BOP Interview: Grand Piano's Elijah Wood and Eugenio Mira
By Ryan Mazie
March 11, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Wood stars in the mystery thriller as a prodigious concert pianist making his buzzed-about return to the stage after a five-year hiatus due to flubbing a piece of music. However, as his comeback begins, playing a perfect concert is not only going to save his career, but his own life as a mystery man on the opposite end of an earpiece targets him and his wife with a sniper.
Elijah Wood and Grand Piano director Eugenio Mira, who directed the shots just as majestically swooping as the music, sat down with me during a roundtable interview to discuss their new film, the horror genre, and directing aesthetics.
Let’s talk about the visual design you had for the movie, because it is a really stunning film where the camera is almost another character.
Eugenio Mira: I like directors who perform, like Roman Polanski and Hitchcock, and that was the core of this project – to do something more than an homage to directors like them and [Brian] De Palma. I didn’t want to do this just for the sake of being able to say, “Oh, this looks cool.” I had this incredible breakdown of when I’m going to use what angle, when I’m going to pan to the right, when I’m going to show the audience, and that’s why I decided to make this movie. When you see the movie, it is basically a guy sitting down at a piano, making facial expressions, and talking frantically into an ear piece, “What do you want me to do?” If you relied on doing this movie solely in editing from the coverage you shot [it wouldn’t work].
You mentioned Hitchcock, Polanski, and De Palma, so I wanted to know if you plan on putting that aesthetic in your future work?
EM: This movie is musical, not because it takes place in a theater, but because the way that it’s told is completely based on dynamics. You could turn the volume down and still make sense of what’s going on, but it will look way more aggressive without the music. That’s how I learned to direct as a kid. I turned the volume down to pay attention to the pace of when the cuts came. I counted the number of shots in scenes.
Elijah Wood: A lot of movies now shoot as much as you can from as many angles as possible and let the editor sort it out, which is insane; a lack of focus and direction.
EM: And what I can’t stand is seeing actor’s performances being built in the editing room. Most actors will spit on my face, because they’ve been rescued and saved by that (laughs), but it takes me completely out of the film. I respect it. I’m not crazy to think that you shouldn’t go that way, but it shouldn’t be the official way to do it. Just one more way to do it.
Elijah, what’s the challenge of working in a medium when the camera is fluid and it isn’t static shots or just coverage?
EW: Traditionally with a film, you shoot a scene and that can take two or three days. In this case, it was literally shots so our call sheet was comprised of shots, not scenes. It was highly technical, but I had all of the information at my disposal, so there was no challenge in that. I thought it was enjoyable. I knew the movie he wanted to make, because it was beautifully articulated in the context of a moving image and we were working together on a daily basis to create these individual moments as if pieces to a puzzle. So the challenge of just fulfilling within those individual frames was technical, such as the playing of the piano for that shot and how to get a couple emotional beats into a certain timeframe. The biggest challenge for me to encapsulate was playing piano, listening to John Cusack, speaking and responding, and being on time. A lot of it was logistic, technical things.
It wasn’t like you were playing chopsticks either. This is a complex piece of music you are playing.
EW: It was intense, but so much fun. And because we shot the film almost in sequence from the moment the character steps out to start to play the piano, the beauty of that was that we had three to four days of relatively light material before things get complicated musically. So those first four days I bought my own confidence. I was able to go, “Awww fuck, I can do this!” on easy material as opposed to when things started to get more complicated, we were all heading into that direction together, because the shots got more complicated, my work got more complicated, but we galvanized together.
In the movie we hear John Cusack’s voice in your ear, so while filming it—
EW: I also heard his voice. It was re-recorded [in ADR], so it was basically a scratch temp track he recorded before he left. Some of the stuff was re-written in the ADR stage.
EM: We mainly rerecorded the whole thing. 80% of it is the same script, though.
EW: But I had a functioning earpiece that both the music and John’s voice were feed through. Also, if the orchestra was playing at the same time, I’d just get the isolated piano track.
Elijah, you have really been making a mark for yourself in this horror/thriller genre. Why the focus?
EW: The focus really pertains to SpectreVision, the production company I have, in terms of what we want to make and produce. What I think interests us is not always pushing the genre forward, but to keep the genre at its best. It’s obviously ambitious and not every movie we produce is going to be breaking some kind of new horror ground, but if to be at its best is a standard that we set for ourselves, we could eventually achieve that kind of thing. Movies that are slightly outside of the box in terms of what people are familiar with in regards of horror… there’s this movie we produced called A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which is an Iranian vampire, western, black-and-white horror film shot in Farsi that this really wonderful filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour directed that got into Sundance and that we are really proud of. And that’s a perfect example of the things that we want to be involved with making. Not the most commercial films. In some ways, most of the films we are trying to do aren’t going to make money, but they’re the films that are driven by artistic expression and aren’t the type of things you see within this genre all that often.
Why are you such a fan of the horror genre right now as opposed to something like Fred Astaire dancing around?
EM: (to Elijah) Well I would want to run this by you, but I’d love to do a musical.
EW: I’d love to do a musical as well! It’s funny. Over the last couple of years, there have been a couple of these films I’ve done that are “genre”, but it’s happenstance, because I love all kinds of films. Yeah, I’d love to do a musical, it’d be amazing. Some Busby Berkeley shit would be amazing.