Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  It was a problem Woolley could’ve done without, embroiled as he was at the time in the small matter of shooting the overblown musical Absolute Beginners, which had unhelpfully been labelled as the saviour of the British film industry. Woolley now faced major problems in raising the £2 million required for Mona Lisa. When it came to the funding of UK films, money was a scarce commodity, despite the existence of HandMade and Goldcrest and emerging companies such as Virgin, who were becoming more entrepreneurial in terms of the film business, and also Channel 4 who were forging a reputation for backing original and controversial film subjects... though not Mona Lisa.

  ‘Channel 4 never gave us any money,’ Woolley reveals. ‘They hated Palace. It wasn’t until much later that we got serious backing from Channel 4. They rejected Mona Lisa, and then later bought it for television from HandMade. That pissed me off. That’s why there’s a joke in Mona Lisa when Bob’s watching a porno tape and Robbie Coltrane comes into the caravan and says, “Channel 4, is it?” That’s deliberate because Channel 4 rejected it; they said our script was pornographic, they said you shouldn’t make this kind of movie.’

  Luckily, the line producer on Absolute Beginners was David Wimbury, not long back from his Caribbean sojourn on Water, who suggested to Ray Cooper that he contact Woolley. Cooper was only too happy to visit the Beginners set, fascinated with the eclectic people involved like Gil Evans, David Bowie and Ray Davies. Woolley remembers, ‘We had a very entertaining lunch and I started going on about Mona Lisa and Bob Hoskins and, of course, HandMade had released The Long Good Friday so they were very pro-Bob. So Ray said, “I’ll have a talk with Denis.” It was a really off-the-cuff thing. EMI literally that week passed on Mona Lisa. So Ray took the script, read it, spoke to Denis and I think within two weeks we were sitting in Cadogan Square having a meeting with Denis and doing the deal. It was that fast.’

  Neil Jordan had already previously dealt with O’Brien and Cooper; they’d asked him about the possibilities of doing some script rewrites, though nothing came of it, and he was looking forward to working with them proper. According to Jordan, ‘HandMade were perceived as kind of a boutique production company. Very well funded, so they seemed to be able to choose their projects quite carefully. They liked Mona Lisa a lot, though Denis O’Brien was very concerned about the seedy and the dark nature of it. Ray Cooper was really the creative force that I worked with at HandMade. He was the supporter of the project. And George Harrison was the nicest man in the world; it just seemed that he paid the bills. He was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in my life.’

  Although Harrison did not intend to involve himself in the production, he still had to OK the script. Woolley remembers, ‘We had lunch and he was absolutely wonderful. He said, “Look, it’s not the kind of movie that I really understand completely, but I really love Neil.” We talked a lot about the Pope, actually. He didn’t like the Pope very much. He didn’t like Catholicism. But George was great.’

  One thing Harrison was adamant about was nudity. He didn’t want any nudity in the film whatsoever. A pretty tall order when your story revolves around Soho, pimps and whores. Jordan says, ‘It so happened that the first scene we did in the film was where Bob is in this bath house looking for his boss and he dives into this pool and we had loads of these guys swimming in the pool and, of course, they were naked, as they would be. We couldn’t afford proper underwater photography so our cameraman Roger Pratt had this splash camera that you just shove down and vaguely hope to follow what goes on. So, as Bob dived into the water, Roger splashed the camera down and, of course, when we saw the dailies all you see are these dangling penises, about 200 of them. And that was the first shot George saw. He was quite nice about it.’

  Things were different with O’Brien. Both he and Stephen Woolley repeatedly clashed over creative matters. It was undoubtedly the worst professional relationship in HandMade’s history, one that would continue to reverberate right up until the company’s final breath. Wendy Palmer calls it ‘a personality clash of the deepest order. Both desperately wanted to be top dog.’

