The Making of 'Amadeus' (2002) Movie Script
1
That was an incredible scene.
It was Fourth of July.
And, of course, that's
not a holiday there
80 we were working.
And we were shooting an opera scene.
The camera was behind the stage,
over the singers and dancers
seeing the whole theater
full of the audience.
So we had, like, 500 extras there.
So I said, "Roll it, playback."
And suddenly,
instead of Mozart's music
the American national anthem
starts to play.
And out of the flies
came this huge American flag
that unrolled on the stage.
And 600 Czechs stood up
and sang the U.S. national anthem
and knew the words.
I get goose pimples
when I think about it.
All the extras either sang or hummed
"The Star-Spangled Banner with us.
All stood up except 30.
Men and women, standing,
panic on their faces
looking at each other,
what they should do.
That were the secret police
dispersed among the extras.
And I was thinking,
"Good God, the army's gonna come
and we're all gonna go to jail.
Because this is an act of rebellion.
It started when we crossed the border.
In customs they said, "You can go on."
Milos said to me, "You're now
in Czechoslovakia, forget logic."
Only in a taxi did I learn
we were going to a play
about a composer.
I thought, "I'm going to faint."
Milos made a great fuss and said:
"Oh, no, I hate biographies of musicians
and that kind of thing.
I loathe it. No, I'm not coming.
In communist countries they love
to make movies about composers.
Because composers make music.
They don't say anything subversive.
And they were the most
boring films I ever saw.
So I was prepared
for a painful evening.
The curtain went up,
and there is this wonderful drama.
I couldn't believe my eyes.
I was introduced to Milos
in the interval.
Peter was nervous. I met him
the first time that night.
And he said to me, with the marvelous
directness that characterizes him:
"If the second act is as good as
the first, I will make a movie of it."
I called Mr. Zaentz
only to find out he already had
the play on his list of what to see.
And that's how it all started.
I thought it was a great play.
It really worked for me.
He said, "Well, what about a picture?"
I said, "It's not a picture.
I don't think it's a picture.
I said, "There's not enough
about Mozart for me."
And then Milos hit me on the arm,
I still have the bruises
even though that was 20 years ago.
He said, "That's right. It needs
music, Mozart and music."
And Milos invited me up
for the weekend
to his house in Connecticut.
And he was just as forthright then.
We spent an extraordinary weekend
in which he said to me:
"You realize that everything
will be different.
In the theater,
everything is stylized.
Nobody pretends a tree is a real tree
or a sunset is a real sunset.
So in the language
when it's stylized, it's proper.
Acting is a little exaggerated
and stylized, and it's proper.
Film is a photography.
In photography, everything is real.
Anything stylized
would feel, you know, fake.
What we ended up doing was spending
four months together in his house
in Connecticut.
Monday to Friday
we were locked into what
we came finally to regard as our prison.
And then we would go back
to New York on the Friday
and instantly separate.
And not exchange a word
for a blissful Saturday
and blissful Sunday
till the evening when he would come
here to my flat to collect me
and drive me back to prison
for the next
almost unendurable five days
when we slowly hammered out
the whole script, moment by moment.
They had some bumpy bumps
in the road along the way.
I spoke to both of them at different
times, and both used terms
you don't use in mixed company
about each other.
Well, no, we had a big conflict,
you know, big conflict.
Because I hated his cooking,
and he hated my cooking.
I regarded both of us
as the odd couple.
On the other hand, we had an enormous
advantage to have the music before.
For example, every day,
we spent a couple of hours
just listening to the music,
to Mozart's music.
And then picking pieces which would
fit here or would fit there.
And that humbled Peter Shaffer.
The music humbled Peter Shaffer.
Suddenly you start to play music
and you start to say the lines.
And Peter himself was,
"No. Stop talking. Stop talking."
I said to Milos that
I did not want repetitions.
I did not want the Mozart theme.
I did not want one piece of music.
It was not in the background,
cueing the emotion we should feel.
But it was, in fact, the foreground.
Peter Shaffer one day said:
"Listen, the music is becoming
the third character of this film."
I think possibly the first film that
has music as its leading character.
We met in the airport
in New York to discuss it:
Peter, Milos and Saul Zaentz.
And they proposed this as a project.
I had less than an hour to think about it
because I was moving on
to catch another plane from another airport.
Immediately, apart from being slightly
flattered they thought of me
I thought of it as a project which,
so long as it didn't develop
into a Hollywood scenario,
I would be very interested in.
And he said, "I would,
under one condition.
That not one note of Mozart
will be changed.
"You have our word."
We had no idea what the film
was going to look like.
Although I knew the play,
I'd seen the play
I knew that once Milos
got his hands on it
it would be a completely
different animal.
We are rolling, stand by for speed.
And action anytime, please.
Your Excellency
FORMAN: Let's cut. Give him some water.
All right, let's
FORMAN: It's fine. It's perfect.
Casting is enormously important because
that's finally whom the audience sees.
My ideas mean nothing if what
I see on the screen, I don't believe.
It was an interesting situation because
a lot of big names wanted to play
especially Salieri
and Mozart, right?
And I somehow felt,
"I don't want to see known faces.
I want people to see Mozart
and Salieri."
Both Saul and Peter,
you know, agreed.
"No, we don't need stars.
We don't need big names.
We have Mozart and his music.
And we believe in the movie."
Mozart was tough to cast.
This man had written his first
concerto at the age of 4
his first symphony at 7,
a full-scale opera at 12!
Did it show?
Which one of them
could he be?
When you look at the portraits
of Mozart from the time
you notice an interesting thing:
none looks like the other.
He must have had
a very nondescript face
that you wouldn't notice him
in the crowd at all.
So he couldn't be a leading-man type,
you know, a leading-hero type.
But he has to be a wonderful actor,
and he has to master the music.
He was very hard on me, and he
was quite gentle with the others.
Then in the process, I learned.
On one day
I spent maybe six to eight
hours in a screen test.
Every 20 minutes, other actors came in,
and I played opposite them all day.
And so I got to watch Milos working
every 20 minutes
with a different set of actors.
Very good. No, that's fine.
That's enough. You still
Oh, I walk out!
And then I began to understand
that the people
who I was assuming
he was most interested in
because it was clear
from their work
he was also treating
the same way as he treated me.
And the people you felt weren't
gonna be the right combination
Thank you, Milos.
are the people there was
a more gentle relationship with.
We auditioned over 1000 people
for all the parts.
I think the number we had at one time
was 1263, and we weren't finished.
I know someone ran a tally,
but we were not finished.
I'm sure we passed
close to 1400.
It seemed like
I was auditioning for a year.
In retrospect, what we were really
doing was rehearsing.
I wasn't actually auditioning anymore.
I guess was rehearsing. Ha, ha.
I thought I was still
working to get the part.
But in that time I thought,
"This is a wonderful project
and he's a great director,
and I'm lucky to be still here.
Of course you start
with the main characters
and then you go down.
But down doesn't mean less important.
I think the small parts
are as important
as the main characters.
In a certain way, I pay more attention
to casting the small, bit part
because once you see them,
you will never forget them.
Nothing drives me more crazy
when I am watching a film
and somebody appears, then
disappears and then reappears.
And he looks like the guy
who was just there, and I'm mixing
"Who is he? Who is she?"
Milos called me and said:
"Vinnie, I would like
very much for you to be in Amadeus.
It is not a very big part,
but I would love you to be in it."
One day, I was reading
F. Murray Abraham
for a small part in the movie.
And he was all right.
And then I had a young actor
come in reading for Mozart
and I asked F. Murray,
"Listen, would you just help me here.
This is just to help, read Salieri
for this young man."
And F. Murray
probably because, you know,
now it doesn't matter
gave a wonderful performance.
I did one of the things from Salieri.
Then I stopped and said, "Milos, this
is where he becomes the old man."
Which I hadn't really worked on.
And he said:
"Well, do the old man."
And I did the old man. I didn't
think I was gonna get this thing.
But I still acted my heart out.
He read so beautifully that it
started to bug me, you know?
He called and said, "I want you
to know you're my first choice.
And I had been around for a while,
you know, and I said:
"Well, that's nice. I'm very happy
about it, but what does that mean?
See, he wasn't saying, "You got the part,
or, "There's no question about it."
He said, "You're my first choice."
Now, from my point of view,
that doesn't pay the rent.
I mean, I'm very flattered,
and I said, "Thank you, Milos.
Just tell me what I have to do next
because I'm busy painting my kitchen."
Some time went by and they said, "We
want to see you for this improv group.
I said, "No, I'm telling you,
I'm not gonna do it."
Milos said, "That's the kind
of guy who would be Salieri."
And I said, "Why do you say that?"
He said, "He's not gonna be happy
about what I say." Milos or Murray.
He says, "Well, this guy thinks
that he would be a great actor
if he didn't have
breaks against him.
Also, I think he's Salieri off-stage
as well as on-stage."
And he was right.
So after several weeks,
you know, I told F. Murray Abraham:
"Okay, you got the part."
