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So discovering him in a working men's club adjacent to the stark Trellick Tower in west London seemed only marginally less surprising than hearing him talk at full spate and with undiluted passion about his latest film, Onegin, which sees him back on the big screen in his best form since that trophy-laden spectacular, The English Patient. It will be released in the UK later this year.
Fiennes is inordinately proud of his most personal project to date - an £11-million adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, Evgeny Onegin. He's clearly nervous about it, too. He is not only the eponymous star but also executive producer; his sister, Martha, directed the film and brother Magnus composed the music. His real-life girlfriend, Francesca Annis, even has a sexy, blink-and-you'll-miss it cameo in the pre-credit sequence.
It sounds, on the face of it, dangerously like a mega-dollar home movie, strictly for family and friends. Happily, the reality is somewhat different, for what this American-financed collaboration between three of the six Fiennes siblings has yielded is a quite stunning, intensely moving romantic tragedy, set in a beautifully recreated 19th-century Russia - achieved with a skilful mixture of St Petersburg locations, lavish Shepperton studio sets and a handy local common.
But what concerns Fiennes much more than any accusations of nepotism is his impending visit to Russia, where the film is to be the centrepiece of a Pushkin festival beginning this weekend in St Petersburg. Not just any festival, mind you, but the home leg of a series of worldwide celebrations to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Russia's national poet, on June 6.
On the scale of nerve-racking, playing Chekhov's Ivanov at Moscow's Maly Theatre - as Fiennes did a couple of years back, in an Almeida Theatre production - was a mere shudder by comparison.
Pushkin is quoted by Russians in the way Shakespeare is quoted here. Fiennes suggests twitchily that it's more like messing with the Bible, except that Pushkin's work - which also includes The Gypsies, Boris Godunov and The Queen of Spades, as well as reams of verse - is probably better known in Russia than the Bible.
Yet, while acknowledging a huge sense of responsibility, Fiennes claims that it would have been unwise in translation to cinema to be "too precious about it". "You can't be hamstrung by national possessiveness," he says. "Of course one rightly has to be aware of how the piece is regarded. I can't say how Russians will respond, but they will inevitably be critical of certain choices, of certain changes we've made in the poem. They know it so well - it's almost like making changes in the Gospel story."
Or, as he politely warned a group of Russian journalists who were visiting London to see Onegin for the first time, "it represents Pushkin's poem - and a film is not just a projected piece of script."
The Onegin story - best known in the west as the Tchaikovsky opera, with its great lyrical arias such as Tatiana's Letter Song and its magnificent final duet - follows the mixed fortunes of a cynical big-city bachelor, whose enforced stay in the country on inheriting his wealthy uncle's estate triggers a compelling scenario of love and pain. At the heart of the piece is an epically pointless duel that tragically presaged Pushkin's own premature end in 1837, aged just 38.
Doggedly pursuing his Pushkin project, in which he co-stars with Liv Tyler, Toby Stephens and Lena Headey, rather neatly straddles Fiennes's acting career to date. "At RADA," he recalls, "we had a wonderful teacher and librarian called Lloyd Trott, who saw his role as encouraging the students to have a wider breadth of knowledge about literature in general. He suggested I read Evgeny Onegin. It may have been just coincidence that I was playing Ivanov at the time, who's also a prime example of 'the superfluous man' in Russian literature. Onegin was the first of that kind. I loved the poem, especially in the Nabokov translation, and the character. From then on, I carried it always in the back of my mind thinking, 'One day. . . what a wonderful part. . .' "
By the time he completed his first film in 1992 (an ambitious if deeply unsuccessful version of Wuthering Heights) the project had moved haltingly on to paper. "I had scrawled some loose storyboard ideas," says Fiennes, "drawn some pictures and even written a small treatment which I then showed to Martha, who was doing commercials and promo videos. It wasn't a question of just giving her a break, rather more my recognising, 'Hey, hang on - my sister's doing some exciting work here.' I said to her, 'Look, we can develop this together as a project which may or may not eventually happen.' "
So, while they then continued to pursue their separate careers - Ralph in films such as Schindler's List and Quiz Show, Martha in award-winning ads and music videos - first Michael Ignatieff and then a young writer called Peter Ettedgui churned out various fresh drafts, after the Fienneses themselves had jointly written an early treatment.
"The real lift was The English Patient," says Fiennes. "I was now perceived as being 'bankable'. Doors had been open before, but nervously. After all, here was a script about a man who first says no to the girl, shoots his best friend for no really good reason, and then doesn't get the girl. When the money began to get serious, the voices of compromise also began to come in, but we were determined to do it the way we wanted.
"As for my extra role as executive producer, I didn't know quite what it actually meant," he adds. "I'd seen people before called executive producers who did absolutely nothing. I wasn't involved in the money. I was there to support Martha, which mainly meant in terms of the script. We both discovered how it was necessary to make wrenches away from the source material yet, at the same time, still be true to it. It's about responding cinematically to what's on the page."
Overall, Fiennes - who has since completed three roles in Istvan Szabo's
Taste of Sunshine, and is currently finishing his first foray into the
world of Graham Greene, playing Maurice Bendrix in Neil Jordan's new
version of The End of the Affair - seems content. "Between the two of
us, I think we can say this is the film we wanted to make," he says,
adding just a little enigmatically, "as much as one ever can."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on June 16, 1999
EL STEPHO