[Dixielandjazz] How actors learn to fake being musicians

[Steve barbone]

This is a long article, but will interest those who enjoyed the recent
thread of movie actors faking playing music in films.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone



July 10, 2005 NY TIMES By MELINE TOUMANI

The 60-Day Course in Perfect Fake Piano Playing

THERE is a good reason that learning to play the piano is generally
considered child's play. Not because it is easy but because, on the
contrary, it requires years of patient practicing that few adults have time
for.

The fingers must be strengthened by hours and hours of exercises - scales,
chord progressions and the ubiquitous drills designed by the French composer
Charles-Louis Hanon, whose 1873 book, "The Virtuoso Pianist in 60
Exercises," is still the most widely used hand workout in print. There are
fingering patterns to memorize, sounds to recognize, motor skills linking
the brain and the body that can be refined only by continuous repetition.
Right?

Right - unless you are a movie star, in which case a combination of camera
tricks and extraordinary training techniques can take you from "Chopsticks"
to Chopin over the course of a few weeks. Like gaining 80 pounds for a role,
feigning piano virtuosity is one of those transformations that consistently
wins Oscars. From F. Murray Abraham's portrayal of Mozart's sidekick Salieri
in "Amadeus" to Geoffrey Rush's of the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine";
from Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman in "The Pianist," and Jamie Foxx as
Ray Charles in "Ray": the pianist role, when skillfully executed, leaves
audiences mesmerized and full of questions.

Is the actor faking it? Are those hand-doubles? Did he really learn how to
play? And if he learned, could I learn?

Would-be pianists may find hope - if false hope - in the new French film
"The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Jacques Audiard's adaptation of the 1978
James Toback movie, "Fingers," in which Harvey Keitel played a debt
collector torn between a life of crime and classical music. In the updated
story, Romain Duris plays Thomas Seyr, a 28-year-old Parisian who makes his
living running seedy real estate transactions and collecting debts -
violently - on behalf of his washed-up dad.

But Thomas, whose dead mother was a famous concert pianist, had shown great
promise on the piano as a child. Now, fed up with his brutal life, he
schedules an audition with his mother's former agent and hires a Vietnamese
immigrant, Miao Lin (played by Linh Dan Pham) to help him relearn the
instrument, which he hasn't touched for 10 years.

In real life, meanwhile, Mr. Duris, 31, had a much bigger challenge: to
learn an instrument he had never played at all. He followed a well-worn path
for film actors: learn to play the piano - actually play, not just pretend
to play - even though the audience will hear a professional performance
while the actor strikes the right keys on a mute instrument.

Margie Balter, a Los Angeles-based pianist who has been the crash-course
coach behind many famous on-screen pianists, explains that this approach is
much more popular than using hand-doubles. "The actor needs to feel like a
musician," she said. "They need to be able to read some music and understand
the mind-set of a musician in order to look realistic."

Ms. Balter, who has been an actor herself, had her first major film-coaching
gig with Holly Hunter, for her Academy Award-winning role in "The Piano."
(Ms. Hunter was already a skilled pianist but needed brushing up.) Ms.
Balter has also worked with Tom Cruise for "Interview With a Vampire,"
Scarlett Johansson for "The Man Who Wasn't There," Sandra Bullock for "The
Net," Barbara Hershey for "The Portrait of a Lady" and, most recently, Paige
Hurd and Djimon Honsou for "Beauty Shop."

Such students usually come to Ms. Balter with what she calls
"Chopsticks"-level skills, a month or two set aside for daily training, and
the charge to master segments of well-known piano works - typically,
Beethoven sonatas or Chopin nocturnes - that have been chosen by a film's
director or music consultant.

The hardest pieces for nonpianists to learn, Ms. Balter says, are fast
pieces with big hand stretches - by Schubert, say, or Liszt. Yet while a
two-part invention by Bach may seem straightforward in comparison, it
presents its own difficulties. Since the right and left hands move in
counterpoint throughout, Ms. Balter says, "it's like splitting your body
into two halves." (The alternative to this "split" would be something like a
waltz, where the left hand maintains a consistent pattern while the right
hand plays a melody.)