  Woolley was one of those who saw Denis purely as a suit. ‘Denis was about money. Everybody thought he was this genius with money — give him a fiver and he’ll give you 15 quid back. So people were giving him fivers and he was giving them 15 quid back. It was all offshore stuff. I had nothing to do with that. I’m not a money person. I just wanted to get the film made. In my view, Denis saw films as an accountant. It was like factories. There was one factory where people made things, the cameramen, the designers. Then outside of the factory you’ve got the talent, which was like the crazy professor area where you’ve got Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan, you’ve got writers, the Pythons, they’re all doing the crazy clown stuff in there, that’s their place. Then you’ve got the management, you’ve got Denis and his team of accountants. And anyone like me who’s a creative producer doesn’t have a home there, you’re sort of running from one place to the other, there’s no box for you with Denis. He’d say, “What are you doing here?” Wherever you are at any given point, if you’re in the factory with the workers, or you’re in the playroom with the talent, or if you’re in the management office, you’re not welcome. After we did the deal, I think Denis must have imagined that would be the last he’d see of me.’

  The first rumblings of disquiet were over who to cast in the crucial role of Simone. After extensive tests with numerous actresses, Woolley and Jordan selected Cathy Tyson. Jordan remembers, ‘I’d just seen her in a play at the Barbican. The casting director, Sue Figgis, said to me, “Go and see this girl,” so I went to see her and she was quite brilliant, quite beautiful. But HandMade didn’t want Cathy. They wanted somebody known and Cathy was totally unknown.’

  In what Woolley describes as ‘one of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever had in my life’, O’Brien told him that he’d been walking past the Odeon Leicester Square and had seen the poster for the latest James Bond film A View to a Kill with Roger Moore posing back to back with Grace Jones. There and then he’d had the brainwave of casting the black pop diva as Simone in Mona Lisa. ‘Can’t you imagine it? Bob Hoskins and Grace Jones standing back to back on the poster.’ He pitched. Steve and Neil patently couldn’t imagine it. Grace Jones was about a foot taller than Hoskins for a start, so it was going to look stupid. But Denis was convinced about Grace Jones and genuinely baffled as to why Palace were determined to have Cathy Tyson, who was not a star and thus had no market value.

  ‘The whole project almost ground to a halt,’ Woolley recalls, ‘and I had to confront Denis over why we wanted Cathy. Denis said, “OK. I’m going to talk to Ray about it. You have to go away and come back.” So we went out for a cup of tea. I had no doubt in my mind about Cathy, I was determined. And Neil was like, “Do you think we should do this? Should we confront him?”... blah, blah... “Maybe there’s another way around this.” Anyway, we went back and Denis spoke directly at Neil, didn’t even look at me. He said to Neil, “If you really believe in this actress, then we’ll go with it.” Not for one moment did he look at me, he was so angry, he was incensed. And that’s what the relationship was like all the time; it was lecturing, no eye contact, no sense of ever feeling you were in the room with him. It was a relationship that was so antagonistic and personal, a personal vendetta, and I never understood it.’

  After winning the Cathy Tyson battle, the Palace boys were less inclined to go to war when difficulties arose over the music. This being a modern-day movie, it made sense to everyone to incorporate a contemporary pop song. Woolley says, ‘So we’re talking about it and Denis suggests Phil Collins, and we’re sort of wanting to be nice because we’d just all had these battles about Cathy, so we’re like, OK, we’ll go with Phil Collins. Of course, it’s not Phil Collins, it’s fucking Genesis. And then Denis signed a deal that we’ve got to put it in the film, so Neil had to cut a whole little sequence of Bob wandering around to this Genesis track. It was just mortifying. It was so like n
ot what we would’ve done. Denis didn’t really have a flair for movies, as such. It was just like somebody told him that Phil Collins was Number 1 in America, so why would you argue with that? Let’s do it.’

  Besides Cathy Tyson’s anonymity with the cinemagoing public, O’Brien also had genuine reason to be concerned about her inexperience. Mona Lisa was going to be her film debut. But Jordan and Woolley were utterly confident in her natural ability as an actress to be able to cope with the stresses and strains of it all. There was the odd hiccup, though. Jordan remembers, ‘Cathy didn’t really know what films entailed. There was one scene in a hotel room where Bob runs in smacking around the punter who’s tied Cathy to a bed or something and she dresses and runs downstairs and goes out to wait for a car. So we had the camera set up at the hotel room and I did one shot and I turned round to do the next take and look for Cathy and nobody could find her. We went through the entire hotel. Eventually, I walked outside and there she was waiting for the car. And I said, “Cathy, what are you doing out here?” And she said, “I thought we were continuing with the scene.” I said, “But the camera’s upstairs, Cathy.” She said, “Oh, I just thought it followed you.”’

