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 Part
Two. And Nothing but the
Best, which I haven't seen now for a while?
That was just a social comedy of the sixties. It was written
by a very witty writer, Freddie Raphael. It was a home-grown,
home-based film about society at that moment and it's still great
fun today - a bit dated, but fun. Not dated actually, but a sort
of pictorial essay of its time and it's quite witty. It was a
great favourite of mine.
It still looks like one of the few films
that tackles class head-on.
It does, absolutely. It's the Room at the Top area,
isn't it? It's the young man who sees his way through crime and
a completely immoral attitude, but who sees what ticks and what
makes the people tick, and finds someone to teach him and to
break all the class barriers. Absolutely, yes, it's class comedy.
Do you know what Lindsay Anderson thought
of this? He was always criticising British films for being too
middle-class.
That was Lindsay's bete noire; he couldn't stand
anything that smacked of the middle class. But I think they do
have their agonies as well, they have their tragedies, they're
not just non-people.
Had you read Kazantzakis's novel Zorba
the Greek before you filmed it?
No, I hadn't. It's a great piece and it was a great stroke
of luck to be in it. It seemed like a wild idea to do it, but
it turned into one of the most famous films I ever made. It's
a classic, wonderful piece.
My sympathies are always with the Englishman
as opposed to the Greek, full of the life force, and I wondered
how you felt about that English character you played.
I had sympathy with him, of course, but he's rather an
extreme product. But then there are such people in English society
-- indeed in every society, though I think sometimes they're
often thought of as being particularly English; closed, locked-up,
longing to break out. And one has sympathy for him for those
reasons, of course. But Zorba is meant to be the great romantic
free character that we all want to be. They're extremes, both
of them.
I don't really want to be like Zorba
at all, and it makes an interesting tension for me as I watch
the film.
I don't know why; maybe he's completely self-loving and
self-orientated; he's not really concerned with someone else.
He's got huge momentary generosity to other people, but it's
all really rather motivated by who he is, isn't it?
You did another film version of a great
novel at the end of the decade, Woman in Love, which still
seems the best film ever made from a Lawrence novel and one of
the best British films ever. How do you rate it?
I rate it like that too. I thought it was extraordinary
when I read the book; I thought, why are we attempting this?
It's too complex; it's too dense. But Ken Russell somehow understood
what to take from that book to make it work on the screen and
the film has a wonderful understanding of the book. I think it
was slightly excessive here and there but, apart from that, the
whole thing was a wonderful reflection of the spirit of the book.
The thing that seems most daring about
it isn't, say, the nude scenes, but how much discussion there
is in it. I wondered what you thought about the film on this
level.
The discussions were cut down to an accessible state,
I think. I think Lawrence is accessible, I don't think he's obscure.
He's symbolic, but I think it's so basic, what he is actually
talking about, that it comes through quite clearly. It's based
greatly on the physical -- the sensual attitude to the physical
presence, if you like. I think people are immediately drawn to
try and understand themselves through the sensual. He seems to
be able to touch on things that most people are perhaps obsessed
with, or at least concerned with. And those fundamental basic
relationships between men and women, between women and women,
and between men and men: he understood them all.
The film caused some censorship uproar
at the time. Was the nudity a worrying thing for filming, especially
the famous wrestling scene?
We knew that it was a very unusual step to take. It was
written and directed with great skill -- it did just catch that
area in which Lawrence was expressing that feeling of friendship
and frustration through a sort of sense of combat, through the
physical -- it's the animal in us, in a way. Whatever sexual
overtone it has is not actually stressed and it's not even probably
meant to be. I've always regarded it as a sort of sensual expression
of friendship rather than a sexual one.
You did another film from a famous book,
which is Far from the Madding Crowd, on which you worked
with Julie Christie and John Schlesinger. Did you have a specially
good rapport with those people?
Yes, I did. I worked with Julie four times. She's a completely
ego-free actress, an intelligent woman who is utterly concerned
with the meaning of what she's doing, rather than the effect;
and John is someone I've always had an absolute rapport with,
so that was a very, very happy time. We were doing something
we all understood and we could talk freely with one another about
it; there were no barriers betwen us. I've always had this ease
with those two people.
