Chris Knight, The National Post
Published: Thursday, September 13, 2007
Every filmmaker worries about pleasing the critics. The two most worrisome and influential for Julie Taymor and her Beatles musical Across the Universe weren't Ebert & Roeper, however, but Sir Paul and Ringo.
"I was sitting right next to Paul McCartney," says Taymor, remembering an early screening, "and so scared and nervous, and he really liked the movie and under his breath he started even singing one of the songs. I could feel him moving to All My Loving."
Ringo Starr took in the film in Los Angeles at a screening attended by Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess, who play the lead characters of Lucy and Jude in the film. "We spent the whole time watching him watching the film," says Sturgess, "and we're like, 'Yes! He's tapping his foot!' "
Sturgess, a 26-year-old from London, got to meet Starr after the screening and says: "The biggest compliment of all was he didn't realize that I wasn't from Liverpool. If Ringo Starr bought it, that was good enough for me."
Across the Universe had a gala screening at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday and opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver tomorrow, with wider release to follow. The movie uses Beatles songs to tell of a group of young people in the '60s: Jude, who travels from Liverpool to America to find his father; Lucy, with whom he falls in love; and Max (Joe Anderson), Lucy's carefree brother, who gets drafted and sent to Vietnam.
Minor characters such as Prudence, Sadie and JoJo allow for more lyrics and songs to be used; in all, 33 of the group's numbers saturate the picture, and the two-hour-and-13-minute movie has only about a half hour of actual dialogue.
Taymor won two Tonys -- direction and costume design -- for her Broadway adaption of Disney's The Lion King. Both those talents are on display in Across the Universe. "You'd be walking around one day and suddenly you'd see this giant puppet being built in the next studio," Sturgess recalls.
For Taymor, part of the appeal of Across the Universe was its epic nature. "You have a love story but you also have a story of ambition," she says. "You can't just do the hippies and the psychedelics without doing the race riots and the darkness."
The original idea from screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais was to use 15 songs, but the concept kept growing. "The story was created by listening to 200 songs and choosing songs that could lend themselves to this basic story," says Taymor, "and then the story was created around the songs. It was a round robin that way, one thing inspiring another."
In addition to his powerful singing voice in Across the Universe, Sturgess stars in the upcoming films The Other Boleyn Girl with Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana; and 21 with Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne. He also has a role in Crossing Over, starring Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd and Sean Penn.
"I had a great time because I had the privilege of discovering him," says Taymor proudly.
The film held open casting sessions in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool and America, but when she saw Sturgess, "I knew right away. There was no doubt. He had the edge. He had the voice. There's no disconnect between his speaking voice and when he starts to sing, he's a consummate musician."
She says Sturgess got an early taste of fame at a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which has yet to be broadcast. "It was like being at an early Beatles concert," she says. "The swooning ladies!"
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