Les Miserables (2012)

Hi, I'm Tom Hooper, director of Les Miserables. Thank you for listening to the director's commentary. So I thought a lot about how to open the film and I was inspired in Victor Hugo's novel by a line when he compares the prison system to the sea and he talks about the sea as being a metaphor for measureless misery. And I like this idea of starting under the water in the dark, looking at this drowned French flag. And the journey of the whole film would be from inside the sea, which is sort of representing misery in Victor Hugo's image, to the end when we're high up in the light on the barricade. And The whole opening was, I suppose, really inspired by the book. There's a wonderful description of how the convicts in this era were used to refit, build, maintain the warships in Toulon. And so they were kind of used as slave labor. And so this idea of the convicts effectively doing a chain-gang song, pulling in this wounded warship, I found very interesting because the warship is both an image, a symbol of state power, but also shows the fragility of state power because the warship is wounded. So at one and the same time, you're being reminded of the sheer scale of state power, but the fact that it's vulnerable. We shot this down in Portsmouth, which has, I think, the oldest dry dock in the world. And the boat, although it's CGI, is based on HMS Victory, which sits down at Portsmouth. And we took every conceivable angle of photo on it and did a LIDAR scan of the exact design of the hull and then reprojected still images of the Victory. onto a wireframe model in CGI. So one of the ways of making it look quite real is actually all the textures come from photographs. There was a photographic element to the look, but it's obviously changed the color scheme to make it look a little bit less like the victory. Now, the irony of this scene is, I mean, I have this passion in this film for the live-sung musical. and the irony this was this was the one moment that it was very difficult to do the the singing live because of having to create the weather conditions of the storm we you know we had wind machines we had wave machines standing in real sea water and and so there was a lot of noise going on and it was an irony that almost the only the only scene where i found it very difficult to achieve live sound was the very beginning of the movie so the lip-syncing which i which i personally can't bear is makes a very fleeting appearance but luckily That's pretty much it for the film. At this moment, I was originally inspired by this first draft of the screenplay that William Nicholson wrote, where he immediately saw... the power of setting up Jean Valjean's strength at the beginning so that when he lifts the cart later on, as Love is the Musical know, we've actually set the idea of his strength up. And more than that, I want there to be a very precise visual mirror between the lifting of the cart and the lifting of the flag. And of course, you'll notice it's the same flag from the opening that has been dragged along in the ocean. And I like the idea of Jean Valjean literally having to carry this symbol of the French state on his back. and drag it to the feet of Javert. This wonderful bit of dialogue between Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, or Rest At Eve, I should call it, shows the way we approached it. So not only are they singing live, the accompaniment was live as well, so that Russell and Hugh have the choice to make little shifts in the tempo or the attack as they approached the song. And I was amazed. I have a wonderful sound, of course, with Simon Hayes. I'm amazed at the sound he got in the middle of an active working military, sort of naval base. And I'm Javert Do not forget my name Do not forget me 24601 Hugh, in order to get this extraordinary look, lost. 30 pounds of weight, went on a water fast for 36 hours, which means no water at all for 36 hours. So his skin is like tissue paper and sort of wraps back on his skull. And I wanted such a savage look because I felt one of the narrative challenges was that when he reinvents itself as the mayor, it's got to be credible that Javert wouldn't spot him. And so we went very extreme and also wanted to ground these first scenes in a kind of shocking level of realism, in the look of Jean Magent as a convict, so that as we're introduced to live singing, we're anchored by the gritty realism of the physical look of the characters and the locale. This is actually just above Nice, in the south of France, in Gourdon. You'll notice that that Hugh Jackman looks properly exhausted having climbed the mountain. The secret to that is that we were struggling financially to be able to afford to go to France, and I kept making the case to the producers, and the producers probably sensibly kept saying that we didn't have the money. I went to Scotland and discovered, obviously, that the Highlands don't look much like France, and finally we managed to work out a way of doing it for about, I think, about $50,000, which involved Hugh Jackman flying an EasyJet, which is a very low-cost, no-frills airline, And, you know, it was a very small crew. I was operating that first shot, and one of the reasons he looked so tired is he had to help lug the gear up. I think he was carrying the lens boxes, so he was truly tired by the time he got to the top of the mountain. And the town that represents Dean in the story is an extraordinary town called Gordons. It's about 20 minutes north of Nice Airport, and it sits at the top of this mountain with the views of the Alps beyond. And I wanted to set up early on in the film this theme of heights, progression, the progression towards grace, being a progression upwards so that we had the movement of the camera out of the water, up into the sky, and then Hugh's movement as Jean Magent up the stairs to freedom, leaving Russell Crowe down below, and then his climb up to the top of this mountain where he finds the bishop.

This is Colm Wilkinson. Fans of the musical will know exactly who he is. He invented the role of Jean Valjean at the beginning in The Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's an absolute delight to have him coming back to play the bishop. There's something very moving about the original Jean Valjean inspiring this Jean Valjean, Hugh Jackman Jean Valjean, on his way. You know, the funny thing was is he suggested it. He rang up Cameron McIntosh, the film's producer and the original show's producer, and then said, you know, is there a part for me here? Sorry, Colin, that's a terrible Irish accent. Bless the food we eat today. This is an example where we opened up the musical slightly in order to allow this moment of spiritual conversion to land. The interior here we actually found in Paddington in London. It's in the crypt of a beautiful church which Eve Stewart, my brilliant production designer, adapted to be the bishop's lodgings. Here we fleetingly set up Jean Valjean's relationship to God at this point and his lack of connection.

And here we're in Oxfordshire. The exterior's in a different place, and Eve had this idea of putting all these multiple crucifixes, which are all added, to allow me to shoot through layers of crosses on the long lens. We have your silver. We caught this man red-handed. I get the nerve to say you gave him this. And this scene is so utterly central both to Victor Hugo's novel the musical because this is when this man who's been you know brutalized by years of mistreatment is forgiven for committing a crime and and it is it's a scene about the central power of forgiveness and interestingly the bishop actually lies in order to forgive valjean which maybe suggests that it's okay to lie if it's in a good moral cause But remember this, my brother, see in this some higher plan. You must use this precious silver to become an honest man. By the witness of the martyrs. We're coming up to a lyric change that in the musical it says, I have bought your soul for God. And we changed it to, I've saved your soul for God, because to me, buying someone's soul had a kind of connotation that made me think of the Faust myth and lacked that kind of warmth and beauty. But that's a personal choice. I should say here that the extraordinary thing about making this film is that I was reunited with the original creators of the musical, Claude-Michel Schoenberg, who wrote this extraordinary score. ...Alan Boublil and Herbie Kretzmer... ...who wrote the original lyrics, first of all in French... ...for the sort of rock opera that was the source of the show... ...and then Herbie Kretzmer, the English lyrics... ...which were translated and inspired and sort of reinvented by Herbie... ...with Alan's guidance. I missed it 20 long years ago. My life was a war that could never be won. They gave me a number and they murdered... What's interesting about this musical is the role of soliloquies. I mean, in modern film dramas, you don't tend to have the form of a soliloquy where an actor can express his thoughts alone without being in some kind of dialogue. But in the musical form, this form gives us permission to... ...explore the workings of a man's mind in this way. And this take, I think, was... I think take 16 of 17 takes. Hugh had extraordinary vocal stamina... ...which he'd built up partly by doing a one-man show in Broadway... ...before the film shoot began. He kind of half-jokes that he did the one-man show in order to... help build up the stamina he'd need to sing day in day out on a shoot. And this was our master close-up that Zach Nicholson shot on the Steadicam. And apart from one cut to a wide shot, it's all the same take, take 16. One of the challenges of shooting live music with live accompaniment is that effectively each take becomes its own unique event. Because if an actor's varying tempos significantly, you can't necessarily cut one take with another take. And so what you, in a way, give up in order to have the freedom, or the actor to have that freedom, is the right or ability to always intercut all the takes you do. So I began to realize from early on that filming Les Miserables would be about making this commitment to... to filming each song in one take. I mean, interestingly in this, we shot some other coverage, you know, from the side and some wides, but through the editing process, we felt that the emotional power of the soliloquy was best served by this concentrated meditation on Hugh's extraordinary performance. Because, you know, when you come wide to show the world he's in, it's not really giving you an insight. into what the words are describing. The words are very conceptual and emotional. And the best guide to what he's going through is his face. This shot involved a huge amount of work. Early on, I always was wondering how to honor this amazing musical moment of the magic notes. In the original musical, the musical began with those magical notes and began here. Everything before this was added by Trevor Nunn, John Caird, Cameron McIntosh, when they recreated the show for the Royal Shakespeare Company. But it involves a plate shot in Oxfordshire of Hugh Jackman coming out of the church, throwing the parole document into a wind machine, and Zach Nicholson actually was walking backwards, climbing onto a... a platform on a crane which then whizzed him about 70 foot into the air so it was quite precarious for Zak because he had to climb onto a platform which immediately lifted off so the timing had to be perfect. The end of that shot is then embedded into a visual effects shot which is based on a helicopter plate of Gordons, the French town and this Oxfordshire church is inserted onto this mountaintop but the mountain is created in CGI and we re-project photos the helicopter shoot in order to give it the realism but the whole feeling was trying to create this sort of epic moment that took us into contact with god into contact with this sort of great turner-esque sky and i like the idea that the bit of parole document almost makes it um towards this sort of break in the clouds in the light in the heavens and then is dragged down and the camera hurtles down to discover uh russell crowe at the bottom

At the end of the day you get nothing for nothing. Sitting flat on your bum doesn't buy any bread. There are children back at home. And the children have got to be fed. And you're lucky to be in a job. And in a bed. And we're counting our blessings. We shot the film as much as possible chronologically. One of the reasons was to do with the look of the actors. lost all the weight to play the convict at the beginning. We shaved his head very roughly, and we shot all the convict stuff first. And, you know, so he had the scenes with Colm Wilkinson early on, which was great for him. And then with Annie, because she wanted very much to have her hair cut for real, you know, we needed to shoot the factory scene early on. With enough in your pocket to last for a week Play the landlord with a shot Keep on working as long as you're able Keep on working

What we're coming up to is an interesting change both from the musical and the book, in fact. When I first saw the musical, I never quite understood the reason that Valjean gets distracted. from paying attention to this fight that breaks out between the women. And when I turn to the book, he's even less involved. And when I was watching the musical for the first time, I was already thinking about making the film, and I had the idea, wouldn't it be interesting if Javert actually was arriving in the town for the first time as the new inspector of police, and at the very moment that Jean Valjean should be paying attention to this squabble. he sees Javert and obviously, you know, his world falls away and he can think of nothing but his past and unsurprisingly leaves this situation for the foreman to sort out. Deal with this foreman. Be as patient as you can. Yes, Monsieur Malalin. And what I like about putting Javert into this scene is it kind of sets up this idea that Jean Valjean's past is always going to dog him. That however much he might try and transcend it, it's going to be something he has to deal with. It also, I suppose, indirectly or directly, creates the beginning of the descent of Fantine, so that Jean Valjean has a real feeling of culpability when he discovers Fantine's descent later. And his desire to atone for that, it leads him to the commitment he makes to Fantine's daughter.

