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Ron Livingston on Music Within
By Fred Topel | Image property of MGM.
Music Within
Music Within is the story of Richard Pimental, the Vietnam War veteran who spearheaded the Americans with Disabilities Act. Denied college funds for his preferred major of speech studies due to the hearing impairment he suffered in the war, Pimental set out to help other veterans get work, ultimately authoring manuals that became the ADA. Ron Livingston plays Pimental in the film, but don't worry, it's not preachy.
Livingston Talks Music Within
"You're always a little wary when you come to a story and it's got stuff like disability in it or human rights because you don't want to make a political movie, you don't want to make a preachy movie," said Livingston. "Those are always really bad and boring. I feel like if people try to attack a subject and they're not willing to really get in there, they want to try to take the party line with it, it's a waste of time. This one for me, what kind of sold me on it was that ultimately, it's not really about disability and it's not really about civil rights. It's about a couple of guys that had sort of been written off, about a couple guys that were told by life that their lives were over and that they weren't really worth anything. Instead of doing what I think a lot of people do when they're told that is say, 'Oh, okay' and accept it, they said, 'We don't believe that. If that's what the world thinks of us, then we're going to change the world so that the world doesn't think that about us anymore.' Then they actually went and did it. So to me, it's just a great underdog story and it's a great buddy film."
Usually playing comic supporting characters in films or television, Music Within is a significant leading role for the actor. "I wish I could say I had as much control or foresight to look for things, but honestly it's really more like I just read what comes along and if something jumps out at you, you're just grateful that you got a chance to find it and read it. I wish I could say I was looking for a story like this and then I found it, but really I think it kind of found me. I was a little nervous about playing somebody over the course of about 30-35 years because I knew that we only had 30 days to shoot it, or 32 I think was the full count. And we weren't going to have a lot of time, we weren't going to be able to do any latex or age or change the hair too much. I had to do three different decades with one haircut because we didn't shoot in sequence and a lot of days we'd have to do three different decades all in the same day. So you'd have 10 minutes to go from 1960 to 1977 and then back to 1982 and we're going to jump back and get something from 1960. So it was a lot of trying to remember okay, how old am I here? That was really fun. That was one of the things I got the most excited about."
Music Within
Music Within
Ultimately, Livingston preferred not having age makeup to worry about. "I think a lot of times you can hide behind those effects or what happens is you get stuck. They stick the wig on you and then the shot all becomes about trying not to show the side where you can see the wig. So you have to play the whole scene like this. I think because we just sort of went into it saying, 'Well, we're just going to try and do what we can with physicality and the audience is going to just have to take this ride with us and buy it or not buy it' it kind of freed it up a little bit. Also we didn't have time to think about it because we were shooting eight or nine pages a day."
Running and gunning on a short shoot reminded Livingston of his Swingers days. "Both very ambitious films and kind of labors of love. What we had on this one that we didn't have on Swingers was on Swingers, what was so amazing about it was that it was a green crew. Our crew on Swingers was a lot of people that either hadn't worked a whole lot or who were stepping up. They were working a job that was maybe a level up from what they had their experience in. Everybody nailed it. On this one, we had some very, very talented, very experienced crew members who were gracious enough to do the money at well under their usual quote. So it was really just a matter of them getting used to the idea of oh, what do you mean we don't have two days to shoot this? We have two hours to shoot it? They were sort of used to a more bigger budget, slower process. Once they got into the idea of okay, we're going to run and gun, I think it really energized them because it kind of put them back to the beginnings of their careers when it was all for the love of it. They got very excited."
That made it a little like television too. "It wasn't as bad as that. There's one major difference in television and that's in television, not only are you shooting fast and doing production fast, you're writing fast. The stories have to come fast because you've got to do 22 episodes a year, so the writers are all locked in a room trying to figure out what happens next. The difference between this kind of independent film is you really have a lot of lead time. You have a year and a half or a couple of years to really get your story right, to figure out what the story is that you're trying to tell. So going in, you know the beginning, you know the middle, you know the end. You know the beats that you want to hit. That for me, I think that makes it a lot easier to do than television where you're sort of going, 'Wait, what happens this week? Oh, I'm anemic? Wait a minute, I didn't know that. Okay, let's go.'"
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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