Colin Firth's Disappeared Film, A Work Of Art, Saved And Restored After 30 Years

the first I heard about this phone call from my agent saying I'm sending you to meet Pat O'Connor who is the nicest man in the business Bar None and so I went in with you know full optimism and confidence and he was right I'm not sure the word nice is the one that Pat would select for himself but he was a delight Michelle Gish was there with him the casting director who and these two people have remained great friends ever since and I remember one of the first questions Pat asked me was addressing a concern about my age because although I was 25 which is the age the character was written to be he was a very worldly 25 year old this is a man who'd been through you know Passchendaele and and had suffered greatly had been married wife had left him and I was probably rather unworldly effete 25 year old and he said so is do you think you photograph older or younger and I said well I'm afraid I'm honest I think I've been told I photograph younger than I am and he said well that's irresistible honesty isn't it and I think that's probably what got me the part was he's the kind of person where I think just likes a perverse to take action on a perversity instinct so I think I got the call the next day or so my parent just left a message offered me the part and from that moment on I just I plunged into research about just about everything the film doesn't address directly I think this is often quite a helpful thing to do whatever the film doesn't say I should be thinking so first world war and it was a quite a chastening experience I realized that the way that war is documented is not only overwhelmingly powerful to the extent that I think if anyone's going to do that reading and you know gird your loins you tend to find this an awful lot of World War two material despite the horrors of that war I love its adventure stories you know there's a lot of spy stuff there's a good there are adventure films I hate it along a bit of that on the first world war the first world war is remembered through the words of poets through diaries letters and very rarely without there's you know confronting the see the trauma of it I think this film deals with the casualties in a way which is more oblique there's a line that Kenneth Branagh's character has anyway he says I wonder if it's not perhaps worse for those of us who don't have anything to show for it or something like that you know the intact ones he said I almost wish that I had an external I'm paraphrasing now an external expression of what we went through like a lost limb or to blindness but no I found that I found it a pretty intense experience and then of course there was the demands actual job which was the restoration of these paintings and it's a it's quite thin on the ground I mean trying to find people who specialize in that it's an extraordinary craft and I found I went out of interesting Cathedral where someone was actually doing that work and was shown what it takes and got a glimpse of the mystery of it all and the and the precision that's required is it is quite extraordinary I read the novel many times it's a short novel it's a it's a joy to read I mean you could read it over and over again just for the pleasure of the prose I think he's jailed car is a mysteriously underappreciated writer I think this is as good a writer as any of his generation in England this felt to me had almost the qualities of perhaps a Chekhov story or something he's not a florid writer he's not a sentimental writer that was really my way in more than anything else was it was the first time at that that I'd read anything at that age where I'd been called upon to practice supposed to play a person with the past you know I think being a callow twenty-year-old you're likely to get the roles of fairly wide-eyed young boys in love or you know where your concerns are either the immediate present or the future and too at the age of 25 to play someone who is haunted by something that happened already in his adult life was not only the first time for me but it probably the last time for many more years it's the sort of thing that I'm lucky enough to get now there were a few things that mitigates getting older and but it it that was it was quite a challenge but it was also it felt like a real gift something very unusual and the book was what helped me with that there's a toughness to it the character has no self pity whatsoever the way he reacts to you know he has this rather phlegmatic response to just about all his woes really you know the line about his wife you know she thinks she's you know she wants to get back together she usually does you know and only he really hinting at what he'd been through in the war which i think is very truthful to veterans of an experience like that and and I kind of I would say superficial disdain for strangers you know you realized that he develops a love for these people but I remember lines in it like waiting no what's the point of meeting a new person you know we meet we go our separate ways go away doesn't matter I don't want to know you and I felt very equipped with all of that as well because I think that allows the film's tenderness because ultimately is extremely humane story it allows it to have some authenticity and his clear love of Yorkshire of his own environment I met Jim Carr he he came to the set and spent some time with us and nothing surprised me having just described his writing he had a sort of rather Bluff Yorkshire reserved but very much with with a twinkle and a lot of warmth there you spent a bit of time with him and he was I remember he said he was I don't think anyone had adapted his work before for film he was delighted that we were doing it and he was extremely supportive of me