He obviously didn't believe me, because
he accepted a role in another film!
While on the set of Scarf ace, I got
the word that I was gonna do Amadeus.
And everyone's attitude, the stars
on the show, changed toward me.
I was no longer just this hardworking,
good actor F. Murray Abraham
like so many other
hardworking, good actors.
I was the man who got the part
that every actor in the English
language was trying to get.
And I was really scared.
Because I had talked the talk,
and now I had to walk the walk.
And it was For three days,
I couldn't answer the phone.
I was just sucking it up, getting ready
for the thing, for the mountain.
This film could only be shot in three
cities: Vienna, Budapest or Prague.
Because only these cities have the
style of 18th-century architecture.
Prague was ideal. Prague was
absolutely ideal, because
Thanks to communist inefficiency,
ha, ha
the 18th century
was untouched, untouched.
Prague was an amazing time capsule.
You could set up camera everywhere
without having to undo
signs of the 20th century.
They just weren't there.
There was no advertising.
You remove the electric lights,
you were in the 18th century.
A lot of locations, all you had
to do was throw dirt down
put a couple of lanterns with some oil
in it, and you were ready to go.
You have squares and streets.
You can turn the camera 360 degrees.
You don't have to change anything.
It's an exquisitely beautiful city.
I don't think there's any other city
in Europe
that has such an extensive
uninterrupted core
of 18th-century structures.
For me, it was a very mixed
emotional experience
because I was not allowed to go
back. I was a traitor and emigrant.
When I went the first time, which was,
more or less, to negotiate
the making of the movie,
that was very emotional for me.
Because before,
I didn't hope that I would ever see
my native country and places
where I kissed my first girlfriend
ever again in my life.
And then I was coming back for the
shooting, I was arriving January 2nd.
It was very cold, snow everywhere.
And I realize that from now on
I have to cut myself,
emotionally, from my past entirely.
Because otherwise,
the work would suffer.
When I got to Prague in the beginning,
as you remember, of Amadeus
there's the scene where his assistant
coming with the muffins,
and Vincent Schiavelli, in snow
And so I had written a 13-page
snow alert in English and in Czech.
I wanted trucks rigged.
I wanted lighting packages.
I wanted duplicate equipment.
I wanted road maps.
They got this thing and they say,
"What are you talking about?
Half the people don't have phones.
We don't have trucks we can let sit."
I said, "Very simple. Just tell me
when it's gonna snow!" Ha, ha.
We didn't have the weather
reports as perfect as we have today.
So there was always a show alert.
They phoned and said, "There's ho snow.
It's not gonna show this year.
The long-term weather reports say
we're not gonna have any snow.
We're not gonna shoot you until March.
We're gonna shoot with fake snow."
I said, "Okay."
"So you're free, you can take other work."
Every day we had to prepare two sets.
One for in case there is overnight
snowfall, and one in case there is not.
And, uh
That was not my problem.
I didn't want him to know about it.
I was engaged to do an episode
of Taxi on Monday.
And Saul called on Thursday,
the Thursday before, and said:
It's snowing. Can you come now?
Ha, ha.
He said, "I know. You gotta be back.
We'll get you back on Monday."
I said, "Sure." He said, "We'll do
the one exterior shot in the snow
and then you'll come back
and we'll do the interiors."
I said, "Okay." So I got on a plane
Thursday, and I got to Prague Friday
and we shot Saturday night,
and I was back for Monday.
I had never been to
a Soviet bloc country before.
And going to one at such a fantastically
accelerated rate of speed
my first impressions
were enormous and huge.
I felt like I was in a grade-B
Spy movie.
Followed everywhere,
hotel rooms bugged.
There were sizable rooms in this
one hotel. And they all were very ornate
with a chandelier
and these sconces
and rugs
Kind of worn, chipped, tacky.
But the fact is they were there,
you know?
And this one guy, Frank, he said,
"These guys have got this room bugged.
I said, "Who cares? Let them listen"
He says, "No, man.
I'm not gonna let them.
I'm gonna knock that"
"Oh, are you gonna make a problem?"
"No, I'm gonna show you."
He starts climbing around the sconces.
"No. It's the chandelier."
He gets up on a chair, he's climbing
around. "No, it's not here."
I said, "Let it go. Let's go to dinner."
He says, "No, I'm gonna find it."
He rolls the rug back and he finds a
plate about this big with screws in it.
He says, "I told you, man!
It's right here.
He gets a butter knife.
We had kitchenettes, right?
He takes it, and as
he takes the screw out
there's this tremendous crash
and the chandelier beneath us
crashes down into
the apartment below.
We went to dinner like a shot.
A friend of mine, an older
Czech director named Jiri Weiss
gave me some pineapples
and lemons for his daughter.
She came to the set that Saturday.
I had the lemons and oranges
or the oranges, the pineapples and
the lemons. And I gave her the stuff
and half the crew was secret police,
and everybody knew it.
And afterwards, I don't
remember his name
but he was sort of a smarmy cop,
and obviously cop. He said:
"So tell me, so,
what is this woman you meet?
This intrigue in Prague?
What is this?"
And I played, like, idiot and I said,
"She's the daughter of a roommate
of a friend who's from here,
used to make movies here.
He asked if I would bring his
daughter some pineapples and lemons."
And he said, "Pineapple?"
And I had learned the Czech word
for pineapple.
It's an an as, it's the same word
as in French.
I said, "Yes, an an as.
And he said, "Ah, yes, in the can?"
I said, "No, no, real, fresh an an as.
"Fresh pineapple? Fresh an an as? Ah!
And then for the next 20 minutes,
I watch it go around the set.
And they're all doing the same
gesture at the end of the exchange.
They're going, "In the can?"
And the teller of the story
says, "No, fresh an an as.
And they all kind of:
And looked at me and kind of:
"Ah!" Ha, ha.
I think they were the only two
pineapples in Prague that January.
When they go down
the corridor of the insane asylum
that was a war museum.
The central hall
where all the mad people were kept
was part of a military hospital
for the wounded from the 30 Years' War.
That was a funny situation.
The Communists took it.
They left only the ground floor
as a kind of museum.
But it was closed for the public.
Up in the second and third floor
were secret archives
of the secret police.
There was a panic when they learned
that they showed us
the ground-floor corridors.
We were questioned very closely
as to what our connections were.
After all, we could be CIA
members or we could be whatever.
And they didn't much like the idea
of a film company invading the
military archive. But we persuaded them.
When we went there
the first time, that corridor
had 75 two-ton cannons
all looking at each other.
And Milos says, "I love it."
I say, "Yeah, I love it too.
What are we gonna do with these 200
2000-pound cannons?"
He says, "Oh, the cannons
can't be there."
I said, "I figured that out already,
that the cannons can't be there.
But we're gonna have to get them
out, and you want pristine snow."
No snow can have footprints in it,
and we got to get the cannons out.
I didn't know it's a problem. There's
some cannons there. Take them away.
I didn't know that every cannon
weighs several tons, you know?
They had to hire
an army to take it out.
The first three weeks of
shooting was Salieri in the hospital room.
I was the guy that went out
with him in the morning
and Dick Smith, our makeup artist,
at 4:00 every morning
for hours of makeup
before the crew came.
And he'd go out to Barrandov.
No one was there at 4:00 am.
And the minute you get there,
"Where's my tea?" You know?
You know, "I just got out of the car,
Murray. I'm gonna go get your tea.
Dick Smith is the best
makeup man in the world.
And when we would start
working in the morning, it was 4:00.
I would get up,
I'd get to the studio by 4:30.
We'd work on the makeup
for four and a half hours.
As much preparation as I had made for
the old man, gestures and so on
the fact is after sitting for hours,
at that hour in the morning
you are kind of tired and slow.
Your movements are kind of like this:
This kind of thing starts to happen.
And I also had lenses in my eyes
which had to be removed,
and my eyes had to be sprayed.
So that the pain, which was always
there, would not be too much.
Once I looked into a mirror
at my face
felt like it
was completely convincing.
All I had to do was believe this guy,
and it was not hard.
I'm not denigrating my work,
I'm a very proud actor
but with a man like Dick Smith there,
and the words of Peter Shaffer
They've got be the most beautiful
descriptions in music ever written
whether on film or in literature.
This was a music I had never heard.
And that we could hear
the music accompanying the words
Filled with such longing,
such unfulfillable longing.
what more can you ask for?
Ff seemed to me { was hearing
the voice of God.
Excuse me.
Because of the way the schedule went,
the first thing that was filmed
in the shooting schedule
was all of Salieri, old.
That sort of breathtaking section
of Murray's performance
most breathtaking
was done in the first weeks. But it
gave us the time to work on our own.
We rehearsed a lot on our own.
We rehearsed all of the scenes
before the filming began.
Initially, Meg Titty was playing
Constanze in the film
and she was amazing.
Basically, at one point,
Milos had said he felt like
we'd done it, because the work
was going so well up to that point.
And the day before Meg
was to appear on camera
for the first time,
she got hurt in a soccer game.
