Music and Lyrics
Hugh Grant has usually been able to coast by just saying the right words in his romantic comedies. Music and Lyrics demands something more physical of him. He plays a has been '80s rocker and has to shake his tush on several occasions.
Hugh Grant Writes Music and Lyrics
"I'm glad you liked them," Grant said of his "moves." "It was misery for me. I don't play the piano, I don't sing and I definitely don't dance. They can teach you to sing a bit and the computer can put you in tune and they can teach you to play the piano, but there's nothing can make you move like a pop star if you haven't got it in you. I used to go to these choreography sessions. There's a brilliant choreographer on the film who did all these big numbers, and we just used to stand there looking at each other. He would put the music on and say, 'Go, just go. Just do your own thing.' And I would say, 'I have no thing.' And in the end I had to rely heavily on the makeup woman bringing me what looked like a 7-Up bottle but was in fact whiskey."
Wardrobe helped too. "I must say when I got into my costume, I thought, 'Yeah, quite sexy.' Especially with those high heels."
Grant actually has a pretty good voice and performs several songs on the film's soundtrack. "I heard a lot of the singing beforehand because you work for days and days to do these recordings. It's not how I imagined it. I mean, you must sing every song about a thousand times and then they take one syllable that you might happen to have got vaguely right, and they stitch it together with another syllable. Literally, it's that fine. Then they put it through the machine 1600 different ways and tune you and put what they call slap, which is sort of an echo effect which makes you sound better. And it's unbelievable and by the time they finish doing that and you've learned that you can do it, you actually do sing better anyway. You get more relaxed. You think they can fix this."
It's not all machines though. Grant actually did learn to croon a bit. "I was doing piano and singing for probably two months before we started shooting, and while we were shooting. I had a little piano in my trailer, and I used to do it by myself at night. Singing, that is. I would sing long into the night. It's a curious thing. it is one of those rare examples where practice does actually make you probably better, I've found. It's all confidence, I'm sure you know. It's weird. People just say, 'Just go for it.' And that's the hard thing. You can't just go for it if you've got no confidence. But this strange procedure where they record you and then fiddle it so it actually sounds pretty good, the more they do that, the more you think, 'I can relax now because whatever happens, I'm going to end up sounding good,' and then you start to sound good on your own."
Though he plays an experienced musician with good taste in the film, it's all, as Jon Lovitz says, ACTING! "I'm a fraud and a charlatan in this film, because I have no interest in music. I never have had. I don't have any records. I never play music, so it's very difficult for me to tell you my favorite song. Sorry."
Music and Lyrics opens to theatres this Valentines Day, February 14th.
For poster, trailer, stills and more movie info, head over to the Music
and Lyrics Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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