Guardian (UK) Interview

Adrian Wootton interviews Neil Jordan, Ralph Fiennes and Stephen Woolley Production and casting & Adapting the novel
(PART 2 OF 2)

NJ: I think Parkis is a great character. He's a great character in the book and he's got - and this is how good Greene was because he's so specific as a novelist - he's got almost Parkis-speak hasn't he? As I was writing this I could adopt this mode of speech, it was almost Mr Gradgrind from Hard Times: "The party in question did this, the party in question did that". The particular way he'd use important legal-sounding words and stuff like that. And Ian is a very interesting actor.

AW: Let's talk about Stephen Rea for a moment because he's a bit of a talisman for you. His role struck me as one of the most difficult roles in the film - to be convincing.

NJ: Yes, it's probably the most difficult part in a way because how do you portray a good human being, particularly when that human has nothing to do? First of all you're demanding that an actor be passive, you're also demanding he be uninteresting. But I had a conception and I think Henry is different in the film than he is in the novel.

I think Greene was quite witheringly cruel to Harry Walston, that was a piece of real life that was in there. When Stephen spoke to me about the role first he said "This man is a dreary little cuckold, what can I make of this guy?" I thought it had to express the goodness of the ordinary person, the goodness of the non-dramatic human being, and as I began to talk about this with Stephen I could see he got interested and I was lucky I had a relationship which went over several movies so that I could persuade him to take a part which he had initially rejected. But those sort of parts need enormous subtlety and there's an enormous attractiveness to those parts. AW: Stephen, tell us about how The End of the Affair got its controversial 18 rating?

SW: The film was shown to the MPAA in America - the US equivalent to the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) here - and they gave it, on a technicality - the two love-making scenes - an NC-17 which means no-one can come unless they are 17+ under any circumstances. We resubmitted the film and said, "Please could you get more people to see it because we don't believe that the way this film's going to be released, the kind of audience that are going to see this picture, are going to be shocked and they in fact are going to be put off by that kind of certification because it would suggest that it's not an adaptation of the book at all, but something that's been modernised or changed or perverted".

So they looked at it again and said, "You're right, it's an art film and technically yes those two scenes are a little close to the edge but given the context of the film we'll give you an R". And an R means that anyone can see the film accompanied by an adult, anyone over 17 can see the picture, anyone under 17 can see the picture if they're accompanied by someone over 17. So then the film was shown to the Irish censor who immediately gave the film 15 with no questions asked.

Then we showed it to the BBFC and they came back to us and said, "It's an 18 because you have two scenes and there's a little too much movement from Ralph in one scene [Laughter] and the positioning of that shot is too long". And I said, "Could you please get Robin Duval, the director of the BBFC, to see it because I really think that if he sees the picture he'll realise that this film isn't an 18".

I mean, there isn't going to be a lot of 16-year-olds who are going to be clamouring for this picture anyway, it's just that I didn't want to send out the wrong signals because a lot of people who will see The End of the Affair are, I hope, people who perhaps don't go to the cinema very often. I mean my mother-in-law and her mother who's 92 came to see the picture and just adored it because they're big Graham Greene fans, they don't go to the movies that much, when you're 92 you don't rush out every weekend to see a movie [Laughter].

But she came to the movie and just loved it and was bowled over. But when she and her friends get together to hire videos or they go to the movies they'll think, "Oh that's going to be like those terrible Scream movies, or it's violent and sexual and they'll be lots of swearing. The closest this film gets to swearing is when Ralph says, "She's a tart to your mumbo-jumbo", that's as hardcore as it gets.

The violence happens more or less off-screen, it's just those two scenes. The irony of this is that the censors said, "We don't want you to cut those scenes for a 15. We think it might harm the integrity of the movie. We don't want to be seen harming the integrity of the movie, but we'll give you an 18. It was just sending out mixed messages. And that weekend I immediately looking at other films with certification and I noticed that the Peter Greenaway film 8 1/2 Women got a 15.