Kate Fleetwood, who plays the lead factory girl, I think is an extraordinary actress. And this scene was an example of where we alternated between free tempo and then the choruses. were to a fixed tempo. So Mike Gibson's wonderful bit here. He's controlling the tempo and he's got complete freedom. And here we've gone back into a fixed tempo because it's quite tricky doing chorus stuff with free tempo, which also allows me to do, you know, coverage slightly more easily. And again in that intercut, we set up that sort of theme of slight inattention caused by the pressure of seeing Javert. And then we come to a scene that's completely new to the musical, which is the scene where Javert introduces himself. In the musical, those who've seen it remember, Javert has been around for a while when we jump forward in time, but I like the idea that we jump forward in time to find to go to the moment where the two meet. So the reason to go to this moment in time is because that's the moment when these two protagonists meet. Now, the process of creating this scene was fascinating because, first of all, Claude Michel has to suggest a melody and then we have to analyse the number of lines this melody allows and then work out whether we can say what we need to say But the process of creating this scene went from Bill Nicholson, who wrote a dialogue version for me. Claude Michel then came up with a melody. Alain Boublier then wrote lyrics in French inspired by Bill Nicholson's English dialogue. And then Herbie Kretzmer did his version of English lyrics based both on Alain's French lyrics and Bill's original dialogue, all fitting the number of lines that Claude Michel's melody allowed. So I had the actual experience of creating in the musical form with all its complexity. And what's fascinating is that melodies, Claude Michel taught me that melodies kind of exhaust themselves after a certain amount of time. So you can't necessarily suddenly double the length of a scene with it and it musically works. The music, it takes a certain amount of time, a certain number of lines, and then it's about seeing whether you can express the content of the scene and the lines you've got. And sometimes with Claude Michel, we'd say, You know, there's too many lines. The rest of the team is being repetitious because we don't need this space, and sometimes we'd say to him, the melody you've given us is too short and we can't say what we need to say in the time that we've got. So there's this constant dance between the demands of the musical form and melody and what you need to say lyrics-wise. Make me think of a man from years ago A man who broke his parole He disappeared Say what you must, don't leave it there. Forgive me, sir, I would not dare. I mean, it might be worth talking about why I chose to do the musical sung through. I mean, first of all, it's to honor the musical itself, which is sung through form. But Bill Nicholson's first screenplay draft was actually dialogue interspersed with songs. But I worried that When you do that, there are these constant gear shifts between dialogue and music. They're almost like two different orders of realism, which in some ways keeps reminding people that singing is less naturalistic than spoken dialogue. So I felt it was perhaps... ...more convincing just to really commit to the sung-through form... ...and not keep reminding people of naturalistic dialogue. But in doing that, you know, I've relied myself... There were very few films that did that. I mean, I think Tommy, Evita, Umbrellas of Cherbourg... ...there are very few examples of films that have been through sung. Most films stick with this dialogue interspersed with song structure. What pretty hair. What pretty locks you've got there. What luck you've got. It's worth it. So we've just gone from Chatham, where the interior of the factory and her exterior journey to the docks, to the historic dock of Chatham, and now we're actually at Pinewood Studios, where we built this set. Eve's wonderful set we built partly because we couldn't find any locations in the UK that gave us the kind of dockside. periodocs that we needed, but also just the complications of shooting at night and capturing live sound. We thought it'd be better to commit to doing some of these big set pieces in a studio environment where we can control it. And so what we do is we do sky replacements where in shots like these, the foreground separates it off the studio ceiling and we put night skies in.

Adrian Scarborough was in the opening scene of The King's Speech. He played the presenter, who is the kind of, you know, the big star of speaking who begins to film off. And it's great to be reunited with him. The pain won't last. You'll still be able to bite. I do it fast. I know my business all right. It's worth a go. So Anne had her hair cut for real and she was very keen to do that I think because she wanted to go through some of the emotions of what it's like to lose your hair in that way and because she thought she could feed those into her performance and also you know both Hugh and Anne were always looking to make the film as real and ground as possible in terms of what she did with her characters. The set actually stank because we had an unbelievable amount of fish imported into the set, which then slowly rotted. So when you went onto the set, it really did feel real, and we left the heating off to keep that cold feeling, so it was pretty unpleasant. Join your sisters. Make money in your sleep. That's right, dearie. Show him what you've got. That's right, dearie. Let him have the love. And you'll see the recurrence of the visual motif of the boat. So just as Valjean, you know, we meet him under the shadow of this huge boat. And he's lifted freedom away from the boat. Anne's descent into prostitution leads her into the bowels of the boat, into the watery bowels of this boat. So it's again the return to water set up by the link between water and misery of the opening scene. Daniel Evans is the pimp who I've... in Love and a Cold Climate and Daniel Rhonda, an extraordinary actor who now is artistic director of the Sheffield Playhouse. Come on, Captain You can wear your shoes Don't it make a change to have a girl who can't refuse Easy money Lying on a bed And here Anne does something which was her own choice, which is to look straight at the lens. It's fascinating how I think it does actually work and how you can have, you know, set up conventions in your own mind or learn conventions coming into directing which are meant to never be broken. One of them is, you know, in a fiction film, actors aren't meant to look straight down the camera. But then again there, she looks incredibly close to the lens. But it's amazing how that brief moment of engagement, I don't know, sends a sort of chill down my spine. There was a time when men were kind, when their voices were soft. So Dream to Dream, she's lying in a coffin bed. When I went around HMS Victory, I noticed that... Some of the offices would have these sort of rectangular coffin beds. And so we create a kind of rotting one for Anne to line as the song begins. Now, there's some great examples of the power of live singing, live accompaniment. This pause here. And then it all went wrong. I mean, because we're in a completely live environment, Anne can hold that it all went wrong up for as long as she wants to allow all the emotions to surface in her eyes before she sings about it. And she takes, effectively, a non-musical pause. The music completely suspends to allow herself that pause. And this is where working is radically different from the way musicals tend to be done. It's not just the live singing, it's the fact that the actors are working with a piano accompaniment, there's no conductor, and they are controlling the tempo of what they're singing. I mean, I have three cameras running on the song. The original master I planned was a slow track in from a medium shot to a close-up over the length of the song. And for a long time in the edit, we kept this tracking shot in. And I remember one day Eddie Redmayne came in, who's been a friend ever since Elizabeth I, when we worked together, and I showed him Dream to Dream, and he was knocked out, but he said, why aren't we using the big close-up that he'd seen in the teaser trailer? And Melanie, my editor, tried the big close-up in, and... It was quite extraordinary, the added emotional power of being this close, because the difficulty with starting in a mid-shot when she sings I Dreamed a Dream, it's almost like you're jumping back from her and you're saying that the beginning of the song is less important than the end, but actually every single line she sings is incredibly vital in this song, and I'm incredibly pleased that Eddie suggested we re-look at it. So I had a tracking camera, a big close-up camera and a roving Steadicam, I didn't say to Anne, you know, we're going to do this in one take. It's one shot, it's one camera, it's a big close-up, off you go. The big close-up came sort of democratically out of the process of editing. What I admire in what Anne's doing is the total lack of emotional self-indulgence. I mean, it is an extraordinary performance. I think she went to a very dark place this day. She opened some kind of box and looked inside and at the end of the day closed that box and... I think it was a very painful day for her. I don't know personally what she was contemplating to get into this place, but I actually felt very protective and concerned for her on this day because she'd taken herself to this dark place. It's an extraordinary example of the kind of preparation that my ensemble cast did. I mean, Anne, works out in this song how to produce the kind of, the belt voice, the very powerful end of the singing while keeping her face very still. She also had to practice crying and singing to make sure she could hold pitch while she cried, but she knew when she sung Dream to Dream, she probably would cry. The other key thing is the song's been moved from its position in the show. In the show, it's straight after. the factory. And when I first saw the musical, I didn't feel I knew Fontaine that well by that point. And I was wondering if there's a way of placing the song that would allow me to know Fontaine a little bit better and therefore the emotional power of the song to be even more deepened. I'm pretty sure that in the French concept album, Dream to Dream Happens Later, and we had a wonderful conversation, Cameron, Alain, called Michelle and I, and Alain Boublil suggested, what about moving it to after she's been forced into prostitution? And I would say the most important direction that Anne received from me was when I said, we've moved the song, because she realised... ...then that it would have a completely different meaning in the film structure. And she applied a kind of raw devastation to the song... ...that revolutionized her take on it. But it's very much a response to where it's placed in the story... ...and the brutality of what it's a response to. You've got some gore. By Christ, you'll pay for what you've done. I guarantee. I'll make you suffer! Rebecca, don't report me, sir. I'll do whatever you may want. Excuse me. Excuse me. Tell me quickly what's the story Who saw what and why and where Let him give a full description Let him answer to Javert The effect it did have on the structure, though, was the scene with Bamatabwa, which is more involved in the musical, and actually we shot a longer version of it. It became... in a way sort of unnecessary to go into such detail, the detail of Bamata Bar's abuse of Fontaine at this stage because the combination of seeing Fontaine forced into prostitution and Dream to Dream being in that place in a way leaves you not needing to make a further point about abuse because you've kind of said everything you need to say. So we found a way of navigating through the Bamata Bar moment more economically because what really matters in this scene is Valjean rescuing Fontaine. But it was also an interesting example of how, you know, I originally felt that we probably couldn't cut the music down, that we'd have to take it, you know, as it came. But it was interesting that the more I got to know the score, the more Claude Michel could show me how there were ways of, you know, making cuts in the score, particularly in the rest of Teeth. Bertie Carville, who plays Bamataba, actually is an Olivier Award winner for the musical Matilda. He's a wonderful actor.

Show me some way to help you. How have you come to grief in such a place as this? Monsieur, don't mock me now, I pray. Anne's extraordinary in this scene, I think. This is one of my favorite moments coming up. It reminds me of Labo M. And Zack, you know, operating handheld quite close to Anne and moving very intimately with her so that you have a very strong visceral connection between the camera and the emotion of the actor.

I kind of discovered the importance of handheld on the top of the mountain in that scene with Hugh right at the beginning when he's left the dock. I was operating that day because of our small crew, and it just felt something very visceral about shooting live singing handheld, about having that very intimate connection between the operator and the actor. In his name. My task has just begun. I will take her to the hospital. Monsieur Le Maire. Where is your child? And here we have the leitmotif of the stairs again, so Fontaine being taken from underneath the boat upstairs to freedom, and again Javert being left behind, beneath, below, with the hydra figurehead of the boat above him.

