People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.
In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.
If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.
Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.
Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world.
Mozart was a punk, which people seem to forget. He was a naughty, naughty boy.
I thought Leonardo DiCaprio was amazing in Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo and Juliet.'
Once I looked into a mirror at my face I felt like it was completely convincing. I was Salieri.