by Peter Hall
In the Sixties and early Seventies, because of the low cost of making movies in Britain and because we still had a film industry, many itinerant American producers passed through London. They would take people like me, those they believed to be ‘bankable’, out to an expensive lunch and discuss a glittering variety of ideas. I spent many weeks working on scripts or attending meetings for projects that never happened. Ironically, such aborted ventures earned me a lot of money. And though they achieved little they taught me a great deal. More than anything I wanted to direct a movie from my own screenplay – and still do. I found that I loved constructing a film script. I worked with writers on an adaptation of Don Quixote and on a version of Huxley’s Brave New World. Then I was commissioned to write a screenplay myself from an H. E. Bates short story, The Last of Summer, which was very nearly made. In those days the tools of the trade were large scissors and pots of glue as the various scenes were arranged and rearranged. Now it is all done by the magic of the lap-top.
Among the films I made at this time, I think of Pinter’s The Homecoming with special pride. The actors were mainly the marvellous group from my original RSC stage production. David Watkins, one of the great cameramen of the world, photographed it, mainly by shining a Second World War searchlight through the window of the set; the shadows and the depth of focus he achieved were extraordinary. So was the heat. The actors and crew rushed in, played the scene, and rushed out again before they melted.
Earlier, I had directed another movie with RSC actors: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cast was a roll-call of my years with the company: Judi Dench, Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, David Warner, Paul Rogers, Barbara Jefford, Sebastian Shaw, Derek Godfrey, Michael Jayston. Made for CBS Television, the film was networked throughout America on a Sunday night and watched by millions. It also had a limited cinema release.
We shot in and around Compton Verney, a beautiful ruin of an eighteenth-century house, and waited until the autumn before starting so that we could capture for the screen the damp and misty look of the bad summer described in Titania’s great speech. Then the money arrived late, so we had to film even later – well into November. It was cold and wet and difficult for the actors. We crawled about in the undergrowth using a hand-held camera which in those days was very noisy. I accepted this because I wanted to re-record every line of the text in the studio afterwards. As a consequence, it is a beautifully spoken Dream. The film, though, is now rather dated, the lovers particularly having a very Sixties look. In a few more years, it could perhaps work again as a period piece.
My film of Akenfield came about because of an amazing act of faith – some said of lunacy. Cyril Bennett, the controller of London Weekend Television, gave me £100,000. ‘Come back with a film in a year’s time,’ he said.
There was no script. The idea was for local people to play the characters; the story was based loosely on Ronald Blythe’s touching book about life in a Suffolk village. At last I had the opportunity to do something I had always wanted: to make an improvised movie; to catch the unexpected moment and to preserve its drama for ever – something that only cinema can do. All the actors were amateur; most of them were in situations which they had experienced in their work or in their lives. I gave them an objective, and they then talked. At the end of months of shooting, almost always at weekends because our players were not available during the working week, I had about forty-eight hours of Suffolk life. And out of it all came one hour and forty minutes of film which chimed at many points with my life as a small boy.
Chapter Four
One of my anxieties on going to the National was that there would be no time for film-making, but I tried to keep my hand in by making videos of some of the plays and operas I had directed. My generation are the first children of the television age and my work over the years has often been taped by others. After helping with the recording of The Wars of the Roses in the Sixties, I resolved to try to do these adaptations myself.
Opera has become more popular because of television transmissions of stage productions. But these bear as little relation to the originals as postcard reproductions do to paintings. Live televised opera may increase appreciation, but we should not mistake it for the thing itself. However good the technicians, the camera angles are as imprecise and the lighting often as glaringly all-purpose as that for a football match. And the singers are never sure whether they are playing to the audience in the theatre or to the camera. I think I overcame these problems with three operas I shot at Glyndebourne: Carmen, Albert Herring and L’Incoronazione di Poppea. So that the performers could concentrate on communicating to the camera, we had no audience. The theatre was, in effect, turned into a television studio.
My video of The Oresteia gave me another opportunity to do something different. Because the actors were in full masks, which completely covered their mouths, it was possible to record the sound of the production independently and then fit the pictures to the soundtrack. We shot the video over four different public performances with four small cameras dotted about the Olivier auditorium. Three of them had a predetermined function – following certain characters, securing certain scripted shots – but each night one of the four cameramen was entirely free to improvise and to shoot what interested him. I ended up with sixteen shots of every second of The Oresteia, so the editing was a long, taxing job. Finally, however, the rhythm of the camera work answered the rhythm of Tony Harrison’s text and the pulse of Harry Birtwistle’s music.
Chapter Five
In 1988, on leaving the National, I was asked by Stephen Poliakoff to direct for BBC Television his screenplay She’s Been Away. This gave me the unexpected chance to work once more with Peggy Ashcroft. I had wanted to direct her in Brian Clarke’s The Petition at the NT in 1986, but she felt her age by then had made her too nervous to appear on the stage. She thought she might still manage film. She did. And that a woman in her eighties could be so creative for so many long, gruelling days was astounding.
