
  Yeah. And Amadeus is in that bracket
• 1:28:55
  to me. I think the writing is that
• 1:28:56
  good. Wow.
• 1:28:58
  Yeah. Well.
• 1:29:01
  Yeah, I think this is just a very thorough piece of work, and
• 1:29:04
  I think it arrived fully formed and we lost.
• 1:29:06
  Foreman just looked at it and thought, right, I can see where
• 1:29:09
  this is going to cut. I see what I can use
• 1:29:11
  narratively. I can see what I can use
• 1:29:12
  visually. But I think all of the emotions
• 1:29:15
  here, the writing of Mozart could have been overplayed.
• 1:29:19
  It could have been on the nose. There could have been a lot of
• 1:29:21
  themes that were just pushed a little bit too far.
• 1:29:23
  But I think everything kind of lands where it needs to land to
• 1:29:26
  make it an accessible piece of work like the whole film is.
• 1:29:29
  And I think that definitely would have been on the page.
• 1:29:32
  Maybe a different director could have looked at this and made it
• 1:29:34
  a little bit more brush and made it a little bit more hard
• 1:29:37
  hitting or made it a little bit more depressing in places
• 1:29:39
  because it does go there, like you said at the top, John.
• 1:29:41
  It's it's really dark in themes. Yeah, and especially everything
• 1:29:45
  that Mozart goes through. But I think in the right, and it
• 1:29:47
  does keep it quite light, but at the same time quite accessible.
• 1:29:51
  It's only when you think about it later, it's like one of them
• 1:29:52
  great novels you read and you realize how flawed the character
• 1:29:55
  is, but you don't realize it until you think about it
• 1:29:57
  yourself and put yourself in their position, which I think is
• 1:30:00
  what he does with every character makes this film
• 1:30:02
  really, really watchable. But I think there's so much
• 1:30:05
  weight with these words and so much weight with this dialogue,
• 1:30:08
  and it all works together. It's just something I think
• 1:30:10
  Peter Schaeffer knows inside out yet he's put down on the page,
• 1:30:14
  but not something that I think he's been authoritarian about.
• 1:30:18
  I think it's an incredible blueprint, but one that you
• 1:30:20
  don't really have to change much of at all for it to be perfect.
• 1:30:24
  And Schaefer is credited as sole writer, but has probably said
• 1:30:27
  himself that Foreman's contribution to the script was
• 1:30:30
  substantial. Once Foreman came on board as
• 1:30:32
  director, Schaefer moved into Foreman's farmhouse performance,
• 1:30:36
  and he adapted the play into a script that would work for film.
• 1:30:39
  Would you fancy living with Milos Foreman for four months?
• 1:30:41
  Crazy. Absolutely not.
• 1:30:43
  Six months for me. Easy.
• 1:30:45
  No minimum. Yeah, Foreman said that the play
• 1:30:48
  was very much written for the stage, so they had no choice but
• 1:30:51
  to kind of tear it apart structurally, right?
• 1:30:53
  But that's a blessing, really, I think because it meant just
• 1:30:55
  putting it straight into production was never an option.
• 1:30:57
  They had to make it more cinematic.
• 1:30:58
  Yeah. So Foreman thought, if we're
• 1:31:00
  going to do that, we might as well go all in.
• 1:31:02
  You can see that, yeah. Yeah, and Schaefer said they
• 1:31:05
  agreed immediately by reimagining the player, but that
• 1:31:07
  they argued about just about everything else.
• 1:31:10
  He said Foreman House became like a torture chamber in the
• 1:31:13
  would resolve their differences by listening to Mozart.
• 1:31:15
  Just that corridor outside the salaries room, Everybody's
• 1:31:18
  changed the walls. You're not?
• 1:31:22
  Well, Yeah, she if I said they would sometimes argue all
• 1:31:24
  afternoon about changing a scene from the play, they'd agree on
• 1:31:27
  what to change and then spend the rest of the evening arguing
• 1:31:29
  about who we should cook dinner. Right.
• 1:31:31
  Amazing. I mean, these guys were The Odd
• 1:31:32
  Couple by the sounds of it. Arguing over all the right
• 1:31:35
  things. But some things that did change
• 1:31:39
  in the player there were two characters called the Ventus
• 1:31:42
  Shelley who represent the Viennese people and they give
• 1:31:44
  lots of the back story, the place sauce with the Ventus
• 1:31:47
  Shelley whispering Speri, Salieri and Farmer said the
• 1:31:51
  films just sold with Salieri shouting what's odd, which it
• 1:31:53
  obviously does right. And in the player, Salieri's
• 1:31:56
  confession is delivered to the audience for the film, the added
• 1:31:59
  the character Father Volcker. Right.
• 1:32:01
  A great addition, The priest. I think those scenes between
• 1:32:04
  Salieri and the priest are way better than they have any right
• 1:32:06
  to be, I think. Yeah.
• 1:32:08
  Definitely. And the event of Shelley, that
• 1:32:10
  sounds like a very theatrical kind of writing device.
• 1:32:12
  I think the ditch that for the film entirely understandably.
• 1:32:15
  Yeah, yeah. The origins of Amadeus start on
• 1:32:18
  the stage like we've been talking about, but not with
• 1:32:21
  Peter Schaeffer. In 1830, a Russian playwright
• 1:32:24
  called Alexander Pushkin wrote a one act player called Mozart and
• 1:32:27
  Salieri. It was inspired by a rumour that
• 1:32:31
  had come about after Mozart's death.
• 1:32:33
  He'd been poisoned by Antonio Salieri, who was jealous of him.
• 1:32:36
  Peter Schaeffer just took that and just started running with it
• 1:32:39
  and he did something similar to Pushkin and wrote it and he's
• 1:32:41
  won't play and explore that whole story, which I think
• 1:32:44
  really works. It does.
• 1:32:45
  I think Peter Schaeff actually said that he was unaware of the
• 1:32:47
  Pushkin play when he was writing Amadeus.
• 1:32:50
  Oh, really? Yeah, right.
• 1:32:51
  It does explore similar themes, but it's totally different as
• 1:32:53
  well narratively. So I'm not sure how much of that
• 1:32:55
  was taken from it. Right, OK.
• 1:32:58
  Then Schaeff has also said he's never seen either the player or
• 1:33:01
  the film is a biopic and called to the Fantasia on the theme of
• 1:33:04
  mortar than Salieri. So we've mentioned some moments
• 1:33:07
  that were based on or changed from reality already, but some
• 1:33:10
  of this are. The film opens with Salieri
• 1:33:13
  attempting suicide. Salary did attempt suicide in
• 1:33:16
  1823 in Mays claims about Poison and Mozart, but he was suffering
• 1:33:20
  with dementia at the time. Right.
• 1:33:22
  Yeah, You refracted those claims later on.
• 1:33:24
  And historians say there's no evidence at all that Mozart was
• 1:33:27
  poisoned. It's actually not knowing how he
• 1:33:29
  died, but it was probably rheumatic fever or strep throat,
• 1:33:32
  apparently. OK, but average life expectancy
• 1:33:35
  in Europe in the late 18th century was only about 35,
• 1:33:38
  really. So it was pretty normal to die
• 1:33:40
  at that age. We'd all be gone as.
• 1:33:43
  All in the same grave though, hopefully.
• 1:33:47
  The all the right movies great. And the main foot point of the
• 1:33:52
  movie is obviously Salieri's jealousy of Mozart and sabotage
• 1:33:56
  in his career, but in reality there's no evidence of anything
• 1:33:59
  other than the two of them having a friendly rivalry.
• 1:34:02
  And actually, after Mozart died, Salieri even tuted Mozart's son.
• 1:34:05
  Right. Salieri apparently trained
• 1:34:08
  Beethoven too, right? Wow.
• 1:34:10
  I mean, there's your sequel. Jealousy.
• 1:34:12
  Him as well. I thought you said Beethoven
• 1:34:15
  too. There's your signal.
• 1:34:18
  The dog. Just training.
• 1:34:19
  The dog can't play the piano. So Pushkin did basically ruin
• 1:34:23
  Salieri reputation. I'm not sure where it came from
• 1:34:26
  but there's a singer came across a few times in research.
• 1:34:28
  Salieri didn't meet our Mozart, but Pushkin for sure murdered
• 1:34:31
  Salieri. Right.
• 1:34:33
  OK, that's great. Cool.
• 1:34:34
  Yeah. Nice, right?
• 1:34:35
  And in the movie, Salieri is betrayed.
• 1:34:37
  A celibate is aware to thank God for his gifts, but in real life
• 1:34:40
  Salieri was married to Teres Heifer Stauffer for that eight
• 1:34:44
  children and apparently had a well known affair with Katarina
• 1:34:47
  Cavallari. Right.
• 1:34:48
  Why was that? He had at least one mistress
• 1:34:50
  too, apparently, so far from a celibate doing like rabbits.
• 1:34:53
  Exactly, Yeah. And also in real life, Salieri
• 1:34:56
  did not Commission Mozart to write his Requiem Mass and D
• 1:34:59
  minor as he does in the film. It was commissioned by an
• 1:35:02
  Austrian called Count Franz von Waltzag, though he did
• 1:35:06
  commissioned the work anonymously and try to pass it
• 1:35:07
  off as his own work when Waltzag died, as Salieri was planning to
• 1:35:11
  do. Outrageous.
• 1:35:13
  Yeah, terrible waltzag. And Salieri didn't pretend to be
• 1:35:16
  Mozart's dead father either, thankfully.
• 1:35:19
  Normal behavior, isn't it? Not at all, no.
• 1:35:22
  And even the name of the film was largely fabricated.
• 1:35:25
  Mortard's real name was Johannes Christamus Wolfgangus Theopolis
• 1:35:28
  Mozart. He would often sign off letters.
• 1:35:31
  He is an Amadir, the French version of Theophilus, and after
• 1:35:35
  his death Amadius became the standard and popular culture.
• 1:35:38
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:35:38
  So Amadeus does mean loved by God, which given the themes of
• 1:35:41
  the film, it's a pretty perfect title, I think.
• 1:35:43
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:45
  Before we finish off on the screenplay, we have our second
• 1:35:47
  ATRM Patreon question. This time it's from Stuart
• 1:35:50
  Mcdean. Hello Stuart.
• 1:35:52
  So Stuart is keeping it simple. I'm glad somebody is.
• 1:35:56
  Yeah, it's about time something. Simple about.
• 1:35:58
  This he wants to know what are your favorite play to movie
• 1:36:01
  adaptations? What do you think about any
• 1:36:03
  stage to screen faves for you? Yeah, I mean, you can never go
• 1:36:07
  wrong with the good Shakespeare adaptation.
• 1:36:09
  Highbrow. Highbrow for me, always
• 1:36:12
  highbrow. If I was to pick just one more,
• 1:36:14
  I'd go run. Which is the Kurosawa film where
• 1:36:16
  you adopt kingly. Yeah, which is just incredible,
• 1:36:19
  really incredible. Think a lot of people maybe
• 1:36:22
  don't realize that The Odd Couple was the stage player.