I started looking at the reviews for that film and realised that it was probably the worst reviewed film of last year and particularly as it was reviewed as being a very sexist and nasty portrayal of women. I saw the film and it was pretty shocking. And then I noticed that the James Bond film got a 12 which is essentially a catalogue of murder and mayhem and people garrotted and blown up every two minutes.

It just seemed rather ludicrous that The End of the Affair... I want people to tell me it should have an 18 certificate because any 16-17-year-old teenager would, I think, benefit from seeing the movie if they stayed the course. Most 16-17-year-olds are going to see the Bond film but if anyone wants to see this movie I think they should be applauded for wanting to see it, not banned.

I mean a 17-year-old woman can do anything, and a man can as well, but they can't see The End of the Affair?! It's really, really shocking and I thought they would come back and say, "We're kidding" [Laughter]. It's like being on Death Row, any minute now the governors are going to come in with your pardon but they haven't come back with a pardon so we're releasing with an 18 and I do think that it will discriminate what will happen to the film because we would of course never cut it.

What will happen is that a certain audience out there, who would have loved the novel perhaps, who only go to the cinema a few times a year will be put off seeing this movie because people of a certain generation do not see films which have 18 certificates. It is worrying to me and if there is someone here who could explain to me that it's a good decision I'd like to hear it.

AW: Why did you employ Michael Nyman to write the score?

NJ: He's got tremendous simplicity, he's written some extraordinarily great music. To return to Peter Greenaway, when I saw The Draftsman's Contract... Peter cut the movie to Michael's music because the bar changes happened on the cuts and it's really thrilling to see that merger. I loved what he did in The Piano. I wanted a score for this which was quite restrained and English, definitely. I met with Michael several times, we discussed it and he just went for it really.

AW: Why did you choose a composer instead of selecting a source, because it would have been quite easy with that period?

NJ: Well, it's weird. If you take the music from that period, Charlie Parker was playing, Benjamin Britten was composing, I think Ravel was still alive and obviously Gracie Fields was singing and George Formby was twinkling away. There's a huge range to choose from in that period but Michael came up with something beautiful and incredibly melodic which I loved. It expressed a sense of loss from the word go.

Question 1: I didn't like the movie. I found it melodramatic and boring. What added value did you bring to the book?

NJ: I didn't want to add anything, I thought it would be taxed afterwards. I thought I'd get VAT [Laughter]. It's hard to say, you want to make a movie because you respond to it instinctively. I can only disagree with you but your opinion is... valuable... definitely. [Laughter] But it's hard to say... when I see the movie I obviously like it otherwise I wouldn't be releasing it.

Questioner: But what did you add that is new?

NJ: The scene in Brighton! [Laughter]

Question 2: How do you feel about Julianne's character being the only woman in the book?

NJ: For me it was interesting to be dealing with a portrait of a woman who was uninformed by any contemporary ideas and is uninformed by any ideas of sexual politics or of empowerment, everything that goes with the gender conversation these days, but I just felt that Greene's portrait of that lady was actually very accurate and it was incredibly simple in a deep way and very true and what interested me was the way she went from this world of sexuality into this world of something other after this traumatic event.

I found it very true and I responded to it very much and that's what I was looking for in the casting of the film and I've always found Julianne in the roles that she's played - there's such an honesty and a directness to the way she approaches the material whatever it is - something as raw as Boogie Nights or as subtle as what she played in the Louis Malle film, Vanya on 42nd Street.

She always seems to get beyond the surface aspects of the character into something quite simple and quite deep and that's what I wanted for that role.

Question 3: What is the universal theme that makes the film so moving?

RF: What I'm going to say is a bit of a truism, but I think there is something about white light shining through celluloid and showing actors' faces, human emotions coming through faces. When they are emotions that you recognise, when you believe in them and when they are phrased and put in a certain order they have the power on the screen to conjure up some quite unusual responses. That is why there is a cult of film, there is something unique about film.

And I think that telling stories in films, even if we've seen them before, we might have seen love affairs before, we might have seen murder stories before, but there seems to be something inherently addictive about it and I think that when all the bits of it are put together, music, text, image, light, when they're in a harmony through the director they can move you.

