‘Shine’: The Movie

David says:

Yes, got to stop talking, got to stop, got to stop, it’s a problem isn’t it? Is it a problem?

It’s all right David; just tell Sylvia why you’re here.

Ahhhh! Well it’s a mystery, a mystery, a mystery--

Are you lost?

Am I lost? Perhaps that’s it. I’m lost, I’m lost, I’m lost. How does that sound?

*

Seated at the edge of the abyss, David Helfgott peers into its great black maw--the mouth of a Steinway concert grand, wide open, ready to consume him--and expecting a deafening roar, instead hears . . . not a sound.

“When you’re playing, sometimes the music just sort of abandons you,” director Scott Hicks is saying now, describing one of the climactic scenes in his new film, “Shine,” which opens Friday. “It’s gone, and all you can hear is your own breathing and heartbeat, the sound of your fingers on the keys.”

In the scene, Helfgott has crossed over to a place where the words have no music, only more words, the madness riding language like eighth-notes. “In a sense,” Hicks adds, “it becomes a scene about someone going so far out on the edge that they tumble over it, into the ravine. And they never come back. Or when they do come back, something’s broken. They expose themselves so totally that they are damaged.”

“Shine” is about the damage that love can do--too much, too little, too late. Peter Helfgott, played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, pushes fiercely for his son to succeed, then pushes him away. “We see in Peter how too much love can destroy,” says Mueller-Stahl. Or as Cecil Parkes, David’s instructor at the Royal College of Music (played by 92-year-old Sir John Gielgud) warns him at one point, “Make no mistake, David: It’s dangerous, people get hurt!” “Shine” is a film for everyone who has ever been hurt, left damaged, with broken paws--poor, poor pussycats.

Helfgott, who was once left badly damaged by a mental breakdown, is obsessed with cats, purrs on and on about them in real life, but unlike pussycats he is not afraid of the water. “Shine” is humid with water imagery because Hicks and screenwriter Jan Sardi postulate Helfgott--played as an adult in the film by Australian actor Geoffrey Rush--as something like a force of nature. “The character Geoffrey plays is someone who has never defined who he is, so he doesn’t know where he ends and you begin,” Hicks says. “He just embraces you and flows all around you, an indefinite sort of person.”

Rush’s performance has about it the lithe quality of something almost wholly improvised, but every stutter and every comma in it is carefully scripted. “It’s nothing to do with improvisation,” Hicks says. “It’s about inventing spontaneity.” Rush seems to sight-read the dialogue like the densely clotted notes of an arpeggio run. “I’d always been intrigued by David’s articulation of expression when he’s at the keyboard rendering his music,” says Rush, “as opposed to the socially inept, fractured syntax just spilling out, the kind of raggedy edges that are there when he’s away from it.”

*

A mystery, it’s a mystery--he only had one arm you see, it was a stroke, a stroke--a stroke of bad luck. Whooah! It’s not funny, it’s sad, very sad, poor pussycat, his paw was damaged beyond repair and it wouldn’t do as it was told, sad, sad pussycat. It was bad luck wasn’t it, he was damaged, he was. . . .

Hicks, 44, first learned of Helfgott in a newspaper article announcing that the pianist, recovering from some undefined “illness,” would be performing that night, in May 1986, at a small recital hall near Hicks’ home in Adelaide, Australia. He was sufficiently intrigued to ask his wife if she would mind his missing the dinner party he was giving that night to celebrate her birthday. This went over big. “She’s since forgiven me,” he says, confidently.

“Something happened in that hall that night,” Hicks recalls. “Here was this extraordinary personality, which was evident even as he came into the room. It was like watching Groucho Marx on speed. He had very, very thick glasses, and he was smiling and bobbing his head around, his hands sort of reaching out in front of him. Very unorthodox. Then he sits down and immediately starts to play--bang! wallop! and he’s off.”

The curiosities did not end there. Helfgott often hummed along with the music, and as Hicks was to learn later, occasionally wandered down into the audience between pieces to give hugs and kisses to the people sitting in the front rows. But the music! Just as Helfgott’s odd mannerisms seemed to keep him at a remove from the audience, his playing connected him to them as if each one were tethered to the end of a piano string.