• 1:36:24
  All right, because they're just thing of Lemon and Matt our.
• 1:36:26
  Neil Simon, wasn't it? Yeah, Neil Simon.
• 1:36:29
  Yeah, but it works so well. Obviously, classic comedy.
• 1:36:31
  And then last one I'm going to mention is Moonlight, the Barry
• 1:36:33
  Jenkins film. Again, I think a lot of people
• 1:36:35
  don't realized that sorted off as the stage play as well, and
• 1:36:38
  that's just a beautiful film. Yeah, it's a beautiful film,
• 1:36:40
  Yeah. Yeah, I think 12 Angry Men is
• 1:36:42
  maybe the gold standard for many.
• 1:36:44
  Yeah, Sidney Lumet took the Reginald Rose player that's
• 1:36:46
  essentially 12 guys sitting around the table and somehow
• 1:36:49
  made it riveting cinema. Yeah, great film.
• 1:36:51
  And it's Griffin. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• 1:36:53
  You know that great one. My Nichols directs that 1 based
• 1:36:56
  on Edward Albie's play and it's cinematic but does still feel
• 1:36:59
  quite theatrical. But Liz Taylor's brilliant in
• 1:37:02
  that. She's unbelievable in that,
• 1:37:04
  yeah. Tearing chunks out of Richard
• 1:37:05
  Byrd. Oh yeah, yeah, art imitates
• 1:37:07
  life. Exactly.
• 1:37:08
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a more modern one.
• 1:37:11
  I like fences, if you saw that. Oh yeah, Denzel.
• 1:37:13
  Great. Directed by Denzel Washington,
• 1:37:16
  starring him in Viola Davis. Viola Davis is unbelievable in
• 1:37:19
  that, yeah, she overshadows him, I think, in that film.
• 1:37:22
  I think she probably does. It's unbelievable.
• 1:37:24
  I think the key with any great play adaptation is the never
• 1:37:27
  just filmed the play, the reimagine it for the different
• 1:37:29
  medium. And Amadeus does that as well,
• 1:37:31
  Yeah. I'm going to go Shakespeare
• 1:37:33
  again, but one I've mentioned recently and Tragedy of Macbeth
• 1:37:36
  I think was absolutely wonderful, really well adapted.
• 1:37:39
  Yeah, West Side Story for me. Of course, Romeo and Juliet
• 1:37:43
  isn't it it? Is, yeah, but it's just the way
• 1:37:44
  that that's played out. It's just so, so good and a
• 1:37:47
  little film that people don't really talk about.
• 1:37:49
  And I think it's Philip Seymour Hoffman's, well, one of his best
• 1:37:52
  performances, but I mean, that's not hard.
• 1:37:54
  He's amazed and everything. But if I'm called doubt.
• 1:37:56
  Which I thought. Was absolutely fantastic, which
• 1:37:59
  is based on a stage player, but yeah, them three for me,
• 1:38:01
  absolutely great. Lovely.
• 1:38:03
  Well, for his work adapting Amedes for the screen, Peter
• 1:38:05
  Schaefer was nominated for and won Best Adapted Screenplay at
• 1:38:08
  the Oscars. Thoroughly deserved, I'd say.
• 1:38:11
  Obviously. Definitely, you would say, but I
• 1:38:14
  do agree, yes. From the writing to the music,
• 1:38:19
  And I think this might be the first time we've covered a
• 1:38:21
  composer who's been dead for 2 1/2 centuries.
• 1:38:24
  It definitely is. Yes.
• 1:38:26
  So the music in Amadeus is, of course, written by Wolfgang
• 1:38:29
  Amadeus Mozart himself, not by Fargo, some may think.
• 1:38:34
  Nope. Sadly.
• 1:38:35
  So I remember you saying you were intimidated by Blade in
• 1:38:38
  about 2049. Yep.
• 1:38:39
  So God knows how you're going to feel about this question, but
• 1:38:42
  what do you think of the work of Mozart?
• 1:38:46
  But there you go, just say it out loud.
• 1:38:48
  How good is Mozart's music if I say I can't pretend I'm finding
• 1:38:52
  the sense that I stick some more Todd on of an evening and sit
• 1:38:55
  and listen to it? I don't, but I'm also not stupid
• 1:38:58
  enough to dismiss the brilliance of it and I can recognise that.
• 1:39:01
  So it's not a case to see it all.
• 1:39:03
  This track is brilliant and this one has been because of the all
• 1:39:06
  are. It's how it's used.
• 1:39:08
  The music is seen either in performance, in the opera scenes
• 1:39:12
  or in the characters heads. Is that he would come together
• 1:39:14
  or it's over the top of the action and it just knits
• 1:39:17
  everything together. And you need this amount of
• 1:39:20
  music because it's about the obsession that Mozart and Alieri
• 1:39:24
  have themselves over music. If the music was only ever heard
• 1:39:27
  in the performances in the opera scenes, it wouldn't have
• 1:39:30
  anywhere near the impact that it does.
• 1:39:32
  It has to be a character in its own right.
• 1:39:33
  Yeah, and it absolutely isn't this.
• 1:39:35
  I agree. Yeah.
• 1:39:36
  I mean, the music's enormous. Salieri's right.
• 1:39:38
  It is like a gift from God. It's lived for centuries after
• 1:39:41
  the guy who wrote it died. They'll probably live forever.
• 1:39:43
  So it's kind of as extraordinary as he expected to be.
• 1:39:46
  Yeah. So Foreman didn't have to do
• 1:39:48
  anything. He could have just got some nice
• 1:39:50
  period cinematography, slapped some mortar on top, and it would
• 1:39:54
  have done the work for him. Yeah, but he doesn't do that.
• 1:39:56
  It's how the music's used that impresses me most in the whole
• 1:39:59
  film, probably, Yeah. The music is like, you're saying
• 1:40:02
  that it's a character in the film.
• 1:40:03
  I think the melodies are woven into the narrative so perfectly
• 1:40:07
  that they tell the story as much as the characters do.
• 1:40:09
  And what's impressive is it's a story this music wasn't written
• 1:40:12
  to tell. So it's like just an adapted
• 1:40:15
  screenplay. It's kind of an adapted score as
• 1:40:17
  well. We talked about Salieri
• 1:40:19
  describing the serenade for the wins, the like a rusty squeeze
• 1:40:22
  box and the way we hear it, he talks and it's brilliant, but
• 1:40:26
  that's not it. The way they use the Requiem all
• 1:40:28
  the way through the films, fantastic.
• 1:40:30
  We don't know the narrative importance to be at the start,
• 1:40:33
  but it's like this kind of dark cloud hanging over the whole
• 1:40:36
  film, getting more intense and then comes into the film towards
• 1:40:39
  the end as part of the narrative, like a character
• 1:40:41
  mate. It's like Darth Vader, an
• 1:40:43
  empire. It is yeah of.
• 1:40:45
  Expecting land order to turn up. That reminds me of like the
• 1:40:47
  entrance to Leopold when he first season.
• 1:40:49
  Yeah, yeah. It's got that vibe.
• 1:40:52
  It's all I was like that Darth Vader.
• 1:40:54
  Yeah, exactly. Top of the stairs.
• 1:40:55
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the music sits above
• 1:40:57
  everything else in the film. You've got great production
• 1:41:00
  design, costume design, 2 huge lead performances, a great
• 1:41:04
  director at the top of his game, and still the music sits above
• 1:41:07
  it, high above it, like the cherry on top of a Belgian bun.
• 1:41:11
  Very nice. Or, Salieri puts it, it's
• 1:41:14
  miraculous. Yeah, Although he would also
• 1:41:15
  love a Belgian bun Salieri. Or a nipple cake or whatever.
• 1:41:20
  Yeah, I mean, as a biopic of Mozart, you could tell the story
• 1:41:23
  more accurately for sure. But as a showcase of Mozart's
• 1:41:26
  music, won't even bother. Yeah, these guys have done it.
• 1:41:30
  Yeah, and you're not topic? It's not going to happen, is it?
• 1:41:32
  Yeah. I mean, I'm the same as you
• 1:41:33
  guys. I'm not just going to be like,
• 1:41:35
  let's go home and stick some Mozart on when I'm cooking the
• 1:41:37
  tea. But at the same time, I do
• 1:41:38
  realize the relevance of it, the importance of it and how
• 1:41:41
  incredible it is. I mean, the majority of it was
• 1:41:44
  written by a teenager then into his 20s.
• 1:41:47
  Yeah. You know, And listening to that
• 1:41:48
  back, you just think that's absolutely outrageous.
• 1:41:51
  But it's mainly what John was saying.
• 1:41:52
  It's how it's used. Yeah.
• 1:41:53
  And the film makes the music more accessible and it makes it
• 1:41:56
  easier to decipher and understand it.
• 1:41:59
  Yeah. Yeah, it does.
• 1:41:59
  Yeah. Because there is a lot going on.
• 1:42:02
  And I think when the audience do hear that music for the first
• 1:42:04
  time, they kind of agree with what the emperor says.
• 1:42:07
  There's too many notes because it is too hard to get.
• 1:42:10
  Then you just then spent the rest of the film understanding
• 1:42:13
  how it's not and understanding how maybe your view on it is a
• 1:42:16
  little bit dumbed down and how if you just relax and listen to
• 1:42:19
  it, it's there. And there's all of these
• 1:42:20
  emotions and everything involved in it.
• 1:42:23
  And it really, really works when you put it in a visual form,
• 1:42:26
  which I think is what Milos Foreman does.
• 1:42:28
  He makes the music visual. Yeah.
• 1:42:30
  Even one Mozart track, I call it a track.
• 1:42:33
  I don't even know if that's what you're supposed to call it.
• 1:42:35
  But one Mozart, you know, piece of music, right?
• 1:42:38
  You've got to put that into a film and make it into a
• 1:42:39
  character. And it's got to address all of
• 1:42:41
  the emotions on the screen at the same time.
• 1:42:42
  And you're just saying, how on earth am I going to do that?
• 1:42:44
  How does that work? But it is kind of softened in
• 1:42:47
  the film and it is brought to that level of almost like a
• 1:42:51
  brilliant soundtrack. Mozart's music, how do you even
• 1:42:54
  start? What's his, like, difficult
• 1:42:56
  third album like, where do you come in with it?
• 1:42:59
  Again, a consistency to everything in this film.
• 1:43:02
  And the music set the tone for everything.
• 1:43:05
  And it had to be as good as the music is.
• 1:43:06
  And I think it might just be. Informing you he wanted Mozart's
• 1:43:10
  music to play a bigger role than it did in the stage player.
