REINTERPRETING THE SONGS
In addition to having a story that was layered enough to do justice to the songs, the other key element to the film was the musical interpretation, says Taymor. "It was really scary having the legacy of the Beatles' music on your shoulders, because it's the Holy Grail," she says. "It's so important to so many people, and the originals were perfect. We knew from the beginning that we did not want to compete with the Beatles' versions," says Taymor. She felt that the best way to honor the band was to have their songs be the heart and the star of the film, emanating right from the characters.
To interpret the music, Taymor relied upon a trusted longtime collaborator, Elliot Goldenthal. "Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I've worked with him for twenty years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again - not a better version, but different."
Goldenthal and Taymor also brought in renowned rock music producer T Bone Burnett and producer Teese Gohl, who has worked with Goldenthal as a music producer on more than 20 films. Goldenthal, Burnett, and Gohl collaborated on producing the music.
Every song was analyzed: who would be singing, what was the content, the feeling needed from it in the film, and the time period. Goldenthal notes, "Everybody knows the Beatles' music so well, it's almost like a ghost in the room. All the licks that they played, the specific guitar fills, the drum fills - everybody fills those in when they hear the songs. The songs were done perfectly already by the Beatles - they are definitive performances. So the challenge was try to find an honest way - staying within oneself - of getting to the core of these songs and try to find other ways to support the beautiful words and music."
To give the music authenticity, the team recorded many of the songs using period appropriate equipment, such as analog tape and vintage microphones. Gohl recalls, "We were all on the same page in taking this approach and in our desire to avoid the digital pitfalls."
As for working with the Goldenthal, Gohl says, "Elliot is unique in every sense, but to see him as a rock 'n' roll producer is yet another mind-blower."
It was not enough, of course, merely to come up with new arrangements for the songs. Because the lyrics of the songs tell the story of the film, it was crucial to Taymor that the performances have immediacy and relevance to the scenes around them. With that goal in mind, the filmmakers decided to make the movie with as much live singing as possible. She gives credit to another one of her team members, sound mixer Tod Maitland, for making it work.
"He's another genius," says Taymor, because "most of the movie is live."
Maitland, who is a three-time Academy Award® nominee, had most recently worked on the more traditional movie musical The Producers, but Across the Universe would require an entirely different approach. He explains why such a radical move was necessary: "In most musicals, the actor speaks and then they go into a singing voice. For most people, a singing voice is an entirely different voice - something they did in a studio two or three months earlier. It takes you out of the film. On Across the Universe, we wanted to keep the environment real. When you transition from speaking to singing, we want those moments to flow free, so that you don't go in and out of different sound qualities - you want to stay in the scene. In addition, because the lyrics serve as dialogue in this movie, you want to hear the little bit of bounce off the walls, you want to hear people moving around. You don't want a very closed-in, studio sound."
The actors began the process by pre-recording their songs; these would to give them an idea of how their performance would go and provide a back-up for the editing process. In these sessions, the actors each performed the songs on three tracks: the first a studio microphone, the second a boom mike, like the one used on set, and the third a "lavalier" mike, also used on set.
During the shoot, the set would have to be extremely quiet to record a live vocal performance. The actors were all fitted with tiny ear pieces, called "earwigs," to enable them to sing along with their pre-recorded performance. The pre-recorded track would give the actors a guideline to follow and allowed some freedom in the sound editing, according to Maitland. "If an actor turns his head away and goes off mike, we could pull in a vocal pre-record and lay that over. Or if there's some noise over a take that the filmmakers really loved, we could go to a vocal pre-record." However, he stresses, those are the exceptions. "The design of the whole film is to use live vocals as much as possible."
The somewhat tricky process was made easier by the cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, and his lighting designer, John DeBlau, who consulted with the sound department when placing their lights, in order to help them to keep the boom microphone as close to the actors' heads as possible. For the optimum result, the mike had to be only 12 to 15 inches from the actor, the same distance used in the pre-recording sessions.

ABOUT THE CHOREOGRAPHY
Just as the music in Across the Universe would be a radical reinvention of the well-known songs, the film also required a unique look to the choreography. The film had to be a feast for the eyes as well as the ears.
