by Steve Coogan
I was, on occasion, overwhelmed by the response. After one Q&A in America a large group of middle-aged women hung around to talk to me. My American assistant, Jessica, took a photo of me looking slightly messianic: I’m crouching down, talking to these women from the stage as they look up at me. She said I look like a cross between Jeremy Kyle and Jesus Christ.
I think people responded to the humanity in the film. It’s not arrogant, it doesn’t claim to have all the answers. There’s an imperfection about it simply because there isn’t a definitive resolution; nor is there total redemption. It allows both Philomena and Martin to say, ‘You don’t have to win the argument. Life can move on. It’s OK that both of us have flaws.’
Martin is very bullish at the start of the film. He thinks his world view is the right one, but he’s wrong. Philomena teaches him a lesson in the end: there is no right and wrong, just different ways of living our lives. That’s me admonishing myself for my own cynicism, because I still have to think quite consciously about not being cynical.
People also responded to the humour in Philomena. I met Tom Hooper, who directed The King’s Speech, at a party after Philomena came out. He said that just as he was convinced he was about to be manipulated he found himself laughing and then, when he wasn’t prepared for it, he was karate-chopped with emotion. I was pleased because it was exactly the response I’d hoped for. And it was no accident. I was throwing ideas out during the entire writing process because I’d seen them before and they felt too familiar.
And so the momentum kept on building around the film.
I was wary of dragging Philomena, who was about to turn eighty-one, around the circuit and I didn’t want to exploit her for the sake of the film. But she was brilliant. She did Q&As, she talked to the audience and she was very honest about her story.
Sometimes you’d get a curveball in a Q&A.
Audience member: ‘Were you really OK with your son being gay, Philomena?’
I’d jump in first: ‘I’m glad you asked. Because some people assume that I was being politically correct by making Philomena accept her son in the film.’
Then Philomena would say in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I was a nurse for thirty years. I worked with plenty of gay male nurses and they were often the best nurses. They did all the heavy lifting.’
I might add, ‘There you go. I didn’t make it up. And I didn’t make up the scene where Philomena sees her son for the last time in the back window of the car as he’s being driven away by his adoptive parents.’
*
I went to so many award ceremonies for Philomena that I can no longer differentiate them in my mind. I know that I wasn’t allowed to wear the same tuxedo twice. Each one cost $5,000 and had to be measured so that it was a perfect fit around my buttocks. I wore a Dolce & Gabbana suit to introduce Katy Perry and Juicy J to the stage at the Emmys and they sent a letter saying I looked like a proper gentleman.
More importantly, I managed to get in a slight dig at misogynistic black rap music and I made a joke about the Jonas Brothers and The Beatles that got a laugh. But those events are mostly mind-numbing and I only do them because I’m told to. I didn’t feel as though I had to sell Philomena, because it was doing a pretty good job of selling itself.
On 16 January 2014, the Oscar nominations were announced. I was half-asleep in my Los Angeles hotel room when the phone rang just before 6 a.m. I’d been trying to sleep all night and I was in this semi-dreamlike state in which I was convinced it was midday and I’d overslept. The phone rang and I jolted awake as if I’d had an electric shock.
My American assistant, Jessica, was on the other end. She was screaming. ‘You’ve got three Oscar nominations! Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay!’
I didn’t watch the Oscar nominations because it would have been excruciating to watch and not get anything. A single nomination would have been amazing. We weren’t in any of the American newspapers’ Oscar predictions, which made it even more delicious.
It was a very emotional day, not least because Mum left a message in which she was barely able to talk because she was crying.
And then three nominations became four when Alexandre Desplat was nominated for his original score. I absolutely love his score. It’s the antithesis of the kind of prescriptive score that tells you what you’re watching is either quirky or significant. It doesn’t spoon-feed you some kind of emotion in the vein of John Williams, whom I have always found too literal.
It was a whirlwind of an experience. People used to tell me that I’d be going on a journey, and I was baffled. But that’s exactly what happened.
The Oscars are like a political campaign. Winning an Oscar is partly to do with how good your film is and partly to do with how tenacious you are during awards season.
In the US I am sometimes recognised by middle-aged women for Philomena, and in Whole Foods by bearded hipsters for 24 Hour Party People and The Trip. No one, however, ever stops me in Wal-Mart. And no one has ever shouted out, ‘Aha!’
Not being well known in America really helped. In Britain, when people were coming up to me in 2014 and saying ‘I loved your film’, they nearly always meant Alpha Papa. In the States, however, it was always Philomena. They would come up to me there without knowing anything about Alan Partridge, which was quite liberating.
As Oscar night approached, I kept thinking of stories I’d heard in the past.
Stuart Cornfeld, who is now Ben Stiller’s producing partner, told me this, my favourite Oscar story. In 1981, The Elephant Man, which Cornfeld executively produced, was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and Martin Scorsese was nominated for Best Director for Raging Bull.
Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford, won Best Picture and Best Director.
