“How do you see her?” I asked Arthur.
“The thing nobody remembers about Marilyn,” said Arthur, “was that she wasn’t just beautiful. She was an extraordinary life force. A life force.”
He answered a question about Abigail Williams by talking about Marilyn Monroe, whom I hadn’t mentioned. He met Marilyn for the first time in Hollywood in 1951. Though he later wrote that they had yet to start a sexual relationship, when he returned to his first wife and two children on the East Coast, “the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable.” Back home, he wrote The Crucible in 1952, a courageous act of resistance to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, but it was impossible not to suspect that he shared John Proctor’s emotional turbulence as he wrote it. Abigail Williams and a dozen other teenage girls are caught dancing naked in the forest; they protect themselves by accusing blameless villagers of consorting with the Devil. But as the witch-hunt spirals out of control, the spine of the play is Proctor’s adultery and the terrible wasteland of his marriage, and its most moving scene is his reconciliation with his wife, Elizabeth, just before he goes to the gallows. “Suspicion kissed you when I did,” says Elizabeth. “I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I kept!”
Winona Ryder played Abigail and Joan Allen played Elizabeth. We built Salem Village on Hog Island, in the mouth of the Essex River on the North Shore of Massachusetts, a few miles from Puritan Salem. Andrew Dunn and Tariq Anwar came over from London. Daniel arrived several weeks early to help build John Proctor’s house and farm John Proctor’s land. He lived John Proctor’s life, took into his bloodstream the daily rhythms of a Puritan farmer, changed his musculature. His total immersion in the parts he plays is famous: he needs to persuade himself, when the camera rolls, that he isn’t acting. Though telling someone else’s story and speaking someone else’s lines, he does everything he can to corner himself into total spontaneity. He starts by taking on his character’s identity, and he sticks with it through long days on the set. Shot after shot, take after take, a film actor must be ready to deliver a few perfect seconds at the crew’s convenience. Maybe he’s acting for a total of only a few minutes during the day, but every time the director calls “Action!” he has to be in the zone. Some actors go blank between takes, others are noisily hyperactive.
Out of Daniel’s complete absorption come performances that stand comparison with the best in the history of cinema. Off set, he’s gentle and mischievous. Even on set, he must sometimes have been Daniel, as I have a photo of him sitting on a bench outside John Proctor’s house, drinking a can of Coke and laughing, which wouldn’t have cut much ice with the Puritans of Massachusetts.
Daniel was in awe of Paul Scofield, whom he’d never met. He expected a magus, but when Paul arrived three weeks before the shoot to rehearse their scenes, they seemed to be on different planets. Daniel would have preferred not to rehearse at all: he held the script at arm’s length, as if it was a radioactive reminder that on the day he’d be telling a preordained story rather than living an unplanned life. He muttered through it, committing to nothing, leaving all the work of bringing it to life for when we shot it. Paul sounded the text for its music. He started with the vowels. He carefully placed every word in the two-octave span of his amazing voice, as if he was singing opera. They seemed bemused by each other. But when the camera rolled, they were in exactly the same place. They’d arrived there separately, but they were in perfect sympathy: open, combustible and spontaneous.
Paul wasn’t much interested in talking about acting or about the part, though he told me that what attracted him to Danforth was the realisation that his extreme zealotry was the dark side of the faith of Thomas More, whose glowing integrity had won him his Oscar in A Man for All Seasons. “St. Thomas was an enthusiastic burner of Protestants,” he reminded us, with relish. Otherwise, he was happy to know what was required. Faster, slower, louder, where do I stand? Once, between takes, I started some elaborate analysis of a scene’s subtle irony. He stopped me: “Do you mean more comedy?” I said yes, and retreated behind the camera.
On a film set, a director should be succinct and precise. There is no call for the kind of open-ended discussion that makes a theatre rehearsal room so hospitable to verbosity. It need take only a moment to communicate with actors—like Paul and Daniel, like Maggie Smith or Nigel Hawthorne—whose gift is absolute, who sometimes stand amazed at themselves, uncertain where it comes from. Paul could summon terrors, real terrors, but between takes he was larky. He would swirl his costume and say, “I love this cloak.”
