Before They Shot the Piano Player—directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s animated look at Brazilian jazz musician Francisco Tenório Júnior and his closest associates in the worlds of bossa nova and tropicália—few knew who the pianist was, let alone the fact that he was kidnapped amidst the fascist regime of Argentina in the 1970s and more than likely murdered at its behest. In fact, in a small way, knowing that Tenório was an innovative pianist who accompanied the likes of Gal Costa, Egberto Gismonti, Milton Nascimento, and Edison Machado on the near-revolutionary E samba novo in 1963, who made but one album as a leader (1964’s Embalo) before his disappearance in 1976, is secondary to the notion of obsession that drives this film’s narrative.
For what else could you say of someone whose thirst for knowledge after hearing Embalo drove him to interview all the players and lovers who knew the pianist (including tropicália’s godfather, Caetono Veloso), then write a film with a central fictional character (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) asking all of the same questions? What else could you say of someone who crafts the animation of They Shot the Piano Player with as many rich and varied emotional lines and hues as its soundtrack? Only someone whose cinematic oeuvre includes the Oscar-winning 1992 period piece Belle Époque alongside documentaries on progressive Latin music giants Calle 54, the samba-riffic animated film Chico y Rita (also created with artist-director Mariscal), and a handful of GRAMMY wins and noms for his production work with Bebo De Cuba and Juntos Para Siempre as well as Calle 54.
Beginning this weekend, audiences in Los Angeles and New York will learn what festival crowds have known since 2023: that They Shot the Piano Player is as magical musically as it is sociopolitically—and vice-versa. Presenting his fascination with all things music in a cinematic fashion is, according to Trueba, part of his nose for great ideas. “When I find a good story, I do something—a screenplay, a film,” says the director from his home in Madrid. “My milieu as a filmmaker is artists, writers, painters, and musicians. And I’m a big music fan, so music has happened often for me, and not just in the films you mentioned. I can see life and warmth through these artists, through this music.”
Acting much like Goldblum’s fictional journalist within his film, Trueba was making a movie in Brazil and bought a handful of albums near the set. While the records featured musicians who he long knew and loved, one unknown name stood out to the director for his innovative, lyrical lines. “Who was this pianist with the strange name who I liked immediately?” was Trueba’s first thought. Additional album sessions that he discovered of Tenório’s only led Trueba further down the rabbit hole. “Finally I found that he had one leader album, [which] was not readily available—I found only one copy on eBay, in Japan. And I kept asking questions until I found out that he had mysteriously disappeared in Argentina.”
“Rather than do him as a documentary where he would become nothing more than a victim of violence, now he was an artist alive and flourishing.”
Then he kept asking more questions—only this time the questions grew deeper and more specific toward Trueba’s long list of Brazilian musician friends, several of whom knew Tenório well. “Caetono [Veloso] not only thought that Tenório was an incredible pianist, the two were scheduled to start on a recording project when he came back from that final trek to Argentina,” says the director.
From 2005 to 2007, Trueba filmed over 140 interviews in Brazil, in Argentina, and in the United States. Anyone who had a Tenório story, big or small, got their chance to speak. Yet rather than turn these interviews about Tenório into a documentary or biopic (or even a book, as he once considered), Trueba decided that animation would allow this biographical document to breathe more freely and imaginatively. “When you see a biopic, it doesn’t matter how good it is. Take Bird, the dramatic film about Charlie Parker. You watch it, and think how good an actor Forest Whitaker is, performing as Charlie Parker. For one second, though, I don’t believe that he is Charlie Parker. Now, with animation, you hear Charlie Parker playing, and you can more readily accept that. When I did that with Tenório, I could see him as alive. Rather than do him as a documentary where he would become nothing more than a victim of violence, now he was an artist alive and flourishing.”
To their credit, through the wide-ranging storyline of They Shot the Piano Player, Trueba and Mariscal present Tenório as a husband and a father—to say nothing of a man with flaws, unfaithful as he was to his wife at the end of his life. “To realize that this guy was in turmoil in his head…he loved his wife so much, and this young painter, Marlena, too. This was a big problem that he knew he had to resolve. But he was completely ignorant of his fate. History often destroys the lives of people. There are thousands of stories such as this.”
Again, to the credit of both directors, the wealth of stories accompanying emotions and memories—to say nothing of the manner in which the instrumental breaks are portrayed—each come with their own unique style of animation. “That was always built into our design,” says Trueba. “For the contemporary parts, we adopted a more realistic approach. For the flashbacks and each point of view, we developed different palettes of color and different lines of animation.”
While some of the black-and-white passages dotted through the course of They Shot the Piano Player come from various wild inspirations such as the films of Jacques Tournier (such as the original Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie) and that director’s use of light and shadow, other shots were developed along the lines of simple color shifts (e.g. deep blues) to signify mood and menace. “So much of They Shot the Piano Player was based on intuition,” says Trueba proudly, as if he was summoning the improvisational skills of the film’s subject. “Intuition was our guide.” FL