Later in the evening, Martin Scorsese walked up to Stuart and said, ‘In twenty years’ time, The Elephant Man and Raging Bull will be considered classics and Ordinary People will be the answer to a trivia question.’
Which is exactly what happened.
And I comforted myself by remembering what Denis Healey said about not being prime minister: ‘I’d rather people wondered why I wasn’t prime minister than why I was.’
It was incredible to be nominated with Jeff for the script. I read books slowly. I like to watch Air Crash Investigation. The closest I get to spirituality is watching Wheeler Dealers, in which cars are done up and sold for £5,000. Watching a programme that has no real consequence or looking at used cars online is, to me, a form of meditation. It’s like doing yoga.
My parents, my daughter and my then girlfriend, Loretta, came to the Oscars.
Of course I was disappointed to lose Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay to 12 Years a Slave (or Roots as it used to be called) but it’s the taking part that counts.
Steve McQueen said at every opportunity that 12 Years a Slave wasn’t about race, it was about America. And no one is going to vote against America. I said we should take a leaf out of his book, so when I won a low-profile award from the Italian film society in LA, I had a bet with Jeff that I could tenuously and circuitously arrive at a point where Philomena was about America.
I went up onstage and said, Philomena isn’t just a film about a woman looking for a son she never saw grow up. It’s about something else. It’s about refugees leaving the Old World and coming to the New World. In a way this film is about America.’
Not that it did us any good. Still, I won the bet.
CHAPTER 6
DAD HAS A great love of poetry. At my mum’s eightieth he quoted Shakespeare from memory. I occasionally read poetry to him and he reads it to me, both to find a connection with him and because it makes a change from his favourite subject, engineering. I read him some A. E. Housman and Byron and then he reads me some Rudyard Kipling.
I wanted ‘The Garden of Love’, a Blake poem, to appear on the screen before the credits at the end of Philomena:
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never
had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
Stephen said no, but I still think it might have worked, because it’s about sexuality and denial. Why would God give us desire and then want us to resist it? And yet I grew up thinking that sex was taboo. It was about procreation, not enjoyment.
Of course I took into consideration the fact that my parents were Catholics when I made Philomena, but I could only be true to myself. When I told my parents that I was co-writing it, I think they were anxious, but I didn’t want to do anything that would denigrate their faith.
I do think that Catholics like Philomena represent my parents: they live their lives without preaching or piety. It’s about being kind and decent, in an unassuming and unremarkable way. My parents aren’t talkers, they are doers. Well, they do talk, but not about what they do. They quietly bear witness to their values.
When the film came out, it was a great moment to share with my extended Irish family.
My father’s brother was in tears. He had only one criticism, and that was about a scene that was set in the Republic of Ireland but shot in a bar in Northern Ireland: ‘On the shelf at the back there was a bottle of Bell’s whisky rather than Paddy whiskey,’ He looked at me and winked. ‘It’s just unthinkable …’
He also said that when the film was shown in Ireland, there was a great wave of appreciation for the opportunity to reignite the topic of the Catholic Church and its adoption practices.
As far as I am aware, more Catholics embraced Philomena than rejected it – apart from the religious right in America, who hated it and dismissed it as anti-Catholic. What enraged the fundamentalists most was that Philomena was willing to forgive the nuns who sold her child. She refused to judge them; they had behaved badly, but she believed they were capable of good.
American fundamentalists don’t get ambiguity, self-doubt or humility; they see such traits as weakness. They see forgiveness as unforgivable.
I’ve travelled a lot around America, but I’ve never seen a bumper sticker that says, ‘I love nuance.’
At the end of the film, Philomena is someone who lives her faith. She doesn’t shout it from the rooftops; she isn’t one of those people who tell everyone else how they should behave. She just lives by her own values. Like my parents, she walks the walk while other Catholics talk the talk.
Philomena is not an angry polemic like The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s very powerful film about three teenage Irish girls who are sent to the Magdalene laundries to carry out unpaid labour under the supervision of nuns. There’s no olive branch in Mullan’s film; there is in Philomena. The irony is that the person who had these things perpetrated upon her is herself the best hope for her faith. She is able to show the most dignified serenity to the same religious institution that repressed her. That paradox is in the film.
The things you’re not supposed to talk about in films are the same things you’re not supposed to talk about at dinner parties: religion, politics and sex. Philomena has all three. We revisited, at my insistence, the occasion when the Republicans withdrew funding for AIDS research in the 1980s. It’s nice to have unambiguous moments of clarity: Republicans guilty; Democrats not guilty.
All of which made the Catholic League’s heads explode. They didn’t want an olive branch, they wanted the film to be a polemical attack because then they could attack back. Attrition, black and white. Microwaveable, instant, ready-made religion takes away the pain of thinking for yourself.
Then Philomena and I went to see the Pope, and it basically shut them all up.
When Stephen first mooted the idea at the Venice Film Festival, it seemed utterly bonkers. Stephen said, ‘I think the Pope should see this film. It’s important. He seems like a good bloke.’