The film is strongest when it’s closest to the play, inside the Proctors’ cold house, in the meeting house where Danforth interrogates the girls who cry witch. When Abigail Williams senses that her case is falling apart, she looks up to the rafters and says she sees a yellow bird spreading its wings: witchcraft! Her hysteria infects the other girls, the judges believe them, and the witches are sentenced to death. I had a whole island at my command, perched on the edge of a continent. I let the yellow bird chase the girls out of the meeting house into the ocean, the entire village in pursuit. “It’s a movie!” I told myself. And it looked great, a vivid image of collective hysteria. But it slackened the scene’s merciless narrative grip: we’d have done better to stay inside.
The film’s emotional climax is something else I pulled onto the edge of the New World. When we came to shoot the final scene for Elizabeth and John Proctor, in a small prison cell on the Massachusetts coast, a violent nor’easter was blowing. So I had them taken outside, and they made peace with each other as the tempest raged around them, and the ocean lashed the shore. The storm was so loud that we had to re-voice the entire scene, but Joan Allen and Daniel Day-Lewis found the same grace in the sound studio as they had in the freezing cold of the day, and it’s the best thing in the movie.
The Crucible was a flop at the box office: maybe it was too solemn, and at the same time I was too anxious to prove my cinematic credentials with stampedes into the ocean and other unnecessary hyperactivity. But it was an exciting shoot. Living for three months through the New England fall, I thought for the first and only time that I preferred making movies to directing plays.
While I was working on The Crucible, the playwright Wendy Wasserstein introduced me to the Hollywood producer Larry Mark. Wendy had written a screenplay for him based on a novel by Stephen McCauley, The Object of My Affection. Her plays were major events in New York, though London never warmed to her sassy, insecure East Coast women, who juggled their hard-won independence with their need to be loved. She had a gargantuan talent for friendship, but she was lonely and she wrote about it. Like her heroines, she used laughter to keep the demons at bay.
We worked together on four or five different screenplays, while I slowly realised that if your last movie lost money, you aren’t surrounded by love anymore, so none of them was made. But Larry Mark knew where the hoops were and how to jump through them, so two years after The Crucible, in 1997, Wendy and I made The Object of My Affection. By that time, the screenplay had taken big liberties with Stephen McCauley’s book, but he never complained: novelists have low expectations of the movie business.
The central idea was Stephen’s, but Wendy made it her own: Jennifer Aniston lets her gay best friend Paul Rudd move in with her when he leaves his boyfriend. Her own boyfriend is starting to drive her mad, and when she gets pregnant she decides to keep the baby but end the relationship. She asks Paul to raise the baby with her. He wants to be a father, so he agrees. As she slowly falls in love with Paul, he falls in love with another man. He leaves her, and breaks her heart.
Around the central couple Wendy wrote pungent dialogue for actors like Alan Alda, Allison Janney and Nigel Hawthorne. The money for the movie came with Jennifer, who is exceptionally skilled, funny and poignant. She and Paul had transparent rapport. Twenty years later, there’s nothing wrong with one part of the film’s premise: that a lonely, intelligent woman might crave th
e companionship of a gay man, and fall in love with him. But these days, a gay American who wants to be a father can marry his boyfriend and have children. There’s a scene where Paul looks through a chain-link fence into a playground where a young father is playing baseball with his seven-year-old son, as if locked out of paradise. It’s mawkish but heartfelt: I identified with it, and Paul played it with touching sincerity. But the future belonged to the gay activists who were agitating for the societal change that has left the movie behind.
There was an honest melancholy to the first cut: falling in love’s a bitch, sex gets in the way, Jennifer and Paul know they’ll never love their partners as much as they love each other. But at test screenings, the audience wanted everybody to be happy, so the studio did too. We reshot the last scene, and the movie was a modest success at the box office, years after Larry Mark first commissioned it and a tribute to his Hollywood resilience.