• 1:43:13
  So Saul Sans asked all of his contacts to recommend a music
• 1:43:16
  supervisor based on what they were doing, and there was one
• 1:43:19
  name appeared on every list. Sir Neville Mariner, who was
• 1:43:22
  known for being one of the world's greatest conductors
• 1:43:25
  performing in Sans, met him in an airport and he said he would
• 1:43:28
  do it on one condition. But not one nod of Mozart's
• 1:43:31
  music was changed for the film. Brilliant.
• 1:43:34
  Well, that's it kind of right there.
• 1:43:35
  I think the film might get criticized about historical
• 1:43:38
  accuracy around the characters, but I don't think that's what
• 1:43:40
  Foreman and Shaffer are massively concerned with.
• 1:43:42
  No. They made the decision that it's
• 1:43:44
  about Mozart's music and that they are extremely honest and
• 1:43:47
  accurate with Yes. Yeah, and Mariner recorded all
• 1:43:51
  of the music for the film before production started.
• 1:43:54
  It was recorded by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields,
• 1:43:57
  an orchestra founded by Mariner in the recorded at the Abbey
• 1:44:00
  Road Studios. Wow.
• 1:44:02
  Should have got Ringo in on percussion.
• 1:44:04
  He'll be hanging around, probably.
• 1:44:06
  Couldn't hear him to any high hats.
• 1:44:10
  And the decision to record the music in full first is inspired.
• 1:44:13
  That's how Foreman can weave it in so well.
• 1:44:15
  He knew exactly what he was working with.
• 1:44:18
  Yeah. There's a few times we will hear
• 1:44:19
  a piece diagenically as an in the world and then immediately
• 1:44:22
  afterwards hear it non diegetically on the score or
• 1:44:25
  vice versa. Yeah.
• 1:44:26
  It's so intentional, so planned, so like, creative, the way
• 1:44:29
  they've used the music all the way through.
• 1:44:30
  I love it. Yeah.
• 1:44:32
  When Foreman Woman adapted the musical Hair, his choreographer
• 1:44:35
  had been Twyla Tharp, and he asked her to choreograph all of
• 1:44:38
  the opera performances in Amadeus.
• 1:44:40
  She moved to Prague for a year and was responsible for the
• 1:44:42
  choreography of Abduction from the Serali, or The Marriage of
• 1:44:45
  Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.
• 1:44:48
  That's yeah. Yeah, I know that she did lots
• 1:44:50
  of research into 18th century opera performances and then
• 1:44:53
  adapted them to make them more accessible for modern audiences.
• 1:44:56
  That's quite an undertaking that in a year though.
• 1:44:59
  Just a bit, yeah, Yeah. Good grief.
• 1:45:01
  I'm not sure they'll compromise too much.
• 1:45:02
  It still feels really authentic. Yeah, massively.
• 1:45:04
  I mean, not. I know too much about 18th
• 1:45:06
  century opera, obviously. I'd still be doing it now.
• 1:45:08
  I think I might just have the Marriage of Figaro down the
• 1:45:12
  first maybe 3 bars, yeah. And even more authentic was the
• 1:45:17
  filming locations for the opera sequences.
• 1:45:20
  The Abduction from the Serrano, The Marriage of Figaro and Don
• 1:45:23
  Giovanni performances were all filmed at the Till Theatre in
• 1:45:26
  Prague. And this is a historically
• 1:45:28
  preserved building and where Mortar really performed Don
• 1:45:31
  Giovanni for the first time in 1787.
• 1:45:34
  Twyla Forbes said the theatre have been pretty much untouched
• 1:45:37
  since it was built in 1783. So basically looks how we would
• 1:45:41
  have when Mortar played there. Wow.
• 1:45:43
  Yeah, Foreman said that when the first got to the Till Theater,
• 1:45:46
  Peter Schaeffer went missing and they found him sitting in a
• 1:45:48
  corridor sobbing. He was like overwhelmed by being
• 1:45:51
  in the same place Mozarted Premier Don Giovanni.
• 1:45:54
  Wow, Understandable. Really.
• 1:45:55
  Me when I went to the Cavern Club for the first time, sobbing
• 1:45:59
  in the corner. And when the films, the Don
• 1:46:01
  Giovanni performance, the hat performance on stage carrying
• 1:46:04
  real fire, and Patricia von Brandenstein said before the
• 1:46:08
  film, did she have nightmares about burning the place down.
• 1:46:11
  So they therefore have 40 firemen on standby in case
• 1:46:14
  anything went wrong. And she said, I thought, God
• 1:46:16
  will truly punish me if this place catches on fire.
• 1:46:19
  Right. Sounds like Salieri, God
• 1:46:21
  fearing. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:46:23
  Yeah, well. When they were filming Don
• 1:46:25
  Giovanni, the actor playing Don Giovanni, he's wearing like, a
• 1:46:27
  plumed hat, if you remember. Yeah.
• 1:46:29
  And he accidentally set the light on a candle, and
• 1:46:32
  apparently the fireman just stood there waving rather than
• 1:46:35
  rushing on the stage because they were so scared of annoying
• 1:46:37
  Foreman. Yeah.
• 1:46:38
  I'm not surprised. Make the Michael Jackson Pepsi
• 1:46:41
  commercial. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:46:43
  His hats on fire, Miloshe. He is on fire bro.
• 1:46:45
  No Oscar from Mozart for his music on the film.
• 1:46:48
  He was 200 years too early for that.
• 1:46:50
  Yeah. But the winner of best original
• 1:46:52
  score that year was Marie Shah for A Passage to India.
• 1:46:55
  And during his acceptance speech, he said, luckily for me,
• 1:46:58
  Mozart was not eligible. Yeah, fantastic.
• 1:47:01
  Nice. And the musical work.
• 1:47:03
  Yeah. Not just Mozart, but Neville
• 1:47:05
  Mariner, Twyla Thorpe and how Foreman used it.
• 1:47:07
  It's pretty impressive. It's really impressive, yeah.
• 1:47:11
  Perfect. A collaborator who was with
• 1:47:15
  Foreman for the long haul was Amadeus, director of photography
• 1:47:18
  Miroslav Andrichek, starting with Foreman's Czech films in
• 1:47:21
  the 1960s. This was their 6th
• 1:47:23
  collaboration, following on from Hay and Ragtime.
• 1:47:27
  Check him out, Westie. Yeah, onrichek it out.
• 1:47:30
  How was Miroslav Andrichek's work here as DP?
• 1:47:33
  Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic work in that it's just so nicely
• 1:47:38
  framed that it's not confusing. You can watch this film on Fast
• 1:47:42
  forward and it's incredible how many of the characters are just
• 1:47:45
  in the centre of the frame. It's very rare uses the rule of
• 1:47:48
  thirds to confuse anybody. This is well before like we have
• 1:47:51
  to shoot now and everything has to be sent to frame because it
• 1:47:53
  needs to be an upright for social media.
• 1:47:56
  All right, Yeah. So you have to crop into the
• 1:47:58
  middle of the frame, so you have stuff left and right that you
• 1:48:00
  don't really do as much. Yeah, where Barry Lyndon's very
• 1:48:03
  much rule of thirds, right, this is right in the middle, which is
• 1:48:06
  hard to do without it being boring and see me, but it really
• 1:48:09
  works. That's a suit.
• 1:48:11
  On the earlier scenes where Mozart comes in and he plays the
• 1:48:14
  March, Mozart's in the middle of the frame as he's playing, it
• 1:48:17
  cuts the Siri, he's in the middle of the frame, cuts back.
• 1:48:19
  You don't get anyone else's reaction.
• 1:48:20
  It's just about them two characters, which it always
• 1:48:22
  works. He's conducting an orchestra and
• 1:48:26
  you know that frame that everybody loves?
• 1:48:27
  There's that wide angle, but he's right in the middle.
• 1:48:30
  Great shot. Oh yeah.
• 1:48:30
  There's no convergent verticals at all, so that wide angle is
• 1:48:34
  using on that. It's perfect because it doesn't
• 1:48:35
  make the theatre come in on top of Mozart.
• 1:48:37
  It makes it seem as haze just fits perfectly within the frame
• 1:48:40
  of it. Yeah, everything's so considered
• 1:48:42
  and very well thought through, and I think that's makes it
• 1:48:45
  really accessible and it makes it really, really fun.
• 1:48:48
  It's a fun film to watch because it moves from scene to scene,
• 1:48:51
  and it's a film that definitely moves from left to right because
• 1:48:54
  every character is in the middle of that frame.
• 1:48:56
  If you want to see anything else in the frame, how about it?
• 1:48:59
  You can see it. There's a lot more going on, but
• 1:49:01
  I think these lens choices, camera movements aren't over the
• 1:49:04
  top. I don't think the lightens over
• 1:49:06
  the top for the period. The whole film could have been
• 1:49:08
  way darker, but I think the tone is consistent with the color
• 1:49:11
  palette, with the lighting, with the dialogue, with the music.
• 1:49:14
  Everything seems to be of a standard and he really ticks the
• 1:49:17
  boxes for me. Yeah, I agree, Wesley.
• 1:49:19
  I think they can see an influence from Barry Linden.
• 1:49:22
  There's always a warm glow of candlelight, the way that shadow
• 1:49:25
  plays on people's faces. It's actually as of the costumes
• 1:49:28
  and the locations. It's quite painterly like Barry
• 1:49:31
  Linden and feels of the time, but still feels relevant as.
• 1:49:34
  Well, as a distinct lack of shadow in this I think is really
• 1:49:36
  important. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:49:37
  With Shaffer, I mean, Mozart, the cast trail, I thought
• 1:49:40
  everything else, Foreman directing Lords of storytellers
• 1:49:42
  at once. And the camera tells the story
• 1:49:44
  as well. Yeah.
• 1:49:45
  There's a shot really early that I love after Mozart realized the
• 1:49:49
  star of the concert without him, when he's like my music.
• 1:49:51
  Yeah. He runs towards the concert
• 1:49:52
  hall. The camera is already there and
• 1:49:54
  doesn't move, so we just seem come sprinting down the corridor
• 1:49:57
  towards us. Love that shot.
• 1:49:59
  Yeah, it's brilliant. The opera sequences are great,
• 1:50:01
  not just the music and the choreography, they're really
• 1:50:03
  well shot as well. The source?
• 1:50:05
  Cinematic performances from over 200 years ago.
• 1:50:07
  But it doesn't really feel it. It feels quite timeless to look
• 1:50:10
  at. Yeah.
• 1:50:11
  I mean, I think it wasn't as clear as day.
• 1:50:12
  When you watch the end result, it's how In Sync everyone is.
• 1:50:15
  Yeah. No one's working in silos.
• 1:50:17
  No, you know that. Andre, check work closely with
• 1:50:19
  Twyla Thorpe. You know, he's worked with
• 1:50:21
  prefetchy von Brandenstein on production design.
• 1:50:23
  He can tell he's worked with Theodore Pistek on costume
• 1:50:26
  design. They must have, because it's
• 1:50:28
  also perfectly cohesive. It's kind of mind boggling.