I think that it's a phenomenon, I don't think it's very easy to put succinctly why it has a universality. People fall in love, people have affairs, people die, people make war, people are jealous and I think that if the film has worked for you I would suggest it's because you recognise some fundamental truths in it yourself through it being projected on a screen.

NJ: There is something deeply uncontemporary about the affair and that's what I loved about it. The way in which they were forced to confront something that they couldn't explain. I don't think anybody who's had any deep contact, sexual or otherwise, with a human being ever loses it. I think a lot of people never survive the depth of affection, whether it be a parent, or a lover or a wife, and the way in which Greene pushed the question of the whole meaning of those relationships to bring up an idea as unfashionable as a God, or a destiny, I found very moving and worth re-examining. I think there is something quite true in what he wrote and I hope we've got something of that truth onto the screen.

SW: On a simple level I think that all of us would like to turn the clock back and look at the events that happened around relationships where you could chart back and say, "Oh my God, that was the point when it worked, when it didn't work, when it could have gone on, when it stopped". Why I feel rewarded by this fantastic film that Neil has made is that moment when you start to read the diary, you start to see the same scenes repeated and with a different aspect, for me that's dream-like and that's why it's very universal.

All of us would love to look back on a moment in their lives when someone has acted in some way untoward or seemingly cruelly and we don't get a chance to do that, to step back and re-see something that's gone wrong from the other person's point of view. I think that's what's absolutely fascinating about the film, and what makes the film absolutely moving for me is that you're suddenly in this other person's head after we've spent all this time in Bendri x's head. Suddenly the emphasis shifts to Sarah's head and her story. The story is written twice from two different perspectives and I think that's why people tend to go back to see it again and again.

Question 4: Is there a parallel between Onegin's suffering and Bendrix's suffering?

RF: I keep being asked why I'm always playing these tortured lovers [Laughter], and I can see honestly that there is an emotional constipation in both parts maybe. Certainly Onegin doesn't want to acknowledge his emotions, he's very detached to begin with from his feelings and they seep through during the course of the story but Bendrix - in my head anyway - he's someone who is venting his feelings onto the page, but he's not demonstrative of them to other people.

He's wearing a kind of mask when he meets Henry, he's playing another role of the benign friend and in that sense there is probably a connection in that they both carry a mask to a certain extent. But I do think that Bendrix privately is very connected to his feelings and Onegin isn't.

Question 5: Will the ruling on the certification of the film be overruled?

SW: I think that this has been such an issue now that I don't think so. I remember seeing Polanski's Macbeth at school for my English O-level. It had a fantastic effect on me. I loved it, I just thought it was incredible and I couldn't believe how great it was. I was studying this brilliant, sexy violent... all the things that were great about Macbeth are in Polanski's movie and it really fired me on. I think that it's so high-profile, this censorship thing, that this current board are going to walk away from this, they're not going to step down because they would look very foolish now.

So I think the only chance now is when this film is released on video there might be a way of cajoling, but I think that unless we cut the film there's going to be little chance of us getting anything below an 18. And it's ironic because Shakespeare in Love had a 15 certificate and yet that seemed to have the same combination of things that we have. But if you're 16 or 17 you can get into a 18 film. [Laughter] But it's not really about that, it's about the messages that that certification sends.

Question 6: Why did you make the love scenes so explicit when they weren't like that at all in the book?

NJ: It's a deeply erotic book. One of the things that surprised me was when I re-read it was that most erotic novels are written by women and very young men and this was an erotic novel written by a 42-year-old Englishman. That was part of the attraction for me for this thing and Greene has written an extraordinary thing. There is an enormous amount of sex in the book, it's perhaps not described in terms that you get in the book, but actually there is an enormous amount of quite graphic description in the novel itself.

That line, "You wouldn't recognise the sound" that we have a start of the film, that's straight from the middle of the book and in her diary in the novel she talks about how he touches her the way no-one else touches her, and Greene talks about orgasm quite beautifully with this terrible sense of loss. We had to show things I think otherwise it wouldn't have been an affair. And I think we had to show them quite bleakly in a way, because there is something bleak about that kind of passion somehow.

