Mary Astor did the same thing in The Great Lie with Bette Davis. She already had piano experience, but learned all the finger movements for the Tchaikovsky Concerto, which is a challenge even for concert pianists. And she won an Oscar!
Key point- the piano is prerecorded by a pro jazz pianist. It's impossible to learn what he played in the movie in a few months and sound professional. That said, props to him for learning how to play everything in such a short time. Very impressive.
He's "piano syncing." As a pianist, I could tell at 1:30 that his hands aren't quite playing what we're hearing. His fingers are also not quite in the right formation to play those fills at the end of that song. Let's see him play outside the movie, and I'll think differently...
He's an actor, not a musician. As a drummer I shrugged every time while watching Whiplash but Miles Teller, again, is an actor. Now it would be awesome if someone who is an actor is also a musician, like Jared Leto but that doesn't happen often. So even if what they play, for people like us, is noticeably wrong or out of tempo, etc. I much rather have people like Ryan who are not only talented but also dedicated, taking their time into learning something even if it's still wrong, than lazy bastards who use doubles or camera tricks to hide it. Same thing with action movies and shaky cams/cuts with editing.
It's just that they are telling the public that "he's really playing" in the movie, which is a misconception since he's only "piano syncing." Ryan was on Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy was saying, "Wow, you play so well," and Ryan just went along with it knowing that he was just mimicking along with someone who had prerecorded all the notes. Now he's won a Golden Globe for his performance, with a lot of the nod going to the misconception that he learned how to play for the movie, and what we're hearing is actually his notes. It just isn't very authentic...people have been "piano syncing" in movies for years, and no one has ever tried to say it was actually their notes being heard. In "Ricki and the Flash, we're actually hearing Meryl Streep playing guitar, and that is really Jason Gould playing violin in "Prince of Tides," according to Barbra...
fool4singing You have a good point. So you're saying that Ryan didn't actually spend 4 months learning anything and they just played it back and said he did learn it? Or are you and OP calling him out for "not learning" as in "he didn't learn the instrument just learnt how to play that piece for the movie"? Because in that case you're being silly since whenever you start playing an instrument, the first things you do is cover songs.
What we're hearing in the movie is someone else playing, and Ryan learned to put his hands approximately in the same place as the other player for the camera shots, so it would look fairly authentic. I'm sure he did learn some chords and such in his lessons, but not near to the level that we're hearing in the film. That sort of technique takes several years achieve, and even then, you have to start when you're fairly young. Like I said earlier, the giveaway for me was at 1:30. As a pianist, I could tell what I heard being played didn't match what I saw his fingers doing...
Yep. He learned the pieces, and did it well enough that his fingers can sync up well enough with the music we hear because it is prerecorded by a more professional pianist.
This is bullshit. He learned how to play a simple melody and then learned how to fake that he was playing the complicated parts, which were recorded by a pro. No one can learn those rifts in 3 months without being a savant. Impressive that he learned anything at all, but all these article like "Yes, it's really Ryan Gosling playing in La La Land" are bullshit because they are implying he actually played everything you heard in the film.
