Amanda Seyfried and the Hathaway Extraction As the campaign continues for "Les Misérables," Tom Hooper, its director, mentioned at an invite-only screening on Sunday that he forbade the cast to watch dailies. His thinking was that he planned to use lengthy close-ups and he didn't want the cast to feel any embarrassment. For Amanda Seyfried, who plays Cosette, it was an acceptable decree. "I don't watch dailies, not as a rule," she said. I just don't have any interest in seeing all those angles. "You gotta throw your vanity out the window when you're shooting a movie," she added. Ms. Seyfried said she officially "quit" singing when she was 17 -- she's now 27 -- and so employed the daily help of a vocal coach for her audition for "Les Miz." "She taught me all these exercises," she said, "to show me that I really can do certain things with my voice that I didn't know, that I do have control. She knew the geography of this machine right here. Ms. Seyfried also credited Ms. Hathaway, whose character, Fantine, is Cosette's mother, with helping her portrayal. "My first day of shooting was with Annie," she said. So I was able to extract some of her essence, so I could infuse it into Cosette. She gave me such sensitivity and warmth, this maternal kind of grace that I realized then that you needed to recognize in Cosette. It was really helpful. The film shot for two months on a grueling schedule that didn't leave time for even a table read, but the cast members, Ms. Seyfried said, quickly bonded -- over their mutual trepidation about the project, which involved live singing, no dubbing in a studio. It's something they've readily talked about as the movie moves quickly from the editing bay to the awards circuit. "We were all kind of leavened by the fear aspect of singing live," she said. Mr. Hooper was ready with his retort to this post-mortem artistic gripe. "They all told me they were really happy to do it," he said, smiling.