Question 7: Neil said that the irrational is very relevant to contemporary life and that's what drew you to the book. Would you elaborate on that?

NJ: I don't know what I meant by that [Laughter]. But I do know that I am drawn to stories where people do not fully understand the reasons for their actions and I don't know why that is. It's probably because I don't believe people do fully understand the reasons for their actions. I always think of Thomas Hardy. When his second wife died he lived to be a very old man and then he suddenly got this tremendous sense of longing for the woman he married when he was 19 or 20.

It's one of the most irrational bursts of poetry in the whole of literature really and I think that the emotions that affect us, particularly to do with sexuality, I do not believe that anyone understands them - President Clinton definitely doesn't understand them [Laughter] and I don't think Sigmund Freud understood them. I think that they exist in that strange realm somewhere beyond understanding and art in a way. I do think Greene touched on it. I'm not as tortured about religion as he was, I described it to myself as a battle between rationality and something else.

Question 8: Does the complexity of the chronology, particularly in the first half distance you from an emotional involvement with the characters?

NJ: There is a danger when you deal with two time frames and particularly when you deal with two different perspectives, of totally confusing people. But I don't think distance is a bad thing, people speak about lack of emotional engagement with characters as a bad thing but I'm not sure it's a bad thing. Some of the films that I really do love deeply are quite austere movies. I'm also tired of the over-emotionalism of, particularly, Hollywood cinema. I don't think that it's a bad thing that you can sit and make your mind up about these characters, that you can sit and have some distance from them. That was part of what I wanted about this film. Some people won't like it but...

SW: That wasn't an issue with the studio absolutely not, but I think the point of the movie is that you have to unravel it and I think that one of the things that is a joy about the film is that when Bendrix reads Sarah's diary the penny drops, it's true people who like the movie keep going back to see it again because they realised they've missed an aspect of it.

Question 9: Did you shoot the movie in the same way events are recorded in the book?

NJ: We didn't shoot it any kind of sequence at all. On films there's often basic facts of production, like we had to build an enormous set for Henry's interior so we basically shot everything that was in that interior first, in this case the entire relationship as it's played out in the series of drawing rooms and bedrooms of Henry's house. We went through the film from beginning to end without approaching an exterior so it was almost a tiny play of the entire movie.

SW: It's just financially and logistically impossible to keep returning to locations, because on a film like this, you're constantly seeing the same location and the same set but the action is taking place in a different way. You can't just keep closing the streets of London down, they don't like you closing them down anyway, they hate you to be honest - quite rightly in some respects I suppose. Middleton Square, where we shot the Smythe exterior, in which we come back to in many different ways. We shot all that at once so that's how you have to make films, unfortunately.

Question 9: How do you work so well?

NJ: I met Stephen after I'd made Angel. I was a novelist, I hope I still am. Angel was the first movie I made and it was about political violence in the north of Ireland. I didn't know what I'd made and Stephen saw it at Cannes and he rang me up and I came over here to meet him and at that time he'd set up Palace Pictures and his enthusiasm for film I found quite overwhelming and we then went and made A Company of Wolves together. We just kept working together really...

SW: The interesting thing was, we never had a contract. It wasn't like I signed Neil up for a three-picture deal or anything like that, or we said we'd make films together. The things Neil liked I tended to like, Angela Carter for instance. That was a great thing for us to work with Angela and to make that film, it was a wonderful experience for me. Similarly with Mona Lisa, the kind of subjects we were attracted to were quite similar so it never felt like uncomfortable, it wasn't as if, "Oh I have to make the horrible Butcher Boy or the terrible Michael Collins".

It was great, what a joy that we can make these quite strange, somewhat subversive pieces of entertainment and how lucky we are to do that. We have a new company now called A Company of Wolves which DreamWorks are funding. It's basically a development company where we're looking for projects and now we do have a signed deal so I should think that the next announcement is that it's all over. [Laughter].

We've actually signed a piece of paper for the first time to produce and direct future projects so I... I've just read that Neil's signed a deal to do a project with Salman Rushdie so that's the end of it anyway [Laughter].

AW: You dipped your toes into production with Onegin. Are you going to do any more producing?