• 1:50:31
  Yeah. I think this is one of the great
• 1:50:33
  examples of just great filmmaking for me.
• 1:50:35
  And the cinematography is a big part of it.
• 1:50:37
  Yeah, Massively just reminded me of that shot you talked about
• 1:50:40
  there, John, when he's running into the frame, yeah, it's kind
• 1:50:42
  of like the first thing he says. They've started without me, so
• 1:50:45
  he has to run into the frame, so they're not moving the camera to
• 1:50:48
  be with him. So even the cinematography is
• 1:50:50
  telling the same story. It's not intentionally humorous,
• 1:50:52
  but that's really funny and nerdy.
• 1:50:54
  I love that. No, yeah, you're right.
• 1:50:55
  It's brilliant. But he runs into the film,
• 1:50:57
  doesn't he? He does exactly, Yeah.
• 1:50:58
  Part of the reason it feels so cinematic because I think 1
• 1:51:01
  aspect that's very easy to overlook is how much of this
• 1:51:04
  film is said indoors. Like after you have that opening
• 1:51:07
  of Salieri being wheeled a hospital, I'm always slightly
• 1:51:11
  taken aback when we get another scene that occurs outside.
• 1:51:14
  And I think the risk of that is that the film could end up
• 1:51:17
  looking very seamy, very dry, particularly when there's not
• 1:51:20
  even that much variation of the interior locations.
• 1:51:24
  It's the opera houses or the palace or Mozart space or sorry,
• 1:51:27
  Ari space. Every location has this grandeur
• 1:51:30
  to it, but it never feels repetitive and never feel like,
• 1:51:33
  oh, just looking at the same shot again.
• 1:51:35
  I never feel, oh, it's this setting again.
• 1:51:38
  Can we not go somewhere different?
• 1:51:39
  I'm never bored by how this looks visually and like, say, a
• 1:51:43
  film, maybe 90% of it indoors in places very similar.
• 1:51:46
  It's very subtle work as well, in that you think of Amadeus.
• 1:51:50
  I don't think the first thing that comes to mind is, wow.
• 1:51:52
  It's a visual feast for the eyes.
• 1:51:54
  But you get into the like the granular details of us.
• 1:51:57
  You really think about what you've seen and how they've done
• 1:51:59
  it. You think, yeah, actually, then
• 1:52:00
  it's just all the more impressive for what to do here.
• 1:52:03
  Yeah, there's just so much to look at, isn't there?
• 1:52:05
  Whether it's a cinematography or the costumes or the production
• 1:52:08
  design, you know, the locations. It is kind of a feast for the
• 1:52:10
  eyes. And nothing overshadows anything
• 1:52:12
  else. It's amazing.
• 1:52:14
  It all just works together. Cogs in the machine.
• 1:52:16
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 1:52:18
  And most of the film used conventional light in setups,
• 1:52:21
  but for their upper performances the crew used candlelight almost
• 1:52:24
  exclusively for authenticity, and over 27,000 candles were
• 1:52:28
  burned during production. No, we're never worried about
• 1:52:30
  burning the players down then. That's a lot.
• 1:52:34
  And you know more than me, Wesley, But that seems like
• 1:52:36
  insanity in terms of the challenge you're setting
• 1:52:38
  yourself. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's
• 1:52:40
  outrageous. Just the fact that that light
• 1:52:42
  moves as well. It's got a natural movement to
• 1:52:44
  it, so you can't judge it exactly where it's going to be
• 1:52:47
  or where it's going to land or what it's going to hit.
• 1:52:48
  So you just have to light and then light and then light again.
• 1:52:51
  And I think it was after this film came out that actually made
• 1:52:53
  cinema candles, which had about four or five Wicks that were
• 1:52:57
  just put together to make it burn brighter.
• 1:52:59
  Oh, really? So that it would be easier for
• 1:53:01
  the film to pick up, so easier to expose.
• 1:53:03
  But yeah, that explains why there's so many in this.
• 1:53:06
  Yeah, there's a hell of a lot. Yeah.
• 1:53:08
  Or for his work on Amadeus, Miroslavandra Check was
• 1:53:10
  nominated for Best Cinematographer the Oscars, but
• 1:53:13
  he lost out to Chris Mangas for The Killing Fields.
• 1:53:16
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:53:17
  Right, OK. For us though, some great
• 1:53:19
  cinematography that brings 18th century Vienna to life.
• 1:53:22
  Yeah, there's a whole film in life.
• 1:53:24
  Yeah, really works. So that's our key crew members.
• 1:53:27
  Peter Schaeffer crafting a brilliant adaptation of his own
• 1:53:30
  play, Mozart himself providing the divine music, and Miroslav
• 1:53:33
  Andrecher capturing it all with candlelight and cameras.
• 1:53:36
  And in Neville, Mariner, Twyla, Thorpe and all the other
• 1:53:40
  craftspeople we've mentioned a crew operating at the peak of
• 1:53:43
  their powers here. Definitely the end.
• 1:53:51
  The second act of Amadeus was bald, breathtaking.
• 1:53:55
  The third is astounding. They're going to talk about the
• 1:53:58
  climactic scenes where Mozart and Salieri write the Requiem
• 1:54:01
  together, and Mozart's death. But first, we've got A Magic
• 1:54:05
  Flute to talk about. We do so with Mozart.
• 1:54:09
  Fortunes and mental state declining, he finds work with
• 1:54:12
  Emmanuel, Chicken Aidas, Vaudeville Theatre, writing The
• 1:54:15
  Magic Flute for the common people.
• 1:54:17
  Meanwhile, Salieri carried out his latest scheme, commissioning
• 1:54:20
  a requiem from Volfi while disguised as a must figure.
• 1:54:24
  Yeah, totally normal behavior. Yeah, Westie, ready for some
• 1:54:27
  lowbrow entertainment? Absolutely.
• 1:54:29
  You know me. Love this.
• 1:54:32
  I much prefer it actually if I'm honest.
• 1:54:34
  The vaudeville, don't you right? Yeah, I mean, I'm never get
• 1:54:36
  tired of sausages coming out of a horse's ass, let's be honest.
• 1:54:39
  And then later a dove and then some champagne.
• 1:54:41
  It's fine. But I just think it's it's
• 1:54:43
  really good. And what is shown here is the
• 1:54:45
  contrast between how little Mozart cares about how
• 1:54:49
  pretentious something is. Yeah, because all the
• 1:54:51
  pretentiousness is removed. It just wants people to enjoy
• 1:54:55
  what he's written, and Stanza kind of knows it's a piss take.
• 1:54:58
  Oh. Stanza hater, yeah.
• 1:55:01
  Just shows that he is just a big kid really, and he just loves it
• 1:55:04
  just as much as when he's conducting.
• 1:55:06
  He just loves to see it come to life, no matter how that's done.
• 1:55:09
  So it just shows he's part of the audience as well as he's
• 1:55:12
  part of the creation, which I think if you can really
• 1:55:15
  appreciate your own art, you're really on to something.
• 1:55:17
  But it's when someone takes it and spins it their own way and
• 1:55:19
  makes it fun and enjoyable. And if your kids love it, you're
• 1:55:22
  going to love it. I think it's a great scene.
• 1:55:23
  I love this. It's crazy coming out the
• 1:55:25
  ceiling. It's all great.
• 1:55:27
  Yeah, when it first cuts to the Vaudeville theatre it does feel
• 1:55:30
  quite jarring, in a good way because we're used to these high
• 1:55:33
  end imperial productions till now.
• 1:55:35
  And then this is all sing alongs and laughs like jazz and Dave.
• 1:55:39
  Strange comparison. I see the other side of Viennese
• 1:55:42
  society as well, builds the world up and tells us that
• 1:55:44
  Mozart, unlike Salieri, is more a man of the people, I think.
• 1:55:48
  Yeah, but from the film's perspective, production values
• 1:55:51
  don't drop an inch. It still looks brilliant.
• 1:55:53
  Does the costume design, the theatre itself, they've got
• 1:55:56
  hundreds of extras, keeps the authenticity totally intact.
• 1:56:00
  And narratively, it's all developing really well.
• 1:56:02
  More thoughts deterioration is shown in his appearance.
• 1:56:04
  He's now wearing that dirty brown wig.
• 1:56:07
  And they must have done some makeup work on Tom Halls as well
• 1:56:09
  because he suddenly got really hollow eyes.
• 1:56:12
  Looks like death warmed up. So all really good.
• 1:56:15
  And did you notice the Star Wars link?
• 1:56:17
  Yeah. Yes.
• 1:56:18
  So the combinatorial character, the little person who comes on
• 1:56:21
  the stage on the horse singing Don Giovanni, that is.
• 1:56:24
  Go for it. Kenny Baker.
• 1:56:26
  There is. R2D2.
• 1:56:28
  Loved seeing Kenny Baker in there.
• 1:56:30
  It's fantastic. So Anthony Daniels would have
• 1:56:32
  been furious. I should be in the Mozart film.
• 1:56:35
  Yeah, you should have been conducting just like Saints Row
• 1:56:38
  2. And Emmanuel Chikuneder is
• 1:56:43
  played by Simon Callow, who was the first person to play Motor
• 1:56:46
  on stage at the National Theatre in 1979.
• 1:56:49
  And that's how he came to form its attention for the part.
• 1:56:52
  The real Chicaneda was the German actor, singer and theatre
• 1:56:55
  manager. He wrote the libretto for The
• 1:56:57
  Magic Flute and played Papa Gino at the premiere like he does in
• 1:57:00
  the film. And according to historians, the
• 1:57:03
  real Chicaneda was as larger than life and flamboyant as
• 1:57:06
  we're seeing here. But there's no records of a
• 1:57:08
  really putting on a parody of Don Giovanni.
• 1:57:12
  Yeah, he did start as Mozart, Simon Callow and Carl said the
• 1:57:15
  foreman told him. His portrayal of Mozart was
• 1:57:18
  truly brilliant, fantastic and asshole and a genius, funny,
• 1:57:22
  tragic, crazy, a baby and a God. Well, still not casting, you
• 1:57:26
  know, chicken Aida for you. I think he's good though.
• 1:57:31
  Simon Callow. Really memorable character
• 1:57:33
  because he just played a part in the narrative.
• 1:57:35
  He is, and I believe Callow in the role.
• 1:57:37
  I mean, he's a bit boisterous. Yeah, I totally get that though.
• 1:57:39
  He needs to be, but he doesn't over shadow anything.
• 1:57:41
  He's not like massively memorable, but he is when you
• 1:57:43
  see him again. Oh, that guy, of course.
• 1:57:46
  And then you get the same way, confront small sauce about the
• 1:57:49
  magic food. And I just really feel for the
• 1:57:50
  mortality, like his dad's died. He thinks he's now being
• 1:57:54
  commanded by his dad's course to write a requiem mass for him.