when he met me doing the role which would gave me an immense amount of confidence I don't think I'd ever read met the writer I've got a novel said you know of which I was doing an adaptation I'm trying to think if I had even met her writer of a novel but no you so he was incredibly supportive he was bewildered by how pared down it all was he said that he's felt that one of his great strengths as a writer was dialog and he's absolutely right I mean you could probably have lifted book and put it on the page and spoken all the words and still had a lovely film that that's not how film adaptation works and I've had had a very I think a very very clear idea of the other kinds of language that you need to draw on for to make a film obviously you know it was quite a pedigree because we had Simon gray adapting it for us and in hidden Pat worked very closely together and there had been an aversion I think the first version I read featured a voiceover it's it's sometimes a an almost irresistible temptation when you your source material is so good to just use all of it that you do have to leave space for other things to happen which aren't just to do with words and Jim was not complaining he just was lamenting that some of the nuggets had gone I think there was a lot of talk about what should be put back in and and what shouldn't perhaps I can't remember the details of those now in fact it's a bit of a lesson and when you're doing this job to realize that the arguments that seem so important at the time when you were in the workshop so to speak get forgotten when you're happy with the end result everyone forgets what seemed so critical it is 30 years later so I'd be unlikely to remember them anyway but I do remember their discussions and I remember there's that you you tend to encounter a director who's been through it for months and this had all the same thoughts and has had to be austere about it and it's just they don't go back there we've heard you know this has come and gone and come and gone endlessly and I do think you just have to make a very very tough decision sometimes a beautiful line does not necessarily make a beautiful scene or a better film Jim gave me a little bit of background on who Alice Keach was had been in his own life obviously he had not been through the First World War but I think the romantic element of it was very very personal to him and he said she's real and she knows who she is she's read the book and she knows that I mean her but it had always been unspoken between them so all of that gives you a little bit of magic and resonance when you're doing it there was a great deal of discussion about the title of the film when I first read the script it was under the title of the falling man that was a working title I realized that it hadn't been settled upon partly because Jo Carr liked his title the title of the book and I disagreed presumptuously disagreed with that being the right title for this particular exercise a fully man appealed to me because I felt it had a darker edge when the film was going to look rather sunny and beautiful I thought it juxtaposed very well with the outward appearance of everything and I think that's to a very large extent what the story is all about you know these people have to conduct themselves appropriately and completely inconsistent ly with the world they've just been in and it's not just the people who've been at war it's the people who've been left behind I think it's fractured everybody and everything Alice Keach is married to a much older man because all the younger men are gone that poor vicar who we are encouraged to have a certain amount of antipathy towards when we watch the film we realized that actually he's been made almost irrelevant because people's experiences have so traumatic and people are so desperate that his functions are questioned you know he talks about what I'm just reduced to the ordinary dispersion of their dead and the christenings and weddings but I don't know what I can I don't know what I can offer people anymore and there are a few questions about that you know and I'm stuck up there in the belfry saying listening to the sermon saying did you did you close the the needy and feed the hungry oh so there's the man who seems to have been safely at home but he's lost a great deal as well everybody's lonely everybody's disconnected nobody can really connect with each other in a wall in the way that they might need because they're alone with this version of Hell that they're in and then you have the fresco which is gradually being uncovered revealing a medieval image of Hell and so there everybody in it is a mystery to themselves into each other and in some ways I think a month in the country has a kind of bitter sweetness about it there's a title but I think the falling man perhaps helps point a little bit or squarely at the undercurrent and I also think there was a feeling at the time and they made a sees where there was films of being a little bit polarized in the way they were being perceived they were the kind of white fly and I'd been a part of this you know I'm not a public school boy but I got cast as one and been rather stuck with that for 20 years I've said he is and I think that this film doesn't really quite belong in that camp of the you know the white flannel public school boys suffering elegantly in a cricket pavilion I think it's about something harsher than that and I think titles can be quite important when it comes to that there's also the problem of confusion with the together of play that doesn't have to be a problem for very long but it did come up and still does come up over and over again and and I know this sounds like a prosaic objection but the fact of it being a month I think Pat felt was possibly misleading he said it's quite