She's playing soccer with some kids
in the street
and she tore the ligament
in her leg
50 badly that the doctor told us
we would have to wait
five weeks before she could start.
And we couldn't because Saul
put together all independent money
and we just couldn't afford it.
It was shocking. Partly because
we were where we were.
Behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from
our lives to a significant degree
more than if we had been shooting
in Western Europe
or someplace closer to home.
Suddenly, she was just gone
and in a hospital.
So in a very short amount of time,
they had to find
an actress to take over the part.
The casting director
who was brought on
to hire the new Constanze
This woman called an acting teacher
of mine and said:
"Do you have anybody you can
recommend for the part?
And he said, "Elizabeth BERRIDGE."
And she said, "Oh, no,
she's too weird and introverted, and uh
And she's too quirky for this outgoing,
bubbly girl." Which I was.
Um Ha, ha.
We flew to New York for a weekend
and it was extraordinary.
Friday night, we went: Prague, Paris.
And Saturday morning
we took the Concorde to New York.
So we went to Milos' apartment
and they had 60-odd girls
lined up for us to see.
I saw, like, 60 girls.
Sunday I read, like, 12 of them.
Out of these 12, two were
I couldn't decide between them.
So Saul decided, "Let's bring them
to Prague
and let's do a screen test
with them there."
It felt like calamitous to me,
like it had gone so badly.
I said to my father,
"If I can't even speak
how am I gonna get a part acting ever?"
Because speaking is required
in that line of work. And, um
Then I got a call: "You're flying
to Czechoslovakia for a screen test.
And there's you
and another contender.
So I had no passport.
And this was, I think, the next day.
Milos went back to Prague Sunday
50 he could shoot on Monday.
And I went over there on Monday,
went back with the two girls Monday.
And that was some ushering job, being
with two girls up for the same part.
I kept saying, "I love you both."
We were flown over and we tested.
And they did the hair and the makeup.
Meanwhile, they're filming the movie
and you really wanna not
start to feel like you're part
of the thing, because, in my case
I knew I was getting back
on a plane the next day.
Apparently, they couldn't decide
that first day, so they said:
"There's gonna be another test
tomorrow. So we came back
and went through all
the hairdos and the gowns
And this went on for a week.
The other woman and I hung out
every night. We would have dinner.
I was always a nervous wreck.
And she would say:
"No, you look lovely in that wig.
I'm sure you did great.
And I was preparing to, "Okay, how
do I say thank you for having me
and for considering me and
for this first-class ticket to Prague.
Thank you so much, and bye,
and good luck with your movie."
And Milos said, "Essentially, you both
have the part, you know
it's impossible to decide
between you
and one of you is simply too pretty
to play Constanze.
So Elizabeth, you have the part."
And, ha-ha-ha
And I was like, "Thanks, that's, um
Well, I have the part. That's good."
As much as I love Meg Titty,
I think, as a personality
Elizabeth BERRIDGE
was more right because Constanze
was a landlady's daughter.
She was a street kid, you know?
So I got to stay and had packed
clothes probably for three days.
I was there for six months in Prague
and started work the next day.
And that was it. I was Constanze.
Frau Mozart?
I remember the first day
the first scene I shot
was the "nipples of Venus" scene
where I come to see Salieri.
I had to eat, like, about a million of those
Go on, try one!
They're quite surprising.
Marzipan! It was foul.
I don't know, it's just awful.
And I remember getting ill
and Milos was like:
"Oh, it's her job."
It wasn't exactly
having to work in a coal mine
but eating a million
marzipan balls can
Maybe I didn't know I didn't have
to eat the whole thing.
You know, that was another thing,
at 20 years old, I didn't know:
"Oh, you can spit it out at the end.
Oh, we're going again? Okay.
It's funny how that can be the only
thing on your mind.
But I couldn't-Ha, ha.
I had to It was like, ugh.
They're wonderful! Ha, ha.
The first scene that I did,
in the actual making of the movie
was the march of welcome.
Meeting Mozart for the first time.
I had to learn to play the piano
not only accurately, but badly.
Even though the harpsichord
The piano was unhooked
the hands had
to be in the right place.
Lightly, then strongly!
They had provided me with several
versions of prerecorded music
and I had to learn
to do it as recorded.
Which was fun. I had a good time.
Then I got to be very good at it.
Tom worked on it too.
Tom had a piano in his room
and he worked on it all the time.
The keyboards that I played on
in front of the camera were all silent.
All of the music was recorded
before we started.
So the sequence was done with the
music played out loud in the room
or in my ear, if there was dialogue
that had to go on.
In the scene where Mozart
first meets the emperor
and Salieri has written this march,
it was such a surreal experience.
It was staged so that the actors
were behind me. The keyboard is here:
Because there's dialogue, the music is
played in a tiny transistor in my ear.
The keyboard is silent.
I'm looking away
so when you lose your bearings,
you can't find it because you can't hear.
So it truly was a kind
of schizophrenic situation.
When we met, the only
instrument he ever played was guitar.
He never played piano.
He was spending like three or four
hours a day for several months
practicing the pieces
he had to play.
I began, as the months went on,
to actually believe the illusion a little bit.
So it was always very distressing
to hear what I really sounded like
on a sounded keyboard.
The practice room,
where my piano was
was right over the room
where Milos hung out.
Imagine what a nightmare
that must have been for him.
The one day he said
that I was improving
was the day that my teacher
was demonstrating to me.
Neville MARRINER,
after seeing the film, said:
"He never hits a wrong key.
Even when he plays backwards."
Now you play it backwards!
There was just no way
to be able to do that
without being able to do it.
It's one thing to play
on a silent keyboard to a playback
but it's entirely different to do it
upside down behind your back.
In the way of stunt work,
you learn what the assignment is.
and some chemical gets released,
and you actually can do it.
It was a big thrill for everybody
.to realize that we were going to film in
practically the only wooden
opera house left
in central Europe
and also the most perfectly preserved.
It had undergone many alterations,
but they were minor
and architecturally,
the place was intact.
The first time I arrived in Prague
for location, and they showed us
the theater, we were there
with Peter Shaffer and Saul
when suddenly,
I realized Peter Shaffer disappeared.
Where's Peter Shaffer?
We found him
in the corridor, hidden, crying
because there he learned
that he is standing exactly
at the place where Mozart himself
in person, conducted
the world premiere of Don Giovanni.
I tell you, we felt awed the first
time we stepped on that stage
and realized that our hero had been
in that very spot.
I think this fact
gave a lot of humility
and respect for the place
to every actor, dancer
and everybody there.
There's something that happens when
you do it in the place, the atmosphere.
I'm not crazy about
the spiritual ghosts and things.
I'm not, but I don't deny them.
Suddenly, the reality of the place and
the moment really enters into you
which is why it was a great idea to
do it there instead of building a set.
It was brilliant.
But again, thanks to the neglect
during the communist era,
it was a powder keg.
It was in danger
of burning down at any moment.
It still had gas lines in it.
They lit it with gas.
They used to have limelight in it.
It really hadn't been modernized.
Now we are going there
to light millions of candles!
All those candles in
a wooden opera house, in a wooden dome.
When the chandeliers were lit, I held
my breath for what seemed like days.
And there we were,
all these extras, all these wigs.
and all this flammable stuff
in this tinderbox-dry theater
where Don Giovanni had had its
premiere. That theater we were in.
Amazing.
Imagine the trust of
the opera house, allowing us to be there.
We had every day
like 30 or 40 firemen
everywhere, standing there.
But they were absolutely
I will never forget Don Giovanni.
At a certain moment, Don Giovanni
moves to the table, does this:
And he has a hat with huge plumage,
you know, a feather
like a peacock feather, right?
And leans like that
and talks to the commodore.
We rehearsed. Everything was fine.
Okay, let's shoot.
So light the candles.
We didn't realize
that there on the table
Is this small candelabra,
which now is lit.
Okay, camera roll it, playback.
We are shooting.
And the actor is performing like that.
He leans
and suddenly we see
that this feather caught fire.
The fire is going up and up and up,
but he's in the ecstasy of performing.
He doesn't even notice.
And everybody is staring and nobody
We have 40, 50 firemen around there.
And his head starts really flaming.
Finally, one fireman dared
to lean from the wings and says:
"Excuse me. Excuse me, Mr. FORMAN,
will you please stop the cameras?
Your actor is on fire!"
When the camera is rolling,
everything is sacred.
My impression, never having done
a movie that size-
I had done a horror film
That if things went wrong
that one should just stop.
When we did that scene
where we're playing under the table
I don't remember if it was a take or
rehearsal, but I came out of my dress.
You know, which I was
barely in to begin with.
And there was Milos, "Keep going!"
I was like, "Really?"
- Stop it!
- I am.
And Milos looks for the-
He'd love life coming in accidentally.
There. You see?
Milos can be a bit abrupt.
That's kind of a pleasant way
to put it.
But he's never wrong.
On Amadeus, after this incredible
journey to get to Prague
through the night
and all of this remarkable stuff
I'm suddenly standing
in 18th-century costume, in the snow
in Prague,
in the middle of the night.
