Music Within traces the true story of Richard Pimentel, a crusader for human rights who was instrumental in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed into law. When he didn’t make a college debate team, Richard (played by Ron Livingston) headed to Vietnam for a tour of duty. There, a bomb blast caused him to lose his hearing. Learning to read lips, Richard returned to college and met and became close friends with Art Honneyman (played by Michael Sheen), an intelligent -- and funny -- man with cerebral palsy. After witnessing how Art was treated in public, and after seeing how difficult it was for his fellow Vietnam Vets to get help with their problems, Pimentel decided to dedicate his life to raising awareness about the needs of people with disabilities.
The Appeal of Music Within: “You're always a little wary when you come to a story and it's got stuff like disability in it or human rights, because you don't want to make a political movie,” said Livingston. “You don't want to make a preachy movie. Those are always really bad and boring. I feel like if people try to attack a subject and they're not willing to really get in there, they want to try to take the party line with it, it's a waste of time.
This one for me, what kind of sold me on it was that, ultimately, it's not really about disability and it's not really about civil rights. It's about a couple of guys that had sort of been written off, about a couple guys that were told by life that their lives were over and that they weren't really worth anything. Instead of doing what I think a lot of people do when they're told, that is say, ‘Oh, okay,’ and accept it, they said, ‘We don't believe that. If that's what the world thinks of us, then we're going to change the world so that the world doesn't think that about us anymore.’ Then they actually went and did it. So to me, it's just a great underdog story and it's a great buddy film.”
Tackling the Role of Richard Pimentel: “I was a little nervous about playing somebody over the course of about 30-35 years because I knew that we only had 30 days to shoot it, or 32 I think was the full count,” explained Livingston. “We weren't going to have a lot of time. We weren't going to be able to do a lot of -- we weren't going to be able to do any latex or age or change the hair too much. I had to do three different decades with one haircut because we didn't shoot in sequence and a lot of days we'd have to do three different decades all in the same day. So you'd have 10 minutes to go from 1960 to 1977 and then back to 1982, and we're going to jump back and get something from 1960. So it was a lot of trying to remember, ‘Okay, how old am I here?’ That was really fun. That was one of the things I got the most excited about.”
Livingston believes it’s a better movie for not relying on effects. “I think a lot of times you can hide behind those effects or what happens is you get stuck. They stick the wig on you and then the shot all becomes about trying not to show the side where you can see the wig. So you have to play the whole scene like this [turning his head]. I think because we just sort of went into it saying, 'Well, we're just going to try and do what we can with physicality, and the audience is going to just have to take this ride with us and buy it or not buy,’ it kind of freed it up a little bit. Also, we didn't have time to think about it because we were shooting eight or nine pages a day.”
Deciding on the Approach to Playing a Real Person: Livingston felt he had to capture the spirit of the man in order to get the character right in the film. “You have to get the things that were important to him,” said Livingston. “Then over and above him at all, you have to get what is universal out of that to everybody because, ultimately, I'm not making this movie just for Richard to watch. Richard was there. He knows what happens. He knows the story.
You have to tell a story that's going to relate to the person that's sitting there in the audience who doesn't know Richard, will probably never meet Richard and may not necessarily care, but wants to know how this story relates to my life out here in the audience with my popcorn. To me, that's the most important thing. Then if over and above that you feel like you also want to catch a little bit about his walk, get maybe his sense of humor or his inflections, a) it's really fun to do, and then b) a lot of times it gives you ideas and it saves you the trouble of having to just make something up. You go, 'Oh, I'll just steal that. I'll just take that from him and I'll take that from him.' I tried to get a couple of those things without getting too inhibited by it. I tried to use that stuff to sort of free up rather than close down.”
Prior to making Music Within, Livingston was totally unaware of this story. “I had no idea who Richard Pimentel was. I knew a little bit about the plight of Vietnam Vets. I had no idea that we had so called Ugly Laws where you could be arrested for being out in public and not being attractive enough. I thought that was made up because there was no way it could possibly be true. I was assured that in fact it was true, and that it had actually happened to Richard Pimentel and Art Honneyman. It was in fact the moment that changed Richard's life because it kind of defined who he was going to be and what he was going to do.”