important that this is several months over a long summer period because people don't heal quite as quickly as that you know it's said for a month to even begin to get better right it might have risked seeming a bit faster I suppose but you know like of all the other things that I've talked about I think in the end it it it fits because that's that's what we ended up with the church was in Buckinghamshire a village called Radnich which is as Dilek and beautiful as it looks it's it is a saxon church i'll see my mind back trying to square my limited knowledge of architectural history with the city as it forgets on this beautiful old church the vicar of the church was incredibly welcoming and accommodating to us and it's one of those happy occasions where the environment helps you do the job there's a everybody just about everybody I think gets a feeling when you walk into an old building like that an old church like that you know it could be hot outside you walk in and suddenly it's the cool stone inside and it's particular smell of stone and plaster and so you know all of that I think lent itself very much to our story they said that that churches and in the field next to it is like a like a sort of a character we did manage to spend a few days in New York sure there were weather as it tends to do was to filmmakers seem to have a sense of irony it was absolutely essential that the film was a summer shot in summer it was essential that we had that barmy light and sense of of heat and partly as a as a healing effect I suppose but also again as a kind of juxtaposition with the darkness that everybody's feeling of course it rained every day because it was England and it was August and it I think it was the rainiest August on record I'm sure someone could go and check that but I think it was the rainiest August in a long time when we desperately need his son the problem that it created was such that of an already very short shoot again I think four or five weeks probably added up to two weeks of real time of filming perhaps less I mean at the amount of sunshine we had could be measured in minutes we must have had some days when you had a clear hour of sunshine but more often than not I remember the direct photography Ken McMillan working on these little eyepiece the clouds and just saying if you roll the camera now you've got 40 seconds and so a great deal of the film was shot in gaps in the clouds and no take two and sometimes you might hope that if you waited for an hour for another gap you might get another go at that so an awful lot of first take just that's as good as we're gonna get and move on the only bit of the film which needed rain was the opening of the film when bokken arrives in August God be in the pouring rain and we went up to Yorkshire to shoot that and of course we go placing sunshine I won't I won't spoil the film for those two less observant people but I'm sure you can see the limitations we had in making it look rainy when it wasn't so basically to almost comical extent with the elements were against us it's part of the job of an actor to see if you can understand experiences which you haven't had or couldn't possibly have I mean that's part of the job description you have to use a feat of the imagination and you you know your level of a success in the finished result is dependent on how successful you are doing that I mean it's the source material first thing like that is very difficult you might be able to spend a day shadowing a doctor if you're playing a doctor spent a few hours in an office if you're playing an office worker there's just something so a little bit beyond your scope even if I were able to go into a war zone and play soldier it's very unlikely that it would look like World War one so all I really had was people's accounts difficult and even if you managed to acquire all sorts of very secondary understanding which can only be incredibly limited I mean you can know you can't hope to have more than a clue that doesn't mean you're gonna be able to deliver anything meaningful so but I once I realized the extent of the horror of that war I mean I'm not saying I understood the horror of it I'm just the extent to which people had suffered and the numbers and the appalling futility I was in danger of being somewhat paralyzed because I thought well I I can't contain this stuff I can't get to the bottom of it and even if I can I have no idea I can convey anything which in some ways I suppose gives you a clue as to why a man who comes back from something like that doesn't try to convey anything it'll be written on your the physical damage to you and all too often in the psychological damage as we see Kenneth Branagh's character moon appears to be intact and you realize he's suffered in a very specific way you know he's punished with sexuality even though he's a war hero and but I can has the twitch the stammer but neither of these men wear it on their sleeve or want to talk about it with anyone else when Alice skeet asks him what his understanding of hairless and they're talking about that evil hell in the in the painting he shuts down immediately and I just thought well I think I understand why he shut down even if I can't quit in the grass much of the rest of it so you just go where you can you make an imaginative journey you try to be as respectful of it as you can and not try to impose ideas of your own which don't have any basis in real experience and in some ways I think the fact that the the script didn't the script was so mature in that respect they're so restrained I think from jail car through Simon grey it's a pad all the way down to us I think you know we thought don't try to speak the unspoken the stammer was very much scripted and if I remember they're there they're written into the dialogue