by Peter Hall
I wish I could have seen these performances. I had to leave the tour in Moscow in order to start rehearsing Falstaff at Glyndebourne – another world.
There is a small collection of masterpieces which, while looking honestly at the absurdity of human behaviour, end up celebrating it: Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, She Stoops to Conquer, The Marriage of Figaro. I would add Falstaff to that list. I had looked forward for a long time to directing it. It turned out to be a horrible experience. Just before rehearsals began, I trapped a nerve in my neck and had to wear one of those torturing collars designed to limit head movement. For the entire rehearsal period I was on strong painkillers and, I’m sure, somewhat hazy. If it hadn’t been for Stephen Lawless, my brilliant assistant, I doubt if the show would ever have reached the stage.
Both in work and in my private life, I was pushing myself to the edge again. I was advised that an operation was necessary to cure my neck. As a last resort I tried a course of acupuncture. In the first minute of treatment I felt the pain draining out of me. It was like silence after six weeks of excruciating noise. A few more sessions and the cure was permanent.
Once Falstaff had opened, Nicki and I left for France. I was in desperate need of a rest. But rest, or at any rate peace of mind, escaped me. Leaving the National, breaking with Maria, upsetting all my children yet again – particularly Rebecca who was only six – disturbing my parents, and starting another new life at my age, all seemed suddenly terrifying.
I loved Nicki deeply, but for a few horrible weeks I could not resolve all the contradictory tensions in my head. I thought of suicide again. All this made a hell for Nicki, and I will always marvel at the strength she found. She knew that I had to sort things out for myself.
As soon as we were back in England, this private turmoil was aggravated. Our affair had leaked to the press. We were suddenly on the front pages and being pursued by photographers and journalists wherever we went.
Perhaps a theatre director, who in the scheme of things rates as fairly small beer, should be flattered that his private life is of keen interest to the reading millions. But I didn’t see it that way. The attentions of the tabloid press made it ten times more difficult to clear my tangled head. Nicki and I were now figures in an absurd public drama and we did not recognise ourselves.
We even split up briefly to see if separation would help me make up my mind; and she wrote me a letter full of understanding and completely devoid of any emotional blackmail. It was this letter more than anything that brought me back from the edge. It is typical of my care for the past that I have lost it.
The pain of that summer of 1988 was also mixed with farce. I was due to go to Scarborough to see Alan Ayckbourn’s new play, Man of the Moment. But all the exits from the National were posted with journalists waiting to waylay me. We had, however, a remarkable security officer, David Mundy, whose job was to remind us constantly that all theatres are a frightful risk to the well-being of the public. Naked flames, insecure handrails, pieces of loose carpet on the stairs haunted his dreams. I shared the problem of my escape with him and he came up with a plan.
During lunch my secretary, Mary Cooper, backed her Mini in through the enormous scene-dock doors at the rear of the building. The doors were then shut with the car inside. When it was time for me to leave I crouched in the back seat of the Mini while Mary, armed with a mobile phone, sat in the driver’s seat waiting for her cue from David who was outside watching. As soon as the group of journalists wandered away for a cup of tea, he phoned her and gave the signal. The dock doors opened and we hurtled out.
As I collapsed with relief into my seat on the train, I saw to my horror that the man opposite was reading an evening paper which had a large picture of me with Maria on the front page. I buried my face in a script.
It was embarrassing the next morning to find that Alan’s house in Scarborough was also surrounded by reporters. How the word had got out that I was there I simply couldn’t guess. I stayed hidden while Heather Chasen, Alan’s very funny and practical companion, showed her mettle as an actress. ‘He’s not here,’ I heard her say at the front door. ‘He’s a very busy man and always changing his plans. You never know where he is …’
That night, going to Alan’s theatre by a roundabout route, I picked my way secretly across the flower beds and over the tiny ornate bridges of the municipal gardens. He met me in the shrubbery and we crept in through a little-used back entrance. I enjoyed the play.
Alan and Heather accepted all that was happening in a wonderfully helpful and humorous spirit. I mentioned to them how furious my mother would be at her son’s third crashed marriage. Alan said, ‘I can see the Daily Mirror headline now: “Son Right off Rails says Railway Wife”.’
The harrying by the press didn’t let up. Back in London I found my house in Chelsea beseiged by journalists. So Alan, again with blessed kindness, lent Nicki and me his apartment in Docklands as a hideaway.
Abroad we were not spared. The Late Shakespeares were by now in Greece and reporters even tracked us there, sending bottles of champagne up to our hotel room in an attempt to persuade us to be interviewed. The representative of the Sun expressed great sorrow that he could not stay to attend the opening of Cymbeline at Epidaurus on behalf of his readers. We returned the champagne.
In September, I was followed around Los Angeles where, on a contract signed two years before, I was directing Così fan tutte with Maria singing Dorabella. A photograph of us going into rehearsal led to speculation about a reconciliation.
It was all silly-season stuff. But the three of us did not feel very silly, although I am sure we frequently looked it.