This is another evolution from the original musical inspired both by the book and also by the wonderful Charles Lorden version of Les Miserables. In the novel, Javert comes to the mayor to apologize for the fact that he's wrongly reported him as being the escaped convict Valjean and basically falls on his sword and wants charges to be pressed against him. And I thought it was a very important scene in the Charles Lawton movie. I think it's possibly my favorite scene with Charles Lawton because it's such an insight into Javert. What it's really saying is this is a man who's not only hard on everyone, he's equally hard on himself. And the first moment he fails by his own standards, he's willing to destroy himself. I mean, he's willing to you know, be prosecuted and end up as, you know, the very convict like Valjean was. And it gives him an incredible honor. You realize he's not a sadist. He's not someone who's just in it for causing other people pain. His honor code applies just as much to himself as to others. But also it's the first intimation of this capacity for self-destruction, which is a pre-echo of the suicide. You know, I remember for the very first time I met Russell, we went for a walk in Hyde Park in London, and he'd just seen the musical, and he talked about his major obligation, his major responsibility, being how to set up the suicide of Javert as effectively as possible. And I was very happy to share with him this script inclusion I wanted to make from the book. And Claude Buchel and Alain and Herbie helped us work it into the existing music. In fact, I believe it's the music that follows the car crash The car crash in the musical happens significantly later, but I wanted it to happen earlier so that it would connect with the factory world, as it seemed to be less random when it sat in that one. I am damned I am the master of hundreds of workers They all look to me Can I abandon them? How will they live if I am not free?

I think this is an extraordinary piece of both lyrics writing and musical writing. I remember early on talking to Hugh about the challenge of Valjean is in a way how to make playing a good man interesting and the guide of course is the novel because what we learn from the novel is that Valjean having been inspired by the bishop and having this extraordinary spiritual conversion, the practice of being good, the practice of being moral is not easy. And this is a great example where he's faced with a very tough choice. You know, if he keeps his identity concealed, he's going to allow an innocent man to go to jail, but save, you know, the livelihood of all his factory workers. If he admits who he is, you know, his factory will probably fall apart and a lot of those people will go into the penury, the very penury we've just glimpsed through Fontaine, but he would have been honest about his own identity. So it's as if Victor Hugo sets up these inspirations, but then shows the fact that, you know, being a person of faith, being a person who's following a path of compassion and morality, involves constant work and constant negotiating of difficult choices. Who am I? Who am I? Jean-Bertrand. And so, Your Honor, you see it's true. This man bears no more guilt than you. Here we're back at Chatham in the chapel, which Eve converted into a courtroom. Two, four, six, a-one! I love this glimpse of the convicts we're about to see. This sort of reminder of... There we go, a reminder of where Bajon came from. And Paco Delgado, our wonderful costume designer, was brilliant at capturing the look of the convicts with their sort of faded, distressed clothes that really felt they'd been worked in for years, not just made yesterday. He had a whole aging department to make that possible.

This is in the attic of the rope walk in Chatham, which was actually something like almost, I mean, like three-quarters of a mile long. It has an extraordinary depth to it.

This was a great opportunity to integrate the Gazette character with Fantine and to glimpse that early and begin to build a connection with the audience between Little Gazette. And we're shooting, Eve Stewart had this idea of these sort of gauzes separating all the beds in the hospital so that we could shoot through the gauze In a way, it's an old-fashioned stage trick to use causes and the combination of back and front light. When you front light them, the objects by them disappeared, and when you back light them, you can see them. But it creates a kind of barrier between her and this visitation. And it's quite important setting up the idea of ghosts because of the way the whole musical ends with the ghosts on the barricade. So to put that language into the storytelling is very important. And in a way, this is the start of the story proper, this pact that's made between these two characters. and this obligation that Valjean takes on to protect this girl. Annie, by this point, I think had lost 15 pounds in weight, in a rapid weight loss regime, because she was very keen to be more emaciated for the death scene and to make that as real as possible. I mean, again, her commitment to this role was quite extraordinary.

Interestingly, our original idea from rehearsal was that as she died, she would see Javert coming down, and so she would have a kind of tragic death where she died, realizing that her daughter was perhaps not safe. And I remember Karen McIntosh in the edit saying something very interesting about how we should allow her to have a peaceful death, a beautiful death. And I realized there was an echo between the death of Valjean and the death of Fontaine, that this idea that This moment can be navigated through love, that she can achieve a kind of closure, a kind of happiness in the moment of death through feeling like her job has been done, which is making sure that there was someone left to protect and love her child. In mercy's name, three days are all I need. Can I return? I pledged my word. Can I return? You must think me mad. Russell had this fantastic idea of bringing a fight into the confrontation on stage. The two men effectively have a sing-off and then they have a brief scuffle at the end. But Russell said, you know, this is a film and we can't just stand and sing at each other. And also thought about the reality of whether, you know, Gervais would really let Valjean just stand and sing in rebellion. And he worked very hard at the choreography of the sword fight with Hugh. And it's a great example of the kind of directorial ideas that Russell brings to the table when you work with him. It's fantastic. Here, I thought that line was very key. I was born inside a jail. I was born a scum like you. I am from the gutter too. In the musical construction, Valjean is singing something over the top. So I never really heard those lyrics. And when I was reading the lyrics for the first time, I saw the huge power of this idea that Javert comes from exactly the same background as Valjean. And in fact, in the novel, we learn that his father was a convict and he grew up in a prison. And early on in life, Javert felt he had two choices in life. to fight society or to guard it, to guard or to fight, and he chose to guard, whereas obviously Valjean chose to fight it. The two men are kind of almost different parts of the same whole, represent different choices of the same personality, and Victor Hugo even does a wordplay, you know, Jean-Marjean, JVJ, Javier, JV, so that the initials of one are contained in the other. She's nice to see and she's soft to touch. She says...

I know a place where no one's lost. I know a place where no... Isabel Allen, what an extraordinary actress she is. I mean, I'm not aware she's acted in any professional acting before Nina Gold, my wonderful casting director, found her, but she's singing this live like all the other actors. And, you know, I think that song is incredibly important in terms of creating a connection between the audience and this character. But it does need to be sung well, and I think she sings it beautifully. We're back at Pinewood at the Richard Attenborough stage. We had this huge sort of composite set that was both the street where the barricades are built later and also created the village of Montfermeil. And go and draw some water from the well. We should never have taken you in, in the first place. How stupid the things that we do. Like mother, like daughter, the scum of the street. Helena Bonham Carter, she played the Queen Mother in The King's Speech. And I was desperate to persuade her to play. Madame Tenardier was so thrilled she did. I mean, she's brilliant at kind of grounding humor in a detailed character and making the humor feel real, which I really needed because, you know, at the moment, directorially, there's a very difficult transition that's about to happen between, you know, a very tough and real story and the humor that Tenardier is bringing in, which is very necessary as an emotional release, but quite a big tonal change, which is something that I thought a lot about and I knew that Helena would sort of anchor that transition. Or I'll forget to be nice. You heard me ask for something and I never asked twice. Wakey, wakey. We're opening. I love you. I love you so much. Sacha Baron Cohen, I mean, what a thrill to work with him. I mean, I was, you know, one of those kids who used to listen to... gangster rap in my suburban bedroom and think that they understood my suburban teenage pain and when Sasha Vanko created Ali G and mocked a whole generation of kids like him and like me I was won over forever and he's a comedy genius so I was so happy to have him in. What was fascinating about Sasha was how rigorous he was about comedy. He basically him and his writing partner would do versions of Master of the House where they would script out all these specific gags, like the idea of the guy under the stairs who he pours beer in and laps it up. They're all scripted out, and he would come up with more ideas than we'd have time for, and we'd work and work about where to place each of the gags. Welcome, monsieur. Sit yourself down and meet the best innkeeper in town. As for the rest, all of them crooks, rookings the guests and cookings the books. And we took inspiration from the tradition in the show of Tenardier having an old military costume. In the book, he actually makes an appearance at the Battle of Waterloo where he steals stuff from dead soldiers. Master of the house, doling out the charm. Ready with a handshake and an open palm. Tells a saucy tale, makes a little stir. Customers appreciate the bon vivant. Glad to do a friend... The whole idea of Father Christmas going from giving out presents to ending up with a prostitute upstairs to losing his dignity by the end was Sasha's. Master of the house, keeper of the zoo. Ready to relieve them of a zoo or two. Ordering the wine, making up the way, picking up their knick-knacks when they cross... And Cameron McAdosh was great at sort of suggesting there were two tiers of people in Master House, the regulars who know that this guy's fleecing everyone and the new customers, and so there's this complicity, this axis of complicity between the tenardiers and the regulars against the new customers. I love you, everybody!

This was one of the funniest things I think I've ever shot. Sasha would just constantly improvise stuff with the props and just at the end of singing that section would just go back and re-sing and again because you're live he could just pick up and start and stop. Extra for the mice, 2% for looking in the mirror twice. He suggested that I watch Fiddle on the Roof, Norman Jewison's wonderful musical, which I'd actually never seen, and I must admit I did get very inspired by Topol and a couple of the sequences. There's a great sequence in it which ends up with this dance-off in a bar, which I found very inspiring for creating Master of the House. In fact, Sasha used If I Was a Rich Man as his audition piece in Los Angeles. He refused to sing anything from Les Miserables but would only sing Fiddle On The Roof to prove that he could sing to me. It was Helena's idea to stage this in a more intimate way in the musical. It tends to be a kind of, you know, it's all a big public moment whereas she felt It was more interesting if the soldier really thinks there's a special intimacy going on between them, but it's all really in the surface of stealing from him. I love the music in this. We had this great band of seven or eight players who did a huge amount of improvisation based around the score. And we'd kind of watch the scene together at Abbey Road and mark up certain beats I'd want to hit with the gypsy violin or with the accordion. And they would just create these accents to mark all the comedy. Sasha actually lost his voice halfway through seeing Master House and we had to shut down the entire film for about a week. Luckily, it was at the very end of the shoot. So, you know, the only thing that we delayed was finishing Master House. But it was quite funny because, you know, various people who'd been concerned about me embracing life singing had always said, well, what if people get sore throats? And, you know, I'd got to week 12 of the shoot with literally no one ever getting ill, no one ever having a problem with their voice. And then Sasha actually lost his voice to the extent that he was... I remember there was a day where he was only singing when he's on camera and was writing everything down on a notebook for me. So we were communicating entirely through him writing stuff down because he was trying to save his voice. But eventually, you know, he realized he couldn't go on and we had to give him a whole week's vocal rest. So the nightmare of someone losing his voice did come true. But actually, of course, with Sascha, the idea of him only writing stuff down, you know, was hilarious. because half the time he'd be writing messages that really had nothing to do with work or were just sort of jokes. And this is again, this is inside T-stage, the Richard Attenborough stage. This improvisation that Sasha does is It's fantastic. It adds a whole layer to this scene. There is a promise I have made For I was blind to one in need I did not see what stood before me I was blind to one in need. I did not see what stood before me. Again, that recurrence of the guilt theme, which is why I thought it was so useful to have Javert arrive as the agent of that guilt.

