(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TUNER")
DUSTIN HOFFMAN: (As Harry) Good. Next.
ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
The new movie "Tuner" opens with Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman huddled over a piano. Woodall plays Niki, a former piano virtuoso turned piano tuner, while Hoffman plays Harry, his mentor.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TUNER")
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) What?
LEO WOODALL: (As Niki) She wants us to fix the toilet.
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) Do we look like plumbers? No. We don't fix toilets. We're piano tuners. We fix pianos.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) OK. Two hundred.
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) Five hundred, and we'll talk.
NADWORNY: While on the job, Niki discovers that his incredibly sensitive hearing, used to perfectly tune the piano strings, can pick up on the subtle clicks and movements needed to crack safes, pulling him towards a life of crime. Leo Woodall joins us now to talk about "Tuner." Welcome, Leo.
WOODALL: Hello.
NADWORNY: Hello. Piano tuning isn't Niki's dream job, is it?
WOODALL: No.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: No. It's definitely a fallback. When Niki's hyperacusis - his condition - really takes a hold, kind of loud-ish noises that one would hear on a daily basis - for someone like Niki, they're extremely loud and painful and can even cause seizures. That's how he joins Harry tuning pianos.
NADWORNY: So one night, while Niki is on the job, he meets a group of thieves who are kind of struggling to crack a safe, and Niki decides to give it a try. What do you think changes in him when the safe opens?
WOODALL: You know, he had dreams of what his life would be. And, you know, he's a young guy, mid-20s, who can't go to parties, can't meet people, can't go on dates. His life is pretty mundane, and that's incredibly frustrating. And so when he cracks this safe, he gets a kick out of it.
NADWORNY: And it's also, like, this immense validation, a little bit, too.
WOODALL: Yeah. It's small, but it's still very real - a feeling of this curse may be becoming a bit of a blessing.
NADWORNY: Had you played piano before you did this?
WOODALL: No. Not really. I had a handful of either scores from films or just songs that I like that I had kind of worked out how to play one-handed. But playing two-handed was a different ballgame, and so to play Niki, it required months and months of piano training.
NADWORNY: Yeah, because you're emulating a virtuoso.
WOODALL: Yeah. I mean...
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: There are some things that you have to allow (laughter) the movie magic to cover.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: It's a really difficult instrument. A lot of it was physicality.
NADWORNY: OK. What do you mean?
WOODALL: Any true pianist will tell you that you need to sit on the edge of the seat, never fully on the stool, which, you know, obviously I hadn't thought of. I sat - plonked right on the center of that stool, and they said, no. Move forward. And then the hands. Your knuckles need to be over your fingers. And then once we got down those sort of basics, then you can start having fun with it. And, like, my favorite thing was to do the huge, like, flicks. You know, like, when the finger flicks a key, and then the hand, like, comes up to the sky. And then there's, like, a sort of pianist slack jaw, apparently. Your jaw's very loose, and your head is just kind of shaking along with whatever the keys are doing. It feels right. Whether it looks right, I don't know.
NADWORNY: You said, like, before you learned, you had some songs you liked or some movie scores you liked. You bought, like, piano books?
WOODALL: No, not even that committed. I would just go on YouTube. I would look at how to play. I think my repertoire was "In Bruges." You know the film "In Bruges"? (Imitating piano).
(SOUNDBITE OF CARTER BURWELL'S "PROLOGUE")
WOODALL: I love that piece of music, so I learned that. The "La La Land" tune.
(SOUNDBITE OF JUSTIN HURWITZ'S "MIA & SEBASTIAN'S THEME")
WOODALL: I'm not going to lie here. It was all one-handed.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: But then my main - my main tune is "Interstellar"...
(SOUNDBITE OF HANS ZIMMER'S "DAY ONE (INTERSTELLAR THEME)")
WOODALL: ...Which I can now play two-handed in a very fun way.
NADWORNY: Yeah, a true takeaway from making this film. I want to talk to you a little bit about working with Dustin Hoffman.
WOODALL: Please. I could talk about him all day.
NADWORNY: You guys have such good chemistry throughout the movie.
WOODALL: Oh, that's good.
(LAUGHTER)
NADWORNY: I read that a lot of your interactions on-screen were actually improv.
WOODALL: Elissa, it was basically all improv.
NADWORNY: What?
WOODALL: Had I known how much improv I was going to be doing with Dusty, my level of anxiety would have been through the roof.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: I mean, he's famous for it. I did know that going in. I just didn't know what it really looked like. But we had scenes that were one-eighth of a page, which is two or three lines. And we would do 20-, 25-minute takes because he just talks.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: It was some of the most fun I've ever had acting. When someone is that good, it makes you better because they draw you into the world of make-believe further than you thought you could go. And he has no qualms with saying whatever the hell he wants, and if it sticks, it does. If it doesn't, whatever. But there were some crazy stories that made no sense about the level of mercury in tuna fish and sharks, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TUNER")
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) I want to tell you something about tuna fish, OK?
WOODALL: (As Niki) What do you want to tell me about tuna fish?
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) Big tunas have much more mercury.
WOODALL: (As Niki) What?
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) You can get sick from having too much mercury in your body. Did you know that? So I stopped eating big tunas.
WOODALL: (As Niki) You just ate a tuna salad sandwich.
These stories would go on for eight minutes, and you're just like, where is this going?
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WOODALL: But then Dustin finds a perfect way to button it up.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TUNER")
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) You have to worry about - I forgot the word.
DUSTIN HOFFMAN AND LEO WOODALL: (As Harry and Niki) Inflammation.
HOFFMAN: (As Harry) Inflammation. That's what they - that's what kills you. Inflammation.
WOODALL: It was a gift for me to get to bear witness to it and play my own little part in it.
NADWORNY: I did want to ask you about kind of your lineage of being an actor. We saw that you were related to the silent film actress Maxine Elliott. Is that something that guided you into acting?
WOODALL: Honestly, Elissa, it was kind of the opposite. I didn't have an active rejection of becoming an actor. It definitely never felt like a natural course. Once I had become an actor, it was really cool to learn this sort of history. I don't think I knew about Maxine until maybe I was at drama school. Maybe even a little bit later.
NADWORNY: That's cool. I'm going to bring us back to the film. For Niki, playing the piano - it's his whole life. Do you think that the film is kind of a cautionary tale about tying yourself, like, too closely to one identity?
WOODALL: Oh, Elissa. I don't know. I - here's what I think. When you have a passion, even if you don't have any talent, it should be a part of your life in some shape or form. For someone like Niki, he had all the talent in the world and the passion, and I think the two of those kind of combined to make it feel like a purpose. And it was taken away from him, and I think that can relate to everyone in some shape or form. It's something that is truly, truly important to you. How much does that shape who you are, and if it's taken away from you, what does that look like?
NADWORNY: That's Leo Woodall, who stars in the new movie Tuner, which is out soon. Thank you for joining us, Leo.
WOODALL: Thank you, Elissa.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELLE CHAN'S "KINGDOM ANIMALIA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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