John Schlesinger told me that you at
first wanted to play Sergeant Troy.
Yes, I did at that time, because I felt about the part
I played that I'd been in that area before. Gabriel's a wonderful
part but I felt that it wasn't a challenge for me, that's all.
The next film I want to mention is another
triumph based on a novel, Joseph Losey's The Go-Between. Do
you think sex and class and their interconnection are really
the main elements of British film narratives?
I think very often that's true. I can't go on about it
much more than that, but that is a fact, I think.
How do you think Losey, an American,
responded to the extreme Englishness of this story?
I think he was fascinated by that. I think it was one
of his key observer interests. I think he loved exploring that.
And I think sometimes it comes better from someone who is not
born into it, because they can really see it. He lived here long
enough to see and understand it. He hadn't just arrived in England,
he'd really lived amongst it, but could see it very clearly.
So I think perhaps that's why it's so well brought out.
What do you remember about filming it?
I only did the last six weeks; they'd done most of the
filming before I came into it -- not quite, but, yes, my part
was all shot towards the end of the film. The thing I mostly
remember about the filming was that my children [twin sons
- ed.] were about to be born, so I was rather preoccupied!
I was down in Norfolk for my scenes.
What do you think about the transposing
of plays to the screen which you did: Butley and Lindsay's
version of In Celebration in the '70s?
I think it's very good to record them, to put them there,
and sometimes they worked for our country. I think there is something
to do with language which is essentially theatre, whereas screen
is image and visual and, finally, the fewer words very often
the better on the screen. The theatre can stand as many as you
like. You can put words on screen, it can work; we've touched
on this with the Lawrence thing; but there is a fundamental difference
between them, and something truly filmic needs economy of language.
In Celebration
really worked as a film.
That was something to do with Lindsay's particular attitude
to it. He seemed to be able to bridge it with that film almost
better than anyone I know. You have to really be able to understand
that difference and he, I think, somehow lightened it. He was
able to bring a highly cinematic flair to that.
There's a very strange film, The
Shout, which I find more or less impenetrable and I wondered
what you thought it was about.
It was quite a daring piece, from a short story by Robert
Graves, about an Aboriginal, and the old concept of the use of
sound as a sort of element with which to kill. It's a quite extreme
idea to write a film about, but it is a fact that sound is often
used in violence and in war as a sort of killer instrument. It
worked in its own way, I think, and it had a strange kind of
artistic success.
I particularly liked The Return of
the Soldier, which I thought was a very underrated film.
It was an underrated film but there was one thing that
it missed: it should have had a voice-over because the book was
written in the first person. The first person was the Ann-Margret
character, who is a seemingly very sweet woman, the victim cousin
who's in love, long-suffering, but in her head she's quite a
bitch. If you don't get the voice-over, you don't get the bitch;
all you get is a very sweet woman. It lacked edge because of
that. I think if it had had that it would have been much more
successful.
How did you respond to those three leading
ladies, who are all quite brilliant in their different ways?
Absolutely. I thought Julie was at her best, I think Glenda
[Jackson] was terrific in her part and Ann-Margret was wonderful,
and I wish for her sake it had just had her voice-over. I mean,
she really resented Glenda's character; while being seemingly
sweet to her, she absolutely resented her and that wasn't fair.
What were your impressions of Zeffirelli
as a director, after working on Hamlet?
He first gives you a wonderful arena, he's a brilliant
designer, and he gives you a platform second to none. He knows
how to dress you, to put you in the right atmosphere, get the
right effect, and he creates a sort of pitch, an emotional pitch.
He then leaves you alone, he absolutely sets you up and lets
you free. It's quite an interesting way of doing it.
Is that really the kind of direction
you like?
I do, in a way. He trusts you to work on it yourself and
to bring your own self to the part. I think it's sort of danger;
I think some people aren't used to that. Artistes do need more
help than that but it depends who you are and at what point you
are in your experience.
-Brian McFarlane
Methuen ISBN 0 413 70520 X © Brian McFarlane,
1997
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