For his role in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Mr. Duris - like his
character, Thomas - labored over Bach's Toccata in E minor (BWV 914), a
technically demanding piece that leaves no room for error or approximation.

But Mr. Duris didn't need to look far for a coach. His sister, Caroline
Duris, 36, is a professional pianist and piano teacher in Paris. He worried
at first that working with his big sister would be too comfortable, that it
wouldn't be intimidating enough to make him practice.

"But I love her perceptions about music so much," he said, "and I realized
that being a good student with her would be a question of the family's
honor." 

Ms. Duris did more than teach her brother; she played the music heard
throughout the film. And an accidental moment of frustration that was
captured during one of her recording sessions, in which she complained that
her heart was beating too fast, made its way into the movie, depicting the
voice of Thomas's mother on an old tape he listens to again and again.

Mr. Duris worked with his sister for three hours a day over two months,
usually at their parents' house or at a music shop in Paris, where they had
a practice room. 

Like his character, he stayed up late in his flat playing a rented digital
piano with headphones. But training his fingers was only part of the
learning process. Mr. Duris says he wanted to understand what kind of mental
space a pianist inhabits.

"When they sit down to play, are they nervous?" he asked. "Are they
inspired?"

To find out, he watched videos of famous pianists. He learned that there
were few physical rules, that each pianist had distinctive gestures and a
personal style. "They all fed me," he said.

In the film, Thomas repeatedly watches a black-and-white video clip showing
the fingers of Vladimir Horowitz curling down the piano in a long run. This
obsession with watching performance videos was just one detail from Mr.
Duris's real-life study that inspired Mr. Audiard's piano scenes in the
movie. 

Another source of inspiration was the real-life rapport between teacher and
student, which informed Thomas's scenes with Miao Lin. She speaks virtually
no French in the film, so she and Thomas communicate through imitation,
repetition and body language. Even this, Mr. Duris says, mirrored his
lessons with his sister, though they had the luxury of speech communication.

"Speaking or not speaking, it's the same," he said. In any music lesson, the
teacher models good technique, watches, listens, waits and says, "Again"
(one of the few words Miao Lin speaks), many, many times.

The speech-free method also resonates with Ms. Balter's Hollywood approach.
While she describes herself as "wild" and "willing to do anything" in a
lesson, she feels she learned more about music instruction from a Chinese
musician who taught her to play a zither, she says, than from any classical
piano instructor she has had. (Ms. Balter's childhood teacher was Lincoln
Maazel, the father of Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York
Philharmonic.)

For a year during her studies in ethnomusicology at the University of
Washington, Ms. Balter entered the Chinese teacher's room each week, bowed,
then imitated everything he played. "He'd shake his head, and I'd try it
again," she said. 

Another speech-free technique Ms. Balter uses is to play a piece directly on
top of a student's hands. "The body has its own memory," she said,
explaining that the repeated manipulation of posture (centered), elbows
(slightly out) and wrists (flat, never bent) can go a long way toward making
a rookie look like a professional. But the most telltale sign of a real
pianist, she says, is that the fingers always stay on the keys.

Still, for all this intensive training, an actor-pianist is the master of
only a few bars here, a fragment there: not bad for a couple months' effort
but not the same as really knowing how to play. Mr. Duris admits that most
of the Bach toccata would be impossible for him.

"They gave me the beginning of the fugue," he said. "But to play the part
that comes 30 seconds later, I'd need 10 years of training."

Fortunately, the repetition of just a few well-chosen segments, artfully
arranged with subtle cuts and fades throughout a film can give an audience a
rich illusion that the actor is playing a lot of serious piano.

Mr. Duris's success in playing the role of late-blooming virtuoso has not
led him to any major delusions about a real-life musical career. But he says
he wouldn't mind having a piano around, just in case.

"How do you call the one that is grand but not very, very grand?" he asked,
searching for an English translation. A baby grand?

"Yes," he says. "I want a baby grand. Steinway. Black, Maybe somebody in
America will read this and be very, very nice