They Shot the Piano Player | Deadline Contenders Film Documentary
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00:00 We've got a stunning animated documentary for you from Sony Pictures Classics.
00:08 It is They Shot the Piano Player, directed by Fernando Trujillo and Javier Mariscal.
00:16 And they join us now.
00:17 Welcome, gentlemen.
00:18 Thank you.
00:19 It's a pleasure to be here.
00:23 Thank you so much for being with us.
00:25 Your film is about really the birth of the bossa nova sound in Brazil in the late 1950s
00:32 and the early 1960s.
00:34 And a mystery at its core, what happened to one of its greatest artists?
00:40 This is Tenorio Jr., a remarkable pianist who disappeared in 1964, never to be heard
00:47 from again.
00:49 And you probe what happened to him.
00:52 Before we get into some questions, let's take a look at a clip from the film.
00:56 This is some extraordinary music.
00:59 It's animated.
01:01 And at the end, we're going to hear a voice that will be familiar to the audience.
01:04 This is our narrator.
01:05 I won't give away who it is, but you will be able to tell who it is.
01:11 Famous person, famous pianist and actor.
01:15 But first, let's take a look at that clip now from They Shot the Piano Player.
01:22 [music]
01:30 [applause]
01:38 [applause]
01:46 [applause]
01:53 [applause]
02:04 [applause]
02:11 [applause]
02:18 [applause]
02:25 Tenorio played on some of the best records of his time, but recorded only one as a band
02:30 leader in March of 1964.
02:32 He was 23 years old.
02:35 [music]
02:44 A few days later, a military coup put a halt to the modernization of the country and set
02:50 in motion a dictatorship that would last for over 20 years.
02:54 That, of course, is the voice of Jeff Goldblum.
02:59 And we're going to get into that in just a moment.
03:03 But Fernando, I wanted to ask you first about the origins of this film.
03:07 You love the bossa nova sound.
03:09 You love Brazilian music.
03:11 And you interviewed, over a period of years, some of the greatest Brazilian musicians,
03:16 including Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, JoĂŁo Gilberto, Milton Nascimento.
03:22 And so that was the basis of the film.
03:26 Can you explain that a little bit of how you obtained those interviews and why you
03:31 were so fascinated by what these musicians had to say?
03:35 Yeah, I was very interested when I discovered his music and also what happened to him,
03:42 Tenorio Jr.
03:44 So I started doing research and interviews with any people that I could find related
03:52 to him and to the facts that happened.
03:57 And my very first idea was, if we can say, a more conventional documentary.
04:04 But then when I worked with Chary, with Mariscal in Chico and Rita, I discovered animation
04:16 as an incredible language who could be used in documentary too.
04:23 And it will give me the opportunity of talking about a musician, an artist, not just as a
04:32 dead man, as a missing person, but also as a living human being, as a great musician.
04:39 And I think my first commitment was to be fair to Tenorio Jr.
04:46 I think you must do something for him doing that movie, not just for us, for him and also
04:56 for the audience to discover him.
04:58 But what I wanted is the audience to know him, to meet him and to listen to his music.
05:07 Yes, and he really comes alive.
05:09 The music is so extraordinary.
05:12 But Javier, how did you approach the animation for it?
05:16 I've never seen animation this colorful, this alive.
05:20 It's really quite stunning.
05:22 Well, I tried to listen to the music.
05:27 I tried to understand what is the feeling.
05:33 And I was so excited with the idea of Fernando.
05:39 Thanks to the animation, we can give again the life to Tenorio and recording and recreate
05:51 this moment.
05:52 And I try to the colors in this space is like a dream, is like a remember.
06:05 And with the colors, I try to to say, look at how happy and how nice and how complex
06:17 and how good feeling between all these musicians.
06:24 I spent like three months to animate this part.
06:32 And I was with Fernando.
06:34 Very exciting to do.
06:38 Well, Tenorio is dead, but he's not dead.
06:43 We live the life and we can listen and see how he played the piano.
06:52 And he was the leader of this.
06:55 And they were so young people.
06:58 And in a great moment, it was a big explosion.
07:03 Yeah, he was only 24 years old when he came up with his first album that he was first
07:10 and only album, I guess, where he was the band leader.
07:13 But a huge influence well beyond that.
07:16 But Fernando, maybe you can explain a little bit.
07:19 Of course, Tenorio Jr. is Brazilian, but he was visiting Buenos Aires with Vinicius de
07:27 Moraes and performing there.
07:30 And then in March of 1964, he suddenly disappears.
07:35 Can you talk a little bit about what happened?
07:37 And it has to do, of course, with the politics and the coup that was going, coups really
07:44 going on throughout Latin America.
07:46 But he's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
07:49 Absolutely.
07:51 They were just before Buenos Aires.
07:53 They spent a month doing the summer season in Uruguay, you know, in a place, a casino
08:03 playing there that Vinicius used to go in the summers.