One afternoon, two years after we made The Object of My Affection, Wendy called me.
“I’m about to deliver a baby,” she said.
“Whose?” I asked, assuming she was in a maternity ward with a pregnant friend, or maybe researching a new play.
“Mine,” she said, and squealed with laughter.
She rationed her secrets among her friends. I’d seen her many times during her pregnancy but noticed nothing, though I knew she was having IVF: we once returned early from a writing trip to Martha’s Vineyard so she could have treatment. She never told me who the donor was, and I never asked. Her daughter Lucy Jane was born three months premature. In her most celebrated play, The Heidi Chronicles, her alter ego Heidi Holland never compromises, stays single, feels “stranded,” and in the last scene overcomes her loneliness by adopting a baby. For the next six years, Wendy lived with Lucy Jane the life she wrote for Heidi, but she was keeping another secret. Everybody could tell something was wrong, but believed her when she said she had Bell’s palsy. In fact, she had lymphoma. She died in January 2006, leaving her vast circle bereft.
Arthur Miller remembered that Marilyn wasn’t merely beautiful: she was a life force. Wendy thought herself unbeautiful, and loved herself a fraction as much as others loved her. She would have found the comparison with Marilyn ludicrous, but it’s what comes to mind.
By the end of the 1990s I realised I had neither Larry Mark’s resilience nor the vocation for the American film business. My calling is for the theatre, where nobody ever threatens to surround you with love. And I’m not sure what I bring to the party beyond a proprietorial interest in Alan Bennett’s work, so I kept my head down until, in 2005, I could claim ownership of it again.
As soon as The History Boys opened, film companies made offers, some of them keen to make “a contribution to the casting process.” Alan and I wanted the same four teachers and eight boys, and nobody to mess with the script. We share an agent in Anthony Jones, whom we both value for his readiness to dispense with the assumption that a client needs a constant deluge of flattery. What I need is never to be treated as if I’m needy. Alan swears that Anthony calls him mainly to tell him of the achievements of his competitors: “Good morning. I thought it might interest you to know that Harold Pinter has just won the Nobel Prize.”
He also knows how to find the money for the films his clients want to make. “If you want to make The History Boys without interference,” he told us, “make it for less than £2 million.” Everybody worked for much less than their market rate, and took a cut of the profits, which were considerable partly because we’d spent so little in the first place. The same trick worked even better on The Lady in the Van.
I thought there was no point in trying too hard to have the History Boys run through Sheffield like the possessed girls in The Crucible ran into the Atlantic Ocean. We didn’t have the budget, and more to the point, the material worked because it was set in an enclosed world, though we did manage a field trip to Fountains Abbey. We spent five of the six weeks it took us to shoot it back at school. The film has a lot of what made The History Boys so captivating on stage. But you’d never know, if you hadn’t seen the play, that the French scene went nuclear or that the audience stopped breathing in the “Drummer Hodge” scene, though Richard and Sam were just as truthful for the camera as they had been in the show.
The play is still alive in countless new productions, many of them in schools and colleges. And when somebody sent me a pirated camcorder video of a performance by the original cast on Broadway, and I remembered the depth of the silence and the spontaneity of the laughter, I also remembered why I work in the theatre.
I first went to Alan’s house, where the lady in the van lived, in the autumn of 1989, a few months after she died. After I moved to Camden Town in the early 1980s, I used to take the detour around Gloucester Crescent on my way to the High Street, mainly to try to work out which creative titan lived where. The crescent was home to any number of writers, film and theatre directors, publishers, journalists and artists; and although I discovered that Alan lived at 23, I had no idea what the yellow van was about, though I wondered whether the derelict old lady who appeared to live in it was his mother.
I didn’t think to ask about her when I finally arrived in the study; nor did most of the people who visited the house when she was in the drive. I only realised what I’d missed when Alan finally wrote about her in the London Review of Books. Her fame spread in 1999 when Maggie Smith played her on stage. Now, in 2014, Alan was offering for the film the real house in the real street where it all happened.
