Bringing Rent to the Big Screen

There's always a risk in turning a musical into a film. So what happens when dealing with Rent-a musical beloved to a huge, almost rabid legion of fans? The stakes heighten infinitely. The result must be more than a good movie; it has to be one that will please a uniquely demanding fan base. Rent, after all, has been on Broadway inspiring audiences for nearly 10 years.

Director Chris Columbus boldly chose to cast six of eight principal actors from the original Broadway cast, despite rumblings that, now in their mid-30s, they are too old. Anthony Rapp, who reprises his role as Mark Cohen, the aspiring documentary filmmaker, is now 34, but he hardly looks it. Rapp speaks of his work with passion and calm. This work, as he puts it, is in his bones. From the first workshop of Rent in 1994, Rapp knew he "was a part of something really special and extraordinary and powerful." Now, 11 years later, he helps to bring it full circle.

Rapp says that returning to Mark was much like reverting to that earlier period of his life, particularly the loss of his mother to cancer, which is a focus of his upcoming book, Without You. He remembers discovering that he and Mark had "very parallel tracks during the run of the show." In re-creating Mark, he "was very mindful of honoring" what he and Michael Greif, the play's director, had created together.

As for the actual production of the film, he says, "It was like camp. There's nothing like being in a group of people who are doing their best work, committed to the greater good, supporting each other, being kind and friendly and loving, and also teasing and having fun." Cast members would go to watch their co-stars film on days they weren't working. "That's rare," Rapp asserts. "It doesn't happen. We're friends. We're forever bonded through this experience that we had all of these years ago, and we're still in each others' lives." The six originals were joined by Tracie Thoms as Joanne, a successful high-power lawyer, and Rosario Dawson as Mimi, a drug addict, whom Rapp calls "two beautiful spirits" who meshed well with the piece and their co-stars.

Rapp says that the concerns in transferring Rent to film would better be considered "challenges" than "problems." "Suddenly you have a whole new set of questions, which are about what details tell the story the best, because on camera, it's all about what's in the frame, and all of those details have to resonate in the right way," he says. On stage, Rent takes place on a "unit set: nothing really changes except for minor locations on stage, and lights. When we were making the film, suddenly you're in the real places ... It becomes a matter of finding what the right locations are."

In a similar vein, "the relationships are much more clearly delineated and more clearly expressed on film" due to the power of specificity in the close-up; Rapp explains that the subtleties of expression alone tell things that can't be seen easily on stage. "Sometimes a lot of people complain about the story being confusing, or messy ... In the film, there's no question. You will be able to follow everything."

Yet, things that must be told on stage needn't be so direct on film. For example, an emotionally charged fight between Mark and Roger (Adam Pascal) was cut from the film at the very end of the editing process. Though fans are up in arms about the issue, Rapp assures that "the Mark-Roger story gets told in different ways, through close-ups and reactions. Some of the dialogue [in the cut scene, at the end of "Goodbye Love"] started to become almost melodramatic. The medium of film can't sustain that kind of direct confrontation all the time; theater can, in a way, because you're still somewhat removed. You're at a distance from it."

When asked if he believes that something might be lost in the transition from stage to screen, Rapp concedes that perhaps film does not have the same "conduit of energy" that live performance can provide. "The film is still very much about the music, but is much more about storytelling. It's not so much of a concert experience." He holds that "film is a more intimate medium, in some ways," and that it can absorb its audiences in a different, though comparable, way.

Now, as Rent enters the world in its newfound, eternal form, it will certainly meet with both cynics and supporters. Rapp remains one of Rent's biggest advocates and is very proud of the film's outcome: "There were a lot of things that I was really impressed by, like that the film feels subtle, which might seem unlikely given that we're singing and dancing. There's nuance and subtlety and life and thought in every moment. I trust the notion that all six of us who were in the show before were very happy with what we saw."