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So was it storyboarded?

MH: It was a script, but the fact is that I draw so when I was writing, I made drawings and storyboarded the movie myself. But it helped to be able to think with images as a drawer. But there was a script written more like a short novel. Usually when people read a script, they don’t read the action, they just read the dialogue. So here I had to find a way to write it and it had to be easy to read. It was more like a short novel.

I think the soundtrack is amazing – one of the best of the year. Being such an important part of a silent film, when was the music brought in, because the actors just hit all of the right beats?

MH: The music was composed both after and during the editing process. But I played some music on set, because we didn’t record sound so I could do it. I could play music and the actors loved it. Actually, in this movie, the music is very important, but in the silent movies, you can see usually that the music is seldom treated with that precision; usually it is just a piano and that is kind of boring. That is the kind of thing that makes this movie more modern in a way. I worked very closely with the composer, because it follows all of the tones and variations of the script. The music is restricted by the story. We had this advantage compared to the ‘20s movies. We had the benefit of all of these years of sophistication in music and moviemaking.

How did you go about playing the music while filming? Did you play certain songs that would evoke an emotion?

MH: Yeah, sure. I used a lot of classical Hollywood composers like Leonard Bernstein, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, and there is actually a track of his in the movie – the Vertigo at the end. I played it for the emotional mood and for some sequences, something with a good rhythm. For example, the scene where George Valentin pulls down all of the white sheets off the furniture, I used the music of Sunset Boulevard with a lot of variation and strong acceleration that helped Jean to do it with a good tempo. And sometimes it was just decorative music like the Charleston and some jazz from that era just to trap the mood of the period.

The Artist has been brought up in a lot of conversations about how movies are now CGI-heavy and all 3D. Was this movie made as a message in a way to combat this technological sophistication?

MH: I didn’t make the movie against a kind of fear. I did it because I had a desire to make it and I had the hunch that it was a good movie to make. There are a lot of movies with special effects that are very good at it. I was just talking about Rise of the Planet of the Apes. There are a lot of strong visual effects, but the movie is really, really good because the story is good and it's amazing. When the ape says “No!” it is really strong. Once I heard someone say, “When the new technology arrives, at first the directors use it as toys. Then they use it as tools. And that’s a big difference.”

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