Then I have to walk down the street
and he says to me,
"Vinnie, television is ruining you!"
He meant my walk was terrible.
"Television is ruining you!"
Then we did a second take a moment
later. He said, "That was wonderful!
I don't know what changed.
We were six days or five days into
shooting the first scene I was in
and Milos wasn't
really saying anything.
I was starting to feel
more comfortable and I said:
"Milos, do you have any suggestions?"
And he said, "No."
I said, "Well, I mean, is it okay?
I mean, should I do more or less?"
"No, you're doing fine."
I said, "You haven't said anything."
He said, "If there was anything wrong,
I'd have said so." It was like Ha, ha.
I was doing fine,
50 he didn't need to say anything.
Less you talk,
less you confuse actors' heads.
If you cast wrong then you have to work
and usually, you're in trouble anyway.
A director is little bit of everything,
but a good director always
for every part of his work, must
choose people who are better than him.
For me, the operas
were not difficult at all.
Because it was, first of all,
beautifully recorded.
Beautifully cast by Twyla,
and she did all the choreography.
So for me, it was just a question,
you know, how to
Where to place the camera
and how to shoot it.
It was extremely difficult to work in Prague.
There were no materials.
Everything had to be brought in
and everything was improvised.
They had no properties, no wardrobes,
no fabrics. Nothing 10 build with.
But they had
an ingenuity, a humor,
and a force to their imagination
that more than repaid
the lack of materials.
I really enjoyed and had great fun
shooting the parody in the theater
the parody of Mozart's operas.
Milos only talks about doing
things extremely and broadly.
That is one of his charms.
You can't go over the top with Milos.
It's not possible. I like that.
Peter enjoyed very much
writing this scene.
The parody, words, learning new lyrics.
I had never done anything like that before.
I'm not sure Milos had ever directed
anything like that.
I'm sure Twyla had never choreographed
anything like that before.
I'm sick to death of that tune!
There was a pure joy.
We just put every silly thing in,
the dwarves
It's very inventive, a very
Milos FORMAN scene. You feel it in the man.
The thing that gives him the greatest
pleasure is that kind of theater.
The guy who is in the back
of the horse, right?
Because he has to reach out
and give out a dove.
When the horse moved,
he had to walk backwards.
That was probably the most
difficult thing in the film.
There were so many extras,
we were hard-pressed
for enough wigs
and enough costumes.
Makeup and hair and wardrobe
for 500 people
It was like a
It was like a battleground.
Once these people were dressed
.they were sort of on their own.
And they wandered the halls
and ate their lunch
and made phone calls
and all in their clothes.
I think that had
a tremendous amount to do
with the way they came across.
It was life.
They lived in these clothes
for as long
as it took to complete this scene,
just as they did in the 18th century.
And I think there is a great deal
of authentic life
in them and in the clothes.
They were in the clothes long enough
that they were not a costume.
They were their own.
The costumes succeeded
because I had a hard head.
When I didn't like something, I had it
redone again and again until it was right.
Even the producer
couldn't interfere
when it was costing more money.
I'd redo it until I'd say,
"That can go in front of a camera.
The worst thing is to compromise.
It compromises the entire production.
It's every woman's fantasy,
I think, for about five minutes
to wear something like that
and feel like a princess.
And then it gets old.
It's very uncomfortable. It was
literally like being squeezed
and coming out
at the top like toothpaste. Ha, ha.
Eighteenth-century
costumes, it really
It really informs how you stand,
how you walk
what your posture should be.
Eighteenth-century clothes
have very, very tight shoulders.
They keep you back.
You keep your shoulders back
and your head erect. That's the pose.
That's what the clothes tell you
they want you to do.
What surprised me
was that because my hair
had gotten dyed
a kind of gold color
I'd get up in the morning and that image
was so different to me
that it actually triggered the part
of me that was more extroverted.
As people would show up
for their sequences in the film
I found that I had an urge
to take them out
and to be the kind
of social director
in a way that isn't
my natural inclination.
He was so much in
Mozart's head. After the movie was done
we ended up sharing
a living space together
and he's a very different man
than he was.
He was transformed into Mozart.
I hadn't thought
about this in a long time
but as Salieri, I was separate
from the rest of the cast
for the first 3 1/2 weeks.
I was only doing the old man.
I separated from the cast because
that's the kind of man Salieri was.
I'm not that way. I love parties.
I love a good time. I really do.
But I was extremely solitary.
It was me against everyone else.
What I didn't realize was that this was
infecting how others felt about me.
There began to be a separation.
Whenever there were parties
I wasn't invited because I wasn't
there. Also, I was always too busy.
If you refused for 3 1/2, four weeks,
people don't invite you anymore.
I began to be like that character.
I didn't like being separate
but in a way, that contributed
to the success of the performance.
In some way, I feel like the work
relationship that I had with Murray
was supported by the fact
that we didn't
become so close that we knew
too much about each other.
Tom and I have great respect
for each other. We like each other.
But during the film, we were living a
little bit like those two characters.
There was always that element
where we never
knew each other so well as people
that we could tell exactly when the
other one was telling the truth or not.
It happens. When you embody
a character as we did
it happens that you carry it over.
He said to give you this.
Crazy, but it's true of any actor
who does a part for a length of time.
And, of course, these parts
meant so much to both of us.
It was only right
that we had this light antagonism.
It's too soon.
Can I?
Could I help you?
Would you?
The dictation of the Requiem
by the dying Mozart, seems to me
to overturn every piece
of wisdom I was ever told.
The words are, in themselves,
not particularly interesting.
They don't even look
like a movie script.
They look as if they will
never play. They are dull.
C sharp, E flat, bar 14,
this, that, the other.
It's several pages
of musical direction.
One guy's in bed
and the other is writing at the end.
And nobody moves.
It's a very daring thing to do
to have a whole sequence
where composers are dictating music
to each other.
And they had set us up,
before we started filming
with Neville MARRINER
and his assistant.
They had them do the scene for us
to let us see what real musicians
would be like.
And forgive me, Neville, it was awful.
It was awful. Because,
you know, they're not actors.
Any film school would tell you
this is not for movie.
- Come, let's begin.
- We ended in F major.
- Yes.
- So now, A minor.
There's one sequence
early on in the scene
where Mozart is fairly delirious
and trying to find
the phrase that he's looking
for in the dictation.
- A minor.
- Yes.
Confutatis. A minor.
In reality, what happened
on that day is there's a little
John Strauss is in the corner pressing
the buttons on a cassette player.
We have little hearing aids
in our ears
which are playing
like an AM radio
the musical phrase, so that we can
be on tempo and on the pitch
for when all the music gets laid
in afterwards, that it's there.
And there was some mishap,
50 there's a moment where I'm
Me, the actor is
I'm genuinely lost.
But because of the kind of trust
and connection that we have
the whole sequence is in the film.
A minor.
Start with the voices.
- Basses first. Second beat of the
- Time?
Common time.
Second beat of the first measure.
There were two cameras set up,
so we didn't overlap.
It was as though we were in the theater.
And most of that is improvisational
because he was acting
as though he were very sick.
Consequently, he began to lose
certain things and I would guide him.
Actually, at times.
He would get lost, and I would help him.
It was a real symphony
between the two of us, a duet.
Later on, I don't know if told Murray,
but I would skip information.
First bassoon, tenor trombones,
with the tenors.
I'd leave out information that I knew
he needed to go to the next place.
- You go too fast.
- Do you have it?
- Bassoon to trombone, what?
- The tenors.
So he'd have to stop me and Salieri
would seem not smart enough.
Trumpets and timpani.
Trumpets in D. Listen.
- I don't understand!
- Listen!
You can do that because there
were cameras on both of us
and also because of a superb
partnership between two players.
The thing that most amazed me
was the artistry
of every person in every job
that worked on this film
and the extraordinary
storytelling
that happened
from every point of view.
I have the deepest
gratitude to that crew
because they gave everything,
everything they had.
In most cases, the film would
be a biography of Mozart
and it would be what happened
and what happened.
But to take all the circumstances
of that extraordinary life
and put it in the context
of this other man
and his argument
with his god, is genius, I think.
I don't really care what it is about
because it moves me
and makes me think.
It makes me laugh.
It makes me cry a little.
And whatever you think about,
that's what it is about.
I don't see that the movie has aged.
It's a timeless story, and it's
beautifully told and beautifully shot.
I'm sure you'll
hear this again and again
but we were part and parcel
of something that was greater
than we were.
I remember the stunned silence
of those long, long main titles
at the end of the film while
the piano concerto was still playing.
And the extraordinary thing, people waited
until the end of the main titles.
Then the applause at the end
as if they'd been to a concert.
And then you got the first sense
that perhaps
this was going
to be an unusual movie
and that perhaps the music had won.
The thing that pleases me
almost more than anything else
about the whole enterprise
Is the number of people,
young people
who discover the man I think
is the greatest composer in the world.
So many people were introduced
to Mozart as a composer, compared
with just doing it in concert halls.
