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Melissa George Talks Music Within
By Fred Topel | Image property of MGM.
If there is a great woman behind every man, then Christine is the unsung hero in Richard Pimental's life. The two met during her free love days in college when Pimental got back from Vietnam with a hearing disability. They stayed together until Pimental's work with disabled veterans distracted him from the relationship. Melissa George portrays Christine in the biography, Music Within.
Melissa George Finds the Music Within
"She was a real person but I didn’t get to meet her because she’s no longer in Richard’s life," said George. "I talked to Richard for hours and hours and hours. We’d just sit on set and just talk about how she was and the stories about her, what kind of woman she was and how she used to wear her hair, favorite boots she wore and of course, with the wardrobe fittings, the makeup and the hairstyles and the accent was very important me being non-American. So a lot of research went into it."
Going from the free love hippie in open relationships to the woman begging for a commitment was the journey George had to track. "You track it in a way when you’re rehearsing say 20 scenes of Christine. You look at the journey. I always make a graph like emotionally the points I want to hit. And I just wanted to make her as fun loving, free-spirited, two boyfriends at the same time, real representative of the time, God love her because you couldn’t get away with that today. I also wanted to make her influential on his life and make her a real support for him so that therefore, the story makes senses that she was the good woman behind the good man and she was the woman who made him a better man. So I wanted to show that."
Sometimes women in biography films serve simple emotional purposes for the male heroes. George got a few key scenes to stand out in Music Within. "You know the scene where she’s wanting a bit more love from him and he wouldn’t give it and she had to make the decision between being with him or being on her own and she took, obviously to go out on her own. I really wanted to hit that scene and that was the peak of my graph. The rest was her coming back a lot older looking, 80s makeup, that pink lipstick was horrible. And then she was the one who saved his life."
Music Within
Born in the late '70s and really only experiencing the '80s with any cognition, George did her research on the film's timeframe. "Besides the costumes, that was the big dramatic difference, the way she used to dress, but also the feminist movement. That’s why she was thinking, `I want to do something for me. I’ve never done something for me.’ I think a lot of women in those days went through that thing where I was always following the man around and always doing something for the man, the man, the man…so that was a big sign of the times when she broke away and said I need to be an independent, free-spirited, bra-burning kind of a woman."
America reflects specifically on its historical eras in film. The Aussie George had exactly the same reference points. "Australian films in those days except for the accent and the G’days and macho kind of guys. Kind of the same, I think. I think a lot of the countries followed the lead of the United States actually. We had great hippies in Australia, actually."
Music Within is out in theaters now.
For the trailer, poster, clips, review and more movie info, go to the Music Within
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of MGM.
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