Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

  Prior to a scene, Maggie would invariably sit in the make-up room with Bennett in attendance and the two of them would laugh hysterically and keep each other amused, nothing like the difficult and temperamental star her reputation suggested. Griffiths recalls, ‘Maggie was treated as Madame la Tempestuosa. “Here be dragons”... you know. We’d be told, “She’s not very good in the morning, so don’t, whatever you do, get her going because she’ll fuck the day up for everybody.” And everybody walked on eggshells when she came in. Nobody could take her waspish tone, they were all whipped by it. But I must say, I never once saw Maggie behave out of order, she was an absolute lady, the soul of charm and grace. She never once gave any credence to this notion that she was a dragon.’

  Another Missionary veteran was Denholm Elliott, replacing first choice Ian Richardson who’d been excused to do a television series in America, in the role of a town doctor who despises his patients. ‘Denholm would sit there between takes and be devilish,’ says Griffiths. ‘I remember he had the tip of his thumb shot off in the war and they managed to cobble it together again, but the top had grown out like a spike. He sort of hinted in a naughty, silly way that it came in very useful for sex. He was so salacious, and it didn’t matter what age, height, size or sex it was, he could have sex with anyone and anything. And he was always, as it were, on the look-out. I think that’s why women just fell down in droves for him, and not a few men.’

  A feature of the early HandMade films are the wonderful casts, made up predominantly of English character actors and comedians, and completing the strong line-up in A Private Function are Liz Smith, Alison Steadman and, in an early film role, Pete Postlethwaite. Griffiths observes, ‘Pete’s got this incredible, insouciant sort of cheeky face. Those bright red cheeks, slightly too prominent, and his eyes, glinting and shining out at you with this half-laugh in them. He has a line where he’s got his mistress’s dress off and she has to reveal her backside, which the poor actress really suffered from, she felt really odious and embarrassed about, and why not, but it was a rather shapely bum. And Pete revealed her bottom to the mirror and then he caressingly puts his cheek against it and says, “Look at this darling, cheek to cheek.” And then he strokes the bum and says, “Oh, if I had this on my bacon sheer.” And that made her squirm. The actress was desperately unsettled.’

  Needless to say, all of these fine thesps were effortlessly upstaged by the pig. Shivas says, ‘We went to a company called Intellectual Animals some months before the film was shot to choose the pigs... they had to be trained from birth. Pigs are supposed to be clever; my theory is that they are so intelligent they never want to do take two. The pig trainer’s advice was to get three female pigs because male pigs are too aggressive to be well trained. I remember Maggie Smith encountering the pig for the first time for a publicity shot on the first day of shooting and it wouldn’t come and have its picture taken, it would wander off, and she said, “I see this is going to be a breeze.”’

  Mowbray was determined to integrate the pig properly into the film, not relying on stagy cutaways, and as this was in the days before animatronics that meant the live pig had to be on set with the actors for everything from long shots to close-ups. To prepare his cast and crew, Mowbray organised a week’s rehearsal beforehand using a stuffed pig as a stand-in. But no one was quite prepared for the real thing. ‘Before a scene,’ Palin remembers, ‘the cast would sit and wait and, at the last moment, when everything was absolutely ready, the pig was brought in — Betty. There were three pigs in all, but only one that could act, so Betty was brought in. It was a bit like the arrival of some mega Hollywood star; you all had to be quiet and then she’d come on to the set and immediately the clapper boy went “Whack!” for action the pig would panic, the way a lot of actors probably do as well but they’re better at controlling it. So we’d have to clear the set while the carpet was cleaned and shampooed rather rapidly and then we’d start again.’

