STAGE 2 ENGLISH COMMUNICATIONS TEXT RESPONSE
Shine – Interview with Scott Hicks

David Helfgott. An Australian child prodigy at the piano. Yet not many people have heard of this person. Until now; the 1996 movie Shine starring Geoffrey Rush and Noah Taylor, shows just this; the life of David Helfgott… a rambling and mentally ill, yet brilliant piano player. In an interview with the director, Scott Hicks answers a few pressing questions of the movie.

Interviewer – Thank you for taking the time to have this interview. First up, I would like to know what some of the challenges that you encountered while making the movie?
Scott Hicks – Thanks, it’s good to be here. The main challenge that I found while Shine was in the making, was getting enough …show more content…
With the Rach. 3 being the most challenging piano piece on Earth, I wanted to show the level of intensity that music can come to, especially in the Rach. 3. To help show this, I used a range of techniques I suppose. I wanted to rely more on the visuals rather than dialogue, to help the audience, musicians and non-musicians alike, to really step into the movie and feel and think what David was. What was in the dialogue had to be powerful enough to get the audience thinking and believing that music can be as Cecil Parkes, David’s college professor puts it, “a monster. You must tame it David, or it will swallow you whole.” When David is practising the Rach. 3, I chose heavy sounding parts of the piece to give it that power that it can have over one. In the way of camera techniques, to aid all of this intensity of the music, I used, for example when you first see David playing the piece, he is playing on a grand piano and the camera is speedily turning around the piano and around David’s head. Most of the camera shots were fast, to help convey this anxiety of learning and “taming” the …show more content…
The piece starts off quietly and as any normal piece would with an emphasis on David’s hands on the piano with the camera and doesn’t become fast for a while. As David is playing, his hair is slowly becoming messier, kind of showing some of the intensity of the piece. With no music in front of him, it was all played by memory and at points, he closes his eyes, giving in to the music and its power. Then there is a point in the music, a fair way in, when the music changes. There is a bit of a run and you start to see how frantic the music becomes. From then on the music is tense, David’s face and hair are messy and very, very sweaty, with drops of sweat dripping onto his hands and the piano itself. The piece then becomes very heavy sounding and a point comes when slow motion is used and the heartbeat of David takes over and when the piece finishes and he goes to take his applause, but falls from the sudden lack of tension and adrenaline in his body and suffers a mental breakdown because of it