And I speak here with her voice. And I stand here in her place. Elizabeth Allen is extraordinary in reacting to the news of her mother's death. And from this day and evermore... Let me take your coat, monsieur. It's very funny shooting this because Hugh Jackman is the only time I ever saw him sort of crack up. And he, I mean, he's incredibly professional here, but in this scene, Sasha kept on making him laugh. And Sasha taught him the trick, the way to get around corpsing is Sasha would just say the funny line over and over and over again to Hugh until it became kind of banal and it wouldn't make him laugh. Again, this is the wonderful gypsy band that we brought in. Can we talk of death? Let's not haggle for darling Colette. Cosette. Cosette. It's probably the best joke in a stage show and it remains one of the best jokes in the film. Have we done for a child what is best? I think so. Shed our bread, shed each bone. Treated her like she's one of our own. Like our own, monsieur. Your feelings do you credit, sir? And I will ease the party blow. Let us not talk of bargains and bones and greed. Now may I say... It's quite interesting. I remember in the novel reading a section where Victor Hugo talks about the concept, not just the concept of the evil rich, but also the evil poor, that he didn't fall into this... of saying, you know, Les Miserables, the poor are all wonderful, and it's just the rich who oppress them. He makes it very clear in the book that as well as the noble poor, there are the evil poor who are just as damaging as the evil rich. And there's an idea he saw in his creation that shows that. No more words. Here's your price. 1,500 for your sacrifice. Come, Cosette. Say goodbye. Let us seek out some friendlier sky. Thank you both for Cosette. It won't take you too long to forget. Farewell, Cosette. That's Cosette. Helena and Sasha are still arguing over who came up with the idea of Cosette. It's a great line. Where I go, you will be. Yes, Cosette. This is true. I'll be father and mother to you. Oh! The next scene, again, is an addition compared to the stage musical. In the musical, the Tanais ended up delighted by the amount of money that they've made. But in the book, they end up... feeling that they've been fleeced when they realize that Valjean perhaps is richer than he appeared and I thought that was a good beat because it means there's a reason for them to have this antagonism towards Valjean when they meet him again in Paris and also I thought it was great to have Javert connect with them here so that there's some history when they all come together later in Paris.

Now, this scene is very key, I think. It's inspired by the novel, where Victor Hugo makes clear that there are not one but two central epiphanies that Valjean... One is with the bishop, where he discovers faith and compassion and virtue, and the second is when his life is transformed by Little Cosette. Victor Hugo writes, when he meets Cosette, this was the second white apparition that Jean Valjean had encountered. The bishop taught him virtue. Cosette taught him the meaning of love. And I felt when I read this extraordinary passage in the novel where Victor Hugo talks about what it's like to be a man in your late middle age who's never been loved, who's never loved, what it's like to experience love as a parent for a child, blossoming out of nowhere with its extraordinary power and force. And I wanted to honor that because I feel in the musical, you know, you get the connection, but it's done quite fast. And I actually felt that if you set up the importance of this love, it completely colors the whole second half of the film for Valjean. And so it's incredibly exciting to basically be involved in the creation of a new song for Les Miserables after, you know, 26 years of this show being so successful and so part of people's lives. And again, to see that process of Claude Michel coming up with a melody and Alain writing the first version of the song in French and then Herbie Kretzmer being inspired by that and trying to find... an English version inspired by the French with Alan's help. And I'd go around to Herbie's house in pre-production for tea regularly and we'd discuss the honing of these lyrics. But in the end, the operative word became suddenly because it was this idea that your life can change in a moment, that you can discover this power of love in yourself in a moment.

The other interesting thing about doing the song was how long it took to get the orchestration right and I really understand now the complexity of orchestrations and how critical they are because it was only really towards the very end of the process. I think we recorded the score a couple of times at Abbey Road. It was only really the last time we recorded that we got it right and it started very lush and full but it worked much better when the orchestration had a lot more restraint and simplicity and Anne Dudley came up with this solution for the song which didn't sort of over claim on you know grandiose emotions it had a kind of purity that is what we stuck with but it's interesting how a song can literally not work if you don't get the orchestration right no matter how good the lyrics are no matter how good the melody is

So here we're transported to Winchester. This is actually Winchester School, in a little alleyway next to the school church. She's being pulled up on wires which we digitally remove. Valjean!

And this again is an addition from the book that's not in the musical. In the book there's this sort of wonderful section, this wonderful chase section where Javert is hot on Jean Valjean's heels and he finds sanctuary in a convent. And I did feel it was important to explain where Cosette and Valjean had been for all those years when we make the time jump. And again it makes that connection between Valjean and his faith and this sense that It's his relationship with his faith that saves him, or it's through religion that he's given sanctuary and he's protected. So it keeps that theme alive. And then here, you know, we discover Fauchelevent again, who he rescued from the cart in this great twist. I mean, it's interesting, you know, the role of coincidence in Victor Hugo's story, because you could say it's sort of improbable, but when you read the book, you kind of, you know, Victor Hugo's definitely writing from the point of view of God existing, and therefore, patterning has a different meaning in a world where god may be providing a guiding hand and i ended up embracing these kind of coincidences because i felt it was so central to the formal nature of victor huger's work

Fans of the show will know that we moved this scene earlier in the structure. In the musical, it's partway through the Paris section in the second half. I mean, it's funny because I advocated putting the scene here early on, but, you know, we were all understandably a little bit nervous because it was such a sort of break with the way the musical normally played. But I felt in the end, you know, the problem with ending the first half of the film on... Valjean achieving sanctuary is your kind of hurtling forward into the future years later on the basis of a character being safe, whereas actually leaving the first half with Javert's vow that he's going to hunt down and find this man keeps the DNA of the hunter, the hunted quest going and means the shadow of that is cast over the Paris section where in a way we divert from the theme between the two men.

In your multitudes, scarce to be counted Filling the darkness with order and light You are the sentinel... Now, we shot this in Pinewood on a stage. Eve Stewart built a section of roof, a rooftop. She built the eagle, otherwise it was green screen. And then the wonderful visual effects company, DNEG, went to Paris and took endless photographs of Parisian buildings of the right period, plus also the Parisian buildings we had created on T-stage, and also did LIDAR scan of Notre Dame, which means a sort of, you know, I don't know, it's probably accurate to the hundredth of a millimeter, but I mean, it's a scan of the entire building. So a bit like with the ship at the beginning, you can put Notre Dame in and reproject photos onto this wire model based on the actual precise architectural shape of Notre Dame. Why did we not do it in Paris? Well, partly cost, but, you know, the idea of being on a rooftop in Paris at night and recording sort of usable sound take after take with Russell seemed a little improbable, given the kind of noise pollution you have in Paris. So, you know, from early on, I felt that this was probably going to be something where we'd have to create Paris using the aid of CGI. And Russell had a great insight about this song when he first came in for audition, which is that he was going to sing it as a prayer to God, and I found that an incredibly inspiring notion, because in some ways it gave me ideas. Almost all the soliloquies, you could almost say, are being sung in relation to God or are being sung in the tradition of the prayer, where we're used to the idea of people alone talking out loud or talking in their head to a higher power or something outside themselves. It was also Russell's idea to do that shot of Javert walking very close to the edge. So again, visually, that flirtation with self-destruction theme is set up in that scene. Come on, boys! Come on! So here we're transported to Greenwich Naval College. on the banks of the Thames in London, where we wanted to create some of the Place de la Bastille. And Eve Stewart had this wonderful idea of recreating the elephant that is mentioned in the book. It's a triumphal elephant, a monument that I think Napoleon built to mark this successful campaign in Egypt. Historians may correct me. And by this stage in 1832, it was rotting and street urchins lived in it. And so he has this idea that Gavroche So that's why Gavroche emerges from the elephant. This is Daniel Huttlestone, who has played the role of Gavroche wonderfully on stage.

And this, you know, unbelievably is sort of done in one take. It's live. I mean, Simon Hayes, the sound recordist and his team are so extraordinary that, I mean, there was so little sound of the carriage, we actually had to put a little bit on in the sound effects because it almost didn't seem real that he was actually singing for real, but he was. And early on, I had this idea that Gavroche would take us on a kind of journey from the elephant through the beggars to meet the students, and we sort of get this glimpse of the scale of Paris and the scale of civil protest. Lisa Westcott and her team have done such a great job recreating the look of misery, the look of the poor in the film. It's very difficult to do. I mean, I was very conscious of all the kind of cliches of the poor, I mean, if you grow up in England, you know, you're endlessly watching Dickens adaptations at Christmas where there's a kind of almost a sort of formulaic look of the 19th century poor, which is kind of cozy and safe because it's so familiar and it doesn't have a sort of visceral reality to it. And they're brilliant here at making the poverty feel quite urgent.