  Not unreasonably, the pigs didn’t take to what the crew wanted them to do and devious tricks were often employed to get the animal to perform. Mowbray explains, ‘For example, there was one scene where a girl is having a piano lesson and the pig wanders into the room and they have to get rid of the pig without the girl seeing. To get the pig to follow a circuit, that was incredibly difficult. Although it’s trained and the trainer has mock-up sets built and everything, the reality is when you try to do it, he’ll say, “It’s the wrong carpet. I thought it was Axminster and it’s Wilton. Pig can’t do it on Wilton.” In the end, sardine oil proved very, very useful. There was a fishing rod with sardine oil in a piece of cotton wool above the camera to lure it.’

  There was the smell, too, remembered vividly by Alan Bennett. ‘I remember being in this upstairs room in this suburban house in Ilkley while we were waiting for the shot and this lingering smell everywhere of this terrible pig. We used to go back to the hotel at night and you’d have a bath and a change but you still somehow smelt of those terrible pigs, and you’d see people looking at you askance. There was no getting rid of it.’ While watching the creature in action one day, Bennett got into a bizarre conversation with Richard Griffiths. ‘You know,’ he announced suddenly, ‘when she’s running away from you it puts me in mind of one of those secretaries in the old days. Know what I mean?’

  Griffiths nodded. ‘Yes I do. Very tight little bum and just mincing along in her high heels.’

  Bennett agreed. ‘Yes, yes. She’s got little slingbacks on and she scuttles along with those very tempting buttocks.’

  Griffiths paused. ‘Tempting in what way?’

  Bennett quickly replied, ‘Oh, to eat, my dear.’

  ‘Yeah. Fine. Remember the Coward song, “he took to pig sticking in quite the wrong way”?’

  Bennett shook his head. ‘Oh no, we have none of that round here. This is Yorkshire.’

  Griffiths said, ‘I bet it goes on.’

  Bennett was adamant. ‘Oh, not in this film.’

  In the end, the defecating animals proved not just a hindrance but a near health hazard and something had to be done. Shivas says, ‘Some of the crew had such a bad time with the pigs, because they would shit all over the place, some of them were asking for special clothing allowance because they had to change their clothes so often. They were eating more bacon butties in revenge.’ Finally, a solution was found. Palin explains, ‘There was a boy who used to hang around the set at Ilkley, just wanted to do anything to get into film. We said, “Anything?” And he said, “Yeah.” So we said, “We’ll give you this plastic bucket and whenever the pig comes on set and you see anything happening at the back of the pig, you just whack that bucket under there.” And it worked, it speeded up the filming, it avoided having to clean the carpet every time. I think it was the only credit ever in films for “Bucket Boy”.’

  After shooting wrapped, the pigs escaped the abattoir to enjoy contented retirement on a farm, oblivious to their fame, not even invited to the film’s royal West End opening. Shivas admits, ‘We couldn’t take the risk of them shitting on the carpet of the Odeon Haymarket.’ The audience’s warm response to the pig was something the makers hadn’t reckoned on and they were forced to delete a scene in which the culled animal is seen dead in a bath. ‘We showed a rough cut of the film to the public,’ Mowbray says, ‘and by that time in the film the audience had become so attached to the pig that when they saw it dead in the bath they were shocked and drew back from the film, and so anything that followed that scene they weren’t engaged with. So, in the end, we thought it was more beneficial to the film to lose that scene.’

  As shooting progressed on both Water and A Private Function, there developed some resentment at how differently both films were perceived by the HandMade hierarchy. Those toiling away on Function saw themselves very much as the poorer cousin. Palin’s view was ‘Water was over in the West Indies, a lot of big stars, and there was us with an incontinent pig in a rather draughty part of north Yorkshire.’

  Function
’s budget was extremely small and O’Brien had also beaten them down to a tight shooting schedule of just six weeks, meaning scenes involving the pig that were too complicated and time-consuming to stage had to be excised. Bennett feels that ‘the problem was they were making Water in tandem, the budget of that was much higher and any spare money was channelled into that. They’d obviously thought either we were a loss-maker or were not something to be banked on. You didn’t get the impression that they had much confidence in it, really, and so any money they had went into Water and we were absolutely cut to the bone.’

