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NJ: Because it was there. No, because I re-read it six years ago and I think everybody knows Graham Greene don't they, and everybody was acquainted when they were a child, or as an adolescent - I was.
I re-read it about six years ago and I was struck by the fact that it is a most powerful book, and I was struck by the naked honesty of this portrayal of this need and this terribly damaged relationship, particularly the pitiless portrayal of Bendrix and his jealousy and his obsession and his need to repossess what he lost.
And I also thought that there could perhaps be something cinematic at the heart of it - in the fact that at the heart of the events of the novel is a few pivotal scenes in the relationship between two people that is viewed in different ways, so it becomes a kaleidoscopic exploration of the same pivotal scenes and I thought that would be really interesting. I found Columbia had the rights to the novel and spoke to Stephen [Woolley] about it, we spoke to Columbia, they were very keen and I just kept thinking about it for a few years and finally I got down to writing a script.
AW: How long did that take?
NJ: It didn't take long, about three or four weeks... but a lot of thinking!
AW: That's fast!
NJ: I write fast, but after thinking about it for a long while. But it was only when I began to write it I saw that there really is a film there. I started with the guy walking across the heath, and the meeting and walking into the house and those flashes of the relationship.
AW: Did you look at the Edward Dmytryk film at all?
NJ: I didn't look at it until we were just about to make the film and then I got very depressed! [Laughter]. I'm not saying it's a bad film or anything, just that it's one of a kind of adaptations of novels they consistently made in those days and it alarmed me a little bit. Then I forgot about it and just went ahead.
AW: Stephen, what role did you have as producer. Did you go to Columbia with a treatment from Neil?
SW: No, Neil and I have made ten movies together and they've all been very different in terms of our relationship and how things have developed... Columbia had the rights because they had made the original 50s version and Neil wanted to do it.
I loved the book, I thought the novel was fantastic, and just the idea of making a film in London. I've been very lucky in that I've been able to work here. London is the place where I was born and I really love material that's about the city and this was so much about London, it plays a second, or third, or fourth, or fifth character in this film so the thought of making this film, putting it together was exciting.
Columbia asked me to produce it, partly because of our relationship. So that was really good and I was really pleased about that, really enjoyed it. But The Crying Game and Mona Lisa are things we've taken from a conversation, or something in a newspaper, this wasn't developed in that way. This was very much a studio picture to a certain extent and we were working with Columbia as a studio picture, not a high budget one, but a studio picture all the same which comes with all the good and bad things studio pictures come with, but they left us alone to be honest.
I don't think we ever met a person from Columbia throughout the whole shoot which was nice and I think the stuff that Neil was turning out was so beautiful and the performances were so wonderful that they just said, "Get on with it", and I think we came in way under budget and it was a really good relationship which I have to say - with the films we made with Warner Bros as well - that's been the case. The three movies we made with Warner's and David Geffen and the film we made with DreamWorks were also studio free in terms of shooting them. We've worked together so long there is a trust people have in us.
AW: Was there a green light to who you cast?
NJ: There were a few names mentioned who were inappropriate.
SW: It was really about, how much will the film cost you rather than you've got to cast X,Y, Z. And because Neil had quite a good track record with actors we felt that we would probably cast people that they would like - they trusted our take on that. I think that they would have been very disappointed if we had cast total unknowns, or cast inappropriately but we weren't really about to do that.
AW: Ralph, at what stage did you talk to Neil about the project? Was it one of dozens of scripts you'd been sent speculatively? How did you get involved?
RF: It was quite a coincidence, because a couple of friends, independently of each other, had said, "You should read The End of the Affair because if it's ever a film that's the part you might be interested in". So I had actually bought it to read but had not read it and then coincidentally Neil sent me the screenplay so I sensed something fated about it.
I read the book first because I had heard so much about it. I wanted to come to it not via a screenplay, and I read it and loved it and was very moved by it, and in fact the other Greene books that I had read I had loved and then thought the screenplay was a wonderful and truthful adaptation.
I mean, I had some questions for Neil about the changes but I've actually come to understand that in adapting there is a necessary mutation that has to happen and in the hands of a director it seems that the director would be redundant if they were just going to replicate a novel scene by scene, they have to weave into their own vision and that's really how it come about.
AW: What were the challenges of adapting The End of the Affair? What I thought was how remarkably faithful it was to the spirit and the dramatic impact of the book, but were there any main challenges?
NJ: The main challenge was its status as a piece of literature - that is kind of intimidating. I've got a theory that if something is finished as a piece of perfect work there is no point in trying to do anything with it. In this case I felt there was something to be done. There was something valid I could do to make it a movie, and it was partly the incredible ironic cleverness of the story, the way Maurice and Henry meet and have this conversation about an unknown lover, without Henry knowing that [Maurice] Bendrix is in fact the lover.