“I just wanted to know what was going on, what was the story?” Hicks says. “What was the gap between this eccentric, slightly confused person and the enormous precision of delivering some of the most complex music ever written?”

Determined to find out, Hicks approached Helfgott and his wife, Gillian, after the concert. “I didn’t really know where to begin, so I simply marched up to them and said let’s explore the idea of a film,” he says. “That was the beginning of a long, drawn-out process of getting to know each other.”

There was no biography from which to work, so Hicks paid his own way to Perth--1,400 miles from Adelaide--where he conducted dozens of hours of interviews with Helfgott and his friends. “I’d stay with them a few days at a time,” Hicks remembers, “and just sit with David while he was playing the piano, talking all the while. That was absolute magic, such an unusual experience. It was a very intimate sort of thing. Conversation with David is a very elliptical thing--it’s never direct, never conclusive. But out of it comes this thread of ideas, and out of that came a great deal of dialogue that was later incorporated into the screenplay.”

It took Hicks a year to win Helfgott’s trust and to develop the beginnings of a story. “They wanted to know: How was I going to do it?” Hicks says. “Was I a latter-day Ken Russell and going to turn this into an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza?”

Hicks wrote a sprawling screenplay called “Flight of the Bumblebee” about Helfgott’s life that he soon enough realized was a rather conventional biopic, with little of the emotional theme music Hicks could hear playing in his own head. He asked Sardi, a veteran Australian screenwriter, to spend a few days with Helfgott and see if he was interested. “That was enough for Jan to be possessed,” Hicks says. “I knew if I exposed him long enough, something in David never lets go.”

Sardi’s screenplay was finished in 1991--five years after Hicks had first met Helfgott--and now, without the approval of David and Gillian (played by Lynn Redgrave in the film), all would be lost. “When I first showed them Jan’s screenplay I was rigid with nerves,” Hicks says. “I couldn’t countenance going on if they hated it. But they could sense that emotional truth it was at least reaching for, and where, for the purpose of telling the story, it had moved away from a strict rendition of reality into conveying a sense of what had happened.”

What had happened was this: After fleeing his overbearing father in Australia for a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London, Helfgott scaled one of the piano’s most formidable summits--Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto--in competition, then descended into a period of complete psychological disintegration. During the next six months he checked in and out of a mental hospital in London, before being discovered nearly starving to death in his basement flat by someone from the Western Australia Music Society. Helfgott was then repatriated to Australia, where he underwent years of further treatment in mental asylums.

“The journey I wanted to show was not about about diagnosis, medicine and therapy,” Hicks says. “Those things are very important in North American consciousness, but it seemed to me that to take the literal path was diminishing, and more redolent of television, the sort of movie-of-the-week mentality. I wanted this to be bigger.

“This is about being eaten alive by a piano,” he adds. “A concert Steinway is a formidable thing. Just to look at it on a stage, you think, ‘My God, no wonder they go crazy.’ In the film, Parkes warns him, ‘It’s a monster, David. Tame it, or it’ll swallow you whole.’ And I wanted to convey that feeling of what it must be like to be barely in control of this beast on a stage.”

With seven years of his life invested in the project, Hicks was still attempting to tame his own beast and hadn’t yet come up with a dime to finance the picture. In 1993, he approached Jane Scott, who had produced “My Brilliant Career,” for help.

“I told her I was about at the end of my tether with this thing,” he recalls. “When Jane came on, I was going to make the movie for about $3 million. She told me I needed twice that much to make the film I wanted. Not the thing you expect to hear from a producer.”

Scott was adamant that the section of the film that is set in London actually be shot there, which sent the budget rocketing up to about $6 million. “There were several times when i thought we had the financing in place, and then it fell about our ears,” Scott says. “They tested us all for a sort of strength to stay with the piece. We had a harrowing conversation with somebody who could finance the film straightaway if we did it his way. His way meant casting people who had names in the industry. That was a turning point because that was when we decided to go ahead and do absolutely what we believed in.”