  Richard Griffiths clearly remembers the day representatives from HandMade arrived on location and took over the catering bus for a showdown meeting with the production team: ‘As this secret meeting drew on, a bad feeling began to emerge. Then the suits came off the bus and smugly walked to their car and got whizzed off and we never saw them again. A disconsolate Alan came out, along with Malcolm and Mark, all with faces that were crestfallen, thunderous with rage. They’d been asked not to talk about it so they were wanting to wail and gnash their teeth but they tried to be honourable about it. Eventually, it turned out that what had happened was Water was all over the place and needed more money and HandMade said, “Look, there’s a budget sitting there in Yorkshire, we can nip a bit off that. It’s only a little tiny movie.” So they came over to Ilkley and said, “We want a quarter of a million pounds out of your budget.”’

  According to Griffiths, these executives already had a strategy worked out. On the way up to Ilkley, they’d gone through the script deciding what scenes could be cut. ‘It was just butchered by these money people. And if it was O’Brien, then we can spit on that and say, “Well, he’s the same bastard that fucked up the company. And, of course, when Function came out, it was successful and Water went straight down the sewage plug hole. It’s just a crap, self-indulgent, fuck-all-going-on type of movie.’

  Astonishingly, when A Private Function was forced to go over schedule by just one day in order to complete the shooting of two pivotal scenes, there wasn’t a penny left in the budget to cover it. Shivas reveals, ‘Denis said, “Well, you can have an extra day’s shooting but it will come out of your salary and Malcolm’s salary — £5,000 each. If the film makes money you’ll get it back.” Needless to say, although the film made money we never saw a bean. Then he had the gall to say when he saw the film, “I think that’s the funniest scene in the film.” Not remembering if he’d had his way, that scene would never have been shot.’

  To be fair to O’Brien, he did have a very firm notion of budgets. Kelleher agrees. ‘It was one thing he was good at. Denis was very clear that the budget was the budget and if you didn’t keep to it then you had to cut shooting.’ As Harrison also said, ‘It’s nice to let people have as much artistic freedom as possible, but I’m the one who has to pay back the bank. If they want total freedom, they have to get their own money and make their own films. It has to be give and take. But I think we’re quite reasonable.’

  For Water, though, the cheque book always seemed open. Where Privates on Parade’s jungle setting had been poorly replicated in Aldershot, this time HandMade allocated huge resources into filming in a far-flung location. Clement and La Frenais’s story called for a Caribbean island so, after a painful selection process, St Lucia was selected, despite the logistical nightmares involved. The biggest problem was having to ship everything out there by sea because of the absence of any filmmaking mechanism on the island. Clement says, ‘We shot most of the film on St Lucia. The studio stuff was done at Shepperton and we did the oil rig scenes in Devon during a pretty good summer. We had quite a lot of sunshine, though I remember one morning when we were sitting waiting for the fog to lift, which you don’t get very much of in the Caribbean.’

  For St Lucia, the filming meant prosperity. Local extras were earning $35 a day. ‘It’s better than a ganja, man,’ one smiling Rastafarian informed a travelling British reporter. But despite the sun, a major cloud was looming. Clement reveals, ‘We were rewriting the ending as we went along and that’s never good. Ian and myself suddenly looked at each other and thought, The ending isn’t working. And then we wrote another ending while we were still shooting it and, in hindsight, I always think you need to get those decisions out of the way before you get on to the set. But, on the whole, it was a good shoot. Michael Caine was a fantastic trouper on the film, he was really a joy to work with, enormously supportive. I can’t be more appreciative of his work on it and how professional he was. In a way, Michael had the straightest part in the film, he was almost the straight man. He kept saying to me, “You realise I’m having to carry all the plot here?”’

