Winning against stiff competition
TOM HULCE, an enthusiastic and likeable 29-year-old actor has won acclaim for his role as Mozart in Amadeus. And he's also won an Academy Award nomination [...] but he is taking it all very much in his stride.
"I was in Singapore when I heard of the nominations," he says. "I was staying at the Raffles Hotel which is full of romantic fantasies. I was a bit drunk from the sun and a rather vicious drink called the Singapore sling. In the middle of the night friends rang to tell me of the nomination and in my sun-poisoned drunken stupor I failed to get very excited. It's been creeping up on me ever since and I am particularly pleased as it's other actors who have made this choice. A lot of people expected it but I was not sure I was going to get the nomination."
"Our parents and teachers never tell us the truth about these people. They whitewash their image so I had to go back to his letters to find he had a bad boy mentality, He had a love of dirty words and I'm sure he littered Vienna with his extra-marital affairs. To put all that together into one person and to take all those unflattering elements such as his arrogance and infantile behavior and try to mould them into a person audiences could understand was incredibly difficult."
"He [director Milos Forman] did not want us influenced by the image that a historical film should have a museum type feel to it [...] Milos believed that as Mozart and his wife were from the provinces and the streets respectively then they should talk in the sort of American accents we used in the film [...] We wanted to make the film as naturalistic as possible, we did not want to limit an audience's enjoyment because they could not identify with the period. You know some of us spent a lot of time dressing and eating in the costumes of the day. We spent a couple of days living in the Mozart apartment and learned how constrictive the clothes were. It was an interesting period, you know the sexual excitement that must have built up while wearing those clothes would have been really amazing."