He insists that there was nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing kind, about what strikes everyone else as fifteen years of lunatic self-sacrifice. He invited Miss Shepherd to park her van in his drive for a month or two, “just till you sort yourself out,” and she stayed until she died of old age. Many of the residents of Gloucester Crescent have been there for decades, and shuddered in horror when the van made its ghostly reappearance. The view from the study window helped me understand how Alan survived. I’d sat with him there often enough over the years, but it was only when the van was in situ that I started to get some sense of it as it must have been to the writer who sat at the desk, looking at it. For the part of him that never left the study, the chaos was there not to be suffered, but to be recorded.
So although the movie showed how it actually was, where it actually happened, it isn’t literally the thing itself.
This really happened:
(AB approaches the van.)
AB: Miss Shepherd. In future I would prefer it if you didn’t use my lavatory. There are lavatories at the bottom of the High Street. Use those.
MISS SHEPHERD: They smell. I’m by nature a very clean person. I have a testimonial for a Clean Room, awarded me some years ago, and my aunt, herself spotless, said I was the cleanest of my mother’s children (AB gives up, and goes)—particularly in the unseen places.
But this, which followed it, didn’t:
(AB catches Alan Bennett’s eye as he passes the study door.)
It’s a movie as much about how a writer writes, and why he chooses what to write about, as it is about his subject. Alan splits himself into two: “the self who does the writing and the self who does the living.” Alex Jennings played both of them, adding two more incisive performances to the twelve we’d already worked on together.
It’s also about what a writer does to what happens in front of his nose to turn it into a story worth telling. Always scrupulous about any departure from the historical record, Alan wrote into the screenplay not just his reluctant recognition that his best subject was living on his doorstep, but his struggle to tell her story without occasionally inventing it, and his discovery that “you don’t put yourself into what you write—you find yourself there.” So it seemed only fair that after her death, he let Miss Shepherd return from the grave to write her own ending.
MISS SHEPHERD: This thing you’re trying to write, you could pump it up a bit…Why do you just let me die? I’d like to go up into heaven. An ascensio
n, possibly. A transfiguration.
Her Assumption was the first piece of CGI I ever directed, shot on a big sound stage at Shepperton Studios. “It’s like making a proper film at last,” said one of the crew, after six weeks squashed into Alan’s tiny study. But I’d never been happier on a movie set than I was in 23 Gloucester Crescent, shooting a film about the writer whose plays have been such an important part of my life.
Maggie crawled non-stop in and out of the van, ran up and down the crescent and occasionally complained about her hip. She was in pain, but I hardened my heart: we were on a tight schedule, and I thought if I started apologising, I’d never stop. “I’ve no time for sorry,” I muttered, like Miss Shepherd. I did finally feel guilty when she had to have the hip replaced, a few months after we finished.
We found small parts for the entire cast of The History Boys. Maggie eyed them suspiciously from the van. “Here comes another member of the family. I feel very left out.”
There is nothing Maggie can’t do. At more than one point in the film, she even suggests that she is simultaneously playing what happened and what the writer would have preferred to happen. She is demanding above all of herself, always at her best when the scene asks most of her. Towards the end of The Lady in the Van, Miss Shepherd walks into a church hall to filch some free cake. A young pianist starts to play Schubert for the assembled senior citizens. Miss Shepherd’s first instinct is to flee: she’s avoided music like a curse since she was forced as a young woman to give up her career as a professional pianist. But she turns back.
“Why would she stay? She hates music,” said Maggie.
“It’s a turning point,” I offered, “or is it something about the way the young pianist plays? Does it remind her of the way she used to play?”
“It’s very peculiar. It makes no sense. She’d leave the room. Why does she stay?” This kind of thing could go on for several minutes, a necessary build-up. “I don’t understand why she listens.”
Balancing Acts Page 16