I like your partly gilded model best.

Congratulations Carl, I’ll keep both eyes out for your Empire when I see the movie.
So was the harp actually being played or was it dubbed ?

I was the harpist they hired in to play for the movie. Myself and my playing is both in the film. Tarantino chose Fur Elise, and I didn’t know what I was going to play until my first day on the set. I did record the song for them in its entirety off camera (twice in two different locations acoustically), but I also played on camera too. Both are in the movie. For the on camera parts, Quentin only wanted the most well known part of the song to be played, so I played it over and over. I’ve only seen the movie once, but from what I could hear, both my live playing, and bits from the recorded version are in the movie. I was only supposed to be on set for 2-3 days., but wound up being there for about 6 weeks, minus the weekends.
The harp wasn’t mine. It was there on set for me.

Carl- I’m not 100% sure who owns the harp. Before my first day on set, they had given me the name of a gentleman harpist in New Orleans named Jacques Weaver, in case I wanted to call him and ask questions about the harp. But I’m not sure if the harp is his own personal harp, or if he just helped them acquire it. At one point, one of the props people told me the harp I would be playing on was coming in from Natchez, Mississippi, and Jacques is in New Orleans, hence why I’m not 100% sure.

Originally, they had had a harp brought in from a Universal Studios prop house, but one of the prop managers thought it wasn’t playable. She had me come in and take a look at it, and she was right. The harp was not in playable condition. It was an old, Erard antique harp. It was covered in corrosion, missing half of its strings, and the pedals didn’t move, and weren’t connected to the mechanism. So after that, they brought in the Swanson harp for me to play.

When they contacted you in the spring looking for a harp to match, they were looking for a stunt harp. At one point, Quentin had wanted to do a scene where the harp gets smashed on top of me, and broken. I think they ended up building a replica harp that looked just like it to use as “stunt” harp, or maybe they bought a harp that looked similar enough to it. I was never clear on that. The stunt harp wasn’t a Swanson, though. It was smaller, and didn’t have working strings or pedals.

They never did get around to filming the harp stunt. He ran out of time, and had so many other things he had to get to first. So fortunately, no harps were harmed during the making of the film. =)

I do know that they sent the harp (the real harp used, not stunt harp) out to be totally restrung after filming, since fake blood had gotten on the strings. I thought it was very nice of them to have it restrung for whoever it actually belonged to.

When I mentioned this to a friend (by the way, Ashley, do you know if this gives you a Bacon factor of 6 or less?), he said “It will probably be smashed to pieces or used as a torture device.” I guess his instincts weren’t off.

Thanks for the inside scoop Ashley! We’d love to hear more about your experiences—how about a blog?? I’m sure people would love to know more about you and how you got this gig! Have you done any other movie/tv work?

Ashley, what a great story! I loved the part about Christoph Waltz-he was so great in Inglorious Basterds and Water for Elephants, and now he’s a big star. Nice to have an actual harpist actually playing in a movie, instead of just a fake harpist like we often get.