And here, another addition in the film is the role of the grandfather that's actually explaining something I thought was very interesting, that Marius is from a wealthy background and has given his wealthy heritage up in order to pursue his political cause and lives in this, you know, shithole of a slum by choice. because he's fallen out with his family over his politics. This is in Boughton, which is ironically one of the most beautiful houses in England, but has a wing that's incredibly decrepit, so we could both shoot the slums and also some of our grandest French interiors in the same but we were very lucky to shoot in it. My location manager, Camilla, tracked it down. I didn't even know it existed. It's an entire building built as a sort of mini recreation of Versailles in the English countryside. So this is our big investment, the street set that we built on the Richard Attenborough stage. It took a vast army of people to create this, and it was an amazing set because I could put ...any actor against any part of this set in close-up... ...and the texture of the wall behind would stand up to the big screen. I mean, there was an amazing detail on it. Eponine! Everyone here. You know your place, Bruges, Bape. The love at first sight moment is... ...I just wanted to create a bit more space for it... In a musical, a lot of this action happens on top of each other, but it's a tough scene, this, in terms of the number of narrative strands that are being dealt with at the same time. And I always feel that the greatest directorial challenge of the second half is leading the audience into a new group of characters willingly and openly. You know, I suppose I was scared that they would think, well, I was enjoying, you know, the Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway film, and where's that story gone? And to me, the key was always in casting, that if you got a... captivating enough, Maris and Cosette, you could lead the audience to this broadening out of the story's focus. And in Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried, I was so lucky to find two actors who really make this broadening of the story very exciting. What is this? Are you mad? No, monsieur, you don't know what you say. You know me, I know you. Can you pay what with you? And you'd better dig deep. Girl, she doesn't come cheap. Close up. The police disappear out for it It's Javert Another brawl in the square Another stink in the air Was there a witness to this? We'll let him speak to Javert We'll show these streets are not safe We'll let these farm unbeware We'll see that justice is done Look upon this fine collection... It's one of the few scenes we actually kind of came back to on the second day. We were meant to shoot in one day, but we're always trying to kind of be very careful about costs on the film, and we just didn't have enough extras, and my brilliant first assistant, director Ben Howarth, just sort of said, the reason this scene isn't quite working is there's not enough of a crowd on the street, and we've got to get more extras and come back tomorrow and do it again, and he was completely right. You will have a job to find in He's not all he seems to be And that girl who trails behind him Is the child he stole from me Yeah, and me. Yeah, both of us. I mean, it's also interesting to see, you know, with the live singing, live accompaniment thing, people can, you know, that ad-lib, me and me, you know, you can throw it in because the pianist can just hold up those moments. I should explain, I'm not sure I'll explain, that what basically the actors are hearing the music in their ear. There are little miniature, miniature earpieces that they're wearing. The piano is electronic and is offset, so it doesn't make any sound, but the sound is being channeled into the actor's ears. And the pianist is watching the performances on the monitors, so the pianist has all the monitors that I have. And the pianist are the two unsung heroes of the film, Roger and Jennifer, because their responsibility was huge in terms of both allowing the actor's freedom but also making sure that the tempo... kept going well enough and in a strong enough way that we could then replace it with the orchestra afterwards and it wouldn't musically fall apart. And they worked under the great guiding hand of the musical director Stephen Brooker and Anne Dudley, the music producer. Samantha Barks now, she's wonderful. The first time I saw the show two and a half years ago, she was actually playing Eponine. And she really stood out in that production. And then she, you know, when I was casting the film, she went through a pretty exhaustive series of auditions because the competition was so fierce for this role. But she won out because, you know, she's really very, very special. Eddie Redmayne and I worked together for the first time on Elizabeth I for HBO and Channel 4 with Helen Mirren. I remember at the end of the first audition with Eddie, as he left, I said, ''Oh, Eddie, can you ride a horse?'' And he said, ''Yes, yes.'' And then, you know, cut to three months later, we're shooting a huge battle scene at the climax of Elizabeth I, and, you know, with 20, 30 horses pounding down towards Helen Mirren, and there's one horse rider whose career's out of control, and... It turns out to be Eddie Redmayne, who'd actually never been on a horse before, and I came out from behind the camera and shouted, you're a bloody liar, Redmayne. So you can imagine when he claimed he could sing, that I was a little worried whether that was true, but luckily he can. The time is near So near It's stirring the blood in their veins And yet, beware Don't let the wine go to your brain. Aaron Tevite, big Broadway musical star, got a great mix in the cast of musical theatre actors and film actors. In fact, Eddie Redmayne discovered that something like a third of the students in this ensemble had actually played Marius on stage at some point in their lives, so I think he was quite intimidated when he realised how many people knew his role backwards. Eddie sent me an audition very early on in the process. He'd filmed himself on his iPhone singing Empty Chairs and Empty Tables dressed as a cowboy because he was playing a Texan meth addict. And he'd put himself on his iPhone singing Empty Chairs this cowboy outfit and had sent it to his agent just to prove he could sing and little knowing this agent would then send it to working title to eric fellner and of course to me but it was i actually remember it was very very special that iphone audition he did and i had no idea he had such a great voice what's the price you might pay is this simply a game for a rich young boy to play The colours of the world are changing day by day. Red, the blood of angry men. Black, the dark of ages past. Red, a world about to dawn. I love Red and Black. I mean, there's opposition between these two claims. You know, the... political claim on our heart and the claim of love on our heart and Morris tries to explain how his whole ideological framework has been blown open by this extraordinary encounter with love This was extremely tricky to shoot while preserving the live tempo freedoms because they basically you know if you know that If the tempo's alive and therefore the actors are making variations between them, take to take, and you can't necessarily cut, you've got to commit to shooting multi-camera. So we had three handheld cameras shooting this in quite a tight space in this cafe. And we kind of shot the first half and the second half in one long run, I think up to the announcement of Lamarck being dead. But, you know, you've always got that tricky thing. I mean, here, we're cross-shooting Aaron and Eddie, singing to each other, and there's a sort of necessary compromise when you're shooting multi-camera, where neither camera can necessarily get as round on the eye line, or you have to go on longer lenses than perhaps I'd normally like to have, but it does allow the actors the freedom in the moment to make these tempo choices. And funnily enough, I mean, I was trained in multi-camera directing EastEnders, which is this unbelievably popular British soap opera which is shot multi-camera. I did it in my mid-twenties and it was amazing training in using up to four or five cameras at once, and I was quite grateful for that training when I came to do Les Miserables, when I realised I needed to make this commitment to multi-camera. As I said, we're working with always three cameras, sometimes up to six on the film. At the tomb of Lamarck shall our barricade rise The time is here. Let us welcome it gladly with courage and cheer. Let us take to the streets with no doubt in our hearts. I must admit I was constantly tormented by the fear that when you heard General Lamarck is dead, you'd have no idea who General Lamarck is. I must admit I had that experience when I first saw the musical, when I was a little bit clueless as to who Lamarck was and such confusion about him. Why it's complicated is he was a Napoleonic general who had become a people's hero. But it would have been much easier if he was, you know, a hero of the actual original French Revolution rather than someone identified with Napoleon who is obviously ideologically divergent from the kind of revolution that these students are fighting for. So Bill and I did everything we could in the script to try to clarify General Marx's apologies if he remains a confusing enigma. So many things unclear So many things

This painted fabric is done by a wonderful Lithuanian who Eve and I discovered when we were doing Elizabeth I in Lithuania. It's hand-painted silk done specially for this set. Amanda Seyfried, one of the few people in the film who'd actually done a musical before on film. Hugh Jackman's obviously done it. on Broadway in the West End, but she was in Mamma Mia. And again, won out through a very, very demanding audition process with stiff competition to get this role. But she gives it, I really wanted a Cosette who would give Cosette a tremendous intelligence and because there was a passivity to the role.

And this is one of my favorite scenes, actually. I mean, we stick exactly to the lyrics as written by Herbie, but there's actually, there's so much going on in the subtext of this scene. In Amanda's performance, you feel this sense that she knows that her father, her father figure is hiding secrets and has a complex past, and she's now old enough to begin to feel she has the right to question. And I kept pushing Hugh to actually get quite irritable or get quite tense in this scene. So there's quite a lot of confrontation in this scene because he doesn't want to admit it. And then underneath it all is this sort of theme that is Valjean being overly protective of Cosette. Is she loving her slightly too much? In the book, Victor Hugo says that Valjean has for Cosette the love of wife, mother, daughter, all rolled into one. He's quite explicit that in a way Valjean has too much love. and the great challenge of his final years is the process of realizing that he overloves her and he has to let go of her and that the loving thing to do is to let go of her. And this moment really sets it up. And I really admire Herbie's lyrics because I felt that there was always more in them when you looked at them. Sometimes, you know, scripts fall apart a bit in your hands when you analyze them, but these lyrics have a tremendous amount of detail.

You will learn Truth is given by God to us all in our time in our turn Now this is also on the Lord Attenborough stage is basically the next door street is where the student cafe is and we're pretending this is obviously a different part of paris we also built the garden inside and the butterflies you're about to see are real butterflies people apparently think they're cgi butterflies but otherwise they're quite tricky to work with because they don't tend to necessarily do what you want you won't be surprised to hear and i saw through a world that is new that is free every word that he's I love the way Samantha does that line. The traditional musical is more of a belt moment, but she brings a real intimacy to it. I mean, that's the great challenge of doing a musical on film is to find, you know, particularly with Les Mis is to reinterpret the iconic way a lot of this is sung so that you find that intimacy for the camera and each of the actors have their own way of finding that necessary intimacy.

I mean, that's classic Eddie, to see the... ...this of the humor in I'm Doing Everything All Wrong... ...and to laugh at himself and to... It's very interesting, he was very conscious of the need... ...to bring lightness into Marius. Even in the ABC café, he didn't want to make Marius' love sickness... ...so earnest that there was no humor... ...because he was very aware of the challenge of the seriousness... of so much of the story. And in that sense, Eddie's a great storytelling partner. Like, he was aware that wherever in the musical you could find that lightness. And Amanda, in her own way, she said something very brilliant when she said that Cosette represents this sort of person of grace, this person of beauty, this person of lightness in the story that lights up Jean's world, Maurice's world. And, you know, in Les Miserables, she sort of stands alone as the one character who, you know, light needs to emanate from. Again, she sort of understood her role in the structure so brilliantly. I love working with actors who don't just take responsibility for the moment, but also take responsibility for the whole storytelling challenge of a film. Now this, we actually couldn't shoot with a live tempo because of the difficulty of the trio, so we had to commit to a certain tempo. So there was a slight loss of freedom for the actors, but it did allow me to shoot the three voices separately because I discovered that two voices singing together, you could shoot at the same time, but three voices, you really need the control and the mix to be able to balance a trio with full control. So this was an example where I actually shot single camera close-ups to give myself the ability to build the trio and then you know eddie would actually pretend to sing to amanda and amanda would pretend to sing to eddie when they were off camera who is this hussy get on home you're not needed in this we're enough here without you i know this house i tell you The fans of the musical noticed a rather stealthy cut at the front of that song. It took me a long time to start to find the cuts. I mean, the very first assembly of the film was four hours long. I got it down to three hours with Chris Dickens and Melanie Oliver's brilliant help, my two editors. But after that, it was tough because, I mean, effectively, the musical as it currently stands runs, you know, two hours, 35. We'd added a load of material in. So there was a worry I'd never get it below 2.45, but the more one got to know the score and the music, you could begin to structurally see those moments that could be excised, and musically, the flow would work. I've got to get Cosette away. We'll go to our apartment at Rue de la Marmée. It's safer there. Then I'll arrange our passage to England. No. Hurry, Cosette. Prepare to leave. Say no more tonight. Wheel away. No, please, Papa. We can't. Hurry, Cosette. It's time to close another door and live another day. Get dressed. We're leaving. Please, no. Now.