There are multiple ironies that begin even there. But the thing I've said about the love affair viewed from different perspectives and in particular I felt - and maybe people will disagree with me here - that towards the end of the novel there is a sense of Greene the novelist beginning to depart from it slightly, and I could feel Greene the philosophic obsessive beginning to take over and I felt the series of coincidences that were revealed about Sarah's death and the thing that led to her sainthood were slightly forced in a Hardy-esque way - you know the way Hardy would make his characters inevitably doomed - and I felt there was something for me to do there.
AW: Even though you've changed the person to whom the miracle happens - from the priest to the boy - I thought it was extremely brave to go for the realisation of the miracle.
NJ: Well, the book wouldn't exist without some relationship to some deity which Bendrix is fighting against and it wouldn't exist without some malignant force which is driving these characters towards a conclusion that they don't want. I was just re-reading it tonight actually because I was anticipating people saying, "Why did you do this" "Why did you do that?" [Laughter]. And what I've done dramaturgically is kept Sarah alive longer ...
AW: ... and taken her to Brighton! [Laughter]
NJ: I like Brighton. Brighton is a place where people used to go to get divorced and be snooped on in bed by a little private detective and that bit seemed right to me. But more importantly in the book after Sarah dies - she's cut down with a scythe, a novelist's impatience I think in a way: he writes her out with a stroke of a pen, "I'm terribly sorry, Sarah's dead".
He goes to Henry's house and he finds a letter from her that she sent to him, so the speech that she gives to Bendrix at the end when she is dying, the essence of her letter is there, so I think I've been truthful to the emotional movements of Greene's book. I just kept her alive longer. And the character Smythe, I never thought was successful - the rationalist preacher who gets this sudden kind of overwhelming conversion, I never thought this character was very successful. Those are my opinions and other people can disagree but that's why I did what I did.
AW: In interviews Greene later said that he regretted putting the miracle in the book at all.
NJ: Well, I thought that if a strawberry mark is removed from a 42-year-old atheist and he suddenly says, "Oh my God, I believe, I believe" like St Paul, I have to be a bloody believer to believe that, I have to take issue with the idea of faith to believe that. But I think those things do happen to adolescent kids, they go through changes in their lives, they're powerfully affected by emotional encounters and I just thought it was more ambiguous on a boy.
AW: How did you approach the character of Bendrix? Did you do much research on Graham Greene, were you trying to naturalise elements of Greene?
RF: I think when people talk about actors doing research it conjures up this image of someone travelling, poring over books, consuming information and in the end you can have a lot of knowledge but it doesn't help you act any better when someone says, "Action".
But there is a case in every part to stimulate your imagination because I think that is a key tool for an actor, and clearly, in this case, the love affair in the book is based or inspired by Graham Greene's own love affair with Catherine Walston, but I really resist when people say it's clearly autobiography, I don't think it is, I think like every novelist he's taken something of his own experience and extended it, fictionalised it.
It was useful to me read up about Graham Greene's life, to get a sense of his persona because I think some of his persona is in Bendrix and it was useful for me to read his love letters to Catherine Walston - or extracts from them - because they do reveal his neediness and his passion and his insecurity and his neuroses, and so putting bits of information together there is a picture of a man who didn't like to reveal his interior life to people, in fact went out of his way to put up smokescreens of information.
At the same time, in his love-letters to Catherine there was incredibly direct expression of need and emotion and I think that all helps. I had an interesting conversation with Norman Sherry, who is the official biographer of Graham Greene, who told me one or two little anecdotes about him as a person, just about the way he would speak, or the way his very blue eyes would follow you around the room. But those are Graham Greene details and they in the end were nice things to have heard - but they weren't Maurice Bendrix.
AW: Was there a particular element in Neil's script that allowed you to find the centre of the role?
RF: I felt that the person I had imagined reading the novel existed in the screenplay. Lots of the scenes of dialogue are word for word what Greene had written. I felt there was no division between Neil's Bendrix and Greene's Bendrix in terms of character and I liked the cruelty of Bendrix, I liked his honesty about how much he hated Henry. I liked that, that was a man in pain and I liked his anger, it was just something I responded to and his humour, too. There's a cruel irony in some of things he says and does and I liked it. [Laughter]
AW: Stephen, the film started shooting in February 1999 and it was finished by the end of the year, you'd shot it, done all the post-production...
SW: We delivered it in October I think.
AW: This is very fast, isn't it?
SW: I hate to sound like a film producer but it was a fantastic shoot. I think Ralph and Julianne and Stephen [Rea] and Ian [Hart] and our crew just got on like a house on fire. We all loved the work, everybody supported Neil in every way, we supported the actors any way we could.
It was an incredibly intelligently-made film in that there were no egos, no tantrums, it was very much that we wanted to get the best work that we could on screen, so the shoot went incredibly well - I mean there were problems and there were crises and panic, crisis-management things you have to get involved in but everybody did it in a really level-headed adult way - that's unusual for films.
Film-makers generally don't act like adults, they act like spoilt brats [laughter] and that includes everyone. On a film you can have a props person who will drive you completely crazy because of their antics and they can affect the whole unit. One person plays games and suddenly everyone's into it.