RF: Yes, but I wouldn't undertake it lightly. I think as an actor I was quite protected from putting a production on, you have no idea unless you've been on the production side. I was quite ignorant about the level of work and time that had to go into nurturing a film and to put the elements of production together. I have a completely different regard for producers and directors and I don't think the public really know the hours and the detailed structuring that has to go on. I think I would have to feel very strongly about something to want to do it again.

Question 10: How much freedom did Neil give Ralph to improvise?

I suppose we didn't improvise much if at all. It never came up. I always felt that the dialogue was superb and it was beautifully written and I think in the early stages I suggested that one or two lines didn't seem right but that was a very subjective response but actually in shooting... if Neil had said to me "Improvise" or "Change it" or "That doesn't sound good" then I would have done it, but I think I took my cue from him. If I had felt that the dialogue wasn't sitting I would have probably have asked to change things in the moment of shooting it, but it never really came up. I have improvised on films before and I've been encouraged to do so by the director and quite enjoyed, but I think that if he or she and the actor doesn't want you to I think it has to be set up by the director in the first place. In this case it was a path Neil never chose to go down and I went with him.

AW: Is the theme of Catholicism what appealed to you in The End of the Affair?

NJ: Of course, Greene being an English Catholic convert - which means Protestant [Laughter] and me being a Irish Catholic - which means doomed [Laughter] it's for me who grew up with that stuff. Irish Catholicism is more to do with magic - it's a very superstitious set of lessons you learn when you're a child. It's quite easy to abandon them but they never leave your sensibility, so for me to see someone grappling with these problems of faith and believability which he had encountered in his early 20s - and he had a very dubious relationship to them all his life - I think he liked the cruelty of Catholicism in a strange way.

He liked the way it implied punishment but it was a punishment deferred. And I found it fascinating to encounter his encounter with those set of ideas which I had encountered as a child but I think they were with him for his life as an intellectual construct and they've not been with me since I was 19 to be honest.

Question 11: Did Bendrix's repellent character appeal to you?

RF: They don't appeal to me as things I try to emulate in my own life. [Laughter]. I think dramatically, as an actor responding to a part, they're strong meat to play, they're what the part demands of an actor, they're just fantastic, just in terms of what you show, what you don't show, which scenes you get to play.

I take your point completely, he is manipulative, he is duplicitous, there is a smear of snobbery with the Smythe thing but I think he's an unhappy man and I think at the end, I don't think he's redeemed but I think something is opened up for him that he has never considered before. I think this friendship with Henry - and there's this tender moment of giving the milk and biscuits - I think that very slowly something is unlocked in Bendrix and I always feel that in the moment of looking at Lance's face at the end. However much he's resisting it he can't ignore it and indeed the very last moment is "I hate you God, leave me alone forever", but the conceit of that is I think that for ever on Bendrix has a dialogue even if he's saying he hates him. So I think it's complicated but I don't think he's all the things you describe. There's other things moving on but I think Greene probably delighted in making him a bit repellent.

A friend of mine was reading the novel and saying "God, he is repellent" and this friend was laughing as she was reading so maybe we enjoy a villain taking us into our confidence. I don't think he is a villain but he is full of a negative quality yet he takes us - the viewer or the reader in - and I like that about it just from a dramatic point of view.

Question 12: You described your portrayal of sex as quite bleak, but the churches are quite sumptuous and seductive. Why did you do this?

NJ: I don't know... What I found interesting is the portrayal of passion in the novel itself, and as I made the movie, [I was thinking of] how spiritual transport in, say, Renaissance painting is portrayed - showing the human body in a state of sexual transport as well.

There is a logic to that, and if you go round churches you see these beautifully modelled torsos - mainly male. And to my mind they're not two sides to the same coin, but they belong together somehow in some way I'd like to understand. But I didn't actually mean to make the church beautiful.

We were actually looking at a very grey church. It was one of these huge grey interiors somewhere in Islington and I went downstairs and I found this tiny little chapel and it was full of all this gold and I just wanted a photograph there. Perhaps it is a bit too beautiful but I actually do like churches.

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