The classical string music from The Soloist

Musicians are a fantastic source of material for big screen dramas. Their lives blessed with the gift of music but oh-so-often cursed by the weight of this genius. It makes for intense and poignant stories, all heightened by the music which adds an extra later of emotional understanding and artistic expression, soaring with every triumph only to plummet with every failure. And the latest film to take us on such a journey is The Soloist, a look at the unusual friendship between directionless journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a former musical prodigy with schizophrenia who now lives rough on the streets of L.A.

Like many other musical biopics such as 1996’s Shine (starring Geoffrey Rush in his Oscar-winning role), The Soloist is a real-life tale and so, despite the strategic tweaking of some details to ramp up the drama (Lopez is depicted as recently separated while in actuality he is happily married), maintaining the authenticity of the music was essential. It is this shared passion that forges the bond between these most unlikely of friends and with Ayers a previous student of the prestigious Julliard School for performing arts, replicating his talent onscreen was the foundation for all that follows in the film.

Cast as Ayers, Jamie Foxx brings a wealth of musical prestige to the role. He’s a chart-topping singer in his own right having released three albums; scored a critical and commercial hit, not to mention an Oscar, for portraying another famous musician, R’n’B legend Ray Charles in 2004 biopic Ray and is an accomplished pianist, having tickled the ivories since he was young. And yet to convincingly portray Ayers, a cellist who is similarly none-too-shoddy on the violin, it was back to musical bootcamp for the actor.

Providing this education was Ben Hong, a cellist from the L.A. Philharmonic who is a real-life friend of Ayers. This crash course began with getting Foxx familiar and comfortable with the cello as Hong recalls: “Jamie is a great pianist, but the cello is obviously quite different from the piano. So one of the most important things was just getting the basic posture and hold of the instrument and the bow,” he explains. “From there, Jamie had to learn the fingerings and the bowings very accurately, because, since the instrument’s neck is right next to the actor’s face, the posture and hand positions are all very much on display.”

To help the actor in his work, Hong devised a system of numbers which correlated with fingerings, shouting them to Foxx to help him quickly recreate the right notes. “The way we did it in our training was by singing the melody along with the fingering numbers to each note, and that worked quite well,” says the cellist. And Foxx also appreciated the benefits: “It was a great system because it sort of translated the music directly to the fingers, and put me on a fast track to learning all the film’s pieces. It felt like I practiced a zillion hours a day, but when it came to shooting, it really came in handy.”

Indeed he did train intensely, the rehearsals starting in late August 2007 and continuing until mid-April of 2008, and the hard work wasn’t confined to just cello lessons with a few violin ones thrown in as well. When Lopez first meets Ayers, he’s playing a violin and so Foxx tutored under international-recognised violinist Alyssa Park for at least one session per week for two months. Thoroughly committed to the cause, Foxx was undaunted, determined to be as convincing as Ayers as possible. “It was essential that Nathaniel’s playing be genuine,” he says.

Not that he provides the music to accompany the actions, this instead being the work of Hong who described this contribution as “act[ing] with the cello”. He elaborates: “I wasn’t playing as myself; I had to play like somebody else. In fact, I had to play like three different people. I had to play like the young Nathaniel, then as Nathaniel when he was at Juilliard, and then as Nathaniel in the present day. I altered the way I played the instrument for all of them to make it sound believable.”

Helping Hong perfect Ayers’s various playing styles was the film’s Oscar-winning composer Dario Marianelli, who was reuniting with The Soloist’s director Joe Wright after collaborating together on Atonement and Pride & Prejudice. And together, they decided early on in the creative process that the music should have a definite identity and so elected to focus on the world of Beethoven, one of Ayers’s chief inspirations and obsessions. A choice that offered parallels between the lives of Ayers and the historic composer.

“There’s such a full spectrum of emotional expression in Beethoven’s works,” says Hong. “The music heard in the film moves from the tender and incredibly beautiful second movement of the Beethoven “Triple Concerto” to the very, very intense, almost angry and violent moods of certain moments of the “Eroica Symphony”, and reflects so much of the story.” While Wright adds: “I think also that Beethoven is a fascinating character in terms of this particular story because he himself had so many personal struggles, including his deafness, to overcome.”

Other top names in the field of classical music were also enlisted to the production, most notably L.A. Philharmonic’s then-music director and esteemed conductor Esa Pekka Salonen making his film debut. The celebrated Finn is also joined by the University of Southern California Orchestra, who under the guidance of conductor Michael Nowak doubled for the Juilliard Orchestra. But the most significant face is one glimpsed only fleetingly in the front row of the final scene’s concert – Nathaniel Ayers himself.