  The first few weeks of shooting were difficult for the young actress and it was Hoskins who took it upon himself to guide her through the pitfalls of her first movie. ‘Bob was fantastic with Cathy,’ Woolley recalls, ‘he’d give her so much time. He really enjoys working with first-timers, Bob, he’s such a genuinely honest nice bloke, he couldn’t stop himself helping you. With Cathy, he recognised that for the film to work, and for him to work, she had to work, and therefore he would do anything to make her work. So he was very patient, instructing all the time, never pulled the big star act with her.’

  But there was one scene in particular where no amount of soothing would pacify her. It was a sex scene between Simone and George. Jordan had written a scene ‘where after she and Bob are attacked in a lift by this pimp they go into her room and they’re forced to lie in bed together. They don’t have sex but something different happens. But Cathy didn’t like being naked. I shot the scene but it didn’t quite work. It was a scene that I couldn’t quite get out of her so I cut it. And I suppose, in the end, I concluded it probably wasn’t appropriate in the film anyway.’

  By this time, Woolley’s other production, Absolute Beginners, was deep in the editing stage, and deep in trouble, too, with its director Julian Temple barred from the cutting room and the film’s main backer Goldcrest in a near state of collapse. Woolley knew that he’d be flitting between the two movies constantly and would need someone to be a rock for him on Mona Lisa. So Patrick Cassavetti was brought in to help with the producing chores and filming began in August 1985 on locations around London. Jordan says, ‘The most difficult thing in the movie was actually turning London into something that was kind of imaginary. I wanted London to be a character, drawing on the memories of when I went there first as a 17-year-old kid from Ireland, and there was this big metropolis and everything seemed strange and dark and mysterious.’

  The Soho area of the capital was used extensively and, prior to shooting, Jordan and Cassavetti busied themselves with research tours of the district, seeing things through the punters’ eyes. ‘A lot of the stuff in the porn shops we did in a documentary style,’ says Jordan. ‘At the time, Soho was nothing but porn — it’s a much nicer place now. Back then, it was nothing but little clip joints and peep shows. We shot in quite a few of them. It was very sad, really, a lot of the girls were heroin addicts, serving warm champagne to fat men from the North of England. It was quite like the world the film depicted. The proprietors were fine about us shooting there. Like most vaguely criminal enterprises, they like to be glamorised. We got no trouble. Nobody tried to chop our fingers off.’

  From this murk and gloom arises George’s boss, a filthy flesh peddler called Mortwell, a Dickensian name for a darkly grotesque Dickensian-type villain... and a radical departure for Michael Caine. Although only appearing in a few scenes, it was a courageous risk for Caine to take on so nasty a piece of work. And, over dinner at Langan’s restaurant in Piccadilly, it was Ray Cooper who convinced the star to play Mortwell. ‘Michael said, “Well, shall I do it? What’s it about then? Come on, tell me.” I said, “It’s a great part. It’s a lovely cameo.” And he did it, which was very sweet of him.’

  Palace had wanted Caine for Mortwell almost from the beginning, writing personally to the actor and talking to his agent Denis Selinger, but it was really only after HandMade got on board that Caine was delivered, so important was he to their foreign sales. Jordan recalls, ‘At the time, Michael was doing an enormous amount of movies, acting in quite a lot of routine thrillers and, for me, it was interesting because he would come on the set, and we only had him for about a week, and he’d be quite impatient — “OK, we can get through this quickly.” And I’d say, “Hang on, Michael, just try this, will you?” And you’d feel he’d want to get it in two or three takes. And then I’d get him to develop it and develop it and suddenly he wouldn’t want to go, he’d be into this thing saying, “Let’s do it this way, let’s try this...” It was like a man who really wanted to act seriously and here was a part he could get his teeth into. It was wonderful working with him because he is such a good actor. It was wonderful actually getting him to express the dark-hearted stuff. Michael loved playing that part.’