in the book it's definitely jail cars I did not not Simon Gray's or mine or anybody else's you know Birkins stammer and facial twitch which I kept of quite a minimum I didn't want that to look artificial or distracting and so I I did incorporate that which a couple of times very early on I think there's something in the Train where a hand goes up to the thing you know but it was so minimal eyes probably lost on those people anyway now this time I think was quite important I think that there's I think it was very interesting sounds like a diversion but it's it is Pat Parker's regeneration trilogy where she talks a lot about shell-shocked victims the First World War in the first book in regeneration people that create lockers you know William rivers tried to find ways to treat them in this assumption that shell-shocked victims were cowards or weak-minded in some way and one of the things that's touched on is the idea that the form with which whatever a hysterical symptom might take is perhaps a metaphor for the trauma some of the observations if I remember with things like hysterical paralysis of the legs which was not uncommon or complete loss of speech according to the book as I remember it rivers idea is that if your legs are paralyzed because you can't run you're frightened you want to run me you can't like one of those nightmares where you can't scream and and I think something similar had occurred to me perhaps so this wasn't just as there wasn't just as far as the idea that he's traumatized traumatized people develop a stamina you know it I think there was something in his experience which meant that his ability to communicate had been compromised and you know in the course of this story that improves and so it was important so it wasn't just a random symptom of war they were scripted they I can remember the dots or however it was that guy he was written in to the script whether I did them where I was told to do them or observe the script exactly I don't know there's some doubt about that but no it was they were definitely not not an actor's embellishment I think the film is appreciated at the time partly because it contrasted with the big slash-and-burn stuff and not because people didn't want to see anymore of that I just think it did it was in the spirit of a varied diet as much as anything else there's always been that's there's always been popcorn film that's I love it as much as anybody the action staff see but I think that just occasionally to have something on offer which has a completely different language completely different pace deals with things on an entirely different basis I think was like a breath of fresh air you know it was the kind of whatever it was the mid 80s mid to late eighties it was around the time surely after Tarkovsky it made the sacrifice you know that I think this was the sort of thing that and that was the idea of a slow more internal karma film was associated with the Europeans polish cinema that sort of thing you know vidas films Bergman and I I think there was that there were a number of filmmakers aspiring to access that sort of tone and Sensibility to make films in English and there was definitely an appetite for it I think there still is I've just produced one actually which we shall see just in a similar way is allowing very much the people's in inner life to speak rather than a highly dramatic conflict or external events but I do remember anecdotally just from personal feedback at the time saying I'll be looking for a film like this for so long I've been looking for something that's not in my face there's not yanking me left and right it's not ambushing me with sudden events because I it's I think people can feel that their imagination has been exercised in a different way when they are allowed to meet the film halfway I don't think there would be any other way to tell this story to be honest I think that it's it is it's about as it's about ideas and feelings which are hard to express and therefore it cannot be demonstrative and so if you're dealing with the interior life of people probably a million ways of doing that but I certainly think that you have to give it the act as a chance to see what that looks like to show people what that looks like and Pat O'Connor was singularly sensitive to that it's the thing that he had that excited him most you know when people used to talk about seeing more of the landscape he would talk about the landscape in the person's face and he he didn't want demonstration he didn't want too much he didn't want people giving it all away I I think he wanted to encourage a little bit of mystery a bit of guesswork and and allow people to you know look a bit more closely into someone's eyes to see what was going on I was very conscious at the time that we were not being directed by an Englishman I think that the kind of reserve we're talking about is obviously famously English and Pat is not a reserved man and I think that he did not become English from a sort of anthropological point of view always any of the rather glib assumptions and prejudices that go with any stereotype he had an incredibly complex and very respectful and affectionate view of the English with all the rather more critical angles that you might expect from an Irishman generation that he really really wanted to look at the heart of a community like that and to see what lay underneath all those distancing tactics that the English use so it was it felt almost more like a an exercise of nurturing that aspect of Englishness in these conditions and and digging into what the most humane elements were rather than making judgments or any sort of comedy of manners about you know it's all too easy to kind of you know to send up the stiffness of the vicar or the embarrassment of the courtship process