*

Live, live-live and let live--that’s very important isn’t it? Molto, molto. But then again it’s a lifelong struggle, isn’t it . . . to live, to survive, to survive undamaged and not destroy any living breathing creature. The point is, if you do something wrong you can be punished for the rest of your life so I think it’s a life-long struggle; is it a life-long struggle?

“Shine” was screened publicly for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival in January, only nine months after filming had commenced in London. Though it was entered out of competition, the filmmakers knew there was a greater prize to be won if it could create any kind of stir. “We were a bag of nerves,” Scott, the producer, recalls. “We were very much the poor relations at Sundance, and Scott was saying maybe nobody would come.”

They came. “The screening was packed, and we knew that every distributor was there,” she adds. “We felt them respond quite strongly. It was tangible. And then at the end they sort of erupted. That was when everything changed.”

After being swept onto the stage to a standing ovation, Hicks announced, almost as an afterthought, “It needs to get picked up.” This was that rarest of confluences--art and commerce standing side by side in the lift-line to a niche market hit--and few who witnessed it will soon forget the sight of a roomful of teary-eyed moguls reaching as one for their wallets. In the next moment, Hicks recalls, “All hell seemed to break loose. Suddenly there was this feverish sort of frenzy to lay claim to the film.”

The following morning, Miramax co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein saw “Shine,” and made a bid for the distribution rights. But Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, October and Fine Line were also bidding, and by that evening the price had risen from $1.4 million to $2.5 million. “There was a sort of stakeout of the offices in the condominium by the distributors,” Scott says. “We allowed ourselves to be courted, in many cases by people who had previously given me something of a hard time. There were, I must say, a few moments of great pleasure.”

Miramax had good reason to assume it would gain control of the film, just as it had prevailed over Fine Line in the bidding war for “Unzipped” at the previous year’s festival. The only other print of the film had been shipped to Los Angeles a few days earlier, and that “had been screened for one distributor only,” Scott says, “and that was Miramax. They’d seen the film, but done nothing. There was no offer. Harvey believed that he had made a deal, but I certainly hadn’t been approached by Harvey.”

Weinstein was so cocksure he had won the festival’s prize that he dispatched an executive search party to track down “Shine’s” sales representative, Jonathan Taplin, to begin cobbling together some sort of announcement. But Fine Line President Ruth Vitale had Taplin cornered in his condominium, and had made it clear she wasn’t leaving without a deal.

“It had been a rocky road with Miramax,” Scott says. “They were the first company that we’d approached, and they had known about it throughout. But it was only in that last flurry that everything happened, so we accepted the offer from Fine Line. Fine Line was hungrier, perhaps. It was a pragmatic decision. But, you know, blood was running high.”

When Weinstein, the volatile not-so-mini-mogul, learned a few hours later that the film had gotten away from him, he stormed into the Mercato Mediterraneo, where Taplin was enjoying a celebratory meal. “How could you [expletive] do this?” shrieked Weinstein, moments before being tossed out unceremoniously into the snow by the restaurant’s maitre d’.

“That did something totally unexpected,” Hicks says, “which was project the film into the spotlight in a way you could never imagine. I was thrilled to discover that people liked the film enough to want to tear each other apart, though part of me doesn’t want it to be remembered as the film they fought over at Sundance.”

Eager to work on what he calls a “bigger canvas,” Hicks is nevertheless wary of Hollywood’s seductive powers. During a stopover in Los Angeles on his way back from the Toronto Film Festival, where “Shine” won both the critics’ and the audience awards, he says, “I relish the ambiguities in ‘Shine,’ the power of suggestion without resolution. But there is no closure between father and son, and I think the temptation in this filmmaking environment would always be to say, ‘Well, that’s what people would want to see.’ Daddy’s there in the audience, and everybody’s happy.