It was a happy shoot. On the first day, I had a moment of unease about where to put the camera: it was fifteen years since I had directed a film. But after a few set-ups I was loving the experience. The film turned out well. Peggy and Geraldine James had become devoted friends when they had acted together in The Jewel in the Crown. They inspired each other again, winning joint best actress awards at the Venice Film Festival.
She’s Been Away fixed on film Peggy’s last great performance. The final shot of our schedule was one of those ridiculous sequences, when a car is strapped on top of a low-loader so that it appears to be driving along the road but isn’t really. At the end, Peggy erupted from the vehicle and addressed the unit in the resonant voice that had carried her through every major Shakespearean role. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank you all very much. That’s it. Cameo roles from now on!’
Our producer was a famous BBC name, Ken Trodd. A man of great taste and infinite gloom, he would stand on the set eating buns all day, never expressing a word of enthusiasm. I didn’t mind about this; he was known for it, and I understood that, all the same, he was supportive and concerned.
When the editing was finished, and while the dub was being prepared, marrying the music, dialogue and sound effects, Nicki and I went to Greece. Almost immediately I was phoned there by Stephen Edwards, the composer of the music. He said he’d been sacked. Ken Trodd wanted to put in other music. I spent most of our short holiday in a hot cupboard under the stairs of the friend’s house where we were staying, arguing on the phone with Ken and his boss, Mark Shivas.
When I returned to England, I discovered that another score had been commissioned. I was amazed. I said that if the BBC was going to break its tradition of honouring what the director wanted, and behave like Hollywood at its worst, it should at least pay like Hollywood. I was shown a section of the film with the new music. It was wallpaper stuff that had no specific intention. I protested that if they insisted on using it I would take my name off the credits. When I was w
arned that I had no right to do that, I said I would make public that the music was their choice, not mine, and was then reminded that under my contract I was not allowed to talk to the press about the production without the BBC’s permission. I replied that I certainly would talk. It was then lightly hinted that if I did I would never work for the BBC again. I said that in that case I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
All this was very silly. But I had a trump card. Stephen, although sacked, had, at my request, continued to work on the music. By the time the BBC and I had reached total impasse, he had completed enough of his intricate, electronic score for them to hear, not just an impression as before, but how it actually sounded. They found they liked it after all and peace was restored.
Many years ago, the film director Sidney Lumet gave me some good advice. You must always have the courage to walk out. Equally, you must always have enough money in the bank not to care about being paid. He called this his ‘fuck you’ fund. The next job, he said, was always less important than getting the present one right.
Chapter Six
A few months after finishing She’s Been Away I was in New York opening Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending. An American company asked me if I would make a television film of the play with the original theatre cast. They surprised me by saying they had to get a writer; I pointed out that they had one already: Tennessee Williams. What they wanted, of course, was a rewrite job. I am terrified of ‘creative adaptations’, so I said that I would do the shooting script myself, knowing that Nicki would help me and that I had the support of Maria St Just, Tennessee Williams’s friend and the executor of his estate. With some rearrangements and cuts, Nicki and I, by working all day and much of each night, achieved in three weeks a tight two-hour screen version of this great sprawling play, using Tennessee’s own words.
We shot at a cracking pace, finishing in twenty-six days. For the first time I was able to shoot film at a speed that maintained my adrenalin. And because the cast, including Vanessa Redgrave, Kevin Anderson, Miriam Margolyes and Anne Twomey, knew the material well, we usually got what was needed in the first or second take. Even so, I would always ask them to do one more, this time with the freedom of trying exactly what they wanted. That take rarely departed much from the rehearsed framework, but it was always fresher, more spontaneous and relaxed. I often used it in the final film.
Stephen Edwards did the music as he had done for the play. When the ominous rumblings of his score echoed round the dubbing studio, the associate producer asked him if he had ever composed music for a horror movie.
Orpheus Descending preserves one of Vanessa’s greatest performances. And, while doing the screenplay, Nicki and I found we could collaborate. She is a clear-eyed critic and writes with economy and precision. I mainly look after the structure. Out of this, a new career for both of us has opened up. Soon after Orpheus we had the chance to work on an original script. I was in Houston staging Tippett’s New Year when a long letter arrived from two women producers, followed by boxes of books, documents and pictures. They wanted me to direct and write (this last was the surprise) their projected Life of Enrico Caruso.
I don’t like bio-pics and I had no wish to make Mario Lanza Rides Again, so I sent a note of thanks saying that unfortunately I was too busy.
But the ladies wouldn’t be refused. In the end, Nicki and I went through the material and were mightily intrigued. Caruso had a secret life. Two young opera singers, sisters, met him when he was a young boy from the Naples slums. They were both very talented (indeed, both sang Tosca within a couple of years of its premiere) and they set about helping him. They taught him to act, to sing, to walk on the stage. It was Pygmalion with the genders reversed. Caruso became the first international superstar, and by 1921, when he died aged forty-eight, he had made over two million dollars from his records alone. He lived with one of the sisters and had children by her. With the other, he had an affair and they became engaged. Whereupon the first promptly eloped with the chauffeur. For thirteen years this ménage à trois played a Strindbergian farce, dangerous in its intensity, around the opera houses of the world. Their lives were more extreme and improbable than the plots of the operas they sang. Then the sisters woke one morning to read in the papers that Caruso had married a rich young American heiress; they had not even known of her existence.
