The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

The 60-Day Course in Perfect Fake Piano Playing (Via New York Times)

For his role in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Mr. Duris - like his character, Thomas - labored over Bach's Toccata in E minor (BWV 914), a technically demanding piece that leaves no room for error or approximation.

But Mr. Duris didn't need to look far for a coach. His sister, Caroline Duris, 36, is a professional pianist and piano teacher in Paris. He worried at first that working with his big sister would be too comfortable, that it wouldn't be intimidating enough to make him practice.

"But I love her perceptions about music so much," he said, "and I realized that being a good student with her would be a question of the family's honor."

Ms. Duris did more than teach her brother; she played the music heard throughout the film. And an accidental moment of frustration that was captured during one of her recording sessions, in which she complained that her heart was beating too fast, made its way into the movie, depicting the voice of Thomas's mother on an old tape he listens to again and again.

Mr. Duris worked with his sister for three hours a day over two months, usually at their parents' house or at a music shop in Paris, where they had a practice room.

Like his character, he stayed up late in his flat playing a rented digital piano with headphones. But training his fingers was only part of the learning process. Mr. Duris says he wanted to understand what kind of mental space a pianist inhabits.

"When they sit down to play, are they nervous?" he asked. "Are they inspired?"

To find out, he watched videos of famous pianists. He learned that there were few physical rules, that each pianist had distinctive gestures and a personal style. "They all fed me," he said.

In the film, Thomas repeatedly watches a black-and-white video clip showing the fingers of Vladimir Horowitz curling down the piano in a long run. This obsession with watching performance videos was just one detail from Mr. Duris's real-life study that inspired Mr. Audiard's piano scenes in the movie.

Another source of inspiration was the real-life rapport between teacher and student, which informed Thomas's scenes with Miao Lin. She speaks virtually no French in the film, so she and Thomas communicate through imitation, repetition and body language. Even this, Mr. Duris says, mirrored his lessons with his sister, though they had the luxury of speech communication.

"Speaking or not speaking, it's the same," he said. In any music lesson, the teacher models good technique, watches, listens, waits and says, "Again" (one of the few words Miao Lin speaks), many, many times.

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