"I didn't want this to be a 'dance' musical," says Taymor. Although there is quite a bit of dance in the film, she says, "We talked a lot about using everyday movement as the vocabulary." To bring this vision to life, Taymor called upon Daniel Ezralow a choreographer with whom she has collaborated on several other works.
"Danny straddles the theatrical modern dance world as well as pop, and circus, and acrobats, and everyday movement," she says. "If you look at 'With a Little Help from My Friends,' the choreography is people sliding down banisters, it's leaping up and falling into couches. If you look at 'Come Together,' you see the people in the street, walking in unison with briefcases. Some sequences are more 'dance-y' than others, but the pieces that feel like they're organically coming from naturalistic movement work beautifully."
"From the very beginning, I wanted Across the Universe to be totally naturalistic and unlike any other musical," says Ezralow. "I said that out loud, and then I was stuck. There were witnesses!"
Ezralow's idea was that the film would take its cues from the way we all move through the world now. "Everyone has their iPods on - they close the world," he says. "As you do, as you look at other people, it's like walking through a movie. It's an altered experience. Every day, as I rode the subway on my way to the set, I would listen to the songs from Across the Universe and imagine movement."
"Julie encourages us to see things differently," Ezralow says. "When you're a foreigner in a country, sometimes you get a better sense of what that country is like than someone who has lived there all his life, because you're seeing it with fresh eyes. So it's a little trick I play on myself - I try to be a stranger to dance all the time."
Of course, the film does feature a couple of more traditional dance sequences. For these, Ezralow cast some of Broadway's and the world's finest dancers to fill more than 350 dancing roles. The casting process was often difficult because many of these dancers were appearing in shows every night. For the "induction center" sequence, set to the song "I Want You," the dancers playing the "sergeants" had to report at 3:30 in the morning to begin complicated makeup and prosthetics - and many had been dancing on a Broadway stage until 11 PM the previous night.
"Mark Friedberg, the production designer, and Julie and I sat together and talked about the sequence early on," Ezralow remembers. "It was a whirlwind, wonderfully improvisational day. Everyone contributed something - Julie, concept; me, dance; Mark, design. The sequence ends up being surreal and artistically playful, but also powerful and poignant."
"Come Together" represents the other true highlight of choreography in the film. At one point, 140 people move in unison in midtown Manhattan; at another moment during the song, the filmmakers envisioned a Rube Goldberg-style device timed to the song. Ezralow says that the song is "a middle point in the film; we define what New York City in the 60s was all about."

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Across the board, Taymor attracted an exceptional team of collaborators for Across The Universe. In the key role of cinematographer, she chose Frenchman Bruno Delbonnel, who although he has just begun shooting films in the US, is already a two-time Academy Award® nominee.
Taymor recalls: "Bruno, in our first interview said, 'I hate musicals.' I thought, 'Now what do I think about that? That's interesting.' And I thought, he's done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important."
Mark Friedberg (Far From Heaven, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Producers) served as production designer. For Friedberg, it was a special opportunity to work with Taymor, a director who happens to be one of the most creative theater designers of our time. He notes, "Julie Taymor has dreams that are better than anything I could ever design." Taymor came in one morning and described to him the image of Vietnamese women dancing on the water as part of the montage for the song "Across the Universe," which she had dreamt the night before. "That is not fair," he laughs. "I want to be able to do that."
Friedberg says that Taymor's greatest strengths are that "she is brave and she is committed to following her ideas to their fullest. She is not afraid that they might fail." In fact, he says, her only fear is not going far enough. "She is afraid that our ideas might not be interesting, or that we are not trying hard enough, or we are not challenging ourselves enough. It's an amazing and inspiring way to work."
As a result, Friedberg says, his greatest challenge on Across the Universe was not the technical process of realizing Taymor's vision, but living up to her expectations of creating a wholly new and original work. "She let me go and get way out there and see if I would find anything she would like, and usually the stuff that was farther out was the stuff she was curious about. I wanted to interpret the 60s in a way that was relevant and interesting. I didn't want to re-create it - I wanted to reinvent it."
