The night he won the Oscar for directing The King's Speech, Tom Hooper was fairly certain his follow-up film would be the first-ever screen adaptation of Les Misérables, the hit 1980s stage musical based on Victor Hugo's classic 19th-century novel. So he was gobsmacked when the ceremony's cohost, Anne Hathaway, took the stage and began singing one of its best-known songs, ''On My Own,'' to Hugh Jackman, who was sitting in the front row. ''Were they doing some kind of subtle or not-so-subtle pitch at the Academy Awards?'' Hooper remembers thinking. ''Was that the most extraordinary attempt to manipulate me into saying, 'Hello, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman — maybe that makes sense'? I have accused Annie of doing that, and she smiles modestly. It obviously worked.'' Hence we can now hear Hathaway, as Les Miz's destitute heroine Fantine, singing ''I Dreamed a Dream'' alongside Jackman, Russell Crowe, and Amanda Seyfried in the movie's sprawling trailer.
Despite their impressive résumés, all of Hooper's cast first had to survive marathon auditions in New York City and London beginning last summer. ''It became more of a workshop, really,'' says Jackman of his session in front of Hooper, producer Cameron Mackintosh, composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, and librettist Alain Boublil. ''After three hours I put my hand up and said, 'Tom? I've got to put my kids to bed now.' '' The Tony-winning song-and-dance man scored the lead role of prisoner-turned-politician Jean Valjean, who's on the run from the dogged policeman Javert, played by that stalwart of musical theater, Russell Crowe.
Actually, Crowe has had a side career in music for decades, including as lead singer of the rock group 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. But he had never sung on screen before. So in the weeks leading up to his audition, he trained with vocal coaches even as he filmed his role as Superman's father in next summer's Man of Steel. ''Building up to it, I started to get more and more nervous. I still couldn't hear the sound I knew I wanted to hear,'' recalls Crowe, who says he hadn't had to audition for a film since 1999's The Insider. ''The week before, I was so anxious. I sang so much I trashed my throat completely. Great, I had four days before the audition and I'd lost my voice. But I just kept thinking the song through. On the day, it just came out, that sound I'd been looking for. Whether it was the adrenaline or whatever it was, in that little room on 42nd Street, just off Broadway, the sound was there. It filled the room and Tom made me sing over and over and over, and every time I sang it, I felt a little more in control and a little more capable.''
Once on set in London this past spring, Hooper had his cast sing live for each take — a departure from the typical movie-musical practice of lip-synching to a prerecorded track. ''It utterly transforms the experience of what a musical is like on film,'' Hooper says. ''When it's live, the actors can actually think the songs.'' He also took advantage of recent advances in technology. ''We put the radio mics on the outside of people's costumes and then just paint them out in post,'' he says. ''So you get perfect sound. Ten years ago, that would have been unthinkable.''
It's also unthinkable that this will be the first time Aussie megastars Crowe and Jackman have ever worked together. ''We've known each other for years, and I've made a career out of the roles that Russell's turned down,'' says Jackman. ''But working on this, we became a lot closer. The two of us looked at each other on our last day of shooting and went, 'Damn, we're going to miss this.' '' As for Crowe, he says the experience was equal parts rewarding and terrifying. ''I have never sung anything as challenging as the songs in Les Miz, never pushed my voice to that place. I'm still not sure if I can do it. I guess I'll know when the movie comes out.'' We will be storming the barricades right beside him.