• 1:57:57
  Running out of money, clearly unwell, and I've been hassled by
• 1:58:00
  this guy. Tried to vaudeville for a magic
• 1:58:02
  fruit. Just give him a break for God's
• 1:58:04
  sake. Yeah, I love the star of that
• 1:58:07
  scene, Shaken, that's banging on the door.
• 1:58:09
  And Stanley comes out and is like, Wolfie open the door, for
• 1:58:12
  God's sakes. But he can't hear it because his
• 1:58:14
  head's like, filled with music. And then the music cuts and was
• 1:58:17
  suddenly like, back in the room, which is another great use of
• 1:58:19
  sound. But that gives us a little
• 1:58:21
  insight to what it might be like being in Mozart's head.
• 1:58:24
  And it's pretty awful. And then sneaks out to another
• 1:58:28
  party when stand. He's asleep.
• 1:58:29
  What you doing? Yeah, no one does.
• 1:58:31
  You leave. Waiting for that moment is near
• 1:58:33
  to awful when he sneaks out, Yeah.
• 1:58:35
  And then you get the actual performance of the magic food.
• 1:58:38
  Yeah, which is more thoughts kind of downfall health wise.
• 1:58:42
  But to start the scene, you've got that great transition of
• 1:58:45
  Mozart having his E bent by his mother-in-law to the opera
• 1:58:49
  singer giving it full gusto, which is really, really funny.
• 1:58:52
  It's. Brilliant.
• 1:58:53
  Again, it just was the brilliance of him to listen to
• 1:58:55
  his mother-in-law doing that going hang on, I can use this
• 1:58:58
  automatically. You just translates to the
• 1:59:00
  music. It's brilliant.
• 1:59:01
  And I guess this performance, I guess it does come down to
• 1:59:03
  personal taste, but I think there's just this irony with
• 1:59:06
  Mozart collapse and given this performance, because I find this
• 1:59:09
  music just quite trivial and silly.
• 1:59:11
  It's a bit annoying. But this is the one Mortat has
• 1:59:14
  driven himself to the point of death performing not one of his
• 1:59:17
  absolute masterpieces. But I think Abraham is so
• 1:59:20
  brilliant in the same because Mozart collapses, Salieri make
• 1:59:24
  sure he's been taken back to bed.
• 1:59:25
  And just when you think this might be his turning point, is
• 1:59:28
  he having second thoughts about this plan now that Mortat is
• 1:59:31
  nearly dead? He then uses chicken ear and
• 1:59:34
  every knocking at the door to push Mozart even further and
• 1:59:37
  returned it. It's the figure, yeah, the Corsi
• 1:59:39
  figure that wants that Requiem mass written.
• 1:59:42
  It's the moment he could have redeemed himself, but he chooses
• 1:59:44
  not to. And Abraham just dances along
• 1:59:47
  that line brilliantly. He does, Yeah.
• 1:59:49
  I also love the transition into the magic flutes where you go
• 1:59:52
  from Stanley's mother yelling at Mozart into the Queen of the
• 1:59:55
  night. It's also funny when Stanley's
• 1:59:56
  mother says I told her marry him, you won't have a pot to
• 1:59:59
  piss in. And the editing of the
• 2:00:03
  performance is superb, cutting between more thoughts, like
• 2:00:05
  manic conducting. Because he's not well.
• 2:00:07
  Salieri, watching from the shadows.
• 2:00:09
  Always watching on the sly. Salieri, isn't he?
• 2:00:12
  Find a curtain or something. Yeah.
• 2:00:14
  Yeah, but if there was a motor opera I'd like to see in full,
• 2:00:16
  I'd probably go for The Magic Flute.
• 2:00:18
  Oh really? Don Giovanni looks way too
• 2:00:19
  intense. Oh, Giovanni for me every time.
• 2:00:23
  Radiohead doing the soundtrack. Yeah, go say that to be fair.
• 2:00:28
  Yeah, of course you would. OK, Don Giovanni.
• 2:00:31
  So while Don Giovanni and the Marriage of Figaro were filmed
• 2:00:34
  at the Till Theatre, the Don Giovanni parody and The Magic
• 2:00:37
  Flute were filmed on the custom set.
• 2:00:39
  Prezi von Brandenstein and her team built a replica of an 18th
• 2:00:42
  century Volks Theatre on Czechoslovakia's biggest
• 2:00:45
  soundstage at Barandov Studios. The replica was 330 feet long,
• 2:00:50
  had 700 seats and took six weeks to build.
• 2:00:54
  Yeah, massive. And those candles chandeliers
• 2:00:57
  are insane. If you know it's those on the
• 2:00:59
  ceiling, there's like 11 of them.
• 2:01:00
  Yeah. I'm surprised it didn't burn the
• 2:01:02
  place down. It's crazy.
• 2:01:03
  It's amazing they didn't call them chandeliers.
• 2:01:05
  The Mr. Trick there. And the actress who see
• 2:01:09
  performing the queen of the night is Whitney Houston.
• 2:01:12
  Of course, The Bodyguard. Amazing.
• 2:01:14
  I love that you've got The Bodyguard into a Moto
• 2:01:16
  autobiographic. I love it.
• 2:01:20
  No, it was a Czech soprano called Meloda Cheklova.
• 2:01:24
  And the voice we hear, though, is June Anderson.
• 2:01:26
  And she was one of the most famous American Sopranos in the
• 2:01:29
  world at the time. Again, enormous pipes.
• 2:01:32
  Yeah, the Queen of the Night might be my favorite stage
• 2:01:35
  performance in the film. I think it's stunning.
• 2:01:37
  Yeah, the Papa Gino bit, though. Chicken Aid are prancing about
• 2:01:40
  dresses. A budgie.
• 2:01:44
  It's outrageous. It reminded me of what's the
• 2:01:48
  song in Inside Llewyn Davis? Please, Mr. Kevin, say please,
• 2:01:53
  Mr. Kennedy, is this that bit with the plosives?
• 2:01:56
  I was. That's the same.
• 2:01:57
  The Coen brothers have obviously seen this.
• 2:01:58
  Ripped it off. So that's The Magic Flute,
• 2:02:02
  Mozart's final opera, written for the people, performed as
• 2:02:05
  he's dying. Yeah.
• 2:02:06
  Should we have a look at the fallout?
• 2:02:08
  Let's do it. The climax of Amadeus brings
• 2:02:12
  everything together in devastating fashion.
• 2:02:15
  After Mozart collapse, Salieri takes him home and they work on
• 2:02:18
  the Requiem, Salieri taking dictation as Mozart composes
• 2:02:22
  from his deathbed. Yeah.
• 2:02:24
  So what is the greatest scene of all time, Matt, and why is it
• 2:02:28
  this I? Knew it was going to be this.
• 2:02:30
  I was going to call it at the start, but I thought it's just,
• 2:02:32
  yeah, it's too obvious. It's amazing.
• 2:02:33
  Yeah, you're probably not wrong, John.
• 2:02:35
  I mean, this scene, the back and forth between them, the way they
• 2:02:39
  modulate their performances against each other, Mozart just
• 2:02:42
  firing out instruction after instruction after instruction.
• 2:02:46
  And it's the reaction from Salieri.
• 2:02:48
  Like what? None of this makes sense.
• 2:02:50
  How will that even work on the page?
• 2:02:53
  And then when you just see it click behind his eyes, Like, my
• 2:02:57
  God, of course it's genius. And it seems obvious, but it's
• 2:03:01
  only obvious if you're more taught in the other level of
• 2:03:04
  brilliance. And it's the most humbling
• 2:03:07
  moment for Salieri because he can't get there until he sees
• 2:03:11
  what's up doing it and telling him how he does it.
• 2:03:14
  And it's the one way forgets his plan.
• 2:03:16
  And he's so swept up in this outpouring and the sheer
• 2:03:20
  privilege of being part of it, which makes it all more tragic.
• 2:03:23
  But it's more thoughts, last moments.
• 2:03:25
  And Salieri only has this brief, brief glimpse of what that
• 2:03:29
  friendship could have been if he'd stopped being a little less
• 2:03:32
  proud about himself and just kind of reined his own ego in.
• 2:03:36
  They could have had the most amazing friendship.
• 2:03:38
  And what this scene reminds me most of all is, you know, in the
• 2:03:43
  Peter Jackson beetroot documentary, when you've got
• 2:03:45
  that footage of McCartney jamming and he just plucks get
• 2:03:48
  back out of the air and you're like, my God, that's genius.
• 2:03:52
  You see in the birth of Genius, that's what they're saying is.
• 2:03:55
  What a climax, what we've been built into Mozart and Salieri
• 2:04:02
  together at last, but also kind of the film in my cosm.
• 2:04:05
  I think most of the things that make Amity is great or here, the
• 2:04:09
  culmination of the rivalry is here with C Mozart's genius in
• 2:04:12
  action and his music kind of showcased in this really
• 2:04:15
  inventive and cinematic way. The whole idea of breaking the
• 2:04:19
  Requiem down into its main components.
• 2:04:21
  C Mozart write them one by one, Salieri writing them down and
• 2:04:25
  then giving us the final composition in the score.
• 2:04:28
  Yeah, total genius take about Milosh.
• 2:04:31
  I mean all of it. It's just such a brilliant
• 2:04:34
  representation of not just music, but I think the creative
• 2:04:37
  process. We've been told all the way
• 2:04:38
  through the Mozart is this genius.
• 2:04:40
  Talent and natural ability counts for a lot, but there's a
• 2:04:43
  science to it as well. Nature versus nature.
• 2:04:46
  And we'll say that here because Salieri knows his stuff.
• 2:04:49
  Just to take down Mozart's dictation, you've got to have an
• 2:04:52
  advanced understanding of music because he's 1,000,000 miles an
• 2:04:54
  hour. If Salieri is mediocre, I think
• 2:04:57
  we're all screwed. To be honest, it's a very long
• 2:04:59
  scene. But it does show Mozart's
• 2:05:02
  talent. You can create these complex
• 2:05:04
  arrangements in his head, and Salieri can't keep up.
• 2:05:06
  I like it when Salieri goes. It's wonderful.
• 2:05:09
  That's it. And Mozart's like, no.
• 2:05:11
  Now for the real fire. It's brilliant, and again, it's
• 2:05:17
  not a 100% accurate portrait of the events, but it isn't honest
• 2:05:20
  reflection of the music. Mozart obviously didn't really
• 2:05:23
  dictate the Requiem, the Salieri on his deathbed, no really
• 2:05:26
  dramatic way to go. But in breaking it down it shows
• 2:05:29
  us how complex and incredible the music is.
• 2:05:32
  That isn't a lie. Mozart really wrote that.
• 2:05:35
  And that, I think, is the history that Formed and Shaffer
• 2:05:37
  want to get across. Yeah, I mean, J Sharp, of
• 2:05:40
  course. Yeah.
• 2:05:42
  I mean, it's my favorite scene of the whole film.