It'd have taken 100 years to reach
as many people as the film did.
That was an incredible scene.
It was Fourth of July.
And, of course, that's
not a holiday there
80 we were working.
And we were shooting an opera scene.
The camera was behind the stage,
over the singers and dancers
seeing the whole theater
full of the audience.
So we had, like, 500 extras there.
So I said, "Roll it, playback."
And suddenly,
instead of Mozart's music
the American national anthem
starts to play.
And out of the flies
came this huge American flag
that unrolled on the stage.
And 600 Czechs stood up
and sang the U.S. national anthem
and knew the words.
I get goose pimples
when I think about it.
All the extras either sang or hummed
"The Star-Spangled Banner with us.
All stood up except 30.
Men and women, standing,
panic on their faces
looking at each other,
what they should do.
That were the secret police
dispersed among the extras.
And I was thinking,
"Good God, the army's gonna come
and we're all gonna go to jail.
Because this is an act of rebellion.
It started when we crossed the border.
In customs they said, "You can go on."
Milos said to me, "You're now
in Czechoslovakia, forget logic."
Only in a taxi did I learn
we were going to a play
about a composer.
I thought, "I'm going to faint."
Milos made a great fuss and said:
"Oh, no, I hate biographies of musicians
and that kind of thing.
I loathe it. No, I'm not coming.
In communist countries they love
to make movies about composers.
Because composers make music.
They don't say anything subversive.
And they were the most
boring films I ever saw.
So I was prepared
for a painful evening.
The curtain went up,
and there is this wonderful drama.
I couldn't believe my eyes.
I was introduced to Milos
in the interval.
Peter was nervous. I met him
the first time that night.
And he said to me, with the marvelous
directness that characterizes him:
"If the second act is as good as
the first, I will make a movie of it."
I called Mr. Zaentz
only to find out he already had
the play on his list of what to see.
And that's how it all started.
I thought it was a great play.
It really worked for me.
He said, "Well, what about a picture?"
I said, "It's not a picture.
I don't think it's a picture.
I said, "There's not enough
about Mozart for me."
And then Milos hit me on the arm,
I still have the bruises
even though that was 20 years ago.
He said, "That's right. It needs
music, Mozart and music."
And Milos invited me up
for the weekend
to his house in Connecticut.
And he was just as forthright then.
We spent an extraordinary weekend
in which he said to me:
"You realize that everything
will be different.
In the theater,
everything is stylized.
Nobody pretends a tree is a real tree
or a sunset is a real sunset.
So in the language
when it's stylized, it's proper.
Acting is a little exaggerated
and stylized, and it's proper.
Film is a photography.
In photography, everything is real.
Anything stylized
would feel, you know, fake.
What we ended up doing was spending
four months together in his house
in Connecticut.
Monday to Friday
we were locked into what
we came finally to regard as our prison.
And then we would go back
to New York on the Friday
and instantly separate.
And not exchange a word
for a blissful Saturday
and blissful Sunday
till the evening when he would come
here to my flat to collect me
and drive me back to prison
for the next
almost unendurable five days
when we slowly hammered out
the whole script, moment by moment.
They had some bumpy bumps
in the road along the way.
I spoke to both of them at different
times, and both used terms
you don't use in mixed company
about each other.
Well, no, we had a big conflict,
you know, big conflict.
Because I hated his cooking,
and he hated my cooking.
I regarded both of us
as the odd couple.
On the other hand, we had an enormous
advantage to have the music before.
For example, every day,
we spent a couple of hours
just listening to the music,
to Mozart's music.
And then picking pieces which would
fit here or would fit there.
And that humbled Peter Shaffer.
The music humbled Peter Shaffer.
Suddenly you start to play music
and you start to say the lines.
And Peter himself was,
"No. Stop talking. Stop talking."
I said to Milos that
I did not want repetitions.
I did not want the Mozart theme.
I did not want one piece of music.
It was not in the background,
cueing the emotion we should feel.
But it was, in fact, the foreground.
Peter Shaffer one day said:
"Listen, the music is becoming
the third character of this film."
I think possibly the first film that
has music as its leading character.
We met in the airport
in New York to discuss it:
Peter, Milos and Saul Zaentz.
And they proposed this as a project.
I had less than an hour to think about it
because I was moving on
to catch another plane from another airport.
Immediately, apart from being slightly
flattered they thought of me
I thought of it as a project which,
so long as it didn't develop
into a Hollywood scenario,
I would be very interested in.
And he said, "I would,
under one condition.
That not one note of Mozart
will be changed.
"You have our word."
We had no idea what the film
was going to look like.
Although I knew the play,
I'd seen the play
I knew that once Milos
got his hands on it
it would be a completely
different animal.
We are rolling, stand by for speed.
And action anytime, please.
Your Excellency
FORMAN: Let's cut. Give him some water.
All right, let's
FORMAN: It's fine. It's perfect.
Casting is enormously important because
that's finally whom the audience sees.
My ideas mean nothing if what
I see on the screen, I don't believe.
It was an interesting situation because
a lot of big names wanted to play
especially Salieri
and Mozart, right?
And I somehow felt,
"I don't want to see known faces.
I want people to see Mozart
and Salieri."
Both Saul and Peter,
you know, agreed.
"No, we don't need stars.
We don't need big names.
We have Mozart and his music.
And we believe in the movie."
Mozart was tough to cast.
This man had written his first
concerto at the age of 4
his first symphony at 7,
a full-scale opera at 12!
Did it show?
Which one of them
could he be?
When you look at the portraits
of Mozart from the time
you notice an interesting thing:
none looks like the other.
He must have had
a very nondescript face
that you wouldn't notice him
in the crowd at all.
So he couldn't be a leading-man type,
you know, a leading-hero type.
But he has to be a wonderful actor,
and he has to master the music.
He was very hard on me, and he
was quite gentle with the others.
Then in the process, I learned.
On one day
I spent maybe six to eight
hours in a screen test.
Every 20 minutes, other actors came in,
and I played opposite them all day.
And so I got to watch Milos working
every 20 minutes
with a different set of actors.
Very good. No, that's fine.
That's enough. You still
Oh, I walk out!
And then I began to understand
that the people
who I was assuming
he was most interested in
because it was clear
from their work
he was also treating
the same way as he treated me.
And the people you felt weren't
gonna be the right combination
Thank you, Milos.
are the people there was
a more gentle relationship with.
We auditioned over 1000 people
for all the parts.
I think the number we had at one time
was 1263, and we weren't finished.
I know someone ran a tally,
but we were not finished.
I'm sure we passed
close to 1400.
It seemed like
I was auditioning for a year.
In retrospect, what we were really
doing was rehearsing.
I wasn't actually auditioning anymore.
I guess was rehearsing. Ha, ha.
I thought I was still
working to get the part.
But in that time I thought,
"This is a wonderful project
and he's a great director,
and I'm lucky to be still here.
Of course you start
with the main characters
and then you go down.
But down doesn't mean less important.
I think the small parts
are as important
as the main characters.
In a certain way, I pay more attention
to casting the small, bit part
because once you see them,
you will never forget them.
Nothing drives me more crazy
when I am watching a film
and somebody appears, then
disappears and then reappears.
And he looks like the guy
who was just there, and I'm mixing
"Who is he? Who is she?"
Milos called me and said:
"Vinnie, I would like
very much for you to be in Amadeus.
It is not a very big part,
but I would love you to be in it."
One day, I was reading
F. Murray Abraham
for a small part in the movie.
And he was all right.
And then I had a young actor
come in reading for Mozart
and I asked F. Murray,
"Listen, would you just help me here.
This is just to help, read Salieri
for this young man."
And F. Murray
probably because, you know,
now it doesn't matter
gave a wonderful performance.
I did one of the things from Salieri.
Then I stopped and said, "Milos, this
is where he becomes the old man."
Which I hadn't really worked on.
And he said:
"Well, do the old man."
And I did the old man. I didn't
think I was gonna get this thing.
But I still acted my heart out.
He read so beautifully that it
started to bug me, you know?
He called and said, "I want you
to know you're my first choice.
And I had been around for a while,
you know, and I said:
"Well, that's nice. I'm very happy
about it, but what does that mean?
See, he wasn't saying, "You got the part,
or, "There's no question about it."
He said, "You're my first choice."
Now, from my point of view,
that doesn't pay the rent.
I mean, I'm very flattered,
and I said, "Thank you, Milos.
Just tell me what I have to do next
because I'm busy painting my kitchen."
Some time went by and they said, "We
want to see you for this improv group.
I said, "No, I'm telling you,
I'm not gonna do it."
Milos said, "That's the kind
of guy who would be Salieri."
And I said, "Why do you say that?"
He said, "He's not gonna be happy
about what I say." Milos or Murray.
He says, "Well, this guy thinks
that he would be a great actor
if he didn't have
breaks against him.
Also, I think he's Salieri off-stage
as well as on-stage."
And he was right.
So after several weeks,
you know, I told F. Murray Abraham:
"Okay, you got the part."
He obviously didn't believe me, because
he accepted a role in another film!
