Instead of pre-recording the songs in Annette, director Leos Carax had the actors perform every musical number live on set. This led to Adam Driver singing Sparks songs while simulating oral sex on his co-star Marion Cotillard, which honestly sounds like quite a mouthful.
Via Insider, Cotillard dove into the deep end in a press packet for Cannes Film Festival, where Annette opened the festival today, July 6th. “On most classic musicals, you record your songs in advance and then you do playback on the set,” she said. “But there, Leos wanted everything to be completely live.”
Obviously, this didn’t make the actors’ jobs easier. “It added to the complexity of the set: we found ourselves singing in very complicated positions, doing back-crawling or mimicking cunnilingus; acrobatic positions that technically modify your song [the way you sing]. But that was the effect Leos was looking for: he wanted the voices are modified, thwarted, by the real [situation].” And here we thought “Peter Piper” was a tongue twister.
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All the songs in Annette come from Sparks, who in May shared a preview with “So May We Start.” The story follows a stand-up comedian (Driver), and his famous opera-singer wife (Cotillard) after the birth of their daughter, Annette. The film will play in theaters starting August 6th and come to Amazon Prime on August 20th. Revisit the trailer below.