Again, inspired by the book, Valjean actually leaves the house in order to go to another safe house, you know, another apartment in Paris while they arrange to go to England, which means that when Maris comes later, they're not there. So, On My Own. One of the strange practical challenges of Eponine's two big songs, Little Fall of Rain and On My Own, is the challenge of getting the singing clean vocals in the rain. And I know it sounds like a silly thing, but actually it's incredibly hard to do because rain is generally very noisy. And we put an inordinate amount of time with the special effects guys, Jamie, working out how to do it. I mean, in the end, we discovered that there was a type of rain rig which produced almost a very fine mist like the smallest droplet possible so we'd use that so that the droplet size was as small as possible then in the set you're looking at there were as many sections as possible were built with rubber cobblestones which wouldn't make a noise and then just off camera we've got lots of felt mats that absorb the rain sound and then I blocked this scene to take her under the eaves of a roof by the end so that over the course of the song you get purer and purer sound. So you introduce the rain at the beginning and with the movement she makes towards this building, it gets quieter and the sound gets purer. Again, this is an example where I didn't necessarily, you know, I wasn't totally committed from the outset in playing it in one. But we just discovered in the edit that this song had most emotion when you played it all on Eponine's close up rather than cutting out wide. Again, it's because when you go wide, a bit like in Dream to Dream, you're not, The environment doesn't inform the song. The song is so much about the world inside her head, just as with Annie Hathaway's song, Dream to Dream, is about the world inside her head, that often the best guide to what's going on inside the character's head is meditation on her face. Without him, the world around me changes The trees are barren everywhere The streets are full of strangers I love him But every day I'm learning All my life I've only been pretending It's very interesting, the amount of time we spent with the orchestration about trying to find a new intimacy in the way these songs so you'll notice when On My Own begins it's a solo piano, then a solo piano and a cello and even in the belt section here we were only playing with half the orchestra because as the songs were being reinterpreted in a more intimate way we never wanted the orchestra to sell that intimacy out and yet at the same time you have to serve the power of Claude Michel's score so it was very difficult getting that balance right between an intimate orchestral sound but also observing sometimes the scale of the highs that the score requires. Again, this is another change inspired by the book, that Eponine has a letter from Cosette which would explain where she is. and doesn't give it to Eddie, to Marius. So Marius has this devastating experience of going to the house, discovering they're gone, and in a way flings himself back into the revolution because he believes he's lost this girl forever. So there's a kind of self-destructive fervor with which he throws himself at the revolutionary cause out of the despair of losing his love.

And this was an example where we had to lock off a tempo because One Day More involves many different characters on different days of the shoot, on different locations. So it would have been impossible to have a kind of freedom of tempo as the whole thing wouldn't have overlaid on each other. I love that moment with Sam. But I would still shoot as much as possible in one flow. So, I mean, in this scene, all the student stuff, we had, I think, a couple of cameras upstairs, a couple of cameras downstairs, and we'd shoot one day more in real time to get that kind of musical continuity. One day more One day more to revolution

I was interested in this scene in kind of contrasting the kind of the might of the police machine with Russell and almost a sort of rustic intimacy of the students project, which is just a few guys in the top of a cafe preparing some guns and trying to get the citizens in the pub on side.

That's Katie Seacombe, Harry Seacombe's daughter, who has played Madame Sardier in the show, who's great. And this moment really, for Marius, is the resolution of that debate that is posed by Red and Black about whether he's going to commit to love or commit to the revolutionary cause. Where Russell's singing in an extraordinary room in Greenwich called the Painted Hall. So you get, you know, the contrast between the opulence of the state and the intimacy of this slum cafe, and Valjean obviously on his journey to this hideout apartment. But this, you know, is one of the great high points of Claude Bachel's score, and it is a great example of, you know, score not operating as under score like in a normal movie, but being an absolute character of its own.

Now here, of course, on stage is where you take an interval. We actually did debate, funnily enough, whether we should have an interval. I remember one cinema chain in the UK was quite keen on the idea. But I think once, you know, once I got it to sort of around two and a half hours, it felt like a more powerful emotional experience to experience it as a unity. But I mean, what's interesting is I was aware that when I watched the show on stage, you kind of needed the interval as a sort of breathing point because it's so intense. So I was very aware that I needed to create a bit of space at this point of the film to refresh the audience in the same way that an interval would when you were physically going to the theater. The funeral, so this is a big new scene in the musical, which was in Bill Nicholson's first draft he suggested this idea. This is Lamarck's funeral and you know when you see the show on stage you go from one day more you have a drink and you come back and they're building the barricade but on film there's a chance to show what actually kicked the revolution off and it's this extraordinary day where they took control of General Lamarck's hearse and and kind of provoke a standoff with the military. And that standoff turned into a riot. And what's clear from reading the book that's starting a revolution in France this period is basically about finding some mechanism to start a street riot and then hoping that that riot will catch fire like a very powerful conflagration and all the people around Paris will join and rise up and join in. And this is the hope of the students. So we're back in Greenwich filming this. We actually had probably a couple of hundred, I think about maybe 350 extras on the biggest day, only a couple of hundred in the crowd, and we've used digital effects to multiply the crowd out. But we did this by shooting many plates of real extras. from the same camera angles as the master shots we use in the sequence, so that when we multiply them out, we're not using computer-generated extras, but we're actually using real extras from additional plates that we kind of stitch together like a big sort of cloth to create these huge crowds. Thank you, sir. Thank you, monsieur. To the barricade! Eddie Redmayne back on a horse. I couldn't resist giving him a challenging bit of horsemanship to do after the previous fiasco of Elizabeth I. And I was quite pleased about the way that that nervous shot of the soldier worked out. Melanie edited that sequence and beautifully timed that first shot, so it does feel like a mistake. And that was the feeling from the book, that no one was quite clear why or how the first shot was fired. We need as much furniture as you can throw, Don. Throw everything you have. Now, the building of the barricade, we actually did this in one continuous take. All the cameras had 400 feet of film loaded, the handheld cameras, which is about five minutes. And, you know, we had furniture prepared in lots of the high windows on the set. in the Richard Attenborough stage. And I basically said to the students and the extras, you know, build a barricade action. And they ransacked this set for every bit of furniture, every table. There was furniture being thrown from the windows, which they were ducking. It was kind of mayhem. And the camera operators were basically disguised as citizens and peasants and with their cameras wrapped up in bits of old cloth. And the focus putters were also dressed in costumes so that they could be immersed in the action. And it gave it a kind of sort of manic energy, this sequence that I liked. It's also interesting to discover that you can build a barricade in five minutes because it probably seems a strange way to fight, you know, to us in the modern world. But when you realize how quick it is to build the barrier, you can understand why they did it. And the funny thing was, is Eve Stewart had this beautiful, art-directed barricade standing by in the next-door studio, ready to shift in when we finished that sequence. But Eve and I both looked at this thing that the students had created and said, this is so great, it really looks like the real thing. So rather than getting rid of it and weaning in the one that she'd prepared, we stuck a few nails in the one that the students had created and went with it. I must admit I did a bit of art directing, things like the tusks at the front and the two coffins as sort of teeth. at the front of the barricade, I sort of arranged afterwards, and also some of the details on the interior side to make sure there was some good settings for songs like Little Fall of Rain. They intend to starve you out before they start a proper fight. Concentrate their force, hit us when it's light. Liar! Good evening, dear inspector. Lovely evening, my dear. Melanie might have had the idea of this little tin drum or toy drum... ...being associated with Gavroche, which comes back when he dies later on. So what are we gonna do with this snake in the grass? It was painful to cut Gavroche's famous song short here... ...but, you know, it's difficult. It was a bit unreal to hold the action up by that long... ...for Gavroche to sing his full song. But again, it's another cut that allowed me to achieve my dream of getting the film under two and a half hours. We keep looking forward. Russell had this idea of Javert trying to escape and thought it'd be really interesting for the students to sort of have that moment of seeing the effect of the first violent action they'd taken out on someone. And in the middle of that moment, hearing the footsteps of the oncoming soldiers. I like that little touch of Eponine handing Morris his rifle without him even realizing it. Now hold your fire. Hold your fire. Front pack, kneel! Save your gunpowder. Save him! So in this scene when they're all shooting, there's real gunpowder loaded in the muskets but obviously without actual bullets you're pleased to know but it's great i mean all the effects you get of the firing are all in camera none of this is cgi and some extraordinarily beautiful moments of of the gunpowder flashing that you could get when you do it in camera so i'm very pleased with it in camera they also have to be trained now this is a very key change coming up In the musical, Eponine arrives after this first battle and we discover she's got blood on her and she has been shot, you know, somewhere on the journey from delivering the letter to Cosette to here. And I thought it was so powerful in the book when I read that in the novel, Eponine actually throws herself in the way of a rifle that's about to shoot Marius. So she actually dies for love. And to me, not only is it hugely romantic and very moving, This theme of what we sacrifice for love is so powerful in this story. I mean, Fontaine makes the ultimate sacrifice of giving her body into prostitution to try to save and support her child and then pays the price through illness. And then, you know, we look at the sacrifices Valjean makes for Cosette for love and then Eponine has paid the ultimate sacrifice for love.

What have you done? Don't you fret. It's a great example of one of the famous songs of the musical being reinterpreted for the intimacy of the film cameras. We're shooting it with three cameras, two close-up cameras and one giving us the two shot. And I think this was the last take. They're singing both together and they're completely free take to take to make the tempo choices to get it right and to find the right emotional arc. And each time I get all the shots I need in one hit through these three cameras. And French speakers will see that I've got the word l'amour behind them on the French flag. There's an edit coming up, for people who know the musical very well, just about here. So don't you fret. It's quite interesting. I mean, there's a key change there, but I think it does work. Or Claude Michel was happy with it. But when we played the song at its full length, it just felt like we were slightly overextending the moment. And these are very, very difficult choices. I mean, be reassured that we agonized over every cut we made. And I've never directed something before where there was so much that you, in a way, couldn't touch or couldn't cut. or you felt you couldn't cut because of its iconic status in the culture. You know, when I made The King's Speech, I was making a film of an unproduced stage play. So, you know, in fact, I cut something quite significant from the original script, which no one even knows about because, you know, why would they? Whereas this is, you're navigating not only iconic music, but 60 million people who've already seen it, who already have some knowledge of the storytelling. So it was a very particular... active navigation and that's why I felt so lucky to have Gordon, Michelle and Alan as partners and Cameron in the process. Tina to help guide me through it. Eddie was very concerned that Marius would seem super callous going from you know grieving the death of Eponine to immediately wanting the letter delivered and he this dialogue scene was originally a lot longer where we were trying to convey the idea that he was not only getting a letter to Gazette but also trying to save Gavroche's life by clearing him off the barricade and sadly we just didn't quite have time to play the scene out in full and I think the audience don't interpret Marius as callous but Eddie was very attentive to to those kind of risks inherent in a story when it gets very highly compressed. It's interesting, this obviously is in the musical, but the bit that follows is new. And it came out of, again, a very powerful passage in the novel, which describes Valjean's crisis when he intercepts this letter. Because on the one hand, is overcome with complex emotion when he discovers that his daughter is in love and that he may be about to lose this woman who's so close to him and lose him to another man, and the inevitable jealousy that he's gonna experience. But at the same time, the moment's hugely complicated by the fact that Maris is on the barricade and is probably gonna die. So I always wanted to kind of acknowledge a kind of moment of weakness in Valjean when he actually, where we actually clearly see his jealousy about the idea of losing his daughter to another man. Because that sets up Bring Him Home, that sets up his great act of sort of decency, grace, when he realizes that, of course, he should stand aside, and that is what all parents should and would do. Don't shoot! Don't shoot! I come here as a volunteer. You see... You see that prisoner over there? A volunteer like you. A spy who calls himself Javert. He's going to get it, too. Get in there. Get inside. Don't kill him. I know him. Enemy marksman! On the roof! On the roof! I mean, this battle was a little bit more involved. I mean, there was even a great stunt of a guy falling all the way off one of those high roofs 30 foot down onto... But I felt in the end it was the real story was the two men coming face to face. And here we did everything we could to try to create the momentary illusion that Valjean might be about to do something to Jaber. I mean, Cillian says, no, no, you know, doesn't want him to go in. He gets handed a knife and a gun. And musically, we've written a new bit of music to build this suspense moment up. And why this is so important? This is so important because when we meet Javert again after the sewers, before the suicide, he's totally preoccupied with this moment. In fact, his suicide, comes out of a preoccupation with this very scene. And so the more we can get inside his expectation that he was meant to die or that the Vajon was expecting to kill him, and the surprise of it not happening, the better because of the way it plays out later. Once a thief, forever a thief. What you want, you always steal. You would trade your life for mine. Yes, Valjean, you want a deal Shoot me now for all I care If you let me go, beware You'll still answer to Javert Russell brilliantly captures the kind of pride of Javert in this moment And always have been wrong I'm a man And I love Hugh Jackman's return I'm a man, no worse than any man There's just a great simplicity to it Again, this theme of forgiveness. He learned forgiveness from the bishop and now he's forgiving this man years of enmity. And it's this act of forgiveness that starts this process of unhinging in Javert's mind. No doubt our paths will cross again.

