Renée Zellweger and Rupert Goold Break Down a Scene from "Judy"

My name is Rupert Goold, and I am the director of Judy.

Hi, and I'm Renée Zellweger, and I'm Judy.

And we are gonna do a one-scene breakdown

of when Renée and Judy sing, By Myself.

Good luck.

[downtempo jazz music]

You know, the first time I sang on a stage,

I was all of two years old?

They say my papa had to come and drag me off

after I started singing the same song for the fifth time.

[audience laughs]

This is a moment where we're revealing the,

I guess, true circumstances of Judy's experience

at that time, where she was fearful

that she wouldn't have access to her instrument

and she wasn't sure how her performances were going to go

and whether or not she was going to measure up

to what had become people's pretty

extraordinary expectations of her.

Oh.

It seems we have a band here.

[audience laughs]

May as well put them to use.

[audience applauding]

[Rupert] For me, the whole drama of, like,

will she, won't she perform

is like a big unknown in the film

and I wanted to draw it out as long as possible,

both on the journey,

but also, is she just gonna talk all night?

Is she gonna make jokes?

♪ I'll go my way ♪

♪ By myself ♪

[Rupert] It's an interesting one,

because By Myself isn't like her,

perhaps the most famous Judy Garland number,

and it's not like The Man That Got Away

or Get Happy.

But what I love about it is she talks about

being on her own and how difficult that is,

but how she's gonna conquer that,

and that felt really kinda pertinent to the moment

in the story when she's on her own, away from her family.

Renée's performance in this first lyric

is really, really extraordinary,

and so for a long time, we actually just stayed in the tight

and once the music has begun,

it's like she's possessed by something really bizarre.

Gives her a whole different kind of movement quality

and even though that's partly in Renée's movement

just within the camera movements

for somebody feeling a little bit more lyrical, I suppose.

We see so much performance on TV now,

we see American Idol and The Voice and all these TV shows,

and we're like how are we gonna make this different?

When I said if we can get the camera

really close to the face, then that would be

a really unusual thing to see.

♪ Like a bird on the wing ♪

This performance was sort of an amalgam

of Rupert's vision in terms of the narrative

and her own performance of this song.

♪ I'll build a world of my own ♪

I kinda tried to learn it in the mirror

in the dining room on my iPad.

[laughs] Kind of propped it up on the dining room table

and looked in the mirror on the wall

and tried to kind of remember how she moves the microphone

and where and when and how she uses it

for emphasis in different places.

[Rupert] Alec Guinness said something about, like,

the way into a character is the shoes.

Well, I always felt for you, like, the teeth.

When the teeth went in, it was like a kind of--

Yeah. The character kind of

popped in as well.

How did they feel, the teeth?

They felt like a Vitaphone, a security blanket.

A little mask. Yeah.

Just one more layer of something to hide behind.

What I would say about the mouth, though,

is she is under the influence

of a sort of slightly intoxicated quality,

really kinda was a liberating thing for the song.

I remember think it would be really great

if the supporting cast who were in the audience

hadn't seen Renée at all, so that when she came out,

they were experiencing Renée as Judy sort of unknown.

We had this most fantastic costume designer

called Jany Temime.

She put so much detail into the costuming and like,

these kind of jewelings around the top of the dress.

To get in really close, you need all that detail

in the earrings there as well,

and she did a really great job, I think.

There were so many characteristics and qualities

that were uniquely definable and distinguishable

as Judy's sound.

It was just a matter of spending time

with the legacy of her work

and becoming familiar with those things,

and suddenly they were in the room.

On screen, yeah. And on screen.

This was the kind of end of her TV period,

and so there were loads of TV shows

from that period in the '60s.

Also the Judy Tapes, those amazing audio recordings.

Oh, we did a deep dive into the internet.

We were very creatively absorbing everything that we could,

and boy, you could spend some days on YouTube.

And how lucky, because before there were things

that were only in people's personal libraries.

The one thing that is really different

between stage lighting and screen lighting

is in stage lighting, you do want these beams,

like this big central beam you've got here.

But you don't ever try and see sources.

On film, that's what gives you your depth,

all these little lights here.

This is accurate in the sense that

there were tables and seating in the original venue.

On some of the other wider shots, back in this area,

we added people, but these are all people

who are really there.

This was the shape of the mic that she preferred,

and the size for her little hand.

And it was interesting 'cause she's left-handed

and yet she held it in her right,

but she would often pass it round

on her back to her left hand.

She liked the cord in her left hand,

which is really interesting.

A lot of that moving it around

was actually wonderfully choreographed into the music,

but it was really out of necessity

so that she wouldn't step on it or fall down.

And there was this great power

in her whipping that cord around,

and it sometimes it seemed like a security blanket for her

because she was known for throwin' that thing around

like she was taming lions.

And I get it, when we were finished,

I kinda missed having it in my hand.

In some ways, it's dinner theater,

but really high-end dinner theater.

All of London society, swinging '60s London society,

was in the theater at the time.

And so it was a sort of performance

we don't really have anymore,

a particular kind of milieu of society coming together.