  Another small but significant piece of casting was Robbie Coltrane as George’s equally sad and displaced friend Thomas. Primarily known then as a television comedian, Mona Lisa was Coltrane’s first dramatic break in movies. ‘I’d met Steve Woolley a few times and he thought I would be suitable for the part so arranged an audition. Originally, I was going to play it Cockney but it was Neil that decided on Glaswegian. I can’t remember exactly how but I ended up with a spanner in my hand and a 51 Pontiac Fire Chief to drive, so there was no acting required on that account. Neil was always surprisingly unprecious on the dialogue, considering it was his script, and always open to suggestions.’ Coltrane’s casting certainly lent extra spice to the general heady creative mix. Woolley recollects, ‘It was something of a liability walking around the streets with Neil, Robbie Coltrane and Bob Hoskins. I’d be frightened if we’d pass a pub because Neil could drink for Ireland, Robbie could drink for Scotland and Bob could drink for England.’

  Liquid lunches notwithstanding, the entire cast got on extremely well and developed into a tight-knit little group. Coltrane remembers, ‘Neil and Bob and Cathy were such good company. I was in awe of Bob, he had done a lot of great work, even then, but he was very friendly, had this great “anti-lovey”, let’s-get-on-with-the-job attitude, and is very funny so we got on well. I think it shows in the film. It is important to the plot, of course, because my character is Bob’s only friend in the film. I remember Bob getting into a major slanging match with someone in the street when we were filming the scene where he trashes his ex-wife’s house exterior. They thought it was for real and told him to behave. Being out and about with Bob in London was exhilarating because he is such East End Aristocracy.’

  George Harrison also made a brief location visit. He’d been much criticised lately for not making the effort to get involved physically in the movies he financed. One producer told the press that he never met Harrison once and that he would drive up to the location when everyone was at lunch, get out his director’s chair, take a few pictures and leave. It was sometimes left to Ray Cooper to impress upon Harrison the importance of putting in the odd personal appearance, meeting the troops, as it were, in the field. ‘It was always nice when George went on the location and he knew that. And he would always be very generous, without interfering, and it was always a big boost for actors and actresses who hadn’t met him to see him. He was always extremely kind to them and interested in what they were doing.’ As for O’Brien, he was practically invisible. Woolley says, ‘I don’t think I ever saw him on set once. He wouldn’t be on set, that would be like the management
being with the workers. He lived in Cadogan Square with the money. He was too busy making the money work.’

  He did, however, occasionally make an appearance at the rushes. And, like Harrison, he did not take kindly to the underwater ‘knobs’ shot. ‘Denis looked at the rushes and didn’t like them,’ Woolley remembers, ‘was very obtuse in his comments, was not nice about anything in the film. And there was a shot of Bob’s penis which caused a lot of laughter in the rushes because you start off with this crotch shot and somebody said, “I know whose dick that is... that’s Bob’s,” and the camera pans up to Bob and it was very funny. And Denis said, “What are you doing shooting that kind of thing? You won’t get a rating in America.” And I said, “Of course you will.” And we had this huge argument.’

  But the big confrontation was yet to come. O’Brien envisaged the film as ending in Brighton, where George has tracked down Simone, and there’s a brutal bloodbath in which she shoots Mortwell. This was followed by a shot of Bob rushing down to the beach. O’Brien wanted the film to end at that dramatic moment. Woolley says, ‘They were literally coming into the cutting room and telling the editor what to do with the film, which to my mind was fucking ridiculous. And people like Ray Cooper, who I really did have a good relationship with, I really loved Ray, were doing his bidding because Ray was being paid by Denis. You see, Denis had people cornered, very few people would go against Denis because of the fiver to 15 quid trick, that’s how he got his power. He was a man who could do a lot for you and so when Denis asked you to do a small thing, like “Oh, can you cut the end of the film off?” people would try and do it. So there was a lot of argy-bargy going on.’