• Behind the scenes of The Sound of Music
Stroppy actors, nuisance Von Trapps and a downpour of Austrian rain were just a few of the headaches that nearly put the kybosh on The Sound of Music ever being filmed at all…
Rolling Austrian mountains, a hopeful, true-life story, a score from composing legends and a stellar cast of actors. From the very beginning, The Sound of Music should have been a dream film to put together.
But as a new book, The Sound of Music:
The Making of America’s Favourite Movie, by Julia Antopol Hirsch reveals, for all the eventual box office success the film enjoyed, there were countless moments when it looked like it might not even get into the cinemas, let alone into the hearts of the world.
CLIMB EV’RY MOUNTAIN
With beautiful Austria as its stage, the crew of The Sound of Music wasted no time searching high and low for the perfect location for every scene. What they didn’t bank on, though, was that such an excursion would actually land them in prison!
It was while looking for a backdrop for the opening sequence – where Maria proclaims the hills are alive – that the helicopter pilot hired to help them mistakenly landed on German, rather than Austrian soil, without a permit and they were promptly arrested. They were released soon after but this clearly wasn’t a great start to the film.
And that opening sequence remained
troublesome throughout. After the jail break, the production team earmarked a beautiful mountaintop meadow with hay and grass that they decided to film in. They paid the farmer who owned the land to keep the meadow exactly as it was. But of course, when they returned to film some months later, the farmer had cut everything down! Fake trees and bales of hay had to be brought in as well as a fake brook for Maria to throw stones in. However, the contrary farmer got so cross about this brook – which he said made his cows go on milk strike – that he stabbed the brook with a pitchfork and drained it entirely of water.
RAINDROPS ON ROSES
This was all ironic given water became the biggest headache of the entire film. Despite doing a weather survey before filming began – which showed nothing but blue skies – The Sound of Music was blighted day after day by non-stop rain which time and again forced a last-minute rescheduling of filming.
Once again, it was the opening scene that was most problematic as it required beautiful weather and came at the very end of the filming schedule; every time cast and crew hiked up the mountain, it would bucket it down with rain and filming would have to be postponed
The film was now 25 days over schedule and $740,000 over budget and the film company gave an ultimatum: finish by next Thursday or come home and shoot it in the studio. Sure enough, Thursday came, along with the rain. But about midafternoon, a miracle struck and the weather broke for half an hour during which time everyone ran out to get those final shots.
Sadly for Julie Andrews, the clear weather didn’t help the fact she had to run, twirl and sing with a helicopter jet blowing wind in her face as that scene needed to be shot from above. Several takes of Julie falling flat on her back and a lot of frustration later and at last that scene was done.
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MARIA?
Both the name of the song and a genuine dilemma the production team had to face in the form of the original Maria von Trapp.
From the start, Maria, who’d written the book of her life on which the film was based, wanted to be involved and continually interfered, complaining that the film was not faithful to her story. She moaned that her family had climbed a mountain to Italy, not Switzerland as in the film, and was enraged that they’d made her captain husband into a cold, distant father when she depicts a much softer, kindlier man in her book. Then came the day where she dropped by on set and announced she wanted to be in the movie. Director Robert Wise agreed to let her live out her dream and be an extra in the, I Have Confidence scene. As often happens, the scene took a lot of takes – more than three hours – and by the end, Maria Von Trapp was so exhausted she declared, “that’s one ambition I’m finally giving up.”
But she wasn’t the only problem personality for the film. Christopher Plummer, who played Captain Von Trapp, also put a spanner in the works when he announced he was quitting when he realised his singing would be dubbed. To appease him, the producers put a clause in his contract saying they’d re-record his voice after filming if he thought it was strong enough. At the end of the movie, they played back the recording to Plummer who quietly agreed that his voice wasn’t right. Shortly after, Bill Lee was asked to dub Plummer’s voice.