So while Friedberg's art department began with a tremendous amount of historic research, he also had a bit of artistic freedom to reinterpret the 60s, and pull in other influences. Friedberg and Taymor looked at a lot of graffiti art from the 80s until present day for inspiration for Jude's art and a lot of the downtown East Village neighborhood. An example of how the production design would sometimes "reinvent" the 60s was Dr. Robert's "magic bus." As Dr. Robert is inspired by Neal Cassady, the real-life figure who drove Ken Kesey's famous bus Furthur, that bus became the starting point for the design; however, Taymor thought it looked somehow old. She loved Friedberg's "Basquiat-inspired," cool, contemporary version. Graffiti art is not true to the period, but Taymor preferred its slightly rougher, street edge to the sweeter and more flowery, more stereotypical 60s look, and it became a useful design element.
"As a designer herself, she has a very keen visual sense," Friedberg continues. "She has a very powerful aesthetic. She's operatic. She's also a collaborator. She asks 'What do you think?' and she is always open to the best idea in the room. We had an easy vocabulary. Julie would say, 'For the circus, I want to use a Matisse palette,' and I knew exactly what she was talking about."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Friedberg was most anxious about one part of the production: the film's large-scale puppetry. He went to an expert puppet designer, Paul Rice, a top puppet maker from the theater, who had built 15 of the Pumbaa puppets for worldwide theatrical productions of Taymor's "The Lion King." Rice and his crew would make small maquettes of the puppets to show Taymor and she would give them her feedback, with very specific instructions on color, shading, and movement. For the circus scenes - which take their inspiration from the radical Bread & Puppet Theater, founded in the 60s in New York City - Rice would carve a puppet for about two days before a crew of about 13 people began the process of painting and paper mâché. Two of the largest puppets they built were an 18-foot-high face at the circus and a 27-foot-tall walking man at the peace march. The giant arms and hands in the circus spanned 120 feet.
One other key design challenge would be finding a visual look and for Jude's work. A member of the art department crew named Don Nace became the source of Jude's artistry. Friedberg had used Nace on his crew before, but was not even aware of the scope of his work until someone in the art department suggested he check out www.drawingoftheday.com, Nace's website. Taymor liked his work the best and so the important character of Jude's art was cast from within the crew. Jim Sturgess, the actor who plays Jude, worked alongside Nace in a studio, in preparation for the scenes (like "Strawberry Fields") in which Jude is working. "Don would give me little tasks to do each day… We would sit and listen to Tom Waits records and he would just sit in the corner, kind of sketching and drawing and give me little things to do."
The induction center and the VA hospital were two of the most unique stage sets. They are "bookends of the Army experience," says Friedberg. "We made it very olive drab, black and white. Julie wanted a mechanized experience for the induction. Even the sergeants are very robotic." During breaks in filming, the dancers playing the sergeants broke up the menacing scene by using the conveyor belt set as a "catwalk," with each trying to do his best runway model impression while wearing full prosthetic makeup.
The induction center is one of the moments that is a true abstraction from reality, which turns into more of a musical number. Another was "Happiness Is A Warm Gun," which takes place in a round hospital room (and features a cameo by choreographer Daniel Ezralow as a possessed dancing priest).
"I thought it was cruel to make the guys all look at each other," says Friedberg. "So we made the room round. This was also a historic reference to old tuberculosis wards; when they were built in Victorian times, scientists believed that germs lived in corners. So if you had a round room you had no corners - you had no germs. On top of that, we had the idea that maybe the room would spin - the song would be stronger than gravity. It was one of the first discussions that Julie and I had."
Another key member of the production team was legendary costume designer Albert Wolsky (an Academy Award® winner for Bugsy and All That Jazz, and an Oscar® nominee for three more films).
Wolsky explains that his greatest challenge was dressing the nearly 5,000 extras in the film. "Anybody who has a non-speaking part, every single one, all have to be dressed from head to toe. We did mass fittings five days a week with teams of fitters," he says.
But even while dressing the masses, every detail is crucial, says Wolsky: "Without the right hair and makeup, the clothes won't make any difference. You have to find ways to capture the period without making it too costume-y. I wasn't out to make a costume ball. I wanted to make it like real clothes, but also to have this feeling of some other time."