• 2:05:44
  When it came to this point, I thought we need this connection
• 2:05:47
  and we need it to slam home. And it's almost like split the
• 2:05:49
  atom, really. It's been building to this and
• 2:05:51
  it does not disappoint. It's when he's just show me and
• 2:05:55
  then it's using the cuts to time travel almost.
• 2:05:57
  And you hear the finished piece and it's just there.
• 2:06:00
  Yeah. It's the simplicity of how
• 2:06:02
  cinematic this is. There's no zooms, there's no
• 2:06:06
  going round the bed. There's like 2 cameras, maybe
• 2:06:10
  two shots. Probably on 2 cameras, but this
• 2:06:12
  could have been done with one easily.
• 2:06:13
  But if you know what the dialogue is and how it's
• 2:06:15
  delivered. So it's literally just two shots
• 2:06:17
  center framed. And there may be a slight push
• 2:06:19
  in on Mozart as he's coming up with things, but not much.
• 2:06:22
  Yeah, it's literally the content of this scene that makes it
• 2:06:25
  train. You could have shot this on a
• 2:06:26
  potato and it still would have been incredible.
• 2:06:29
  And there's so many bits in this that click.
• 2:06:31
  It's when he starts naming all the different instruments.
• 2:06:33
  Take the bassoon to the trombones, and then it's the
• 2:06:35
  tennis. But it's when Salieri is not
• 2:06:37
  keeping up and Mozart's just like, come on.
• 2:06:40
  And he stops a little bit and he goes, look, it goes with the
• 2:06:43
  harmony. Boom, boom.
• 2:06:46
  That's when they're in harmony. That's when they catch up with
• 2:06:48
  each other. And it was that point where I'm
• 2:06:50
  like, I need to see this run out front of that 7 or 8 minutes,
• 2:06:54
  this scene, I need to see where this goes.
• 2:06:56
  And it doesn't disappoint, to be honest.
• 2:06:57
  It's not on that long. That's how long I wanted it to
• 2:06:59
  be on for. And you know, it's a
• 2:07:01
  masterpiece. You know what he's doing.
• 2:07:03
  And this scene finished and I watch it for the second time.
• 2:07:05
  And as I was watching for the second time, I thought, fuck me,
• 2:07:07
  what Mozart could have done with an air track.
• 2:07:09
  I know he just could just put it down and just record it where he
• 2:07:13
  is, even if it was just bumper that and did the that.
• 2:07:15
  Far off and think what would these guys do with around 200
• 2:07:18
  years later? Yeah, if they were around now
• 2:07:20
  and they're just access to everything we've got access to,
• 2:07:22
  there's no excuse for us really. We're just lazy.
• 2:07:26
  There's no talent left anywhere in the world.
• 2:07:28
  Use make excuses like me. Laptops not fast enough, now
• 2:07:30
  you're just not more so enough. That's the problem.
• 2:07:33
  And I think that's the genius of this, is how simple it seems,
• 2:07:36
  but at the same time how powerful it is in the content of
• 2:07:38
  the scene. And it really works.
• 2:07:40
  It does. It's a fantastic scene, yeah.
• 2:07:43
  But before the film The Scene, Tom Hall said that Neville
• 2:07:45
  Mariner and one of his musicians acted out the scene just to show
• 2:07:49
  Hulse and Abraham how 2 musicians would actually dictate
• 2:07:52
  music like this to each other. Yeah, Hall said it was rubbish
• 2:07:56
  and then showed them how to do it.
• 2:07:58
  Rubbish that. Yeah.
• 2:07:59
  I mean, I imagine it might be a bit dull watching that for real,
• 2:08:02
  unless they do get Ringo in, obviously.
• 2:08:04
  That would be great, obviously. And then when the film the
• 2:08:06
  scene, Holst and Abraham were both wearing a pieces that the
• 2:08:10
  pieces of music were played through.
• 2:08:12
  So that's why Mozart and Salieri are perfectly in time and in
• 2:08:15
  pitch with the music as the singers I.
• 2:08:17
  Love that when I read that I was like that's genius.
• 2:08:20
  It is brilliant and you would never.
• 2:08:21
  Have thought about it because this film is so authentic.
• 2:08:24
  The last thing you think of is any kind of technology.
• 2:08:27
  It's going to help them. You don't put that in the next
• 2:08:29
  day at all. Because he's singing along with
• 2:08:31
  the music as we hear it, and he's in the same key as it as
• 2:08:34
  well. You just think, oh, that's
• 2:08:35
  amazing. Not like they could have an
• 2:08:36
  earpiece. Of course they could have an
• 2:08:37
  earpiece. That's only way to do it, isn't
• 2:08:39
  it? You don't really think about it.
• 2:08:41
  Yeah, and the music coordinator on the film was John Strauss,
• 2:08:44
  and at one point he miskewed the music going into Hulse's ear,
• 2:08:47
  and we see that take in the film.
• 2:08:49
  Yes, it's a bit right at the start where Mozart goes A minor.
• 2:08:54
  A minor Hulse was waiting for the music to play.
• 2:08:56
  Right. Nice.
• 2:08:58
  Right. Yeah, it's even better when he's
• 2:09:00
  trying to just bring it to the foreground of maybe I think
• 2:09:02
  there's something else. That's how it feels, yeah.
• 2:09:04
  Yeah. And then on top of that, Abraham
• 2:09:07
  said that Holtz would deliberately change the lines
• 2:09:09
  from the script or skip certain bits.
• 2:09:11
  Abraham thought that he was forgetting his lines, but Holtz
• 2:09:14
  was actually trying to confuse him.
• 2:09:16
  And we see this in the film in the mornings where Salieri is
• 2:09:18
  struggling to keep up with Mozart.
• 2:09:21
  Yeah, obviously the music is what you think of in the scene
• 2:09:23
  and it's fantastic, but those back and forths inject loads of
• 2:09:26
  drama into it, where Mozart's like, do you have it?
• 2:09:29
  Do you have it? One moment, one moment, please.
• 2:09:32
  That stuff's so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:09:34
  It's that please are so genuine as well.
• 2:09:36
  Really polite still, please. Let us get this.
• 2:09:39
  We're not doing just yet, though.
• 2:09:41
  After Stanley turns up and gives Salieri a final piece of her
• 2:09:44
  mind, we say Mozart's funeral and then one final scene with
• 2:09:47
  old Salieri in the hospital. A good way to finish, do we
• 2:09:51
  think? Probably the only way to finish
• 2:09:53
  at this point isn't. It.
• 2:09:55
  It is. I mean, it's brutal.
• 2:09:58
  Yeah. Like a pop is mass grave.
• 2:10:00
  That's all he gets. The priest barely putting any
• 2:10:02
  effort into it. Yeah.
• 2:10:04
  Where's the justice for this one?
• 2:10:06
  And the genius he gave to the world?
• 2:10:08
  And the absolute kicker is that Salieri doesn't even get to
• 2:10:11
  claim that requiem mask for his own.
• 2:10:13
  He's put all this effort in, expanded so much of his own
• 2:10:17
  creative energy on hatred and jealousy, and he's achieved
• 2:10:21
  absolutely nothing. And when we go back to the
• 2:10:25
  confession, it's just the final underlying point.
• 2:10:28
  Mortard has triumphed all from even a death, and God has
• 2:10:31
  rejected Salieri one final time, and all he has, as he says, is
• 2:10:36
  the knowledge that he is the patron state of mediocrities.
• 2:10:38
  Yeah, what an ending. Yeah, it brings us full circle
• 2:10:42
  back to old Salieri in the asylum.
• 2:10:44
  It works so well. The way to be cut from the
• 2:10:46
  funeral on the big are men of the death Mass.
• 2:10:49
  Back to the priest and he's like head down sweating.
• 2:10:52
  Yeah. Totally done in by everything
• 2:10:53
  he's heard. Brilliant.
• 2:10:54
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Surely he wasn't expecting to be
• 2:10:57
  there all night. He thought he'd be in and out in
• 2:10:58
  5 minutes. Yeah.
• 2:11:00
  So yeah, he wouldn't shut up the.
• 2:11:01
  Transition when he first comes into that part.
• 2:11:03
  Like if you put them scenes together that would be
• 2:11:05
  incredible. Just a smash cut to.
• 2:11:07
  Just yeah, it's great. Yeah, I mean, it's it's so
• 2:11:11
  harrowing, but it's so humbling at the same time.
• 2:11:13
  It points home that not everybody thought as highly of
• 2:11:16
  Mozart, Salieri did. He thought it was going to be
• 2:11:19
  angels on top of castles just playing this Requiem to the
• 2:11:23
  whole world. And it isn't.
• 2:11:24
  He didn't have them in such high regard.
• 2:11:26
  And that's a tragedy because he's the only one who saw him
• 2:11:30
  God like. And I think it's just incredible
• 2:11:32
  when it goes back, the older version of him, he's that is his
• 2:11:34
  confession. That is what he he did and he
• 2:11:36
  did kill him. And it's in a way because he
• 2:11:39
  kind of killed him through his own obsession.
• 2:11:41
  Well, yeah, that's what he kind of means, I think by the end
• 2:11:42
  doesn't. It and exactly.
• 2:11:43
  And he's in 32 years of torture. That's what he's left with.
• 2:11:46
  His delivery of that bears so good as well.
• 2:11:49
  Amazing. My music grows fainder.
• 2:11:51
  It's just an absolute lesson to walk away from this film and
• 2:11:54
  just think. Appreciate what you have got and
• 2:11:57
  don't wish for what you haven't got.
• 2:11:59
  It's a life wasted. Amen.
• 2:12:01
  Yeah, there's your real death mess from West here.
• 2:12:03
  You go. As always, the film fades the
• 2:12:07
  black with us here and one last version of Mozart's laugh.
• 2:12:11
  This wasn't scripted and Foreman realized you wanted it during
• 2:12:14
  editing, so they brought fuels back.
• 2:12:17
  And it was nine months later after filming the wrapped and he
• 2:12:20
  wasn't able to do the laugh anymore.
• 2:12:22
  Wow. Until Foreman gave him some
• 2:12:24
  whiskey straight back in. Yeah, the music that plays over
• 2:12:29
  the final sequence into the end credits.
• 2:12:31
  Piano Concerto #20 it's called, right?
• 2:12:33
  Stunning that. Yeah, it's unreal.
• 2:12:35
  In the final shot, we're looking at Salieri and listening to
• 2:12:38
  Mozart. Yeah, pretty perfect.
• 2:12:40
  Weird when I think brilliant. And that is the end of Amadeus,
• 2:12:43
  from the magic fluid through the deathbed Requiem to that final
• 2:12:46
  absolution. Mozart is gone, though his music
• 2:12:49
  isn't. And a final act worthy of that
• 2:12:52
  music. Oh, unbelievable.
• 2:12:53
  Yeah. Certainly.
• 2:12:57
  Reception and awards. So that is the story of Amadeus
• 2:13:02
  and it opened in cinemas on September the 19th, 1984.