  Caine’s unlikely co-star was Billy Connolly, a cult comic star in Britain, though largely unknown anywhere else, who misguidedly viewed Water as both his big break in movies and the chance to crack America. ‘Billy had a special relationship with HandMade,’ Clement recalls. ‘They were always trying to put him into a movie because Denis was convinced that Billy Connolly was the funniest man in Britain... he was way ahead of the pack there. He said, “You’ve got to find a part for Billy in Bullshot.” And we said, “Fine.” So that part of an accident-prone blind man, was written with him in mind. Again, Billy was in Water because of Denis. He was actually cast before anybody else.’

  Back in the far less exotic Ilkley, someone had come up with a brainwave. Because most of the action in A Private Function takes place inside the household of Palin’s character, it was decided to buy a local town villa, get the art department to do it up in a Forties style and shoot inside. Other rooms housed the make-up and wardrobe departments. When the film was over, according to Richard Griffiths, the art department moved back in to redecorate the property and then flogged it for something like £20,000 profit. It was probably the first time a crew has ever used a location and walked away with 20 grand more than they started with. Bennett says wistfully, ‘I often go past the road where that house is and think about it. I look back on the film now and have very happy memories. There was a good atmosphere. We had such a wonderful time. If you watch the film, particularly Richard Griffiths, you can see that the cuts always come just when he’s about to break up. Every time they had to put the fart noises in for the pig, he could keep his face straight for the next half-minute but then he’d suddenly start laughing out loud. So you can see when the cut comes just as he’s breaking down. The whole cast were a lovely lot to work with. It was very happy in that way.’

  Griffiths’ corpsing got so bad that Shivas one day took the actor quietly to one side. ‘You’re having a good time doing this movie, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes I am. I love it,’ Griffiths replied.

  Shivas grew more serious. ‘Only I’ve noticed watching the rushes that you crack up a lot.’

  A broad smile came over Griffiths. ‘Yes. It’s so funny, isn’t it? And I can’t help it, everyone just makes me roar out laughing. I mean, normally I’m good at keeping a straight face, but it’s so ridiculously funny.’

  Shivas continued. ‘Yes. You realise, of course, that this movie is roughly costing about £100 a minute between the morning call and the evening wrap. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  Griffiths nodded.

  Shivas went on. ‘And so far, your cracking up has cost me about £17,000. So I’ll be grateful if you could take it a little more seriously.’

  The congenial atmosphere on the set of Function was probably a result of the fact that Denis O’Brien rarely ever paid them a visit. Shivas says, ‘I think Denis came on set once in Yorkshire with his Doris Day-lookalike girlfriend, had his picture taken, smiled, then mercifully went away and let us get on with it.’ As for Harrison, he seemed to shun the picture altogether. Bennett admits, ‘I never met George Harrison. He was no help over the money, he was totally a united front with Denis O’Brien. I mean, there was no sense of fellow artists about it.’

  Despite the crew shooting for a few days in Henley, just down the road from his mansi
on, Harrison chose not to go anywhere near them. This didn’t deter a pair of girls, though, who followed the filming everywhere in the hope of catching sight of the former Beatle. According to Shivas, ‘The reason that George didn’t come anywhere near the film when it was being made was because of Water, which was always held up to me as being the perfect production — it was going terribly well, it was bigger, it was more professional, etc, etc. Every time I had a problem, Denis or somebody would say, “Well, Water’s going well.” But George, I believe, doesn’t terribly like confrontations, and why should he bother with confrontations when he doesn’t have to? He didn’t come near us because he thought it was difficult... he knew my relationship with Denis wasn’t particularly good and stayed away because he thought he’d get an earful when he came to the set.’

  Harrison did, however, throw his considerable weight behind Water, not least in a stunning rock concert sequence set in the United Nations building where he was responsible for roping in a few pals like Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr to play especially for the film. ‘Although George was very leery of appearing in his own company’s movies,’ says Clement, ‘that was a big help to the film. We called in a few favours and, obviously, the Harrison connection didn’t hurt. We hoped that scene would be a big selling tool for the movie... didn’t work out that way, but it was a good idea.’