Anxious parents outside the studio worry about how few dancers will be accepted.
Judges point out the ballerina from before, whispering, “Not enough turnout.”
“Bad feet.”
“But…lookat her.”
You know the performances like you danced them yourself onstage at Lincoln Center.
you’re free to quote all the iconic lines.
Every song from the soundtrack takes you right back to the movie.
But did you know there was originally a character who dies in the script?
What mistake has haunted the star of the movie for the past two decades?
“I was really fortunate that he championed for me.”
And Schull had exactly the kind of training and background that Hytner was looking for in his star.
“I had been dancing for my entire life until that point,” she says.
After two years there, she was accepted into the San Francisco Ballet School for the summer.
“Towards the end of my year is when the casting director came.
“After finishing the movie, I went to London on tour with the company.”
The parallels are not lost on Schull that her experience is pretty much exactly the same as Jody’s.
“Yeah, although I didn’t have an illicit affair with any company members!”
“I didn’t have film acting experience.
I was in the right place at the right time when I got cast to be Jody Sawyer.”
Cast members, assemble!
ButCenter Stagerelied on so much more than just Jody to become a hit.
“We started working on the choreography before we started filming anything,” Schull says.
And it didn’t take long for the group to become real friends during their time off filming.
“We were all around the same age if not the exact same age.
It was just a gift.
It was a lot of fun.”
“We were all looking forward to that,” she says with a laugh.
“It also happened to be the first and only day my parents came to visit on set.
We were just chomping at the bit to start throwing things at each other.”
After “about a dozen takes,” Hytner finally released the sponges.
“He just let us rip and we went for it,” Schull says with another laugh.
“I remember my parents just sitting there watching like, ‘This is your job?!’
Oh God, it was fun.”
“I wasn’t a company member yet.
“And Ethan and Sascha are so good.
Both of them have retired now, butgoshthey were good.”
Even just rehearsing alongside them while they would “mark” (a.k.a.
not do the moves full-out) intimidated Schull.
“He would go through the motions and still look sensational.
He’s just gorgeous.”
Schull adds, “Sascha is nothing to sneeze at either!
But at the same time they weren’t intimidating because they were good guys.
He didn’t need to do that.”
But the very first scene that Schull filmed was left on the cutting room floor.
The character wasn’t completely cut from the film.
“He’s our limo driver on the day we go out,” she says.
Schull remembers the original version of the movie as more tragic because of that cut story line.
“That would have taken the movie to a much darker place,” she says.
“It’s probably why things got changed around.
“And it just would have been so darn long if they had included everything.”
at a salsa bar.
But it was also one of the most challenging for her as well.
“I specifically remember those were a couple of long days,” she says.
“It was a style of dance I had never done before.
I had just come from a ballet school where you do the steps, everything is very specific.”
So that’s how she approached learning the salsa dance, but with much different results.
“I learned the steps on the counts,” she explains.
That was a blast.”
And things were steamy… but not because of the hookup.
“We’re in Brooklyn, so just consider the muggy factor.
I was wearing tights, a leotard, jeans, a shirt, and an angora sweater.
Between every single smooch, I was sopping up sweat.”
“For most of it, I was fairly sleep-deprived,” she reveals.
“I worked every single day for the three or four months that we shot.
In the beginning when we weren’t shooting I was rehearsing.
“It was the perfect way to do it,” she says.
“Now, loving back, if I was given an opportunity now I would probably overanalyze things.
Then, it was the best summer job I could have possibly dreamt of.”
Compared to them, they had so much experience and their careers blossomed so beautifully.
Costume change
Center Stagebrought new meaning to the term costume change during Jody’s final workshop performance.
And while Schull loved how it turned out onscreen, it was less fun figuring it out onstage.
“We had to work hard on getting that tutu ripped off,” she says.
But in order for the snaps to come loose, he needed to yank me backwards.”
But Schull kept that rip-away tutu as a souvenir to celebrate successfully pulling it off.
It’s not, what am I going to do with a rip away tutu?
[Laughs] But I was excited about that.”
“I would have done that movement a little more freely.
But not everyone’s work is forever embedded on celluloid.
That’s what makes it frustrating.”
Those shoes were slippery little suckers.
So we’d do it again and I’d fall again.”
Schull remembers Hytner being satisfied with the takes she had done.
“He was like, ‘The curtain is coming down, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine.
We got it,'” she says.
That’s the final few seconds of this revenge and assertive validation of Jody.
It’s her power dance.
But I was so frustrated."
So when did she finally stop?
“So I gave up at that point.
But that was also my learning from school where you finish every single thing you do.
It was still a school mentality with that.”
“The last time I saw Zoe was a few years ago.
I saw Susan last year.
They’re all beautiful people; I didn’t fake any of those friendships.”
But Zoe saw me from across the room and started to cry.
“I have this reminder all of the time.
I’m very, very lucky and I know that.”