While on the set of Scarf ace, I got
the word that I was gonna do Amadeus.
And everyone's attitude, the stars
on the show, changed toward me.
I was no longer just this hardworking,
good actor F. Murray Abraham
like so many other
hardworking, good actors.
I was the man who got the part
that every actor in the English
language was trying to get.
And I was really scared.
Because I had talked the talk,
and now I had to walk the walk.
And it was For three days,
I couldn't answer the phone.
I was just sucking it up, getting ready
for the thing, for the mountain.
This film could only be shot in three
cities: Vienna, Budapest or Prague.
Because only these cities have the
style of 18th-century architecture.
Prague was ideal. Prague was
absolutely ideal, because
Thanks to communist inefficiency,
ha, ha
the 18th century
was untouched, untouched.
Prague was an amazing time capsule.
You could set up camera everywhere
without having to undo
signs of the 20th century.
They just weren't there.
There was no advertising.
You remove the electric lights,
you were in the 18th century.
A lot of locations, all you had
to do was throw dirt down
put a couple of lanterns with some oil
in it, and you were ready to go.
You have squares and streets.
You can turn the camera 360 degrees.
You don't have to change anything.
It's an exquisitely beautiful city.
I don't think there's any other city
in Europe
that has such an extensive
uninterrupted core
of 18th-century structures.
For me, it was a very mixed
emotional experience
because I was not allowed to go
back. I was a traitor and emigrant.
When I went the first time, which was,
more or less, to negotiate
the making of the movie,
that was very emotional for me.
Because before,
I didn't hope that I would ever see
my native country and places
where I kissed my first girlfriend
ever again in my life.
And then I was coming back for the
shooting, I was arriving January 2nd.
It was very cold, snow everywhere.
And I realize that from now on
I have to cut myself,
emotionally, from my past entirely.
Because otherwise,
the work would suffer.
When I got to Prague in the beginning,
as you remember, of Amadeus
there's the scene where his assistant
coming with the muffins,
and Vincent Schiavelli, in snow
And so I had written a 13-page
snow alert in English and in Czech.
I wanted trucks rigged.
I wanted lighting packages.
I wanted duplicate equipment.
I wanted road maps.
They got this thing and they say,
"What are you talking about?
Half the people don't have phones.
We don't have trucks we can let sit."
I said, "Very simple. Just tell me
when it's gonna snow!" Ha, ha.
We didn't have the weather
reports as perfect as we have today.
So there was always a show alert.
They phoned and said, "There's ho snow.
It's not gonna show this year.
The long-term weather reports say
we're not gonna have any snow.
We're not gonna shoot you until March.
We're gonna shoot with fake snow."
I said, "Okay."
"So you're free, you can take other work."
Every day we had to prepare two sets.
One for in case there is overnight
snowfall, and one in case there is not.
And, uh
That was not my problem.
I didn't want him to know about it.
I was engaged to do an episode
of Taxi on Monday.
And Saul called on Thursday,
the Thursday before, and said:
It's snowing. Can you come now?
Ha, ha.
He said, "I know. You gotta be back.
We'll get you back on Monday."
I said, "Sure." He said, "We'll do
the one exterior shot in the snow
and then you'll come back
and we'll do the interiors."
I said, "Okay." So I got on a plane
Thursday, and I got to Prague Friday
and we shot Saturday night,
and I was back for Monday.
I had never been to
a Soviet bloc country before.
And going to one at such a fantastically
accelerated rate of speed
my first impressions
were enormous and huge.
I felt like I was in a grade-B
Spy movie.
Followed everywhere,
hotel rooms bugged.
There were sizable rooms in this
one hotel. And they all were very ornate
with a chandelier
and these sconces
and rugs
Kind of worn, chipped, tacky.
But the fact is they were there,
you know?
And this one guy, Frank, he said,
"These guys have got this room bugged.
I said, "Who cares? Let them listen"
He says, "No, man.
I'm not gonna let them.
I'm gonna knock that"
"Oh, are you gonna make a problem?"
"No, I'm gonna show you."
He starts climbing around the sconces.
"No. It's the chandelier."
He gets up on a chair, he's climbing
around. "No, it's not here."
I said, "Let it go. Let's go to dinner."
He says, "No, I'm gonna find it."
He rolls the rug back and he finds a
plate about this big with screws in it.
He says, "I told you, man!
It's right here.
He gets a butter knife.
We had kitchenettes, right?
He takes it, and as
he takes the screw out
there's this tremendous crash
and the chandelier beneath us
crashes down into
the apartment below.
We went to dinner like a shot.
A friend of mine, an older
Czech director named Jiri Weiss
gave me some pineapples
and lemons for his daughter.
She came to the set that Saturday.
I had the lemons and oranges
or the oranges, the pineapples and
the lemons. And I gave her the stuff
and half the crew was secret police,
and everybody knew it.
And afterwards, I don't
remember his name
but he was sort of a smarmy cop,
and obviously cop. He said:
"So tell me, so,
what is this woman you meet?
This intrigue in Prague?
What is this?"
And I played, like, idiot and I said,
"She's the daughter of a roommate
of a friend who's from here,
used to make movies here.
He asked if I would bring his
daughter some pineapples and lemons."
And he said, "Pineapple?"
And I had learned the Czech word
for pineapple.
It's an an as, it's the same word
as in French.
I said, "Yes, an an as.
And he said, "Ah, yes, in the can?"
I said, "No, no, real, fresh an an as.
"Fresh pineapple? Fresh an an as? Ah!
And then for the next 20 minutes,
I watch it go around the set.
And they're all doing the same
gesture at the end of the exchange.
They're going, "In the can?"
And the teller of the story
says, "No, fresh an an as.
And they all kind of:
And looked at me and kind of:
"Ah!" Ha, ha.
I think they were the only two
pineapples in Prague that January.
When they go down
the corridor of the insane asylum
that was a war museum.
The central hall
where all the mad people were kept
was part of a military hospital
for the wounded from the 30 Years' War.
That was a funny situation.
The Communists took it.
They left only the ground floor
as a kind of museum.
But it was closed for the public.
Up in the second and third floor
were secret archives
of the secret police.
There was a panic when they learned
that they showed us
the ground-floor corridors.
We were questioned very closely
as to what our connections were.
After all, we could be CIA
members or we could be whatever.
And they didn't much like the idea
of a film company invading the
military archive. But we persuaded them.
When we went there
the first time, that corridor
had 75 two-ton cannons
all looking at each other.
And Milos says, "I love it."
I say, "Yeah, I love it too.
What are we gonna do with these 200
2000-pound cannons?"
He says, "Oh, the cannons
can't be there."
I said, "I figured that out already,
that the cannons can't be there.
But we're gonna have to get them
out, and you want pristine snow."
No snow can have footprints in it,
and we got to get the cannons out.
I didn't know it's a problem. There's
some cannons there. Take them away.
I didn't know that every cannon
weighs several tons, you know?
They had to hire
an army to take it out.
The first three weeks of
shooting was Salieri in the hospital room.
I was the guy that went out
with him in the morning
and Dick Smith, our makeup artist,
at 4:00 every morning
for hours of makeup
before the crew came.
And he'd go out to Barrandov.
No one was there at 4:00 am.
And the minute you get there,
"Where's my tea?" You know?
You know, "I just got out of the car,
Murray. I'm gonna go get your tea.
Dick Smith is the best
makeup man in the world.
And when we would start
working in the morning, it was 4:00.
I would get up,
I'd get to the studio by 4:30.
We'd work on the makeup
for four and a half hours.
As much preparation as I had made for
the old man, gestures and so on
the fact is after sitting for hours,
at that hour in the morning
you are kind of tired and slow.
Your movements are kind of like this:
This kind of thing starts to happen.
And I also had lenses in my eyes
which had to be removed,
and my eyes had to be sprayed.
So that the pain, which was always
there, would not be too much.
Once I looked into a mirror
at my face
felt like it
was completely convincing.
All I had to do was believe this guy,
and it was not hard.
I'm not denigrating my work,
I'm a very proud actor
but with a man like Dick Smith there,
and the words of Peter Shaffer
They've got be the most beautiful
descriptions in music ever written
whether on film or in literature.
This was a music I had never heard.
And that we could hear
the music accompanying the words
Filled with such longing,
such unfulfillable longing.
what more can you ask for?
Ff seemed to me { was hearing
the voice of God.
Excuse me.
Because of the way the schedule went,
the first thing that was filmed
in the shooting schedule
was all of Salieri, old.
That sort of breathtaking section
of Murray's performance
most breathtaking
was done in the first weeks. But it
gave us the time to work on our own.
We rehearsed a lot on our own.
We rehearsed all of the scenes
before the filming began.
Initially, Meg Titty was playing
Constanze in the film
and she was amazing.
Basically, at one point,
Milos had said he felt like
we'd done it, because the work
was going so well up to that point.
And the day before Meg
was to appear on camera
for the first time,
she got hurt in a soccer game.
She's playing soccer with some kids
in the street
and she tore the ligament
in her leg
50 badly that the doctor told us
we would have to wait
five weeks before she could start.