“You can take those risks on a smaller film, but they’re the very risks that maybe bigger films should be taking,” Hicks continues, then catches himself. “I don’t want to sound like some brat who’s turned up telling everybody else how they should be doing it. I suppose the first instinct of a studio wanting to finance the film would have been to get Dustin Hoffman, or Robin Williams, or Jim Carrey. But the minute you do that, you set another thing between the role and the audience, which is the whole persona and the history of that star.”

*

The importance of being earnest in this matter is evident in “Shine’s” first frames, when the unlovely oblate of Geoffrey Rush’s face--teeth slightly asymmetrical, his skin fissured and pale, glowing in a penumbral cloud of cigarette smoke--floats across the blackened screen in a kind of mad moonrise.

Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did . . .

“There’s always a bit of a chatter that goes through an auditorium at the beginning of a film,” Hicks says, “but as soon as Geoffrey starts to speak, as soon as that silhouette appears, there’s silence.”

. . . if a cat’d let me kiss it, I’d kiss it--Cat on a fence I’ll kiss it--always, always, I will--didn’t I? I did because I was different wasn’t I, I was. . . .

It was Rush, all but unknown beyond the infinitesimally small outback of the Australian theater, to whom the guys with cigars objected. But Hicks had cast Rush, 45, three years before filming began without so much as an audition, and then never wavered in his belief that of all the actors in all the world, only Rush could bring an almost Shakespearean sense of poetry to the deranged soliloquies of the adult David Helfgott.

The script originally called for a single actor to play Helfgott from the age of 18 to 35, but by the time production began Rush was 40 years old, and 18 was long out of reach. “So we cleaved off that section of the adult David, and created a middle David,” Hicks says. “And that’s where Noah came in.”

From this creative cell division grew the performance of Noah Taylor, who plays David from the age of 13 through his early 20s. Like most Australians, Taylor had never heard of Helfgott before reading the script. “The first thing that struck me was that the dialogue was so nonsensical and crazy,” says Taylor, 26. “I had to see videos of David to be convinced that it was real. On the page, it looks so strange, as though the typist had been drinking.”

Rush believed that the audience wanted to be similarly convinced that his piano playing was real, and spent four months prior to production girding for his battle with the great beast. “When Geoffrey decided he was going to do his own playing, I thought he had flipped,” Hicks says. “But that’s just the nature of his particular level of obsession.”

“One of the things we discussed early on was the need to show enough playing for the audience to relax about the performance,” Scott says. “If you feel that he’s not really playing, you become tense and start searching to see if his hands are on the keyboard.” Hicks worried that the piano interludes would allow the audience’s mind to wander from a struggle whose stakes were, literally, life and death.

Like the younger incarnation of his character, preparing to scale the Rach 3 (A mountain! The hardest piece you could everest play), Rush saw the sensual link between the keyboard and the character he had by now become. Boldness of attack! “I’m not a pianist, so they had a hand double standing by,” he says. “But if you play Hamlet, you’ve got a sword fight at the end of the play. And if you don’t pull that off, you’re killing Act 5.”

*

That’s right. Is that right? Might damage me, that’s right isn’t it, because it did once before--a long long time ago; that’s the story, so what can you do Beryl? Come on Beryl, boldness of attack! The point is you’ve got to share and care and care and share and just behave. Isn’t that right--that’s right. . . .

“David is a living example of how different the rules can be for a person,” Rush says. “He’s the first one to go, ‘Ooooh, I’m a silly sausage, I’m a silly sausage.’ He’s the holy fool, the circus clown. Whatever damage people have that they may not have acknowledged, he’s up there living it, doing it.”

After David Helfgott saw “Shine” for the first time, he came galloping up to Hicks and declared it “brrrrilliantissimo,” trilling his Rs to maximum effect. “I showed the film to David at my home, and it was a tense experience for me,” Hicks recalls. “But he was very moved. I was watching him watching it, and I could see the emotional bolts slam home. He also saw the humor in his own nature. He knows. He said, ‘I’m ridiculous! I’m ridiculous!’ He seems relieved to have the story out there, as if to say, ‘There it is, that’s the mystery.’ ” That’s the mystery.