Award-winning Hollywood actress Anna Kendrick got the script of Pitch Perfect 2 a week before rehearsals. Yet she took up the challenge, and see how! She spills the beans
What did you think of Kay Cannon’s script for Pitch Perfect 2?
It was nerve-racking at first because we were given the script a week before rehearsals. It was one of those things where if there was something we didn’t like, we couldn’t do anything about it. Kay, in my opinion, is a total genius and this script was even better than the first one.
How did Kay build on her script from the first movie, Pitch Perfect?
I remember Elizabeth [Banks] calling me and saying the script wasn’t ready but when I read it, I thought it was great because she knows all of us and knows how to write for our voices. It’s so packed with jokes and even more solid than the first one. Her script and her wit were the reasons I did the first Pitch Perfect.
When we first meet Beca in Pitch Perfect 2, what is going on in her life and career?
Beca has an internship at Residual Heat, a record company, and her boss is Keegan-Michael Key, who is hilarious in this movie and so much fun to work with. She’s trying to think about the future, while trying to divide her energy between the Bellas and her new job.
Where are the Bellas at? They seem to be in a bind at the beginning of the movie.
They’re trying to win back favour, so they decide to compete against the German team at the World Championships of A Cappella. They are trying to redeem themselves.
The German A Capella team – Das Sound Machine – they’re pretty daunting adversaries, aren’t they?
They’re so good! We’re this group of ten women and we identify predominantly as actors who sing and dance, but the majority of DSM was made up of dancers who lip-sync, while the two leads are actors. In rehearsal, I knew there had to be some serious “movie magic” to make it look like the Bellas are better than DSM. I mean, I want to watch them go on tour and do that dance. They’re just so dynamic and exciting to watch.
What do you think about the choreography in Pitch Perfect 2?
“A.J.” Jones choreographs to everyone’s strengths. So for the Bellas, he’s choreographing for people who don’t have a dance background and trying to make us look as good and as professional as possible. For DSM, he came up with the most insane choreography.
What was the coolest thing for you personally about making Pitch Perfect 2?
We’d been shooting the opening number for a week, and it starts messing with your head because you’re doing the same dance for 14 hours for five days. On the very last day, they finally did this piece in the end where they dropped a bunch of balloons from the ceiling, and something snapped inside all of us. We essentially turned into kittens chasing laser pointers; we were running around and smacking each other with balloons. Our mental stability was so fragile. And our pleasure centers, which clearly hadn’t been accessed in five days, just exploded. I was so happy. I don’t think I’ve experienced joy like that since I was five years old, and it was all because of multi-colored balloons!
Given that Pitch Perfect 2 is a movie about sisterhood, how did you all arrive at that level of bonding?
There are definitely times when we’ve spent literally every waking hour together for two months, but just when you think you can’t be around the same ten people for another day, we’d have a weekend and it was like, ‘What do you guys want to do? You want to hang out?’ It’s a weird dynamic.
If you had to create your own set list for the International Competition, which three songs would you select and why?
I would select The Wait because I love that song, Crazy Youngsters by Ester Dean, which was my actual choice for the finale of this movie, and just for fun, Yellow Submarine.
How was it working with Elizabeth who this time around directed, as well as produced Pitch Perfect 2 and played Gail?
She’s certainly got better legs than Jason Moore! When I found out Jason wasn’t doing it, I was a little upset because he had created the first movie and helped me create Beca. So for the first couple weeks on Pitch Perfect 2, I kept forgetting he wasn’t there. Since Elizabeth only produced the first one, I would sometimes get confused when she would be directing a scene. It was an adjustment, but I think she did a fantastic job.
Pitch Perfect 2 is about powerful women with a woman director and a woman writer – is there a change happening in Hollywood?
That would be great and I certainly hope so. It’s important to vocalise these positive things in order to give people the confidence to continue to make it happen, and in the case of this movie, it’s a step in the right direction.