And we couldn't because Saul
put together all independent money
and we just couldn't afford it.
It was shocking. Partly because
we were where we were.
Behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from
our lives to a significant degree
more than if we had been shooting
in Western Europe
or someplace closer to home.
Suddenly, she was just gone
and in a hospital.
So in a very short amount of time,
they had to find
an actress to take over the part.
The casting director
who was brought on
to hire the new Constanze
This woman called an acting teacher
of mine and said:
"Do you have anybody you can
recommend for the part?
And he said, "Elizabeth BERRIDGE."
And she said, "Oh, no,
she's too weird and introverted, and uh
And she's too quirky for this outgoing,
bubbly girl." Which I was.
Um Ha, ha.
We flew to New York for a weekend
and it was extraordinary.
Friday night, we went: Prague, Paris.
And Saturday morning
we took the Concorde to New York.
So we went to Milos' apartment
and they had 60-odd girls
lined up for us to see.
I saw, like, 60 girls.
Sunday I read, like, 12 of them.
Out of these 12, two were
I couldn't decide between them.
So Saul decided, "Let's bring them
to Prague
and let's do a screen test
with them there."
It felt like calamitous to me,
like it had gone so badly.
I said to my father,
"If I can't even speak
how am I gonna get a part acting ever?"
Because speaking is required
in that line of work. And, um
Then I got a call: "You're flying
to Czechoslovakia for a screen test.
And there's you
and another contender.
So I had no passport.
And this was, I think, the next day.
Milos went back to Prague Sunday
50 he could shoot on Monday.
And I went over there on Monday,
went back with the two girls Monday.
And that was some ushering job, being
with two girls up for the same part.
I kept saying, "I love you both."
We were flown over and we tested.
And they did the hair and the makeup.
Meanwhile, they're filming the movie
and you really wanna not
start to feel like you're part
of the thing, because, in my case
I knew I was getting back
on a plane the next day.
Apparently, they couldn't decide
that first day, so they said:
"There's gonna be another test
tomorrow. So we came back
and went through all
the hairdos and the gowns
And this went on for a week.
The other woman and I hung out
every night. We would have dinner.
I was always a nervous wreck.
And she would say:
"No, you look lovely in that wig.
I'm sure you did great.
And I was preparing to, "Okay, how
do I say thank you for having me
and for considering me and
for this first-class ticket to Prague.
Thank you so much, and bye,
and good luck with your movie."
And Milos said, "Essentially, you both
have the part, you know
it's impossible to decide
between you
and one of you is simply too pretty
to play Constanze.
So Elizabeth, you have the part."
And, ha-ha-ha
And I was like, "Thanks, that's, um
Well, I have the part. That's good."
As much as I love Meg Titty,
I think, as a personality
Elizabeth BERRIDGE
was more right because Constanze
was a landlady's daughter.
She was a street kid, you know?
So I got to stay and had packed
clothes probably for three days.
I was there for six months in Prague
and started work the next day.
And that was it. I was Constanze.
Frau Mozart?
I remember the first day
the first scene I shot
was the "nipples of Venus" scene
where I come to see Salieri.
I had to eat, like, about a million of those
Go on, try one!
They're quite surprising.
Marzipan! It was foul.
I don't know, it's just awful.
And I remember getting ill
and Milos was like:
"Oh, it's her job."
It wasn't exactly
having to work in a coal mine
but eating a million
marzipan balls can
Maybe I didn't know I didn't have
to eat the whole thing.
You know, that was another thing,
at 20 years old, I didn't know:
"Oh, you can spit it out at the end.
Oh, we're going again? Okay.
It's funny how that can be the only
thing on your mind.
But I couldn't-Ha, ha.
I had to It was like, ugh.
They're wonderful! Ha, ha.
The first scene that I did,
in the actual making of the movie
was the march of welcome.
Meeting Mozart for the first time.
I had to learn to play the piano
not only accurately, but badly.
Even though the harpsichord
The piano was unhooked
the hands had
to be in the right place.
Lightly, then strongly!
They had provided me with several
versions of prerecorded music
and I had to learn
to do it as recorded.
Which was fun. I had a good time.
Then I got to be very good at it.
Tom worked on it too.
Tom had a piano in his room
and he worked on it all the time.
The keyboards that I played on
in front of the camera were all silent.
All of the music was recorded
before we started.
So the sequence was done with the
music played out loud in the room
or in my ear, if there was dialogue
that had to go on.
In the scene where Mozart
first meets the emperor
and Salieri has written this march,
it was such a surreal experience.
It was staged so that the actors
were behind me. The keyboard is here:
Because there's dialogue, the music is
played in a tiny transistor in my ear.
The keyboard is silent.
I'm looking away
so when you lose your bearings,
you can't find it because you can't hear.
So it truly was a kind
of schizophrenic situation.
When we met, the only
instrument he ever played was guitar.
He never played piano.
He was spending like three or four
hours a day for several months
practicing the pieces
he had to play.
I began, as the months went on,
to actually believe the illusion a little bit.
So it was always very distressing
to hear what I really sounded like
on a sounded keyboard.
The practice room,
where my piano was
was right over the room
where Milos hung out.
Imagine what a nightmare
that must have been for him.
The one day he said
that I was improving
was the day that my teacher
was demonstrating to me.
Neville MARRINER,
after seeing the film, said:
"He never hits a wrong key.
Even when he plays backwards."
Now you play it backwards!
There was just no way
to be able to do that
without being able to do it.
It's one thing to play
on a silent keyboard to a playback
but it's entirely different to do it
upside down behind your back.
In the way of stunt work,
you learn what the assignment is.
and some chemical gets released,
and you actually can do it.
It was a big thrill for everybody
.to realize that we were going to film in
practically the only wooden
opera house left
in central Europe
and also the most perfectly preserved.
It had undergone many alterations,
but they were minor
and architecturally,
the place was intact.
The first time I arrived in Prague
for location, and they showed us
the theater, we were there
with Peter Shaffer and Saul
when suddenly,
I realized Peter Shaffer disappeared.
Where's Peter Shaffer?
We found him
in the corridor, hidden, crying
because there he learned
that he is standing exactly
at the place where Mozart himself
in person, conducted
the world premiere of Don Giovanni.
I tell you, we felt awed the first
time we stepped on that stage
and realized that our hero had been
in that very spot.
I think this fact
gave a lot of humility
and respect for the place
to every actor, dancer
and everybody there.
There's something that happens when
you do it in the place, the atmosphere.
I'm not crazy about
the spiritual ghosts and things.
I'm not, but I don't deny them.
Suddenly, the reality of the place and
the moment really enters into you
which is why it was a great idea to
do it there instead of building a set.
It was brilliant.
But again, thanks to the neglect
during the communist era,
it was a powder keg.
It was in danger
of burning down at any moment.
It still had gas lines in it.
They lit it with gas.
They used to have limelight in it.
It really hadn't been modernized.
Now we are going there
to light millions of candles!
All those candles in
a wooden opera house, in a wooden dome.
When the chandeliers were lit, I held
my breath for what seemed like days.
And there we were,
all these extras, all these wigs.
and all this flammable stuff
in this tinderbox-dry theater
where Don Giovanni had had its
premiere. That theater we were in.
Amazing.
Imagine the trust of
the opera house, allowing us to be there.
We had every day
like 30 or 40 firemen
everywhere, standing there.
But they were absolutely
I will never forget Don Giovanni.
At a certain moment, Don Giovanni
moves to the table, does this:
And he has a hat with huge plumage,
you know, a feather
like a peacock feather, right?
And leans like that
and talks to the commodore.
We rehearsed. Everything was fine.
Okay, let's shoot.
So light the candles.
We didn't realize
that there on the table
Is this small candelabra,
which now is lit.
Okay, camera roll it, playback.
We are shooting.
And the actor is performing like that.
He leans
and suddenly we see
that this feather caught fire.
The fire is going up and up and up,
but he's in the ecstasy of performing.
He doesn't even notice.
And everybody is staring and nobody
We have 40, 50 firemen around there.
And his head starts really flaming.
Finally, one fireman dared
to lean from the wings and says:
"Excuse me. Excuse me, Mr. FORMAN,
will you please stop the cameras?
Your actor is on fire!"
When the camera is rolling,
everything is sacred.
My impression, never having done
a movie that size-
I had done a horror film
That if things went wrong
that one should just stop.
When we did that scene
where we're playing under the table
I don't remember if it was a take or
rehearsal, but I came out of my dress.
You know, which I was
barely in to begin with.
And there was Milos, "Keep going!"
I was like, "Really?"
- Stop it!
- I am.
And Milos looks for the-
He'd love life coming in accidentally.
There. You see?
Milos can be a bit abrupt.
That's kind of a pleasant way
to put it.
But he's never wrong.
On Amadeus, after this incredible
journey to get to Prague
through the night
and all of this remarkable stuff
I'm suddenly standing
in 18th-century costume, in the snow
in Prague,
in the middle of the night.