08:06 And then when they were there, someone called from Buenos Aires just for making two nights
08:15 in this big theater in Buenos Aires.
08:19 And they say, OK, let's do that at the end of the tour, no, before we go back to Brazil.
08:26 And then the second night, they didn't knew.
08:29 They were completely ignorant of what was going on at that time in Buenos Aires, who
08:37 was a war climber in the streets.
08:41 Every day there were killings and bombs and kidnapping.
08:48 People were kidnapped in the streets and things.
08:51 And Tenorio was taken back clearly by mistake.
08:57 But they tortured him during nine days before killing him.
09:01 And in this period of time, the coup d'etat, the military coup d'etat take place in the
09:10 middle of the nine days, final nine days of his life.
09:15 It is a tragedy, but it shows at what point violence and all this war and all these things
09:26 so stupid, monstrous, but arbitrary, completely senseless.
09:33 It's just the monumental stupidity of the human race, no?
09:41 Killing people as it happens every day now.
09:46 Yes, absolutely.
09:48 And you take an interesting approach here because you have sort of a somewhat fictional
09:55 frame around it.
09:56 And this is where Jeff Goldblum comes in as the narrator.
09:59 He is playing an American writer who gets interested in Bossa Nova.
10:06 He goes to Brazil and then he finds out about this extraordinary man, Tenorio Jr.
10:13 And so Jeff Goldblum was actually kind of a fictional character.
10:19 Can you explain both using that device to frame the story and how you got Jeff Goldblum
10:25 to take part in the film?
10:27 He's an old friend.
10:29 We did a movie together 30 years ago and we keep in touch and in friendly terms, our
10:38 friendship has been kept all this time.
10:41 And from the very beginning, I thought of him because I love his voice.
10:47 The fact that he's a pianist gives it a supplementary sense to it.
10:53 But also the character is only small part fictional because it's a kind of alter ego.
11:03 He's doing what I did and meeting the people that I met.
11:08 But I always thought, what the hell is a Spanish director doing there?
11:15 Because Bossa Nova and Brazilian music were not so influential in Spain at that period.
11:26 In the United States, it was a great following of the Brazilian music and vice versa.
11:33 And in Brazil, they influence in both sense, American and Brazilian music.
11:40 So that's the beautiful part of the story.
11:46 And the dark part of the story is also that in a way, historically, United States and
11:54 Latin America were connected by not the best reason during that historical period.
12:04 So I thought it was more interesting and more truthful to the story to make it an American
12:13 than a Spanish.
12:15 Right, because Americans should understand that, of course, it was the CIA in many cases
12:21 that was certainly aware of, if not responsible in some degree for these coups that were going
12:29 on, right wing coups in the middle of the Cold War, of course.
12:33 A few years later in Chile, you have the Augusto Pinochet who is put into power replacing Salvador
12:40 Allende.
12:41 So there's all this politics and the US is totally involved in that.
12:45 I did want to ask, Javier, I was wondering in creating the animation, there's some reference
12:53 video that you're looking at in order to kind of figure out how to create these scenes or
12:59 how does that happen?
13:01 What is your reference point for creating the art?
13:07 Well, Fernando working during four or five years and make a crazy and very, very deep,
13:18 excellent work to research and many, many interviews.
13:24 And because we are very friends, I know these images before we decide to make the animation.
13:36 And one day when Fernando made the script and said, OK, now we have the script and this
13:44 will be animation, he bring me all the information in a lot of the films and the voices and the
13:57 reference.
13:58 So I started to try to listen very well the script, try what the script need, what this
14:09 idea of Fernando needed.
14:11 And the result must be a documentary and very, very real one.
14:21 And in another part is when the people talk, we must illustrate what is the memory of the
14:35 characters.
14:37 So I decide to make one part very realistic and I try to make a little RG Tintin and also
14:50 recreate very well Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or New York and try to make a very realistic
15:01 reference.
15:03 And in another part, when there is the illustration of the memory, try to use different styles,
15:15 more like noir or very dark or the love scenes when Carmen and Tenorio, they meet for the
15:29 first time and try to make more an animated, more simple and more caricature and more extremely
15:43 the colors and not realistic.
15:47 So it's like a mix all the time.
15:53 So my work always is drawing the script and try to understand very well what is the script
16:08 and what is the, and well, Fernando helped me a lot and we're working very good together.
16:17 Yes, of course.
16:19 And you earned an Oscar nomination.
16:21 It's a very good gift.
16:24 He bring a lot of material and was amazing.
16:29 Was very easy.
16:31 Well, it's an extraordinary film and a really amazing experience for the audience, I think.
16:37 And so moving to hear people remember Tenorio Jr. and then we hear his music, which speaks,
16:46 if you will, for itself.
16:48 Is They Shot the Piano Player.
16:51 And we have been joined by the directors, Fernando Trujillo and Javier Mariscal.
16:56 Thank you so much, gentlemen.
16:58 Thank you, Matt.
17:00 Thank you, Matt.
17:02 [BLANK_AUDIO]