So quite a lot of fiddling around the edit to make it clear that Hugh's firing that shot in order to create the illusion that he's killed Javert. But it becomes a kind of nice moment for the students, recognizing the reality of death and reality of warfare through the death of the person who actually hasn't been shot. Kouferak, you take the watch. They may attack before it's light. It's a very important theme here that we're touching on again of the expectation that people are going to rise up to help them. I love in the book the description when you're fighting street warfare of how the neighbours in the street go from sort of waving flags out the window to suspiciously shutting their shutters to not coming out to help in the final battle. Drink With Me was one of the songs that we cut short, which was painful because it's one of my favorite songs. But in the end, the key bit is when Eddie sings and when Maris sings about Cosette, that allows Vajon to know who Maris is and also hearing the boy's pain in a way. opens up the possibility for forgiving him, dealing with the jealousy in himself and singing, bringing him home, which is this beautiful commitment to putting this boy first over him. He's got the handkerchief in his hand that Gazette dropped.

And again, I'm reminded of Russell's words about the idea that, you know, Stars is a prayer to God, and then again this is another soliloquy song that's done in the form of a prayer to God, which kind of solves that problem of who people are singing to, that challenge of who people are singing to in a solo song.

In a way, the great challenge of acting this song, which he does so beautifully, is to keep some of that drama going of his latent complexity about Marius expressed in the scene when Gavroche delivers the note.

to see in this the struggle to do the right thing again I go back to Who Am I in that earlier moment that having committed yourself to being a morally strong person sometimes the moral choice is tough and this song is all about him accepting the need to stand aside and that the loving thing to do is to step aside from his daughter's life to allow her to have Marius.

The really interesting journey in this song is going from him singing, you know, bring him home or wanting him to be safe to actually committing to the idea that he says to God that he's happy to sacrifice himself to save Marius. So he actually goes one huge step further, which sets up the way he saves Marius at the end. And that was the journey that Hugh and I talked about in this song. And so often in Les Miserables, the challenge for the actors was finding what that journey was so that the song is dramatic in the close-up, not just musically, but because there is an arc to the storytelling that the actor's exploring.

It's interesting because on stage he sings Bring Him Home, sort of next to Marius, and you forgive the idea that Marius wouldn't wake up, but in film, which is a slightly more literal medium, we felt that he needed to kind of get clear of Marius in order to sing the belt section so that it wasn't ridiculous that he'd be belting it out over the sleeping boy and the sleeping boy wouldn't wake up. But also it gives it a nice sort of movement and restlessness.

And this pullout is a crane shot that then embeds into a CGI pullout where we, again, use textures from our Parisian shoot to create all these roofs and we see the soldiers coming in and we see the pressure they're under. I'd also like to mention that wonderful optician sign. That's a great example of Eve Stewart's, where she... chooses to put an opticians advert above the cafe which becomes like this all-seeing eye behind Hugh when he sings Bring Him Home. It's her eye for kind of idiosyncratic detail which gives me as a director great opportunities because that then became incorporated into the language of Bring Him Home.

This was, I think, an idea that came out of rehearsal. We had a wonderful nine-week rehearsal, which is very unusual in a movie. In King's Speech, we had three weeks, and that was considered long. But this moment of, I suppose, the hesitation about whether they should give up, it's the little kid Gavroche who recommits them to the cause of the People's Song. And it was Eddie's idea that Gavroche would have little tunnels in the barricade, which he'd move around in. I mean, Eddie always said he wanted to be Gavroche when he was seven, and he still wants to be Gavroche. And he said, you know, Tom, you know, what could be more exciting than having tunnels inside the barricade if you're a kid?

Daniel's fantastic in this. And I try and set up this extra level of drama with Fra, the wonderful Fra, who's trying to get to Gavroche to save him before this final shot's fired. And so there's this cross-cutting that Melanie does brilliantly. There's no CGI. Daniel holds his eyes that still for real. It's extraordinary.

We used to have it there, a scene, I mean, a fantastic little moment where Eddie takes out the soldier who killed Gavroche. But I felt there was something strong about the officer standing up. There's something about the death of a child that cuts through all this and effectively offers them clemency, offers them an opportunity. Why throw your lives away? In the musical, this tends to be sung sort of quite fast and... I wanted it to be slowed right down so you really feel that they're being offered a chance. And then we really see the tragedy of the way the students recommit to fighting. In the book, it's very clear Victor Hugo said that it kind of becomes a suicide mission that they commit themselves to this fight knowing that they have no chance. And he's brilliant at kind of describing the psychology of how a group of rational people end up, you know, committing voluntary suicide. ...through a combination of adrenaline, heroism... ...and, in this case, the emotions of the reaction to the death of Gavroche. They're the Verdict of Replaceless! Second cannon, fire! Fire! So this scene, again, each time we shot it... ...we would shoot it in one from the very beginning to the very end. Took about ten minutes to shoot it. But by doing it in one, and each time the cameras would, you know... ...cover different sections of the battle... There's sometimes a close-up pass and there's a wide pass. You do get this kind of very manic, very adrenalized quality from the actors. And by the time they're finished, they're covered in sweat and blood and feathers and high on adrenaline. And you only get that when you run action on. And in a way, that grew out. Just because it was a musical, I got used to the idea of shooting entire scenes in one take because of the musical integrity of scenes. And so I then started to take that approach into the fights and say, why can't I shoot... These in one long take, and they take a long time to set up. But they're also incredibly exciting to shoot because you'd be watching, you know, six cameras and cameras in different rooms going on at the same time. You know, so it's like watching a kind of weird reality TV show. Luckily not real. Hurry up!

In the book, there's this retreat into the cafe, which is very moving. And this idea that they're listing them through floorboards, and only Aaron survives, only Andras survives.

And here I wanted to kind of reprieve. There's something very iconic about the death of Andras in the musical. Aaron is wonderful. I wanted to give him a moment that both reprises... ...that position that he takes up on the barricade... ...but also adapt it for the fact that he's not dying on the barricade... ...like he does in the musical. This moment coming up again is another example of a contribution that Russell made. again going out of how do we set up the suicide correctly. He felt there'd be something very powerful about Javert really reacting to the death of Gavroche because he spied on these guys, he gave away their whereabouts, he could have done something to avert their deaths and he now has a death of a child on his conscience. This is where we use the reprise of Bring Him Home which is so powerful emotionally. It's the real beginning of that unhinging, which you can see in Russell's eyes so brilliantly. In fact, in one of these all-in-one takes, see that sewer entrance where there's a tube that runs from that, which basically came out where my monitors were. So in the middle of this battle sequence, suddenly, Unity turned up sort of under my monitors covered in mud. And so I went, hi, Tom. We're still shooting. We're still filming the battle. This was actually quite a short run of pipes, but we basically double, triple cut different angles of the same bit of fall to make it feel like a really long pipe. The Suez was another set that you've created. We did this on our... I mean, this was our last day. It was a crazy last day. I had, I think, three units going at once. This was the main unit. I had an extraordinary amount to get through in a very tough 12 p.m., midnight cutoff. I was told by the producers that if we went even a minute over midnight, it would cost about 70,000 pounds. And the whole escape of Jean Valjean was actually done in one take, multi-camera, because it was all we had time for. So there was huge pressure on that final day. I mean, the funny thing about filmmaking is A secret history of every film is how a director deals with time pressure, and this was no exception. I mean, the time pressure on this was, in its own way, as tough as a film like The King's Speech, where we only had a seven-week shoot. This was a 13-week shoot, but it was a lot to get through. And quite often, you know, Even the style of the way you shoot stuff grows out of the need to get something shot in a certain amount of time and the other balance of pragmatism and creativity that's involved in coming up with a solution. This is a lovely ladies set revamped to be the edge of the Seine. and the deep background is CGI of Notre Dame, and the water's put in with visual effects. I think the only song we cut in its entirety was Dog Eats Dog, which is Sasha's song in the sewer, which was fantastic. but we felt interrupted the flow of the Javert-Valjean rivalry. One more step and you die.