The really unusual thing about Talk of the Town,

the venue that Judy performed in is

it had this sort of thrust stage

and it had tables all around the edge,

so that gave it a sort of gladiatorial quality

and to try and recreate that was really hard

because most theaters in Britain don't have that capacity,

the original Talk of the Town is now a casino.

This particular theater is Hackney Empire,

and they allowed us to build this stage out

and that gives us different camera angles

to come across the stage,

rather than do everything one way.

I really liked the reflection here we get in the floor.

And I was sort of nervous we'd be able to get

the focused atmosphere, but once we really kind of

took the sides down and dark

and had this lovely sort of central block of color,

that felt a lovely contrast.

I felt like these great vocal performances she gives

are a bit like that movie, Free Solo,

about the guy climbing up the rock face without any ropes,

but they were sort of almost like an operatic aria.

Must have been Fred Spire and Fred Astaire

talking about how he filmed his choreography,

and he never wanted to cut away to reactions

because he felt that sort of subliminally, I guess,

the audience would know that there was a cheat there,

and so I always wanted this performance to be,

or the meat of it to be a single take

because the audience would know

that Renée was really doing it for real

in the moment, in real time.

I remember Renée's vocal coach saying,

you know, you only get so many goes of this in a day

because, like, this is a big vocal test.

And I think that pressure gave it some of its intensity,

in a way.

I'd never sung live in front of people like this before.

So this was new.

This was entirely new.

Well, that's not true, Empire Records, on the roof.

No, actually, that might've been playback.

Yeah, this would be the first time.

This was gonna be a crane shot.

But literally the day we got into the theater,

the full stage that the tables and chairs were on

wasn't strong enough to hold the weight of the crane.

So we had this, like, panic.

This is our big day to get our big performance shot

and our key camera we can't use.

So this was shot on stable eye,

which is like a kind of steadicam rig.

What was gonna be quite a precise camera movement

became something a bit more improvised.

But I think actually, weirdly,

that slightly sort of floaty quality

gives it some of its magic.

And I just love what happens in Renée's eyes.

Garland's eyes were very, very dark

and the first contact lenses we tried,

which were accurate,

were so dark that they felt like

we couldn't get into your thoughts.

And so we went a couple of shades lighter

to get this these sort of pinpricks of light here and here.

But that was a tricky thing, wasn't it?

Because the show makeup was, you know,

it had to be accurate to the period,

but yet the character is going through

a very vulnerable moment,

and I think Jeremy did a really lovely job

with sort of something that is clearly

dressed up for performance,

but allows you into the thoughts as well.

Sometimes the contacts would go in with great ease,

and sometimes they wouldn't at all,

and there'd be a good five minutes of going,

almost, not quite, almost.

What you don't know is quite how the light

is gonna bounce off the jewels in the moment,

and so there's lots of lovely flecks

of this kind of gorgeous amber light.

The other two funny things about, actually,

this shot were this ring of hers here

kept clicking against the microphone

in the recording 'cause it's a live vocal,

and we had to kinda work quite hard

to kind of put our artificial version on,

but get rid of it when we didn't want it.

I didn't know much about prosthetics before this

and I didn't really understand that once you put them on,

they take on a life of their own, you know?

Renée's extension of nose,

it just sort of beings like there, I think.

And it's just one of the few moments

where we had to do a tiny bit of post-production cleanup

because we could see a tiny bit of join.

As your skin starts to kind of sweat or try to breathe--

Under the lights, you know?

Under the lights, yeah.

That glue turns into this kind of like milky substance

that starts to bubble out of what is supposed

to be the seamless sort of join.

It was an exciting mystery

about when it was gonna make an appearance, wasn't it?

[laughing]

[Rupert] We rehearsed it quite a bit.

He wanted the emotion of the song

not to be in my voice, but in my body completely,

and so he had me sing while I was trying

to push a piano around the room

because he wanted the energy and the emphasis

and the resistance of life

to be palpable in the singing of the song.

♪ Like a bird on the wing ♪

And I loved singing through that.

[laughing]

It was, it, no--

It was a heavy piano.

It didn't get very far in the room,

but I got what you were trying to do.

And then the other time,

where you had me kicking the chairs.

That was fun, yeah.

And throwing chairs on the moments of emphasis

just to get the emotion out

and the anger that's in the sort of subtext

of the performance.

There's a photo of Renée and I both

like lying on the floor at the end of the week here,

on the black floor because we were so exhausted.

[laughing]

But there's so much joy in it,

in the discovery and the experimentation.

It was exciting when something worked.

Yeah, like this.

[Renée] Yeah!

Yeah, this was electrifying.

The things you talk about normally in acting,

which is like, what do I want?

And what is the obstacle to getting what I want?

Apply as much to a song as well.

And I would say just to give Renée like a map through it,

rather than just like one shape.

Yeah, to ground control. [laughs]

Just giving me points to know where we're going next

and where the next turn was emotionally.

It was a very nice template

and wonderful parameters to kind of dance inside of.

So, it was very cool.

Theater director, awesome.

It's awesome. [laughing]