He continues: "What makes it interesting for me is that the beginnings are all very specific. Jude comes from Liverpool, so that's one look. Jo-Jo comes from Detroit, that's another look. Max and Lucy come from the Massachusetts area, that's another look. And they all converge onto New York and the Village."
Most of Across the Universe was shot on practical locations - over 50 locations in 60 days, mostly in the New York City area. Coordinating this complicated shoot was First Assistant Director Geoff Hansen, who says, "Julie is one of the most creative, artistic directors I've ever worked with in my life. She's got a vision that blows me away. She'll have this image, say, of Vietnamese ladies floating in a lake with masks next to them, and I'm the guy who has to figure out how to get the crew up there and shoot it and where we're going to eat lunch and everything else involved with executing that idea."
Location manager Rob Striem notes: "On a lot of films you have a few locations where you can settle in and get comfortable. On this film, every single set was one, two or three days at most, so we were constantly jumping around."
Many of the sets that would be shot for only a couple of days required two-to-four weeks of preparation. Every day that the crew was shooting on one set, they could be simultaneously prepping four other sets and striking two that were completed - all over New York City. And this work was not simple work, like painting walls and dressing a living room, says Striem, but "making the South Bronx into Detroit, dealing with 50 active businesses."
Indeed, the film company created so many different worlds - Detroit, Vietnam, Washington D.C., suburban Massachusetts, Muscoot farm, where they staged the circus, and other "magical" environments - all within the New York City area.
Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was one of the biggest locations for the film. The hip and artsy neighborhood was transformed into a heightened version of the East Village scene in the 1960s. A few real businesses from St. Mark's Place that actually existed were portrayed, but the art department mixed it up and made the area more colorful and exaggerated than anything that was really in New York at the time. Much of the Rivington Street set was actually inspired by the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco, says Friedberg. "There's probably not too much in that location that did not exist somewhere, but it did not exist all together. We made an impressionistic collage of the world of youthful self-expression."
The set stretched for three blocks; from Attorney Street to Norfolk Street on Rivington, then a half block North and South on Clinton Street. The Rivington/Clinton intersection was the major crossroads, where the dancers would do their "Come Together" number and several other scenes were staged.
The neighborhood was extremely supportive of this psychedelic explosion. The local newspapers encouraged people to drive by and check out the sets while they were still up, and after filming was completed, several neighborhood restaurants chose to leave up the colorful paint and murals.
A similar thing happened on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square Park, where a peace march set to the song "Dear Prudence" was filmed. Area residents wanted to leave up the peace symbols and anti-war banners. It was another moment where the 60s and the present seemed to come together, so to speak. Similarly, the art department found that they did not have to create mock newspaper stories for set dressing: they took current newspaper articles about Iraq and changed the names in the headlines, and found they worked perfectly for Vietnam stories.
As for the actual Vietnam scenes, the production staged them in one day in Moonachie, New Jersey, in a swampy area out near the Meadowlands Arena. The production also went to New Jersey to shoot "A Little Help from My Friends" at Princeton. In these scenes, Joe Anderson got the chance to perform a little stunt work, firing a gun in the Vietnam sequence and sliding down a 35-foot-high marble staircase at Princeton.
The South Bronx became the Detroit riots, again a massive undertaking for a shoot that was only one day. The production picked a block that New York City has plans to raze, so the challenge was to make one side of the street that was entirely abandoned look occupied. The Detroit scenes required 20-25 stunt people, explosions, and stunt guys on rooftops firing guns. For Jo-Jo's little brother's funeral, Taymor wanted a cemetery that was adjacent to a church but entirely surrounded by concrete in an urban setting. The production laid sod in a parking lot and created the cemetery, since nothing like that existed.
Washington D.C. was also staged in uptown Manhattan, at Grant's Tomb, and the Columbia University student riots worked out well at the Museum of the City of New York.
During filming, Wood and Sturgess coined a phrase to describe the sometimes overwhelming nature of the project. "Jim and I had this joke - we'd call it an Across the Universe moment, when we would stop and we really think about what we're doing," says Wood. "It would make us cry."

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