Everyone laughed. It seemed like a preposterous idea; how on earth do you get an audience with the Pope?
But Stephen persisted. ‘Seriously, I think he should see it.’
I don’t think Stephen would have suggested a visit to Pope Francis’s predecessor, but Pope Francis is a bona fide liberal by comparison. I love the fact that he has humility as well as an awareness of the complexities of life. When he first arrived at the Vatican, you could tell that the more right-wing, fundamentalist, intolerant Catholics didn’t know how to react to this outspoken liberal guy who had just been made the head of their Church.
He argues for greater tolerance of homosexuality in the Church, has discussed his love of the gay baroque painter Caravaggio and is passionate about Italian neorealist cinema. His favourite films are Fellini’s La Strada and Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta, one about a young woman sold by her mother to an itinerant circus strongman, the other about the Nazi occupation of the Italian capital.
American fundamentalists just scratch their heads at Pope Francis’s understanding of nuance and ambiguity. They don’t get it at all. The extremists are not, of course, to be taken seriously. Most Catholics understand that life is not black and white.
Some of the often unnoticed victims of the Church’s abuse of its position in one form or another are those who have quietly and diligently gone about their own lives. Those people are unfairly judged because of the actions of others.
That an unaccountable institution has wielded so much power over the governance of its people is scandalous. The reason so much abuse went undetected in the Church is because it was shielded from scrutiny.
Ireland is, thank goodness, a new country now, reclaimed by a younger generation.
CHAPTER 7
OUR EVENTUAL PAPAL visit was the result of a perfect storm.
I had seen the Pope before, but only at a great distance.
The first time was in September 1979, when I was about to turn fourteen. My family and I were on holiday in Ireland, and Pope John Paul II came to Phoenix Park in Dublin. No unofficial vehicles were allowed within a ten-mile radius of the city, so we had to walk two miles along a country road and then get a bus to the park.
A nun passed me a camera to take a snap of her as the Popemobile went past, but far more memorable was the crowd: 1.25 million people were there, a third of Ireland’s population, and no doubt the biggest crowd I’ll ever be in.
Three years later, the Pope came to Heaton Park in Manchester, and we stayed up all night waiting for him. I wandered through the crowd, aware there wasn’t the same en masse devotion here as at Phoenix Park. This being England, there were too many latent Catholics.
I knew Bernie Jones, my girlfriend at the time, was there, and miraculously I found her. Just as the light was coming up, we leaned against a fence and snogged.
A policeman walked past with full stripes, leather gloves and a cane. He said, ‘If you’re going to do that, go and do it over there in the bushes. The Pope has consecrated this path.’
What a wanker.
Anyway, Harvey Weinstein wanted to maximise publicity for Philomena, and Philomena wanted to be exonerated by the Pope. Susan Lohan, a founder of the campaigning Irish charity Adoption Rights Alliance, had teamed up with Philomena to set up the Philomena Project, and together they were lobbying for open access to adoption records.
I only found out that Philomena and I might meet the Pope a few days before flying to Rome. There was a cast and crew screening of The Trip to Italy on Monday night in London and by Tuesday afternoon I was in Rome with Philomena, her daughter Jane, Harvey, two of his Argentinean friends and Susan Lohan. The Philomena Project precipitated a trip to the Vatican, which was then accelerated by Harvey.
On Tuesday even
ing, we had drinks with Bishop Sanchez, who is in the Pope’s inner circle. He made it clear that Philomena was entirely in keeping with the new Pope’s tone. There was an overwhelming sense of anticipation: not only would we meet the Pope the next morning at a papal audience, but the film would be screened inside the Vatican.
Papal audiences are held in St Peter’s Square on Wednesdays at 10.30 a.m. when the Pope is in town. He gives the assembled crowd short readings and teachings in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Polish and Portuguese before saying ‘Our Father’ in Latin. He then talks to and blesses those who are in the front row of the audience, most of whom are devout Catholics who spent the early morning queuing up.
On Wednesday morning, we drove through a damp, grey Rome in a convoy of black Mercedes and were waved through by the Vatican City State Gendarmerie. Vatican City might be the world’s smallest sovereign state, but it is surprisingly big. There’s a railway, a petrol station, a supermarket and a post office. I took a photo of the petrol station on my iPad as we drove past.
I kept thinking, ‘These cars are full of people who have a vested interest in how Philomena is received. There’s a lot at stake here. All this has happened because I read an article in a newspaper.’
We waited in the Vatican to be taken into St Peter’s Square with the faithful. Everyone was quietly respectful in the Vatican, but once they were out in St Peter’s Square, facing the Pope’s heated marquee, little groups started shouting for Pope Francis while others sang ‘Ar-gen-tina’ over and over again. It had the fervour of a boy band concert.
I was guided to the front row, where I sat next to Philomena and Jane. We huddled together under an umbrella while the rain pounded down.
As the Pope came to meet and greet, the sun came out.
