Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Mozart in the Jungle is a hopeful ode to the madness and mayhem that is artistic creation — which means that it’s a bit of an oddball in the age of sardonic sadcoms and challenging dramas. The Amazon Original series took home two major Golden Globes last year — for Best Comedy and Best Lead Actor In a Comedy (Gael Garcia Bernal) — but was shut out of this year’s Emmys. It was an anomaly that wasn’t lost on the press.
I asked Executive Producers Paul Weitz and Roman Coppola about this during the show’s panel at Summer TCA and Weitz got a little flustered, saying, “Um, well, I think we were thrilled to get noticed at the Golden Globes and, um, it’s probably something to aspire to, getting nominated for an Emmy. I think that it’s a show, on some level, of pointing towards your aspirations so, I…I don’t know…I’m fumbling.”
Luckily, I had a chance to follow up with Weitz and Coppola after the panel. I brought up the moment and Weitz joked, “I felt like I was having a fucking acid flashback, honestly, because normally I think I’m decent at doing press and I finally realized someone was going to ask about the aspect of having won a Golden Globe and not getting nominated for an Emmy. I gave fake, joke-y bad answers, but whatever. I think the thing was that I was actually trying to answer the question if one had thought three years ago when we were starting this that we would be thought of in terms of possibly winning a Golden Globe or something, we would’ve been like, ‘Holy shit! That would be an incredible dreamlike by-product of this.'”
“But I didn’t want to be dismissive because the real answer was, it was like for one moment I heard while I was in Venice I didn’t get nominated for an Emmy, and I was like, ‘Okay! Well, that’s too bad,'” Weitz laughed, “and then we moved on to getting on a boat and going to shoot at the grand canal in Venice. But I think the real answer is it seems to me that there are so many friggin’ good shows and the great thing about this one is that it’s distinct and not like any of the others, I don’t think. And the alchemy of the weird Preston Sturges-type optimism with some inherently cynical aspects of the storytelling I do think is unique. I don’t really know how to process any of the rest of it.”
Coppola said, “For me, coming more from the film backgrounds — we both do — it’s not like we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re making a career this way.’ When you get something, it’s such a blast. And if you don’t get something, you never expected anything.”
Weitz added, “I think it’s all great and it’s all a trap. To be frank, winning a Golden Globe can be a trap. You could be like, ‘Oh, what did we do that made them like it?’ as opposed to, ‘What is inherently, organically happening with the characters and what’s fun for us to discover?’ This sounds weird, but sometimes people who really get lauded on a constant basis — I would imagine that it makes it harder for them on an artistic level because you’re very conscious of what people like about your work and it makes it scarier to diverge from that. But sometimes, in order to be creative you have to diverge.”
Season 3 of Mozart in the Jungle is diverging a bit by introducing opera and EDM to the mix. This year, Rodriguo will pair up with an aging diva played by international superstar Monica Bellucci. I was curious how they came to cast Bellucci over an established opera diva, and how they managed to nail the voice of a towering star.
Coppola effused over Bellucci: “She is such an alluring actress and the right age. Opera singers at a certain point they age and your voice changes and there’s kind of a threshold for realism’s sake of what you can perform at this high level. And she’s right at that perfect point for her age. She was such a talented person, charismatic person —”
“Yeah, it was interesting, the thought of casting a real opera singer,” said Weitz. “They’re booked. They like know what opera house they’re singing in two years from now. But you do cast the voice and we had a singer, Ana Maria Martinez, who is a wonderful star singer, but also was interested in the storytelling aspect of it, because we needed somebody who would not only sing the arias but who also would sing a rehearsal or — there’s a moment where she first sings in the show where she has a little bit of a meltdown and we needed the person doing that voice to be up there doing that.”
Weitz continued, “As Roman pointed out, this is somebody who is a soprano and now her voice is changing slightly and Rodrigo, one of the things he’s doing is pushing her to try different roles that she might not have done in the past and that, due to her ego, she might not want to do now. So even that might have been difficult for some opera divas in real life to lend their voice to. They don’t want to do that. They only want to do certain roles. So Ana Maria was awesome and fun and was totally available and gave great advice and pointed to things such as, when you’re an opera singer your instrument is part of your body, and it’s like your soul. And Monica was great, too, because Gael had always been a fan of Monica’s and she’s a little older than he is and I think he had a wee bit of a crush on her and so all of that fed into this thing of having this Callas-like singer coming back.”
Season Three of Mozart in the Jungle is now streaming on Prime Video.
