Julie Andrews knows what everyone thinks they remember from the opening of The Sound of Music—a single, unbroken shot as the camera glides over the mountaintops, drawing rapidly down on a lone woman in the tall grass who twirls in her skirt as she fills the air with her high, sweet voice: “The hills are alive with the sound of music…”
The ear may be delighted, but it’s a trick of the eye. Few recall the jump cut just as the camera gets close, at the very moment she opens her mouth to sing. That edit was necessary, Andrews says, because the vortex of the helicopter’s rotary blades hurled the petite songstress against the ground every time they drew near. A face-planting Julie Andrews would not make for the graceful opening that was envisioned. “I was spitting hay and mud and straw and God knows what. But it was an amazing shot,” Andrews tells Vanity Fair in a new exclusive interview. “It looks so seamless.”
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