She continues: “It was a bit of a first for all of us: the first one I was producing on my own, the first Working Title musical, the first time Cameron Mackintosh had done a film, Tom Hooper’s first musical, the first time many of the cast had sung on set, and the first time some of the singers had acted. “We approached it with humility, because it’s a big undertaking on something as great as this,” producer Debra Hayward says.
The film team includes Oscar winners, the UK’s most successful film producers and a theatre legend - but they were not resting on their laurels. So the pressure was huge to get everything right with the first big-screen adaptation of such a beloved musical. More than 60 million people in 42 countries have seen the stage show that Boublil helped create. Considering the sleek design of this Les Misérables-and the imperfect vocal abilities of Amanda Seyfried-it will not be surprising if the live vocals are partly masked with post-production mixing and overdubbing.Lyricist Alain Boublil calls Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables “one of the most beloved novels of all time, sitting right there next to the Bible”. Much of what audiences heard was a “blend” of live and re-recorded singing. During the filming of Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep insisted on singing live-but, as director Phyllida Lloyd later explained, the movie only included some of those vocals. It’s also fair to wonder at this point how much of the live singing will make it into the final cut. Compare Hooper’s Les Misérables to 1932’s Love Me Tonight, for instance, which recorded the full orchestra and the vocals simultaneously while filming, and you see that the new film is not quite as innovative as they’re suggesting. As film scholar Lea Jacobs explains, musical numbers at Paramount Studios were recorded live on set “whenever possible” as early as 1931, and RKO recorded singers live-accompanied either by a live orchestra present off-screen or a recording of the score-until 1934’s The Gay Divorcee.
Even if you eliminate non-narrative concert and experimental films-which typically record vocals live-there are movie musicals that counter Hooper’s claim.
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