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Monologues from Plays. Search all monologues from plays. Search all monologues. Scenes from Plays. Search all scenes from plays. Sign In. Edit Amadeus Showing all 4 items. The Orion Pictures logo, which was seen at the beginning of the film when it was first released theatrically, was not shown when the film played on both cable and commercial television, and is not seen on the VHS or DVD releases.
The director's cut adds the following scenes twenty minutes in total : When Salieri talks of his initial success in Vienna, a section has been added where Salieri describes how he believed God had accepted his vow, and how he honored it, working hard and often for free, while staying chaste.
When Salieri describes his first impression of Mozart's music to the priest, a shot has been added, where Salieri expresses his denial, saying that the music couldn't be anything but an "accident".
After that a scene has been added where Salieri and Mozart visits Cavalieri in her lodge. Caterina throws some surly remarks about Constanze before she too comes and asks that she and Mozart go home. Mozart walks out on Caterina, and the scene goes to Salieri saying that he knew Mozart "had had her". When Salieri asks "What was God up to? After Salieri admits to have started to hate Mozart, a shot has been inserted of Salieri praying, asking that Mozart be sent to Salzburg.
This is immediately followed by the shot of the archbishop telling Leopold that he won't take Mozart back. After Mozart refuses to submit his work for the royal appointment, a scene has been added showing Wolfgang and Constanze arguing.
This establishes that the couple is in need of money. Forman, for his part, believes that ''there must be a way to make any play into a film'' - given a good storyline and good characters; and after seeing the first preview of ''Amadeus'' in London, he began urging Mr. Shaffer to go ahead with the project. The fact that ''Amadeus'' was so stylized, so theatrical - well, so uncinematic, he argued, was actually a blessing - it meant they wouldn't be tempted to merely translate the play to the screen, but would be forced to demolish the original, then totally reimagine it as a film.
In fact, the one thing Mr. Forman says he'd learned from directing adaptations of novels ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' and ''Ragtime'' and a musical ''Hair'' is that you cannot ''just photograph the pages or the play, you have to use the novel or the play as source material for your own vision.
You have to take the basic story and characters, and the spirit of the play, and then start from scratch. And as you go, use what film has to offer. You can't go on comparing this scene to that scene in the play. You have to totally dissociate yourself from the techniques of playwriting. Because Mr. Forman was so worried that elements from ''the stage would creep in and make the film stale,'' he says he developed an ''unobjective resentment'' towards everything in the original show.
Shaffer - who received screen credit for writing the movie - remained considerably fonder of the play he'd spent two and half years writing, and he found himself trying to ''get in the script as much as possible of the original. Given these two points of views, the collaboration between the playwright and the director naturally took on an adversarial, if still amiable, air. Forman, recalling that an argument over a single word could go on for hours. I would want to be better than the last word he said, and he would try to be better than the last word I said.
That supplied a lot of energy to the collaboration. Often it was lines, because Peter's world is theater with its noble theater language, while I am on the other extreme. I like that the dialogue is just one part of human behavior, that what someone says has the same importance as how they walk, how they comb their hair.
So my tendency is sort of not to appreciate the beauty of stage language. On the other hand, Peter is - well, I don't think I ever met anybody who has such a power with words and is enjoying this power. Whatever his misgivings, Mr. Shaffer did agree that the movies require language that is ''less elaborate, less deliberately rhetorical,'' and he says he took ''pains to make the language accessible to a large audience, without condescending to them.
Descriptive and reflective dialogue was also pared away. Perhaps the biggest change in language involved Salieri's monologues. Structured as a confession by Salieri to the audience, the stage version of ''Amadeus'' featured lengthy speeches about God and Mozart and fate. Dazzling as such soliloquies were on stage, they would have seemed unwieldy and pretentious on screen, and so Mr. Forman and Mr. Shaffer tried to replace them with ''visual equivalents'' - images that would convey the same facts and emotions.
For instance, a three page soliloquy at the end of Act I - in which Salieri curses God for giving His voice to the ''spiteful, sniggering, conceited infantine Mozart'' - has been replaced by a simple shot of the composer throwing a crucifix into a burning fireplace. And the conceit of having Salieri confess to the theater audience has been replaced with scenes of him talking to a real priest about his sins - a set-up that allowed Mr.
Shaffer to break up the composer's monologues and transform them into conversations. In switching the emphasis from the verbal to the visual, film tends to turn metaphors into facts - consequently, says Mr. Forman, it calls for a more naturalistic approach. Nobody pretends that the wall of the stage is a real wall, nobody pretends that the tree is a real tree.
But in film, everything is real: tree is real, buildings are real, everything is real. So people have to be as real as possible too - the way they speak, the way they behave has to sustain the scrutiny of anybody who lives and judges people.
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