Seventeen-year-old actress Chloë Grace Moretz ("Hit-Girl" in the Kick-Ass 2 movies) studied the cello for seven months to prepare for her latest role, a conflicted young musician in the film If I Stay. Since Moretz's superpowers don't include violoncello virtuosity, director R.J. Cutler and crew faced an issue that's as old as the movies: making an actor who's playing a musician look convincing in performance scenes.
In the new age of digital filmmaking, it seems the old tricks aren't good enough anymore. Shoot the performance from the back the concert hall so the figure is so small you can't tell it's an actual musician and not the actor? Cheap. Cutting as smoothly as possible between hand/body shots and facial close-ups? Better, but so 20th century.
WQXR's Brian Wise spotted no fewer than nine visual effects personnel in the cast and crew list for If I Stay. The story is about Mia Hall (Moretz), a girl who has an out-of-body experience while in a coma after a car accident. Will she go to Juilliard? Will she stay in Oregon with her rocker boyfriend? Based on the best-selling novel by Gayle Forman, If I Say wouldn't seem to be a film needing nine people manning the digital effects.
Until you think about the cello performance scenes. In a Scripps Media interview Moretz talked about her musical preparation: "Honestly, I'd be silly to say that in seven months I could learn such an intricate instrument, so really what it was was learning the emotionality of it and how you have to surrender your soul to the instrument. The technicality of it came from the Frankenstein cutting of taking my head and putting it on another body of someone playing. That way it matched the two sides of it perfectly."
It's that "Frankenstein cutting" and the subsequent perfect matching, we presume, that required so much digital manpower behind (or rather after) the scenes. Cellist Alisha Bauer is credited with the actual performances and as cello consultant. So what we'll see, instead of clever editing between face and bow shots, or distant man-on-a-galloping-horse shots, is Moretz's head grafted onto the body of a body double.
I'm sure it looks great. And my expectations for film realism have evolved along with everyone else's, so if it didn't look utterly convincing I suppose I'd be taken aback.
On the other hand, I don't remember having any problems with how Gérard Depardieu and Jean-Pierre Marielle's performance scenes looked in Tous Les Matins du Monde, or those of Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths in Hilary and Jackie. Or John Garfield "playing the violin" in Humoresque way back in 1946, for that matter.
It's called suspension of disbelief--something we have apparently come to disbelieve in today.
If I Stay opens this weekend.
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