Well, I think it’s done as a confessional and hooks the audience into the story and into the event.  Salieri’s self explanation to the audience has a much greater immediacy.  He’s addressing in that confession a communal ear of some kind and everybody is listening to his confession.  

I thought that was a much more lively idea than just showing the play as a series of dead, historical events. It seemed to me a very lively and electric event that approach. Plus, by having Salieri addressing the audience, it strengthens the notion that the play is really the story of Salieri, and not Mozart at all. 

Everything, everything, even the elements of the play that people complained about or didn’t like, such as the fact that Mozart was portrayed as too dirty mouthed, is in fact justified by research and in every scene, there is a crystal of truth.  

Except of course, in the finale, in the last encounter between Mozart and Salieri, I wanted a confrontation scene of some kind between the two men but it wasn’t there historically and so I put it in, in various forms.  In the film, I did it even more outrageously than in the play, by having Salieri sit by the bed and Mozart dictating the requiem to him, I confess that.  Amadeus is a drama; not a historical record.  I wouldn’t say there was any warrant for that scene, but for all the others I think there is, but it’s called dramatic licence isn’t it? 

A lot of the confrontation and dirty language is Mozart’s, not mine at all.   For example, Mozart’s letters to his cousin, a female cousin, throughout the year 1777 were absolutely extraordinary! They are alarming.  No not alarming, it’s just that they are rather infantile in their humour, you know like a school boys; but he maintained it all his life.   Moreover, Bavarian and South Austrian humour was pretty racy in those days; I mean his parents talked like that!  The mother I think wrote a letter about farting (well Mozart did, and she replied in the same way) and the father did too.  Leopold (Mozart’s father) had a reputation of being a rather frowning severe man, but he also joined in; it was the family humour. 

But with Mozart it becomes very startling because you think you are talking about a genius, and it’s very hard for some people to believe that the same man who wrote letters to Constanze about excreting, could also have written this very moving music.  But it’s true and that’s what has intrigued me. 

I think Mozart was much too serious a man to be “serious” in a heavy handed 19th Century way, but he was a profoundly serious man where it counts.   But to be serious, he doesn’t have to be solemn.  Mozart could not be solemn in that way, he didn’t want to be.  He was much more talented and had much more important things to do; like write music.  Almost all of Mozart’s music in the last 10 years touches sublimity and that’s very rare and that without much crossing out either.  That’s amazing. It passed through him.

Salieri was a devout Catholic, probably much more devout than Mozart who was more interested in human goodness and all the things cherished by the free-masons.  Mozart was a very devout and serious free-mason and he persuaded, I think, Hayden to become a mason as well.  Also the opera The Magic Flute is filled with Masonic language and ritual.  Whereas in contrast; for Salieri I drew the picture of a man who was a devoted and believing catholic, a man who prays to God to make him a magnificent composer, and he then feels betrayed because Mozart’s skill outweighs his.  He sees Mozart as being preferred to him, favoured by God. 

Salieri believes that there is an equation between goodness as the world rates it, and being an excellent and creative artist.  Well, there isn’t of course at all, think of Wagner, he was an awful man, but Mozart wasn’t awful at all.  I think there is something very prissy and prim about Salieri; he takes offence at Mozart’s silliness and he’s almost heckling God, “why did you prefer this silly thing to me”.  Well of course Mozart wasn’t just a silly and dirty minded figure as portrayed, but remember it’s not my Mozart, its Salieri’s Mozart; he is collecting and presenting all these things, these facets of Mozart’s character and presenting them to the audience.

However, I can’t believe Mozart was like the way Salieri portrayed him all the time, but if he wrote like that what was his speech like?  If people are genuinely being silly or tell dirty jokes they tend to speak them rather than write them, he may have been very tiresomely doing that or he may have been very juvenile. But he doesn’t show any signs of being unworthy to write music or of being very wicked.  That seems a very prissy view of life that Salieri takes. 

The play is about, amongst other things, what a man perceives to be unjust in his dealings with God, but Salieri’s view is a rather simple minded view that good behaviour should be rewarded by God.

That’s right, I think that when he says “goodness is nothing in the furnace of art” he comes to realise that human goodness in that way has nothing to do with it and that’s a rather alarming thought.  But Mozart isn’t wicked, on the contrary I think he was a rather ebullient figure who never quite grew up in terms of behaviour but at the same time, you know, there were many silly spoken people in the world, there still are. 

I think what I have always disliked in the play is that I made the mistake of giving Mozart a giggle which you hear in the film all the time, but I don’t like it.  What I really meant was a snigger.   Do you know the kind of people (perhaps you don’t, you live a pure life I’m sure), but the people who come up to you and say “I heard a marvellous one last night” and tell you a dirty joke almost in your ear, they almost pant like dogs, do; which is fascinating, but deeply irritating.  In fact, it’s not fascinating at all it’s irritating actually, and sort of retarded in a way and that’s what I think Mozart did, he never quite grew out of that; but at the same time what does it matter?  Mozart was one of the greatest conduits of life, one of the greatest artists.  I always think that Mozart and Shakespeare justify human evolution and the whole idea of humanity.  The greatness of those two talents has really dominated me, I’ve been endlessly fascinated.