• 2:13:06
  How to do when it's release? Well, our own statistical
• 2:13:09
  maestro is here to tell us Wolfgang Amadeus Matt's art.
• 2:13:13
  And I. Saw from the top, please, Matt.
• 2:13:17
  OK. So production butchered was $18
• 2:13:19
  million and Amadeus Gross $90,000,000 worldwide.
• 2:13:23
  And that's even more impressive considering it only opened in 25
• 2:13:26
  theaters and didn't have a wide release until months later.
• 2:13:30
  And it did amaze me. Well, at the Oscars that yeah,
• 2:13:32
  nominated for 11 and winning 8. Solzhenz won for best picture,
• 2:13:37
  Milos Foreman won for best director, F Murray Abraham won
• 2:13:40
  best actor, Peter Shaffer won for best adopted screenplay,
• 2:13:43
  Patrizia von Brandenstein and Carl Cerny won for best art
• 2:13:47
  direction, Theodore Pistek one for best costume design, Mark
• 2:13:51
  Berger, Thomas Scott, Todd Bokelhider and Christopher
• 2:13:54
  Newman won best sound, and Paul LeBlanc and Dick Smith won best
• 2:13:59
  makeup. Oh, that's a lot of wins.
• 2:14:01
  That's a lot of wins. Last picture I was presented by
• 2:14:04
  Laurence Olivier. It was about 77 at the time and
• 2:14:07
  he forgot to mention all the nominees.
• 2:14:09
  He basically got up and went Amadeus.
• 2:14:11
  So souls, Anthon, listen to all of you the nominees during his
• 2:14:14
  acceptance speech, which nice to oh, nice.
• 2:14:16
  Right. Nice.
• 2:14:18
  I didn't mention Creedence. Though won't forget about the
• 2:14:21
  Creedence. Yeah.
• 2:14:22
  Orion Pictures promote the film by putting together a music
• 2:14:25
  video for Mozart Symphony #25 in G minor.
• 2:14:29
  It featured David Lee Roth as a conductor.
• 2:14:31
  It was put together using clips from the movie and footage of
• 2:14:34
  big pop stars at the time like Madonna, Springsteen, Bowie,
• 2:14:37
  Michael Jackson, as if they were kind of dancing along the track
• 2:14:40
  itself, which is great. I've never seen that.
• 2:14:42
  I'd love to see that. Yeah, it's quite fun.
• 2:14:43
  Yeah. It's the music that opens the
• 2:14:45
  film. Yeah, it's that piece of music.
• 2:14:47
  I thought it must be, yeah. Yeah, it seemed to work.
• 2:14:48
  The soundtrack album for Amadeus sold over six and a half million
• 2:14:51
  copies. That'll do.
• 2:14:52
  And it was the first classical recording to chart alongside pop
• 2:14:55
  albums in the US, Right. And of course, Rodney Amadeus by
• 2:14:58
  Fargo went the number one in 1985.
• 2:15:00
  Did. Yeah, The only German language
• 2:15:02
  song to ever get the number one in America.
• 2:15:05
  Wow. Mainly because it's a total
• 2:15:07
  banger. Well, of course, yeah, it is.
• 2:15:10
  Yeah. No Hasselhoff in there.
• 2:15:13
  Under the critics, and we'll start, as we usually do with
• 2:15:15
  Roger a bit. What did Big Rog make of Amadeus
• 2:15:18
  do we think? I reckon he loved it big full
• 2:15:21
  marks. Easily, of course.
• 2:15:22
  It was four stars out of Fall from Roger.
• 2:15:24
  Yeah, obviously, yeah, he said. Amadeus is one of the riskiest
• 2:15:28
  gambles the filmmaker has taken in a long time.
• 2:15:30
  There's nothing cheap or unworthy about the approach in
• 2:15:33
  magnificent film, full and tender and funny and charming.
• 2:15:38
  It was risky for former non souls hands to pay for it all.
• 2:15:40
  Yeah, yeah. Zach readings, obviously.
• 2:15:43
  Obviously. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker
• 2:15:45
  was less impressed and said Milos Foreman trudges through
• 2:15:49
  the movie as if every step were a major contribution to art.
• 2:15:52
  And he keeps the audience hooked by showing you Mozart as a
• 2:15:55
  rubber faced buffoon with a Randy mind, as if that were all
• 2:15:59
  there was to him. There's nothing but confusion at
• 2:16:02
  the heart of the movie. Oh really?
• 2:16:04
  Wow, that's a very confused and strange.
• 2:16:07
  Take rubber faced grinning buffoon.
• 2:16:09
  Jim Carrey. Exactly, I mean yes, but I think
• 2:16:13
  mortal would love. That, yeah, you would have,
• 2:16:15
  yeah. Yeah, and full marks from Empire
• 2:16:17
  magazine. In the retrospective of you, Ian
• 2:16:19
  Nathan gave the film five stars over the five and said a
• 2:16:23
  towering achievement. The film, so magnificent and
• 2:16:26
  ornate, is posing very human conflict on a grand scale.
• 2:16:29
  Self aware mediocrity versus blind talent, liberated
• 2:16:33
  creativity versus the establishment.
• 2:16:35
  Forman's period piece is worth every second of demands of you.
• 2:16:38
  The music's pretty good, too. Yep, agreed.
• 2:16:41
  The music is pretty good. Yes it is and today on Rotten
• 2:16:44
  Tomorrow's Amadeus has a critics approval rating of 90% and 95%
• 2:16:50
  from audiences. And then on IMDb it currently
• 2:16:53
  sits with a rating of 8.4 out of 10, putting at 73rd on the IMDb
• 2:16:58
  top 250 list. And that is one place below Coco
• 2:17:02
  and one above Avengers End Game. What it for you all that is?
• 2:17:06
  Yeah, yeah, it's Saturday night in, isn't it?
• 2:17:11
  Actually, another Marvel tidbit with Amadeus.
• 2:17:14
  Have you seen the first Iron Man film?
• 2:17:16
  Yeah. So Jeff Bridges plays Orbit.
• 2:17:18
  I asked in who was like a poor man's Tony Stark.
• 2:17:21
  There's a scene where he plays the piano and he's playing a
• 2:17:23
  piece by Antonio Salieri, right, Which is a nice reference, Yeah.
• 2:17:27
  Yeah, great. So Amadeus was released a
• 2:17:30
  critical acclaim and boxer for success. 8 Oscars, including the
• 2:17:33
  big ones, tripling its budget and introducing Mozart to the
• 2:17:36
  MTV generation. Yeah, not bad for a three hour
• 2:17:39
  period costume drama about classical music.
• 2:17:42
  Is it not bad at all? Certainly not.
• 2:17:47
  Sequels and influence. There are no sequels to Amadeus
• 2:17:52
  Milos Foreman never tried to follow this one up.
• 2:17:54
  No. I think this might be,
• 2:17:55
  thankfully, a film where you literally couldn't make a sequel
• 2:17:58
  even if you wanted to. No.
• 2:18:00
  No. Unless you do get Beethoven in
• 2:18:01
  there. Maybe.
• 2:18:02
  Beethoven. It's Bill and Ted called
• 2:18:04
  Beethoven. Yeah.
• 2:18:06
  But what about Amadeus impact? What kind of influence and
• 2:18:09
  legacy has it had since 1984, do we think?
• 2:18:12
  I think it's influences that assured that period films don't
• 2:18:15
  have to be, you know, painfully slow and very restrained in
• 2:18:19
  emotion and performed. He can view people in the 18th
• 2:18:22
  century the same way you view people today.
• 2:18:24
  And I think something like when Armando Iannucci adapted David
• 2:18:28
  Copperfield, that owes a lot to this because it's very loose and
• 2:18:31
  it's funny and it's warm. I think it's legacy is that it's
• 2:18:34
  a master class and how to take something on stage and make it
• 2:18:37
  cinematic to the point where you almost think, well, how would
• 2:18:40
  this work on stage because it works so well as a film.
• 2:18:42
  Yeah, exactly. Individual bits, I think.
• 2:18:44
  Remember the scene in Philadelphia where Tom Hanks,
• 2:18:46
  this character, was talking about the classical music?
• 2:18:48
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's totally taken from this,
• 2:18:51
  I think, how they describe the classic music here.
• 2:18:54
  And the last thing I'd say is that Mozart and Salieri
• 2:18:56
  themselves have become shorthand for that kind of jealous
• 2:18:59
  relationship where one person is overshadowed by another.
• 2:19:02
  No, countless times I've seen character relationship described
• 2:19:06
  us or they've got a whole Mozart and Salieri thing going on.
• 2:19:09
  Yeah, and that's from this. It absolutely is, Yeah.
• 2:19:11
  I mean, poor Salieri. Massively successful, man, in
• 2:19:14
  this time, and now we're second best for eternity.
• 2:19:18
  Yeah. But yeah, the influence of
• 2:19:19
  Amadeus, it was pretty immediate, I think, massive
• 2:19:21
  success. It was an overnight classic,
• 2:19:23
  basically. And like we said, six and a half
• 2:19:25
  million soundtrack album sold. And Falco, obviously, I think
• 2:19:29
  this made classical music more accessible.
• 2:19:31
  Before Amadeus Mozart, was this like, dusty portrait than a box
• 2:19:35
  of chocolates? Since Amadeus, he's been like a
• 2:19:37
  kind of Rockstar genius from 200 odd years ago.
• 2:19:40
  Yeah. I think it proves the studios
• 2:19:42
  that period costume dramas can be both artistically credible
• 2:19:46
  and commercially successful without being pretentious.
• 2:19:49
  Whenever we see a film like Immortal, Beloved or Maestro,
• 2:19:53
  it's like, oh, going for Amadeus then.
• 2:19:54
  Yeah. Are we?
• 2:19:56
  Oh, my sort, definitely, yeah. So I think the DNA of Amadeus
• 2:19:58
  has been all over cinema since 1984.
• 2:20:00
  Every time a period film decides to be irreverent, or when a
• 2:20:04
  historical icon gets the Rockstar treatment.
• 2:20:07
  That's Amadeus I think. Yeah, I think it's for me when
• 2:20:10
  it's spiraled out and it's not necessarily about musicians or
• 2:20:15
  from an art point of view. I think if you look at the
• 2:20:16
  favorite by Yogas Lanthimos from 2018.
• 2:20:20
  Oh yeah. I think he's really trying to
• 2:20:22
  have that kind of spin on it where it's accessible but funny,
• 2:20:25
  and it's not necessarily supposed to be funny, but it's
• 2:20:27
  playful, I think. Marie Antoinette by Sofia
• 2:20:29
  Coppola in 2006 was very much the same, just that light tone.
• 2:20:34
  I get a lot of that from it. And when it is taught about
• 2:20:37
  composers, I think that can go for the heavy element.
• 2:20:39
  But at the same time they make it lighter and accessible, but
• 2:20:43
  they make the music really speak, which the doing TA I
• 2:20:46
  think from 2022, directed by Todd Field.
