![]() So we put on the accordions and got a sense of where it’s supposed to be on your body, adjusting the straps. He let me know a handful of the songs that would be in the movie, so the first one we worked on was “My Bologna,” which is also one of Weird Al’s first popular songs. Our first few lessons were like, “Put on your accordion and let’s go to the bathroom.” So we’d spend 45 minutes or an hour in the bathroom. You can look down and see the keyboard side, but the button side is over a ridge, and you can’t see it. Because you need a mirror the first time you play accordion to see that button side. ![]() That’s why it felt weird to teach him.Īlso, a lot of accordion players do their best work in the bathroom. Tons of video-game music: Legend of Zelda, Super Mario. But I learned accordion around 2011, and I only learned John Williams film scores, so Jurassic Park and Star Wars. That was a big part of my life, and I did it for about four years, and it was a surprisingly lucrative source of income. For a while, out of college, I was a freelance animator during the day and a subway busker at night. I had been collecting accordions and had a few extras - my wife was not thrilled about me just amassing accordions in our apartment. Other than that, completely cold to the accordion. He played bass for a little while, which I think helps with rhythm. He knows where middle C is and that’s it. Preparing for that, I was like, “What’s your music experience like? Do you know any piano?” He had taken piano lessons as a kid but said that knowledge had pretty much disappeared. So the first meetup we finally had was somewhere in mid-November. They shot this movie in 18 days in February, like four or five months later. He asked me to do it back in October of 2021. But it was Dan, so it felt more or less like we’d be hanging out and we’d each have an accordion in hand. A couple of things to know: I’m a self-taught accordion player with zero teaching experience, so that was a little nerve-racking. His take on it was that they could hire an accordion teacher for him, but he would much rather do it with a friend and someone that he knew. ![]() He mentioned he had gotten this role and wanted to know if I could help him learn accordion for it. So he became aware that I played accordion.ĭuring the pandemic, we would have these Zoom hangouts where we would play Quiplash because that was all we could do. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself “the accordion douche,” but the accordion did make its way to some of our parties. My accordion followed me to some of our hangouts sometimes. So from 2012 onward, we would all hang out. We bartended together at a place called Broome Street Bar, and she was actually leaving the place as I was starting, but she went on to work for a casting company, and she’s an extremely talented actress herself, and she met Dan on the movie Kill Your Darlings, and they started dating. It was actually through his girlfriend, Erin Darke, who I used to work with. How did you land the job of teaching Daniel Radcliffe to play the accordion? As an accordion salesman played by Thomas Lennon says in the film, “When you play the accordion, you are a one-man band.” Though he now works as a videographer and editor for the Met, Scalzitti found time to give Radcliffe - a friend of nine years, who’d seen him play accordion at parties - a crash course in all the buttons, keys, and bellows that make the instrument sing. Soon, he was strolling around Manhattan with the box-shaped instrument attached to his chest. So Radcliffe recruited Pete Scalzitti, a New York–based filmmaker and animator with a background as an accordion-wielding subway station busker, to put him through a squeezebox boot camp.Īfter graduating from NYU film school and growing tired of playing low-paying gigs behind a piano, Scalzitti bought an accordion for $120 off Craigslist and taught himself to play in 2011. Though the Roku original movie Weird: The Al Yankovic Story parodies the self-serious excesses of biopics like Elvis, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Walk the Line, star Daniel Radcliffe, sporting a mustache and a curly wig, still had to actually strap on an accordion and pump his way through Weird Al classics like “My Bologna” and “I Love Rocky Road.” Given Yankovic’s status as a living accordion god, faking it wouldn’t be right. For an actor taking on a role as a tortured yet brilliant rockstar, learning to play an instrument is essential to selling the smoldering intensity of the performance.
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