That autumn I left the National in a whirl of parties, speeches and presents. I have always loved presents, and the theatre staff gave me a wonderful one: a Hasselblad camera.
The Board had decided on a present that had to be specially made. It was a beautiful modern love-seat devised to go round a tree. But when the time came to give it to me, I had left Maria and the country house where we lived. I no longer had a tree.
I was starting again.
Part Five
Flash Forward, Flash Back
Chapter One
Like all my generation, I spent a great deal of my childhood in cinemas – vast smoke-filled palaces of fantasy, a world away from the tiny boxes of today’s multiplex movie houses.
I saw Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Olivier’s Henry V, Citizen Kane; and then, thanks to the Cambridge Film Society, the great French films of the Thirties and Forties. I watched Raimu, Jean Gabin, Les Enfants du Paradis, and graduated to Cocteau and Eisenstein. I discovered new heroes in Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. In fact, I have been so thoroughly marinated in film that I am surprised to find myself still chiefly a director of plays and operas.
We all have unrealised ambitions. Peter Brook is perhaps the stage’s greatest living innovator; yet his ambition was to be a film director – an auteur like Godard or Truffaut or Louis Malle. I have stayed in the theatre because, although it is a minority art, it has, at its best, an unrivalled power to change the hearts and minds of audiences. Also, I love words, and a play communicates primarily by its text. Even a silence is shaped by the words that surround it; even a dance or a duel has to be set up verbally.
With film, it is the images that matter most, and they alter literally with the speed of light. Twenty-four frames of celluloid flicker through an illuminated gate each second. And this montage of shot on shot, jump cut, dissolve, flash forward and flash back gives film the mobility and unexpectedness of a dream. Its images seem real but of course they are not. Our apprehension of film is literal before it is metaphorical. An actor on a bare wooden stage, if he has the right words and the right magnetism, can make a theatre audience believe he is in Ancient Rome. But a film of him on that same stage, saying the same words, remains just an actor making a speech on bare boards.
It seems to me that, as the cost of shooting has increased and the
power of the controlling accountants with it, some of the art has gone out of film-making. In the early days, for example, rushes were a quickly developed record of yesterday’s work that could be shown to the actors so they could learn by seeing their mistakes. That is the way Chaplin worked; rushes were part of the process of doing it again. Now they are too often just a check that the film has come out without any technical flaws; and actors are generally discouraged from watching them. Only the most blatant disaster can justify a retake. Thus a once-great creative strength of movie-making – its ability to hold a mirror up to the actor which helps him to refine what he is doing – is no more.
However, to see again some of the cinema’s early masterpieces can be unsettling. While theatre doesn’t last beyond tonight’s performance, film is fixed and therefore dates because of the changing responses of a contemporary audience. The other day I experienced something I would never have thought possible: Garbo began to overact.
Chapter Two
I love the physical world of movie-making. It is tatty and tawdry, a bit like a building site. Everything is improvised and taped together for the moment. The most elaborate and atmospheric lighting is achieved by torn bits of frosted gelatine and black cardboard strips fastened over the lamps with bulldog clips. A technician wafts smoke on to the set by waving a piece of rough-sawn plywood – and what the camera sees is a mist that steals gently over the heroine’s hair and eyes. Only the tiny frame that the camera is actually pointing at – only the shot itself – is shaped and ordered; all else is the untidy chaos of the film studio.
Make-up and hair-do’s, the preparations of prop men and of the lighting cameraman, are all allowed lengthy care and attention. When everything is ready, and only then, the actors are hurried to the set. There they are expected to deliver instant genius. If actors or director stop to think, or discuss their problems, the atmosphere quickly becomes tense. The minute one shot is over and safely in the can, the unit moves on to the next. Unlike in the theatre, there is no time for trying out solutions and jettisoning them. The director must come prepared, knowing exactly what he wants. He must always seem certain and god-like.
The pattern of a film director’s day is different from that of a theatre director. For two-thirds of it he is liable to do nothing except pass the time, chat idly to other people who are also waiting to do their jobs, and try to avoid eating the mountains of food that are always available to bolster up the crew. But during the third of the day when he is actually shooting, his critical and creative energies are stretched to the full. It is a switchback ride; and I took a long time to get used to it. I would pace nervily around the studio, wondering why the lighting cameraman couldn’t be quicker, or thinking that the unnatural calm around me came from laziness. I was wrong. I had to learn to trust the natural rhythm of the work.
I found, as well, that I had to change how I worked with the actor. I admire the great movie actor just as intensely as I admire the great stage actor. Both convey absolute truth in performance. But in the theatre, that truth has to be projected – though without coarsening or distorting it. In the cinema good actors do not project at all. This does not mean that they don’t feel, but that when their feelings are almost hidden the camera is most eager to reveal them. If actors behave like reticent lovers, the camera wants more and more of them.
