- Who is the least likely to flub a line?
Well, we know who that's not.
(laughing)
The girls who play the feather girls,
we had these rehearsal sessions,
and they were telling the story
about Clang, Clang, Clang Went The Trolley,
and that the person who was singing the song
in the show forgot the words
to Clang, Clang, Clang Went The Trolley
and ding, ding, ding went the bell,
piss, piss, piss went the pistons.
(laughing) - Wow.
It's a pretty good thing to just improvise them
at the moment.
- It's colorful.
(laughing)
(light music)
- So, our movie, Judy, is about
the one and only Judy Garland.
It's mostly about a set of concerts she gives,
extraordinary set of concerts,
she gives in London towards the very end of her life.
But it also touches on the beginning of her career
with Wizard of Oz.
- It felt like a collaborative experience
from the beginning, and it was all of us together.
And it felt like it was a,
Rupert called it mining for treasure,
and it felt like it was perpetually in motion.
It was always moving and we were always digging
and looking for things, and the materials
of her legacy were surrounding us all the time.
There was her music and her voice and the audio recordings,
and we were looking at video footage all the time
and reading the books and biographies
and the autobiographies
of the people who knew her best, her family.
You know, and suddenly it sort of,
I don't know, the presence
of this person felt very much alive around us,
in all of its manifestations
in how she looked at these different times in her life
and her clothing and again, like you said,
her physical language, both in performance and not,
and it just became familiar.
It became familiar with the repeated exposure
to all of the materials.
- [Interviewer] And you also never stopped
in between takes, and on set, I know, Finn, you said
that she stayed in character,
and you didn't actually see Renee Zellweger
until later on through the process.
Can you tell--
- 'Til right now, actually.
Yeah, hi, I'm Finn, hi.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah, it was very cool to be part the process
and to see you inhabit her,
but also it didn't feel like a struggle ever
or like Renee was never like,
I'm gonna go into my dark corner and become Judy
and I'll see you in an hour, you know.
It was like we were always kind of immersed in it,
and we were always kind of finding it together,
and I felt very welcomed.
You know, it could have been, I could've been
some cog in this tour de force performance,
but I didn't feel like that.
It felt like we were making a movie as a group,
and that's what I think kind of makes the movie more
than just your average biopic,
which is like I was born here, and I grew up here and then
we're like honing in very very intensely on this one chapter
of her life, and to kind of be able to shed all
of the other stuff and know that the rest
of life has happened and have that as your research
but then be able to really fine tune the moments
of this exact time in her life.
I mean, to be a part of that was, I think,
a very unique thing.
- [Interviewer] That was well said.
And this is also not an average biopic because, you know,
it's one thing step in the shoes of Judy Garland,
but to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow
is also a really ambitious move.
What did you do?
How did you do that and pull it off in the way that you did?
- All that was Rupert,
because if could've gotten out of it, I would've.
He explained it really beautifully about performance
and the connection that Judy had with her audience
and how he felt like this story and this moment illuminates
a lot about the cost of performance
and what that relationship that Judy had specifically
with her audience was about, what it meant to her.
So I understood and appreciated what it was
that he was trying to capture.
And that song in particular, when he talks about it,
and he should 'cause he speaks of it so beautifully,
about how it speaks to all of us in a different way
and how we have nostalgic feelings
from childhood attached to that song
and the meaning of it and the hopefulness in it
and how throughout Judy's life, it came to mean something
and represent something different
as she weathered life's challenges and struggles.
And to me, that moment is sort of like the culmination
of her experiences until that point,
and when you consider what's happening
in her life at that time,
and that she still maintains that hope,
it's just of a different color.
Hearing those words and that music again in that context,
to me, is just so deeply moving
and that she still has ownership of it
but in a different way,
and then you come to understand the circumstances
of her life in that period,
and you feel that song differently, too.
You feel that, wow, there's this undying hopefulness
that has just transformed in a way
and become bigger, because in spite of all this,
she continues to carry on.
(light music)