The plan seemed simple enough, filmmaker Ted Braun says of the start of his documentary about conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in his native Venezuela.

“We imagined we’d be making a film that explored and celebrated Gustavo’s relationship with two orchestras, the Bolívars and the L.A. Philharmonic,” says Braun of the documentary “¡Viva Maestro!” which arrives Friday, April 8.

“The timing was good because the L.A. Phil was celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2018-2019,” he says. “And the art of conducting was something of a mystery to most people. The joke was someone with magic hands who was able to make things happen with an orchestra.”

And at first, things unfolded as Braun envisioned. Financing for the start of the production came quickly.

By early 2017, shooting had started in Caracas, where Dudamel, 41, was prepping the orchestra in which he’d grown up for a European tour. Braun and his crew traveled with Dudamel and the Bolívars, as the orchestra is informally known, to Spain and Germany and Austria.

The months ahead seemed as clearly defined as the measures on a symphonic score. And then in 2017, all the notes tumbled off the pages in a jumble, forcing Braun to improvise.

“The day after the orchestra returned to Caracas after the European tour, Venezuela erupted in 100 days of massive street protests and violence,” he says. “As a consequence of that violence, tours that the Bolívar orchestra was planning were canceled, and Dudamel, as it turns out, has not been back.

“So we were suddenly looking at a situation where the main character of the film had no immediate plans to return to Venezuela and was dealing with a country in crisis and an orchestra that wasn’t being allowed to travel,” Braun says.

“We had a very different set of circumstances on our hands,” he says. “But what guides me, and I think other documentary filmmakers who make films in those situations, is the subject, and the subject’s values.

“In this case, Gustavo’s commitment to music’s transformative power. His commitment to the musicians that he grew up with. And to the mentor, who really made him who he is.”

These all were things Braun planned to include in the film anyway. Now they were being tested in unexpected ways.

“We obviously were going to watch and follow how he responded to those tests,” Braun says. “To pay attention to Gustavo, his values and his commitment to music’s transformative power. And that’s what we ended up doing.”

The first movement

For Braun, “¡Viva Maestro!” initially represented a break from such weighty topics as international fraud and genocide that he had explored in the documentaries “Betting On Zero” and “Darfur Now.”

“I was really looking to get away from the messy problems of the world and make a film in which audiences could really immerse themselves in a world of beauty,” says Braun, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts who teaches screenwriting and is the Joseph Campbell Endowed Chair in Cinematic Ethics.

Braun also had been a bassoon player in the Vermont Youth Orchestra and at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and at one point thought he would pursue that as his career.

He says Dudamel seemed such “a charismatic creative force, and one who’s rich enough and complex enough to sustain an audience’s attention for 90 minutes.”

Braun met with Dudamel’s management in the summer of 2016, to explain the kind of film he wanted to make.

“I said to them what a feature documentary would afford someone like Gustavo is a chance for him to not just be recognized, but to be known, and for the things that he values to be communicated in a way that would deepen, I think, the world’s understanding and appreciation,” Braun says.

An initial meeting with Dudamel got him on board. A second meeting provided an initial piece of the story.

“He said, ‘Well, we’re rehearsing the Beethoven cycle in Caracas, then we’re going off to Germany and Austria and Spain on a tour? Would that be a good place to start?’” Braun says. “I said that would be the perfect place to start, for all sorts of reasons

“They’d played around the world for many, many years, but this is the first time they were taking the nine Beethoven symphonies to Europe, which, in the world of classic music, that’s like going to Yankee Stadium to play baseball.”

Open doors and hearts

“¡Viva Maestro!” benefited throughout the shoot from Dudamel’s openness with Braun’s crew, the writer-director says.

“He was so generous,” Braun says. “We could stick our cameras and microphones where we wanted to, we could get right into the middle of that communication.

Doors opened wherever they followed him. The Venezuelan musicians, who were like brothers and sisters to him since adolescence, invited the cameras in. The same with the children and teachers in the nation’s youth music edition program, known as El Sistema, a creation of Dudamel’s mentor, José Antonio Abreu.

Braun, who does not speak Spanish, managed to capture Spanish speakers in the film with an intimacy that makes the translations invisible.

“We used to joke that there are three languages in the film: music, Spanish and English,” he says. “When we cut the film together, we sort of figured out that 44% is music, 22% English, 22% Spanish, and the rest is purely cinematic.”

All of those musical performances and rehearsals created challenges of their own, Braun says, especially because he wanted to capture a more fluid conversation between conductor and musicians than typical in films about an orchestra.

“Because we were telling Gustavo’s story, we wanted to get the audience into his shoes,” he says. “We wanted to try to get audiences to be hearing and experiencing it as though you’re inside of it, not outside looking in.

“Gustavo let us put the cameras wherever we wanted to, which was an extraordinary luxury,” Braun says. “So we were able to get one of the best verité documentary cinematographers on the planet right there in the orchestra.”

Braun says they also incorporated a technique used by director Martin Scorsese in “The Last Waltz,” a documentary about the final performances of the Band, using dolly tracks across the lip of the stage and a camera with a long zoom lens to glide from point to point, capturing closeups and wide shots as needed.

The camera operators instinctively gravitated to the sections of the orchestra that were playing until Braun coached them to try it differently.

“I said, ‘Guys, forget it. Beethoven is too clever at moving the tune around, you’ll be playing catch up the whole time,’” he says. “I said, ‘Trust your emotions. Trust that what you’re feeling and are curious about will guide you to the right spot.’

“The shorthand was, ‘We want you to be using the cameras with your heart, not your eyes or your ears.’ The solution ended up being really effective in the hands of some of the world’s greatest cinematographers.”

Music and man

After months as Dudamel’s shadow, and months more in editing, Braun says he came to a deeper understanding of both his brilliance as a conductor and his heart as a person.

“Two things about him as a conductor really struck me,” he says. “One was his ability to communicate a feeling to an orchestra.”

Most conductors don’t talk as much as Dudamel does to the musicians, but Dudamel in the film displays “an extraordinary gift for analogy,” Braun says.

“The really lovely one he says, ‘This needs more sparkle. More like champagne, less like moonshine,’” Braun says. “That’s not technical, but everybody, regardless of whether you’re playing a wind instrument or a string instrument or percussion, it’s like, ‘I get it. I can make sparkle. I can stay away from moonshine.’”

Dudamel also amazed Braun and his editors with his “uncanny sense of time.” At one point, while considering cutting back and forth between a rehearsal for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Caracas and a performance of it in Hamburg a month later, Braun asked one of the editors to check the difference in running time between them.

“It was less than a second,” he says. “It was a matter of a frame. We just couldn’t believe it. I mean, that kind of technical expertise is staggering.”

Even more than Dudamel’s skills with the baton in front of an orchestra, Braun says he finished the film completely impressed with the humanity and strength with which the conductor has gone through two of the most challenging years of his life.

“What I saw as we neared the very end was an openness and understanding about what he’d been through, and about how much clearer he sees what matters most to him,” Braun says. “Which is carrying forward the message of Maestro Abreu, which is that music can transform lives and build communities.

“He was able to share that with us, and  I hope we’re able to share it with an audience. Because that’s a message for our times, I think.”

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