I also had to develop a different pace in dealing with film actors. In the theatre, five or six weeks of rehearsal allow the director to conduct stage actors on a journey they may never have contemplated before. Areas of their talent and their personality may be explored in ways quite new to them. This is an exciting and dangerous proceeding, and needs time. But time is the one thing the film director never has. If he challenges the film actor too obviously, he runs the risk of photographing the nervousness and tension that result from facing up to the problem. And he will film that, not the solution. Directing the film actor had, I found, to be more about reassurance than exploration.
Dirk Bogarde became a great friend during my early years in the theatre – I had directed him in a not very successful West End play – and during visits to see him on sets I watched avidly how a film was put together. Later, when I was married to Leslie, I saw Hollywood at work, and also learned about camera angles and editing. Since then, whenever I go to a movie I have to force myself to surrender to the film: otherwise I sit working out how many different shots have gone to make up each scene.
But it was not until I directed my first film that I understood the miracles that could be performed in the editing room. Editing allows the director to make the final choices, to juxtapose the images in different ways, and to become the creator. The scriptwriter may well have inspired these images, but he could not have known precisely how they would interact on each other. In the cutting room, the director, in a true sense, becomes the author. The dialogue can be retimed and repaused; the reactions altered; the mood changed by the addition of music and effects. And what is unsatisfactory can often be cut or obscured.
Orson Welles once said that being given the opportunity to make a film was like presenting the small boy that is in every director with the ultimate electric train set. I find it more like painstakingly putting together the thousand pieces of a jigsaw, one piece for each shot of the film, without knowing quite what picture the jigsaw will eventually make.
Chapter Three
I made my first film, Work is a Four Letter Word, in 1967 for Universal. It was produced – with a great deal of courage in view of my inexperience – by Tommy Clyde. The script was freely adapted by Jeremy Brooks and myself from a play I had done for the RSC, Eh? by Henry Livings. In the film were David Warner, the young Cilla Black, and a group of RSC actors including Alan Howard, Elizabeth Spriggs and David Waller. But its strange mixture of anarchy and North Country humour did not take easily to the screen. I tried to turn David into a modern Buster Keaton at large in a surreal world. Looking back, I think the movie was not surreal enough. I was also very nervous, learning by doing it, learning above all how to know when a scene is adequately covered by the camera. In my anxiety, I did precisely what I wished to avoid: I filmed too many shots. If a director covers a scene from too many angles, he inevitably ends up using the majority of them. This made my first movie extremely restless.
I’ve always worshipped classical film-makers such as Billy Wilder and Jean Renoir. They contain the action in carefully composed shots which develop only with the movement of the actors, and the cut to the next shot is inevitable and unnoticeable. The film-makers I admire today for their technique are Louis Malle and Woody Allen. Allen is also the only modern director to take full advantage of film, keeping forty per cent of his budget for re-shooting once he has looked at the rough edit.
I do not much like those modern American films where an anxiety to hold the audience’s attention results in constant cutting to a different shot. This produces a surface energy, but belongs to the world of the advertising commercial where the style becomes the meaning and the meaning itself is lost.
Every time I make a film, I struggle for the simplicity of style that I believe I can achieve on the stage. And I usually fail, because I will not economise with the camera: there are still far too many shots. Yet I yearn to make films. I dream of being Ingmar Bergman in his heyday, working with the same group of actors and making modest pictures on big subjects in the summer, then directing plays in the winter.
Perhaps, one day, it will be possible for a director to shoot his film with a tiny camera which he operates himself. Perhaps, one day, there will be a minimum of lights, with the sound created by intensely sensitive, invisible microphones. Then the vans and the lorries and the catering buses and the make-up caravans and the portable lavatories, and all the vast army of people who make up even the smallest film crew, will be reduced to a few basic technicians.
Though Work is a Four Letter Word was not a success, it was not such a failure that it stopped me making more films. After leaving the RSC in 1968, and be
fore going to the National in 1973, I was a freelance director and shot, as well as a short film of Pinter’s play Landscape, five full-length movies. One of the earliest was Three Into Two Won’t Go with Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom and an Edna O’Brien script. I followed this with Perfect Friday, a caper movie with Stanley Baker, Ursula Andress and David Warner, produced by a partnership between Dimitri de Grunwald and myself.
Dimitri was an old-style European wheeler-dealer, with flair, acumen and great charm. He taught me that it is not enough for the script to be good and for the actors to be gifted; if a film is actually to be made, the project must in some way be ‘hot’.
And this does not change. Some time ago I was asked if I would be interested in developing a book as a movie. It was a fascinating journal by Etty Hillesum about life in Amsterdam under the Nazis. I proposed Harold Pinter as the scriptwriter, but the producers said they could not attract the money they needed unless they could also include an actress’s name. I suggested Emma Thompson. ‘Emma who?’ they said. Some eighteen months later, when Emma was nominated for an Oscar for Howard’s End, the producers rang me and, after apologising for their long silence, enquired whether I knew Emma Thompson; did I think she would be good for the film? I said that I had suggested her at the start. They were dumbfounded: they couldn’t remember this. Then they rallied. ‘But,’ they said, ‘she wasn’t Emma Thompson then.’