This irresistible combination of Puccini and farce makes me hopeful that the film will happen. Also, our finished original script has led to other work. I had read a remarkable book, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, which clearly had possibilities for TV. The story of how, during the eighteenth century, millions of black people were exported from Africa to the West Indies to be slaves, thereby vastly enriching Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol, is an extraordinary and appalling episode in our history. It provided capital which made possible the Industrial Revolution.
I suggested an adaptation of Sacred Hunger to Michael Grade and Peter Ansorge of Channel 4. We found, however, that a Hollywood deal was about to be signed. I wrote to Barry saying that in my view his narrative needed the slow unfolding of a television series. To tell his tale in two hours on the big screen could wreck it. There was an interval while I waited in suspense for his verdict. Happily he said yes. Nicki and I were commissioned to develop scripts for eight episodes, working with Barry.
Chapter Seven
In the autumn of 1990 I was asked to have a drink with two young independent television producers, Sophy Belhetchet and Glenn Wilhide. The meeting showed them to be, as producers go, blissfully straightforward. Did I know Mary Wesley’s novels? I was ashamed to say that I didn’t. Did I know Ken Taylor? I certainly did, as one of the best screen-writers in the country. The Jewel in the Crown was his.
Sophy and Glenn said they were going to film Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn in five parts, that it had been scripted by Ken, and that it would go before the cameras the following March. They thought – largely because of She’s Been Away – that I would he the right director. I took the vast script away and read it. It was about the early war years in London, years which I remembered from my childhood. I then read the novel and the rest of Mary Wesley’s books. As her many readers know, these have a clarity so pin-bright that they can be quite shocking. I lunched with her and found her very much the author of her novels. She is in her late seventies, shrewd, witty and elegant, seeing life unblinkingly and unsentimentally with all its warts and absurdities.
There are many young characters in the story, so the cast we had was an interesting combination of the new – Jennifer Ehle, Tara Fitzgerald, Toby Stephens, Ben Walden – with the seasoned talents of Paul Eddington, Felicity Kendal, Rosemary Harris, Claire Bloom, Virginia McKenna and Richard Johnson. The thirteen weeks of shooting were a delight, despite the maddening contrariness of the weather. In Cornwall we had to create a beautiful summer out of the wettest season for years; and in Oxfordshire the sun blazed down while we filmed a long funeral sequence which was meant to be in the rain.
The opportunity to tell a complex tale over an extended period was something new to me. It is a strength of television that it can deal with a long narrative by presenting it as a series – much as big nineteenth-century novels were first published as serials in magazines.
My pleasure in the work was crowned by pride in my daughter Rebecca, then nine, who played the part of Sophie with the utmost truth. How myopic we can be about our own children. Even when she was very little, if Rebecca were asked whether she would like to play with her friends or come to a rehearsal, either mine or her mother’s, she would always choose the rehearsal. Yet neither Maria nor I thought this in the least odd or significant. By the time of Camomile Lawn, Rebecca had watched with gravity and concentration many operas and plays in rehearsal, and films being shot. One afternoon, two years before, she had come on the set of She’s Been Away and seen the excellent James Fox make the same telephone call for two hours for the benefit of various camera angles. Afterwards, she said to me ‘Well, papa, I’ve
watched you rehearse theatre, and I’ve watched you rehearse opera. But I think making a film is the most boring thing you do.’
It was not my idea that Rebecca should play Sophie. We had seen over five hundred little girls and were only three days from shooting when Sophy and Glenn asked me if they could test Rebecca, whom they had met. With some trepidation, I agreed. I knew she could act because of her performances in school plays. But the surprise was how well; and that she knew precisely how to do what was asked of her. She had clearly learned a lot while looking so absorbed at all those rehearsals over the years. Her secret was out: she had always wanted to be an actress.
I was very nervous for her, but I needn’t have been. Her work was brilliant, and she was responsive and professional. At the end of the first day, she talked over the problems of film-making with me. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘if it feels silly to you, then it looks silly to the camera.’
Some of the scenes that Rebecca had to play were very emotional, some were quite adult. In one, she finds a dutch cap in a bathroom cupboard and speculates on its function, suggesting to a flustered grown-up that it might be a ‘truss for a bosom’. I felt I couldn’t ask her to do this scene without talking to her about it. But I was the uneasy one. Did she know what a dutch cap was, I asked? ‘Oh yes,’ she replied with no trace of embarrassment. Later I discovered that she had discussed the matter with Nicki weeks before as part of her preparation for the part.
There were several sexy sequences in The Camomile Lawn; these were praised by a few for their honesty and damned by more for their titillation. The truth is that I tried to shoot them with the same unemotional clarity that I had found in Mary Wesley’s descriptions of them. Sex was, after all, part of life – even in the 1940s. In fact, all the scenes were either before sex or after it – never the act itself – and they were comic. My aim was to make sex as absurd as it can often be in reality.
