You’re acting, so it’s pretend. But we were really underground in the dark, and so you start to absorb some of that darkness, if you will.
Shannon: I get what you’re saying—the atmosphere. We were in this salt mine. I never really shot anywhere like that before. It was beautiful to look at, but it was uncomfortable.
How much rehearsal was needed for the choreography?
Oppenheimer: The rehearsal period was a month, and we had parallel rooms. So there was a room where we were exploring the scenes by reading them and improvising around them. And it became very interesting to improvise the moments after a scene ended, because that’s where we discovered that the characters had to find harmony again. They couldn’t afford for the conflicts that were in each scene to fester.
And then we had another room where we were working on the blocking, because [cinematographer] Mikhail [Krichman] and I had spent four or five months, cumulatively, storyboarding all of those long, single-take scenes. Those had to be tested and planned so that we’d have enough time to execute them on the shooting day. Then they had singing rehearsals when they weren’t with me. And then they had dance rehearsals.
Were there nerves around the singing and the dancing?
Shannon: I’d already tried to sing like George Jones [for the TV series George & Tammy], so I’d kind of already been on the top of the mountain. But the songs are very difficult. What I really love about singing in the movie is it doesn’t sound like your typical Broadway musical. Those people can belt it out, but a lot of times those voices don’t have so much personality in them. They’re just technically proficient. And I feel like the voices in this movie really are statements of the people that are making the sound, and like the personality and the conflict. I feel that way about everybody singing in the movie.
Oppenheimer: I heard George and Mike sing, but I hadn’t heard Moses. You introduced yourself as not a singer. And so when I first heard Moses sing, I think it was kind of heart-stopping.
Shannon: A fellow asked me on the street, “You guys were lip-synching, right?” I’m like, “No, we sing live.”
Oppenheimer: It’s almost a hundred percent [live singing].
You said onstage that you just finished the film a week ago. What took so long?
Oppenheimer: Why did the whole film take so long? It was a learning curve for me to make the leap into narrative, and I took every step of it seriously. So there was a long process with my cowriter, Rasmus [Heisterberg], working on the script. Then we started with one composer whose mother got sick. There was the pandemic; that took some time. It just took the time it took. I’ve been lucky to be able to afford myself the luxury of time. You can kind of lie to yourself when you don’t have enough time and say, Well, I went as deep as possible. Actually, you just ran out of time.
It’s a very appropriate theme for this movie.
Oppenheimer: And I hate that. I really resist that. And I think on set, 90% [or] 95% of the time—which I think is an incredible batting average—we had enough time to go as deep as possible.