and he was also didn't fall into that trap which I think the English do when they tell a story which a painful story which is to hide behind irony to hide behind a kind of you know acerbic dismissal of things and Jo cars writing doesn't do that either so we weren't I think they were quite blessed not to be in that world I mean irony is one great but it is one of the major currencies of English language and English writing generally and and it's also I think it the language at its richest so you know I'm not making a great plea for earnestness in all cases I don't think he was being honest really I just think he wasn't taking that route it's only now really that I've come to realise just how long I've been doing this and it's long enough to look back and wonder what's happened to films which I've done which now could be considered old and film can disappear it can not only disappear from the cultural scene it can physically disappear as well and so I don't really know what the life expectancy other film is unless it's a real classic but I think an awful lot of little gems and endangered species and I haven't really asked a question of many of my you know early body of work some types of understandable reasons as to what their fate has been there because this one is special to me it has concerned me are there any prints who's got the negative or where or what's it what what transfers have been made will it ever be available to anyone will anyone ever care and you don't ask that question three years later four years later and you're moving on to the next thing but then you start to realize that among the things that you've done over several decades one or two might just be precious and worth looking after I don't know I don't know how completely it disappeared I suppose it did completely disappear I've got to be a try a VHS copy somewhere it made it onto VHS I do have a DVD somewhere but that's some years old now and because it wasn't a film of immense profile I realized that yeah it could be at risk in terms of a disappearing I think most films do I mean if we're talking about kind of cultural disappearance most films do they maybe one or two a year that get remembered in one way or another but it's more like it's been in an article than anybody seeing it on a big screen now you only have to if you're very interested in trolling for old films you only have to see how hard some of them are to get online so you know it a film has to have its friends it has to have something like BFI which i think is the salvation of an enormous number of otherwise you know endangered films or it just has to have a you know kind of support group of something but sometimes it takes a generation to get curious about what happened where these things are and by that time the chances are it's too late so this one does seem to have been whisked from the jaws of oblivion in the nick of time it's important to me not just because for a long time I felt it was the best thing I'd ever been involved with perhaps I still do feel that but also the nature of the personal friendships that came out of it you know Pat O'Connor is remains one of my closest friends he's still one of the directors I admire most in the world one of the reasons I was excited to meet him was because there's two films I had already seen of his I loved my first trip to count I've just done a film called another country and it was there at the same time as his film cow and I loved it I was envious I wanted to be in that film and in Balham of romance I think it's as good a film as you'll see period I think it's a absolutely perfect little masterpiece but that's that's where I formed a friendship with Kenneth Branagh and with Natasha and great many of the other people as well on that Perlman tit I think one of when there's a certain magic to the process when you feel like you're making something worthwhile even in a bit of adversity it that one that really stays with you I don't know if it made much impact on a professional level it's rather hard to measure those things it obviously wasn't a spectacular enough success to transform my life overnight I was surprised I think by how much love it did get not because I was pessimistic about it but just because I felt we'd done something too small and intimate to get noticed so I felt that I'm very gratified by the extent to which it did I've done two or three films up to that point I hadn't really noticed that I hadn't played a lead in a film you know I I suppose you know a leading role but I supposed the idea that you know that you this time you're the protagonist this might have been the first one but then you of course Kenneth Branagh was already a legend and so I felt rather felt it was his though he was cast first too by the way so I you know it was Pat O'Connor was Kenneth Branagh attached so I think I rather felt they can't just was tagging along [Music] but it was um it might have been the first thing I did on film which I felt at least on a personal level was as much mine as anybody else's you know that I wasn't just a cog in the in the machine that there's that rather proud sense of being at least a shareholder in the in the process you

Channel: Colin The Firth

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Rating: 4.9040589 out of 5

Keywords: colin firth, a month in the country, BTS, video, interview, oscar, actor, star, career, film, movie, Ireland, bonus, dvd, fan, love, stammer, world war, stutter, Irish, church, fresque, mural, painting, hell, medieval, crusade, Natasha Richardson, Kenneth Branagh, book, restoration, Jesus, Yorkshire, England, rain, Colin, Colin The Firth, Benjamin's Crossing, Pat O'Connor, J.L.Carr, Booker prize

Id: e4z-EVJDyaQ

Length: 38min 17sec (2297 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018