We just lucked-out with an A-team on every front and that is unusual. We shot the film quickly with a great deal of ease. Of course when you finally see the piece there are changes that have to be made because some things work splendidly, some things don't work so well but it was a real joy and a really easy, fluid experience and I think that's why we managed to deliver it so quickly.
AW: You surprised me when you said the film came in under budget because it looks like an expensive movie...
NJ: There are two ways to shoot a film. One way is where you shoot a lot of stuff with a lot of energy and fire a lot of squibs off in the dark and you make the film and you edit it - that takes a long time. The other way is to decide what the film should be like before you shoot it and that takes a shorter time and I prefer the second way!
But we confined it, we didn't try to turn the book into a wider, more epic, more sweeping portrait of London, or of the Blitz, or of the war, if anything we reduced it. Our energies did go into making this city and the wider experience of London to be an enabler to their relationship, the war was just seen through their bedroom.
SW: We didn't make a feature about the war, that was the important thing. It was as if that was going on so when the bomb actually comes it's actually quite shocking, it should be the moment when people jump out of their seats because it's so unexpected, given that although you do see war-torn London you don't really ever come to grips with the inherent violence.
During the love-making scenes when the bombs are dropping you feel it's not going to drop on the house. We used the locations very, very carefully and the atmosphere of claustrophobia that is there within the characters' relationships and the secretiveness is also there in those beautiful rain-filled scenes and moments where you feel things are encroaching on you.
AW: Did you have a lot of rehearsals?
NJ: We had a week. [Laughter]
AW: Is that a long time, Ralph?
RF: For films that is quite long. I think two, three weeks is very generous on a film and very often there is no rehearsal. I think a week is good - ish. [Laughter]
NJ: We used the rehearsal because there was a script, there was me as director, there were the actors and there was the novel. I would say I used it selfishly because there were certain elements in the characters or in the characterisation or in the overall meaning of where the characters were going that could perhaps have been highlighted, or perhaps were underdeveloped in what I had written.
There was one scene in particular that I had written where Bendrix and Henry have a ferocious confrontation in Brighton and Ralph's instinct very strongly was that he would not shout at Henry and he said, "Look at the book again" and the character he does shout at is the priest. And I looked at that scene again and I rewrote that last scene and that's the thing that comes out of working closely with people who are really committed to their craft, and are approaching the subject with huge intelligence. [Pushes Ralph playfully].
No, I'm serious and there was another scene - the scene with the biscuits - where he apologises to Henry, those two things came out of conversations with the actors and there's other little bits I added when I felt things were missing.
RF: Those rehearsals were useful because you were open to suggestions about the dialogue. It may sound odd, but it's quite good not to rehearse for a film in the terms of "giving a performance" in the rehearsal room, because unlike the theatre I think that those moments that are unexpected and surprise even the actor themselves have to be protected.
NJ: They have to be avoided really until you begin. [Laughter] Otherwise you never find them. A point does come when I see the performance beginning and I get terrified, I say, "Let's stop now please" because I don't want to see that and I don't think the actor wants to see it either. Film is a different thing than theatre; I'd love to do it for theatre sometime to see what that was like.
AW: Did you use storyboards?
NJ: No, well for huge scenes like that bomb. Everyone has to know how high that window has to be so they can blow it up. A stuntman has to do an incredibly dangerous fall through three stories of a building, stuff like that you need to storyboard, and the explosion in the park where the doodlebug falls, but that's very basic stuff.
I don't know how you could storyboard a film like this, I think it would be rather silly. It is about performance and it's about atmosphere and it's about creating the haunted context within which these steamy emotions can exist.
AW: Ralph, do you agree with Neil here?
RF: I'm in complete agreement, that's what I was just trying to say. This week of so-called rehearsal is more a discussion and just simply reading with no indication of any interpretation, just reading it to get a sense of how it plays and I think you don't want to shoot your bolt before you've got a camera turning. Steven Spielberg didn't do a single rehearsal at all on Schindler's List - not one for that reason. He would be shooting rehearsals in case something happened. AW: What does that mean for your relationship with Julianne Moore, because The End of the Affair is such an intense love story...
RF: Lots of drinks [Laughter]. People say so-and-so and so-and-so have great chemistry but actors can't act chemistry. I think it's luck in a way if there's some kind of trust. Actually, I think Julianne and I found a shared sense of humour a lot of the time, especially during these love-making scenes because it is frightening and it is quite absurd isn't it - to create this very intimate thing with all these cameras around and lights and people holding things and everyone shuffling and looking very serious [laughter] and looking at their stopwatches and scratching their heads and Neil says "Action" and then you do it.
You do IT and then he says "Cut" and you stop IT. It's funny, it's absurd. You have to have a sense of humour and I think the humour makes you trust each other and from that relief that you can laugh, it's not so terrible, it's not so embarrassing, and then I think you can just get on and do it.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on February 11, 2000
EL STEPHO