That laugh and the accents
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Sugarminx — 10 years ago(November 12, 2015 02:48 PM)
I'm not sure why Mozart was so silly in this movie
Because Salieri is recounting the story, it is being told from his POV. A man who didn't like Mozart. It seems pretty clear to me that he'd exaggerate Mozart's annoying habitsWe can't know what Mozart (in this fictionalised world) was really like, we can only rely on the information given to us by someone who had an agenda.
So put some spice in my sauce, honey in my tea, an ace up my sleeve and a slinkyplanb -
snsurone — 10 years ago(September 08, 2015 12:52 PM)
The brilliance of Tom Hulce's performance was that while Mozart was an annoying ass early in the story, as time went by he gradually developed into a sensitive and sympathetic person.
His problems with his marriage, his father, and Salieri's blacklisting of his work forced him to grow up, and it made his death all the more tragic. -
sesquick-seabag — 10 years ago(September 17, 2015 04:49 PM)
I love the laugh Hulce did. There are some accounts that Mozart had an silly-sounding giggle. The point of emphasising it in the film/play is it would seem to emphasise Salieri's disbelief that the true musical genius, the voice of God, behaves like an "obscene child".
Jeffrey Jones's accent (as the emperor) was 100% American though. I listened to the DVD commentary (with Forman and Schaffer speaking) and Forman says his idea was that the authority figures would speak with British accent (specifically upper-class English accents) while everyone else is represented by American accents (including Simon Callow). But Jones sounds American (if he was trying to affect an English accent he failed) and Patrick Hines (an American actor playing Kapellmeister Bono) used an Italian accent. Accents are just all over the place in this film. Yet - and don't ask me why - I'm not bothered by it when I watch this, even though I usually am bothered by such things. -
daniela_atmad — 10 years ago(September 25, 2015 06:05 AM)
Mozart was thought to have a distinctive annoying laugh in real life, and this added to his silly vile nature, making it more questionable why God have his voice to such a man.
As for the accents, the director also did not want to waste time on actors perfecting their accents, he preferred them to focus on their actual portrayal of the characters more. And if you watch Immortal Beloved, the movie about Beethoven, the actors actually speak with German accents which I find are insanely annoying and distracting from the actual performance.
That movie is terrible compared to Amadeus by the way.
Amadeus is a masterpiece. -
Robbmonster — 10 years ago(October 26, 2015 09:06 AM)
Mozart was well noted for having an extremely annoying laugh. Some one wrote in a letter at the time something to the effect it sounded like a knife scrapping across glass.
So if the laugh was annoying mission accomplished.
Never defend crap with 'It's just a movie'
http://www.youtube.com/user/BigGreenProds -
mrwnmero — 10 years ago(December 10, 2015 04:02 AM)
the story writer said that he got the idea of making Mozart appear silly and childish from his letters that he read before writing the story.
also the whole story is told by Salieri who hated Mozart "in the movie, not sure if in real life too" so Salieri made Mozart look bad as much as he could.
Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! -
lulupalooza — 10 years ago(January 14, 2016 03:12 PM)
As portrayed in this film, Mozart's laugh was based upon supposed
"references in letters written about him by two women who met him".
There is more detail in the
Trivia
section:
http://www.imdb.com/board/10086879/trivia
I quickly found this descriptive tidbit:
"The concept for Mozart's annoying laugh was taken from references in letters written about him. One writer described Mozarts laugh as
'an infectious giddy'
, while another wrote that it was
'like metal scraping glass.'
Ivan Gonzalez
"Don't get chumpatized!" - The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) -
jamesc-helgrim — 9 years ago(August 24, 2016 09:07 PM)
The English accents represent native Italian speakers. The American accents represent native German speakers. It's a simple way of distinguishing the two for an English speaking audience in a way that subconsciously feels more authentic.
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etsis — 9 years ago(October 01, 2016 02:56 PM)
The English accents represent native Italian speakers. The American accents represent native German speakers.
That was the impression I got too. Well, with the exception of Salieri. Anyway, I don't see why characters in a costume drama should be required to speak English with a foreign accent, or worse, in a posh English accent regardless of the characters' nationality. This has long been a bugaboo of mine. Why would a German or an Italian sound like an upper crust English dandy? -
jamesc-helgrim — 9 years ago(October 18, 2016 08:56 AM)
Because it's meant to portray the Germans as more down-to-earth and realistic (or more crass) relative to their intellectual, foppish Italian counterparts. The simplest means for differentiating between the two nationalities is to give different nationalities different accents. The obvious choices of accent for an English-language film are generic American and generic English. Within the English-speaking world, each accent has a different connotation. The filmmakers exploited those connotations as rough approximations of the cultural connotations of each character's nationality: the Italians come across as stuffy and elitist; the Germans, as worldly. It's subtle, and apparently a lot of people didn't understand the point of it, but the subconscious effect is undeniably successful. It adds another layer to every bit of character interaction and affects their relationships to each other. If everyone had the same accent, the effect would be lost. Similarly, for an English-speaking audience, using correct foreign accents (Italian and German) would completely fail to convey the proper effect, and would come across as quite silly. But using English and American accents adds that extra dimension. It's a bold choice, and one I think worked quite well. Even if people don't understand the effect, they feel it.