Then I have to walk down the street
and he says to me,
"Vinnie, television is ruining you!"
He meant my walk was terrible.
"Television is ruining you!"
Then we did a second take a moment
later. He said, "That was wonderful!
I don't know what changed.
We were six days or five days into
shooting the first scene I was in
and Milos wasn't
really saying anything.
I was starting to feel
more comfortable and I said:
"Milos, do you have any suggestions?"
And he said, "No."
I said, "Well, I mean, is it okay?
I mean, should I do more or less?"
"No, you're doing fine."
I said, "You haven't said anything."
He said, "If there was anything wrong,
I'd have said so." It was like Ha, ha.
I was doing fine,
50 he didn't need to say anything.
Less you talk,
less you confuse actors' heads.
If you cast wrong then you have to work
and usually, you're in trouble anyway.
A director is little bit of everything,
but a good director always
for every part of his work, must
choose people who are better than him.
For me, the operas
were not difficult at all.
Because it was, first of all,
beautifully recorded.
Beautifully cast by Twyla,
and she did all the choreography.
So for me, it was just a question,
you know, how to
Where to place the camera
and how to shoot it.
It was extremely difficult to work in Prague.
There were no materials.
Everything had to be brought in
and everything was improvised.
They had no properties, no wardrobes,
no fabrics. Nothing 10 build with.
But they had
an ingenuity, a humor,
and a force to their imagination
that more than repaid
the lack of materials.
I really enjoyed and had great fun
shooting the parody in the theater
the parody of Mozart's operas.
Milos only talks about doing
things extremely and broadly.
That is one of his charms.
You can't go over the top with Milos.
It's not possible. I like that.
Peter enjoyed very much
writing this scene.
The parody, words, learning new lyrics.
I had never done anything like that before.
I'm not sure Milos had ever directed
anything like that.
I'm sure Twyla had never choreographed
anything like that before.
I'm sick to death of that tune!
There was a pure joy.
We just put every silly thing in,
the dwarves
It's very inventive, a very
Milos FORMAN scene. You feel it in the man.
The thing that gives him the greatest
pleasure is that kind of theater.
The guy who is in the back
of the horse, right?
Because he has to reach out
and give out a dove.
When the horse moved,
he had to walk backwards.
That was probably the most
difficult thing in the film.
There were so many extras,
we were hard-pressed
for enough wigs
and enough costumes.
Makeup and hair and wardrobe
for 500 people
It was like a
It was like a battleground.
Once these people were dressed
.they were sort of on their own.
And they wandered the halls
and ate their lunch
and made phone calls
and all in their clothes.
I think that had
a tremendous amount to do
with the way they came across.
It was life.
They lived in these clothes
for as long
as it took to complete this scene,
just as they did in the 18th century.
And I think there is a great deal
of authentic life
in them and in the clothes.
They were in the clothes long enough
that they were not a costume.
They were their own.
The costumes succeeded
because I had a hard head.
When I didn't like something, I had it
redone again and again until it was right.
Even the producer
couldn't interfere
when it was costing more money.
I'd redo it until I'd say,
"That can go in front of a camera.
The worst thing is to compromise.
It compromises the entire production.
It's every woman's fantasy,
I think, for about five minutes
to wear something like that
and feel like a princess.
And then it gets old.
It's very uncomfortable. It was
literally like being squeezed
and coming out
at the top like toothpaste. Ha, ha.
Eighteenth-century
costumes, it really
It really informs how you stand,
how you walk
what your posture should be.
Eighteenth-century clothes
have very, very tight shoulders.
They keep you back.
You keep your shoulders back
and your head erect. That's the pose.
That's what the clothes tell you
they want you to do.
What surprised me
was that because my hair
had gotten dyed
a kind of gold color
I'd get up in the morning and that image
was so different to me
that it actually triggered the part
of me that was more extroverted.
As people would show up
for their sequences in the film
I found that I had an urge
to take them out
and to be the kind
of social director
in a way that isn't
my natural inclination.
He was so much in
Mozart's head. After the movie was done
we ended up sharing
a living space together
and he's a very different man
than he was.
He was transformed into Mozart.
I hadn't thought
about this in a long time
but as Salieri, I was separate
from the rest of the cast
for the first 3 1/2 weeks.
I was only doing the old man.
I separated from the cast because
that's the kind of man Salieri was.
I'm not that way. I love parties.
I love a good time. I really do.
But I was extremely solitary.
It was me against everyone else.
What I didn't realize was that this was
infecting how others felt about me.
There began to be a separation.
Whenever there were parties
I wasn't invited because I wasn't
there. Also, I was always too busy.
If you refused for 3 1/2, four weeks,
people don't invite you anymore.
I began to be like that character.
I didn't like being separate
but in a way, that contributed
to the success of the performance.
In some way, I feel like the work
relationship that I had with Murray
was supported by the fact
that we didn't
become so close that we knew
too much about each other.
Tom and I have great respect
for each other. We like each other.
But during the film, we were living a
little bit like those two characters.
There was always that element
where we never
knew each other so well as people
that we could tell exactly when the
other one was telling the truth or not.
It happens. When you embody
a character as we did
it happens that you carry it over.
He said to give you this.
Crazy, but it's true of any actor
who does a part for a length of time.
And, of course, these parts
meant so much to both of us.
It was only right
that we had this light antagonism.
It's too soon.
Can I?
Could I help you?
Would you?
The dictation of the Requiem
by the dying Mozart, seems to me
to overturn every piece
of wisdom I was ever told.
The words are, in themselves,
not particularly interesting.
They don't even look
like a movie script.
They look as if they will
never play. They are dull.
C sharp, E flat, bar 14,
this, that, the other.
It's several pages
of musical direction.
One guy's in bed
and the other is writing at the end.
And nobody moves.
It's a very daring thing to do
to have a whole sequence
where composers are dictating music
to each other.
And they had set us up,
before we started filming
with Neville MARRINER
and his assistant.
They had them do the scene for us
to let us see what real musicians
would be like.
And forgive me, Neville, it was awful.
It was awful. Because,
you know, they're not actors.
Any film school would tell you
this is not for movie.
- Come, let's begin.
- We ended in F major.
- Yes.
- So now, A minor.
There's one sequence
early on in the scene
where Mozart is fairly delirious
and trying to find
the phrase that he's looking
for in the dictation.
- A minor.
- Yes.
Confutatis. A minor.
In reality, what happened
on that day is there's a little
John Strauss is in the corner pressing
the buttons on a cassette player.
We have little hearing aids
in our ears
which are playing
like an AM radio
the musical phrase, so that we can
be on tempo and on the pitch
for when all the music gets laid
in afterwards, that it's there.
And there was some mishap,
50 there's a moment where I'm
Me, the actor is
I'm genuinely lost.
But because of the kind of trust
and connection that we have
the whole sequence is in the film.
A minor.
Start with the voices.
- Basses first. Second beat of the
- Time?
Common time.
Second beat of the first measure.
There were two cameras set up,
so we didn't overlap.
It was as though we were in the theater.
And most of that is improvisational
because he was acting
as though he were very sick.
Consequently, he began to lose
certain things and I would guide him.
Actually, at times.
He would get lost, and I would help him.
It was a real symphony
between the two of us, a duet.
Later on, I don't know if told Murray,
but I would skip information.
First bassoon, tenor trombones,
with the tenors.
I'd leave out information that I knew
he needed to go to the next place.
- You go too fast.
- Do you have it?
- Bassoon to trombone, what?
- The tenors.
So he'd have to stop me and Salieri
would seem not smart enough.
Trumpets and timpani.
Trumpets in D. Listen.
- I don't understand!
- Listen!
You can do that because there
were cameras on both of us
and also because of a superb
partnership between two players.
The thing that most amazed me
was the artistry
of every person in every job
that worked on this film
and the extraordinary
storytelling
that happened
from every point of view.
I have the deepest
gratitude to that crew
because they gave everything,
everything they had.
In most cases, the film would
be a biography of Mozart
and it would be what happened
and what happened.
But to take all the circumstances
of that extraordinary life
and put it in the context
of this other man
and his argument
with his god, is genius, I think.
I don't really care what it is about
because it moves me
and makes me think.
It makes me laugh.
It makes me cry a little.
And whatever you think about,
that's what it is about.
I don't see that the movie has aged.
It's a timeless story, and it's
beautifully told and beautifully shot.
I'm sure you'll
hear this again and again
but we were part and parcel
of something that was greater
than we were.
I remember the stunned silence
of those long, long main titles
at the end of the film while
the piano concerto was still playing.
And the extraordinary thing, people waited
until the end of the main titles.
Then the applause at the end
as if they'd been to a concert.
And then you got the first sense
that perhaps
this was going
to be an unusual movie
and that perhaps the music had won.
The thing that pleases me
almost more than anything else
about the whole enterprise
Is the number of people,
young people
who discover the man I think
is the greatest composer in the world.
So many people were introduced
to Mozart as a composer, compared
with just doing it in concert halls.
It'd have taken 100 years to reach
as many people as the film did.