We actually tried some takes where Russell had the idea of actually holding the gun to his head as if he was going to shoot himself. And it was quite interesting, the idea that you'd give away the fact that he was going to commit suicide already. But in the end, I think it undermined what the musical construction demanded, which was this journey towards the point of suicide, which happens through the logic of this song. Now we're back on the same studio that we shot Stars, revamped to basically give us a section of bridge with green screen and the backgrounds of Paris are created through D-NEX visual effects. But the weir we're looking at is Bath Weir. This is actually the only pickup I did on the film. I thought there was something... Originally, we just shot a sort of simple jump into a tank at Pinewood, the same tank that's used when Valjean jumps. out of the hospital after Fontaine's death, and we just felt it needed something more dramatic. And so Ben Howarth and I first came up with the idea of using bath weir, which has this extraordinary kind of shape, like the ellipsis of an eye, or the circles of hell. It's very powerful. Like it's tempting him, calling him. And it also provides a very definite end to his life because he hits the shallow part of the weir and you can hear the crack of his back as he hits it. Again, look at this. This is an example of live singing, live accompaniment, Russell slows down and basically the music suspends itself to create this sort of climactic moment. None of these choices would be possible if you were doing it to a conventional musical playback. You know, Russell would have to be kind of sticking with the decisions he laid down three months before when he pre-recorded in the studio. I'll escape now from that world From the world of Jean Valjean There is nowhere I can turn There is no way to go on Russell did the jump himself in the studio which was a shorter jump off the section of bridge We then had a dummy doing the drop into the weir, and then a stuntman actually did a disappearance under the water. Did you see them going off to fight? Children of the barricade who didn't last the night. Did you see them lying where they died? And that was an important moment of, you know, beginning to pay off the grandfather so that we understand that Morris is back in his family home. Again, it was great to use a little bit of turning, even though it's not the full length, it's such a beautiful song. There's a pain Shooting this on three cameras, the profile close up. There's a great way to start because it just kind of, in a way, holds the revelation of the intensity of his motion back a bit. Now, the idea of starting a cappella, I mean, Eddie had that from the beginning. Even the very first audition he ever came to, he wanted to perform it with the first section a cappella, and why? I mean, it was very interesting, he said that If you do it like that, then you're not kind of going, oh, here comes a song, because you don't really know where it's going. Whereas when you have the melodic introduction of the song, you say, okay, here comes a song. And starting a cappella means you're less sure where it's going, and it makes it slightly more uncertain, more unpredictable, and it has an intimacy with the film camera that's very powerful. And they rose with voices ringing And I can hear... Eddie did this, this is take 21 of 21 takes. Eddie had this idea that each time you get to the end of singing Empty Chairs, you're more emotional than you began. So he said, could he do three in a row so that each time the emotion of where he ends up would become the new beginning? And by doing this, he drove himself into a more and more emotional place. So by take 21, I mean, face is sort of, you know, puffed up and blotchy with tears and you really feel this man's being ripped apart by grief before he even sung this song. And it's interesting how, you know, the different processes actors use to get themselves to the emotional place they need to be. Whereas with Anne Hathaway, I think it was more she came ready to do this performance and we got it on the fourth take and Eddie... was musically absolutely ready, but needed to go on this journey of driving himself further and further to get to the place he was happy with. I mean, it's funny, I remember thinking on about take 14 that I was happy, but he said, look, I've waited practically a year, Tom, please let me keep going and going. And here's an example where I don't stick with the principle of playing it all in one continuous close-up because the space he's in is part of the story and it is necessary to reference the spaces in the empty chairs, this destroyed cafe which has an emotional resonance to us. What he's singing about is connected to the environment and therefore the whites earn their place.

For a long time I had in the script a kind of reunion moment because I thought it was important to see the moment when Marius' eyes wake and there's Cosette and it didn't really work in the musical structure so I put that beat in so that you have some sense of reunion between the two. I think he's particularly extraordinary in this scene. He shows such understanding of the human condition. I mean, this is a man in his early 40s who's playing a man towards the end of his life who's having to accept that he has to let go of a grown-up daughter. And when he sings this line coming up... So such understanding of the journey this character's gone on Going back to why we reintroduced the song suddenly, I wanted to make the stakes of the love very clear so that the pain of this letting go and the importance of this letting go and the maturity of understanding he must let her go are very well set up because you understand the intensity of the love that he experiences for this child. It's also obviously a new thing having Gilles Normand, the grandfather in it, making it a quartet. But it just sort of locates us. We know that in a way he doesn't want to become part of that world and the grandfather orientates us where we are. Is gratitude enough for giving me curses? Your home shall be with us and not a day shall pass. But we will prove our love to you whom we shall call a father to us both, a father to us all. Not another word, my son.

Something now that must be done. We talked a lot about why Valjean removes himself, and I think in the end it's mainly he's afraid that his past will keep catching up with him and hurt Cosette. I did actually shoot a scene It was the last thing I shot at 10 to midnight on that famous last day of Valjean seeing the death of Javert. And I had it in the cut for quite a long time. And then I remember one of my early screenings, my wonderful agent Doug McLaren saw the film and was struggling with why Valjean leaves. And I realized that it's better that he doesn't know that Javert is conclusively dead. because Javert is therefore still this presence in his head that he's running from. This, we're back at Boughton in yet another brilliant French interior of that house. Monsieur, you cannot leave. Whatever I tell my beloved, she will never believe. Tell her I've gone on a journey a long way away. Tell her my heart was too full for farewells. It is better this way. Promise me, monsieur... Eddie handles very well that kind of balance between... ...somehow being complicit in allowing Valjean to go by not fighting too hard... ...but also being upset by Valjean's request that he is not honest to Cosette.

We used grading, actually, to help make Valjean look that ill. And this was a scene I added, you know, it was a pick-up, because I like to try and do pick-ups as I'm going, so I think I did it in the last week. But just to help establish his illness so that we're setting up the death scene without it coming out of nowhere. I mean, in a way, given he was practically drowning in sewage, it's not that surprising he might have caught something that makes him frail.

And this was a new scene. I felt it was strange in the musical that, you know, Valjean leaves, then you cut to Cosette and Maurice being incredibly happy at the wedding. And again, Cosette doesn't feel like a, you know, enough of a real person because she's not given that moment to react to the departure of her father. And even here, you know, she's looking out the window and you can feel she's slightly unhappy on her wedding day because Valjean's not there. But I really wanted to give Cosette moments like that to give her Integrity is a character and an intelligence in a life. I love all these gags that Sacha and Helena brought in. This is the ground rooms about where I was saying we shot that slum room. Go away. Tenad yet. Do you think I don't know who you are? Who's not told? Told you so. Again, with this scene, Beggars at the Feast, we shot... The scene was longer when we shot it, sort of following the musical example, but it just feels that this part of the story, we had to find a kind of more concise route through it. Jean Valjean in the sewers one night Had this corpse on his back Some boy he had killed in a vision... I think it's very interesting the way, you know, the humor that Sacha and Helena brings to it. It sort of makes possible the emotion of the final scene because it gives you this sort of emotional breather, this refresher before you hit the final scene. This is surely some heavenly sign And it's true Then I write, Jean Valjean is my savior that night. Jean Valjean, the old corner. You pay up or I'll say where he's gone. Where is he? And brilliant costumes by Paco and makeup by Lisa Westcott and her team. Come with me. Come with me. This was that wonderful gypsy band that did Master of the House.

So this is back in Winchester School, in Winchester. It's interesting, I took the decision not to have prosthetics for his aging and do it with makeup. And I think in the way with singing, prosthetics would get in the way. But I think Hugh's portrayal of Valjean as an older man in this weak state is... quite extraordinary this is one of the few times on the whole sheet that i cried when i shot this scene take these children my lord embrace and show them grace

Hear my prayer Take me now To thy care Where you are Let me be

Again, you know, that's interesting. Sorry, I've just got caught up watching Hugh. He's so extraordinary in this moment. But, you know, again, the simplicity of just doing this in one shot, one out. We had two other cameras running, so we could have intercut. But the actors were so prepared by the time we got to the shoot that we were always getting it in one. They were never making any mistakes. It was just a question of getting the right performance in one.

And it's so joyous when we get Annie returning. She's so full of grace in this moment. We actually added those candles in behind her using visual effects just to kind of create something a little bit more spiritual, otherworldly. I didn't want to make her into a ghost, but I did want to create something And we used the flare of the candles to create a kind of translucent barrier between her and Valjean that reminds me of the gauze that stood between her and Little Gazette at the hospital. Am I forgiven now? Thank God, thank God. I've lived to see this day. It's you who must forgive us. This was the first scene, I think, we shot with Amanda Seyfried and Eddie. I mean, one of the things that's amazing about actors is how they can hit a scene like this first up Without having done the journey chronologically, this was due to location availability, we weren't able to be chronological. I mean, they're both extraordinary. When they wounded me, he took me from the barricade Carried like a babe and brought me home to you

And I remember talking to Hugh about the fact that this, in this moment, whatever final bit of antagonism or emotional complexity lay between him and Maris, he'd let go of and find peace. And I think what's so powerful about this scene is Victor Hugo and the creators of the musical kind of show us how a moment like this can be navigated.

that somehow Valjean transcends the challenge of his own death through love through being loved and giving love and finds a kind of peace that is a beautiful symmetry with Fantine's death where she finds that moment of peace before she passes and this is a scene that still makes me cry despite the fact I've watched it hundreds of times And we adapted this final line of one who turns from hating. And we make it about the discovery of love to reflect the use of the new song.

Again, this is all being done with live accompaniment, so Hugh Jackman has all the kind of choices about the pacing so that he can capture the frailty of Valjean through the pauses and the changes in tempo. We're shooting it multi-camera on four cameras. I think Anne is extraordinary in this moment. In fact, they're all extraordinary.

The fans of the musical know that on stage, Eponine is part of this and actually we shot her in this scene and I ended up painting her out digitally because I just felt that Valjean doesn't really have a connection to Eponine. And instead I introduced the bishop, Colm Wilkinson, to the trio with Colm, Hugh and Anne. They're incredibly powerful. the final line that takes you to calm. And I like the idea that, you know, Eddie, does Eddie hear those voices in the distance, the ghostly choir? Perhaps. Then we crane up, and that's a map painting of Paris with this extraordinary sky. And that's Samantha Bach so brilliant as Eponine. Aaron, such a strong Andras. In fact, it was interesting, in the original script, this represented, there was a caption saying this is the 1848 barricade when finally Paris achieved its freedom through revolution. But in the end, we decided to drop the historical caption because it kind of commits to the idea of the ghostly barricade. I mean, we even shot it with Eddie Redmayne and Amanda on the barricade. That's like the real characters, you know, many years later, but there was something uncomfortable about mixing the ghosts with real characters, you know, years later. And it was Cameron's, I think actually Cameron's advice to start on the faces and start on the emotion rather than starting on the history. And I think that was right to make this about the emotion of being reunited with these characters. We brought that barricade into Greenwich on like three flatbed lorries overnight. And then it's extended the visual effects to create this amazing ending. Thank you so much for listening. I'd like to thank my wonderful producers, Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan, Deborah Hayward, Cameron McIntosh, the original producer of the show, to work with Anna-Anne-Claude Michel, Herbie Kretzmer, what an honor, and thank you to Bill Nicholson for navigating them through the film screenplay process. An amazing ensemble cast led by Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe. I think 204 actors in total, plus obviously thousands of extras. ...who all embraced this live singing dream that we all shared. I'd also like to thank... I mean, it was a huge team that made this. You know, well over a thousand people at Pinewood and... in the post-production process, and I'd like to thank all of them for their contributions. I've never made a film where I felt so reliant on the individual expertise of so many people, particularly in the process of capturing the singing live and in the navigating of the movie musical form. Danny Cohen is the fourth project we've done together. Eve Stewart, the fourth project we've done together. They're long-term collaborators. Huge thank you to them. Simon Hayes, well, he walks on water, as far as I'm concerned. Melanie Ann Oliver. I think, again, this is the fourth film we've done. Chris Dickens, the first time. He edited Slumdog. And the wonderful music team.

...a veteran of four or five of the great musicals the last few years. Nina Gold, who first cast my first commercial when I was 21 years old. And Universal, who so beautifully backed... ...the ambition of what everyone was trying to do... ...and gave us such great support. That's a huge thank you to everyone involved. Thanks for listening. Bye.