• 2:20:49
  And I think the music kind of really has something to resonate
• 2:20:51
  in that. So there's a lot of filmmaking
• 2:20:54
  elements and I think there's a lot of biographies that came
• 2:20:57
  after this. I mean, there's Walk the Line,
• 2:20:58
  Rear Elvis, Save Mr. Blank. It's kind of count this really.
• 2:21:01
  They've just kind of made, Oh yes, they make money.
• 2:21:03
  I think that's what Amadeus said.
• 2:21:05
  You know, make something, make it well, make an interest and
• 2:21:08
  doesn't really matter who it's about, it's going to make money.
• 2:21:10
  So no sequel to Amadeus, but in terms of influence, from making
• 2:21:14
  classical music almost cool to showing how to make period
• 2:21:17
  dramas that feel new, the film's impact has been felt decades
• 2:21:20
  later. Definitely, yeah, all the right
• 2:21:26
  movies ranking. And we've arrived at the final
• 2:21:30
  movement. Now it's time for our summaries,
• 2:21:33
  where we each rate the film out of 10.
• 2:21:35
  So, Westie, would you care to lead us in your summary and
• 2:21:38
  score for Amadeus please? Not a problem.
• 2:21:41
  This one, like I say, I came very, very late to in a matter
• 2:21:44
  of a month. Yeah.
• 2:21:47
  So it really had an impact and it really did work.
• 2:21:51
  First viewing I couldn't get past the laugh.
• 2:21:54
  Second view and I realised how important it was.
• 2:21:56
  Third view and you don't really notice it.
• 2:21:59
  And the more you watch this film, the more you learn from
• 2:22:01
  each character and seeing it from a different perspective.
• 2:22:03
  It's fresh every time you watch it again.
• 2:22:05
  I think there's so much that we've already spoken about that
• 2:22:08
  helps the film shine. From every aspect of the film
• 2:22:12
  making to every single performance in the cast.
• 2:22:14
  Nobody lets this film down. But at the same time, there's
• 2:22:17
  no, it's nowhere near pretentious enough to be this
• 2:22:20
  good. It is a really, really great
• 2:22:25
  film. And it's 1 you can kind of sit
• 2:22:26
  with with anybody, I think, and anybody would get something out
• 2:22:29
  of it. You don't just have to be a fan
• 2:22:30
  of classical music. It'll make your fan of classical
• 2:22:32
  music. You don't have to be a fan of
• 2:22:33
  period pieces. It'll make your fan of period
• 2:22:35
  pieces. It's one of them films that will
• 2:22:37
  change your mind. And they're quite, you know, few
• 2:22:39
  and far between. But when you come across them,
• 2:22:41
  it puts you in a mindset and it makes you feel a certain way and
• 2:22:43
  you leave feeling a certain way. And I don't think I can give it
• 2:22:46
  any more high praise than that. What I will say because I came
• 2:22:49
  late, wait, I can't give a full marks because there's always
• 2:22:51
  something else I'll get from it. There's always something else
• 2:22:53
  I'll learn. And when I've seen it as many
• 2:22:55
  times as John has, I'll probably give it a 10.
• 2:22:57
  I can't imagine that ever happened.
• 2:22:58
  Exactly. I'd have to watch it twice a day
• 2:23:00
  for the rest of my life and you'd have to stop watching it
• 2:23:04
  for the balance out and that's never going to happen.
• 2:23:06
  So I know that much. But it is very strong.
• 2:23:08
  It's a very good film. I would recommend it to anyone,
• 2:23:10
  but it's a solid name from me. Lovely.
• 2:23:13
  So we've covered the music, the visuals and everything kind of
• 2:23:16
  in between. And for me, to the surprise of
• 2:23:18
  nobody, I guess this is one of the great filmmaking
• 2:23:21
  achievements in Hollywood. We've seen these films before
• 2:23:23
  many times. It's fairly dull period biopics,
• 2:23:26
  and this couldn't be further from it.
• 2:23:28
  I find it innovative. I think it's vibrant and alive,
• 2:23:32
  like a human exploration of genius.
• 2:23:34
  I find it breathtaking, to be honest.
• 2:23:36
  The lead performances are crazy good.
• 2:23:39
  F Marie Abraham, one of cinema's great tragic figures in Salieri,
• 2:23:43
  and Tom Halls's Mozart giggling man, child slash genius Rockstar
• 2:23:47
  maybe shouldn't work, but does. Peter Schaeffer's writing uses
• 2:23:51
  structure and relationships to explore very human themes, in
• 2:23:55
  this case, jealousy and genius to a level I've rarely seen
• 2:23:58
  anywhere else. And technically, it's like a
• 2:24:00
  master class across the board. Yeah.
• 2:24:02
  Cinematography, costume design, production design, filming in
• 2:24:05
  actual locations where Mozart performed 200 years earlier
• 2:24:09
  still boggles my mind. Yeah, and the music.
• 2:24:11
  I mean, it's Mozart, so enough said to integrate that into the
• 2:24:16
  narrative. I'm still going on about it.
• 2:24:18
  I'm going to be on my deathbed dictating about how Amadeus
• 2:24:20
  weave music into the story. I found that spellbinding since
• 2:24:25
  I first saw it. Still do, always will.
• 2:24:27
  It's a theatre roof raising 10 out of 10 for me.
• 2:24:31
  Easy and mad. Your submarine score for Amadeus
• 2:24:34
  I. Mean taking the stage play about
• 2:24:36
  two 18th century composers, one of whom hates the other because
• 2:24:39
  of Chelsea, and tries to bring about its downfall.
• 2:24:43
  Put it all through the music. It doesn't sound like cinematic
• 2:24:45
  dynamite, but this, and it's all kind of slightly understated
• 2:24:49
  way, it really does explode off screen.
• 2:24:51
  The emotional conflict, the passion for the music of both,
• 2:24:54
  so visceral. Within 10 minutes, you're not
• 2:24:56
  thinking about the time of the topic.
• 2:24:57
  You're just involved in this story.
• 2:24:59
  You want to see where this rivalry is going to go.
• 2:25:02
  And that's because everyone is pulling together Foreman and
• 2:25:04
  Shaffer Holton Abraham, two incredible performances from
• 2:25:08
  them, and it gives the film this incredible richness.
• 2:25:11
  It's surprisingly funny. The devotion to the time period
• 2:25:14
  is done with just the right amount of reference, but not too
• 2:25:17
  much. Are there any flaws?
• 2:25:19
  Maybe the scenes of domestic strife with Stanzi later on are
• 2:25:22
  a little bit kind of wrote. I've seen this before and all
• 2:25:25
  would be where this one falls is just what we've all said about
• 2:25:28
  Ferry's films. It's excellent, but it's just
• 2:25:30
  not quite a personal favorite. So it's close, but it's a nine
• 2:25:34
  for me. Or had the patrons send in
• 2:25:37
  mediocrities. Now it's time for the opposite,
• 2:25:39
  the ATRM patrons. Should we see what they think of
• 2:25:42
  Amadeus? Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:25:43
  It's to be interesting. So Benito said.
• 2:25:46
  I remember saying this in high school and loving it, bought the
• 2:25:49
  soundtrack and listened to it non-stop.
• 2:25:51
  We watched it a few months ago and I had forgotten how great F
• 2:25:54
  Marie Abraham's performance really was.
• 2:25:56
  Yeah. Someone coming this for the
• 2:25:58
  first time after a long time must watch Abraham and Holsen be
• 2:26:01
  like, what the Hell's going on? Yeah, Yeah.
• 2:26:04
  Are these guys? Wait to see the films that were
• 2:26:06
  in after this. Yes you can.
• 2:26:10
  Kirsten Wolf said epic storytelling and masterful use
• 2:26:14
  of music, as well as the wonderful location filming.
• 2:26:16
  It's 10 out of 10 for me. First saw as a teenager and was
• 2:26:20
  devastated at the ending despite knowing it was coming.
• 2:26:22
  Stuck with me for life. Nice.
• 2:26:25
  Kirsten's reading my mind there, pretty much.
• 2:26:27
  Yeah, pretty much. And Scott B said a period piece
• 2:26:31
  that is definitely not a period piece from the viewpoint of
• 2:26:34
  Salieri as genius. Plus the music of Mozart, the
• 2:26:37
  plot, the characters, the dialogue, everything is
• 2:26:39
  wonderful about this movie. Can watch it over and over.
• 2:26:42
  And not just because I majored in classical music at
• 2:26:44
  university, right? So Scott knows what he's talking
• 2:26:47
  about. Yeah, he does, yeah.
• 2:26:49
  I wonder if he's infuriated by Mozart's genius as well.
• 2:26:52
  Yeah. So overwhelmingly positive from
• 2:26:54
  our patrons and all together they rate the film as What do
• 2:26:58
  you think? Tough one.
• 2:27:01
  It's overwhelmingly positive, isn't it?
• 2:27:02
  Let's say 9.5. Yeah, I'll call 9.5, Yeah.
• 2:27:06
  It was 9.5 out of 10. All right.
• 2:27:09
  Cool, there we go. So in total like it was Amadeus
• 2:27:11
  37.5 out of 40. Pretty divine numbers there.
• 2:27:16
  Yeah, pretty big. That's just done, Amadeus.
• 2:27:19
  Hopefully you don't think it was too many notes.
• 2:27:22
  No. Too many words, sure.
• 2:27:24
  Yeah, of course, but still wasn't enough.
• 2:27:26
  Next time out, Luke, Westie and Matt are taking a very different
• 2:27:30
  journey as they travel with Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Sam
• 2:27:33
  Mendes down the road to perdition 18th century Vienna to
• 2:27:38
  Depression era Chicago. Quite the change of pace, but
• 2:27:40
  she'll be good. Yep, as always.
• 2:27:43
  Wonderful film. Yep.
• 2:27:44
  Well, in the meantime, to find out more about becoming a
• 2:27:46
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• 2:27:49
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• 2:27:53
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• 2:27:59
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• 2:28:03
  really helps us out. It really, really does, guys.
• 2:28:05
  Yeah. Thank you so much.
• 2:28:07
  Socially, you can keep up with all the right Movies on X where
• 2:28:09
  we are at AT Right Movies, we post threads on there to tell
• 2:28:13
  the stories behind classic films and everything we post has been
• 2:28:16
  said by somebody involved in the production or come from three
• 2:28:19
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• 2:28:22
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• 2:28:24
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• 2:28:36
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• 2:28:39
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• 2:28:43
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• 2:28:46
  We're all off now to eat some nipples of Venus while pondering
• 2:28:48
  our own mediocrity. Come back for road to position,
• 2:28:51
  which definitely won't be mediocre and by now Ganassi
• 2:28:55
  seniority. Thanks for listening.
• 2:28:57
  Yes, Thanks guys. I'm not going to try that.
• 2:29:01
  Guys.