DEEPFOCUS: Jim Sturgess

The Harvard Crimson film page introduces a new section, Deep Focus, in this week’s issue. Geared to provide you cineastes out there with quality material for cocktail party conversation, Deep Focus will feature interviews, commentaries, and analyses, all offering further insights into current films still playing in theaters. We hope you enjoy it. —The Arts Board



It’s no easy task to make a movie musical resemble real life. But according to Jim Sturgess, star of the Beatles-infused, Julie Taymor-directed film “Across the Universe,” it’s not impossible.

In a phone interview with The Crimson, Sturgess said the cast had a unique strategy for avoiding the more over-the-top aspects of the genre: studying other musicals and taking note of what not to do.

“They’d be talking and speaking, and then suddenly they would just burst out into song in this fantastical kind of way,” he said. “And we really didn’t want to do that. We wanted to keep the singing an extension of the dialogue.”

Throughout the interview, the 28-year-old Sturgess—who made his feature-film debut in the movie—emphasized that “Across the Universe” is no ordinary musical, and that making it was no ordinary performing experience.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Making a film based on Beatles covers is a formidable task. For starters, how do you pull together an original plot from lyrics everyone has already interpreted? And how do you rearrange classic tunes without offending legions of Beatles fans?

Instead of splicing studio-recorded singing into the film’s sound track, Taymor, who won a Tony for directing Broadway’s “The Lion King,” recorded the vast majority of the film’s songs live on the set.

“Julie was really desperate that we did it live, to bridge the gap,” Sturgess said.

“Across the Universe” is not your average song-and-dance musical. Dialogue blends into lyrics and trippy, dreamlike sequences, and at the center of it all stands Sturgess. He plays Jude, singing his way through the 1960s.

“As far as my musical background, I came from being in a band back in London,” said Sturgess, and like his character, he was blown away by New York City.

“I had never really traveled to America,” he said.

EERIE SYMMETRY

One particular moment of filming stood out in Sturgess’s mind—one with near-mystical connotations.

He told of the intensity of a scene set to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The filming happened to fall on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

“Julie just came up to me, and we spoke about John Lennon at length,” he recalled. “And then she said, ‘Just go in with him in your heart, in your soul, in your mind. We’re just gonna put the song on a loop, and you’re just gonna keep singing, and we’ll just keep rolling.’”

In the film, the scene does keep rolling, with Jude escaping from youthful naïveté and entering into frightening maturity.

According to Sturgess, “Across the Universe,” its characters, the 1960s, and the Beatles themselves all share this progression.

“The film sort of expands off of the innocence of the sixties, and the bubblegum sort of years…and then as the Vietnam War was introduced, the characters become more politically weighted, as did the music,” he said. “As the characters change and start becoming more experimental, so did the world around them, and so did the music of the Beatles.”

—Staff writer Benjamin C. Burns can be reached at bcburns@fas.harvard.edu.