by Steve Coogan
She suggested that I write the screenplay with Jeff Pope, head of factual drama at ITV. He had co-written Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, which I absolutely loved, and had produced several dramas with Paul Greengrass, including The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. He had also produced, among others on a long, impressive list, Mo and Appropriate Adult for ITV.
I always wanted Judi Dench to play Philomena, and Christine thought Stephen Frears, with whom she’d worked on The Queen, would be the perfect director.
Stephen played hard to get. He made me chase him. It was definitely worth it. I found my voice with him. We would have robust conversations in which he would challenge me. He involved me the whole way, asking what a particular line meant in the script and pushing me to think about every nuance. The film is certainly better than the script; Stephen lifted it.
He was a great ally on set too. When the make-up artist made the nuns look too wicked, he understood that we needed to be more subtle. We talked about ensuring that the nuns didn’t announce the fact that they are bad; clearly what they’ve done is bad, but they shouldn’t be caricatures of ‘bad nuns’.
Jeff was an equally brilliant call on the part of BBC Films. He’s the Essex equivalent of me: lower middle class and suburban. Both our fathers are very practical: his worked for Technicolor, helping to develop colour film, and mine worked for IBM. He feels like a brother.
I like Jeff’s matter-of-fact, direct and clear approach; it counters the fact that I talk round and round in circles. We are not natural, lifelong intellectuals, but we share a hunger for knowledge, for learning.
I wasn’t intimidated by Jeff. I could say what I thought without holding back and wondering if I was being articulate enough. He gave me the space to grow in confidence as a writer; I could tell him that something he’d written didn’t feel right and he wouldn’t get upset.
He is a populist, he has compassion and a sense of the poetic, and he is also straightforward, a grafter and great company. When we meet we spend half the time together exchanging anecdotes and gossiping. I always look forward to working with him.
I was very clear about what I wanted the script to be. I wanted humour to help tell the story; I knew it would stop Philomena from being portentous. I also wanted it to be a warm film as a direct response to the irony and cynicism that seem to flavour everything, and that I ultimately find debilitating and depressing.
It’s good to trample on received wisdom. You might think that you can’t poke fun at old Irish ladies because it’s bullying behaviour. Of course you can, so long as there’s warmth. You can have a good raucous laugh at someone and ultimately dignify them at the same time. That ambiguity is real, it’s human; it’s no different from mocking your parents while loving them. You also need the conviction to say something and not bookend it with some sort of apology or qualification. You don’t have to parachute humour in as an insurance. If it feels difficult or you feel selfconscious when you do it, it’s probably a good sign.
All these thoughts were racing around my head. I felt compelled to tell both sides of the story and not to have to come to a concrete, judgemental conclusion; I’ve learned late in life to understand the beauty of thoughts and reflections. I’ve taught myself to formulate sophisticated thoughts, and it’s taken a long time. I’m trying to find truths that are underrepresented on screen, to embrace nuance and ambiguity.
*
When I saw the photo in the Guardian of Martin and Philomena sitting side by side on the bench, my first thoughts were: ‘OK, they took flights together. I wonder if they got coffee from Starbucks. Did he go to WHSmith at the airport? Did they go together? If he got a newspaper, did he ask her what she wanted? Did he buy it for her? Did he react when she asked for the Daily Mail?’
I knew I had to talk to both Martin and Philomena in as much detail as possible about their trip to America. I needed all the detail he’d omitted from the book because he didn’t think it was dramatic enough. I needed background: how did Martin feel when his parents died? How did Philomena feel when, as an adult, she had a second child? Discovering how excited I was about storytelling was a revelation.
The first time I met Philomena and her daughter, Jane Libberton, was at Martin’s house. Philomena was anxious and nervous. Jane was understandably suspicious and defensive; what did this British comedian want from her mother? I knew I would have to work hard to win their trust. I had to convince them that I was honourable.
When I mentioned to Philomena that we were talking to Judi Dench about playing her in the film, she clasped her hands to her chest and gasped, ‘Dame Judi Dench playing little old me?’
Philomena soon got used to the idea of her story being turned into a film. I used to joke at Q&As in America that Philomena had kept a secret for fifty years and now you couldn’t shut her up.
I was also very keen to play Martin. I related to some of his world-weary journalist persona because I was no longer excited by comedy in the same way. I knew that I could use the fictionalised version of Martin to get stuff off my chest, to say things that I know are conceited, that are me at my most bilious.
Whenever Martin and I met, we discussed ‘Martin’ in the third person as if it wasn’t quite him. We talked about the film version of Martin as being slightly different from him.
Not long after Jeff came on board as a co-writer, he came with me to talk to both Philomena and Martin. As a journalist, Martin was able to give us notes on the script, to tell us personal details about himself and to help us with the factual background to the story.
During one of our visits to see Philomena, Martin and I played her footage of her son, Anthony, running around the flower garden in Ross Abbey when he was five years old. She had never seen it before, and she started crying. She grabbed my hand as I was watching the footage and said, ‘I did love him you know.’
I used that line in the film, when Martin and Philomena are at the salad bar and she grabs his hand. What is strange about life imitating art is that it didn’t happen to Martin, it happened to me. And then to me when I was playing Martin.
When I asked Philomena if she could forgive the nuns for what they did to her, she thought about it and said, ‘Yes I do.’
Her daughter Jane said, ‘I don’t.’
Both are valid responses and I wanted them both reflected in the film. I gave the ‘I don’t forgive’ line to Martin and let Philomena have her moment of forgiveness, which allowed us to go from the anger and vengeance of the Old Testament to forgiveness, supposedly one of the central tenets of Christianity.
Almost all narratives are about sating the desire for revenge, because forgiveness isn’t sexy. Philomena’s clemency, being a rarity on screen, excited me. We can, after all, learn from those we castigate. No one has a monopoly on wisdom.
Jeff and I also retraced some of Martin’s steps, including a visit to the nuns at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. I had a difficult conversation with a senior sister of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary that I felt was reflective of the Church’s generally dismissive response to women like Philomena. Historically it has a siege mentality of manning the barricades and refusing to engage in discussion.
I saw ‘Sister X’, as I will refer to her here, in a car outside the abbey, and approached her.
Me: ‘Hello. Are you Sister X?’
Sister X: ‘I am.’
Me: ‘My name is Steve Coogan. You may know that I’m working on a film about Philomena Lee. I wondered if I could ask you—’
Sister X (interrupting): ‘I must say I find it incredibly discourteous of you to come looking around here without first knocking on the door to introduce yourselves.’
Me: ‘I thought people were allowed to wander about.’
Sister X: ‘No. This is private property.’
Me: ‘Why are you presuming that I have negative intentions? If you have nothing to hide, why not be open?’
Sister X: ‘I have nothing to hide, but you should have introduced yourself and spoken to me.’
Me: ‘Martin Sixsmith called you.’
Sister X: ‘No. I was called yesterday by someone else.’
Me: ‘Yes, that was my PA. She reported back that you wanted nothing to do with the film.’
Sister X: ‘That’s right.’
Me: ‘So you are refusing to cooperate?’
Sister X: ‘What is your question?’
Me: ‘I wondered why there are no names of the babies who died, on the wall in the Garden of Remembrance.’
Sister X: ‘There is a sculpture to commemorate them; we do not list individual names because there would be an issue of whose names were left off and whose were left on. If the parents wish to place an individual plaque then they can.’
Me: ‘There were a number of plaques with names of the dead about five years ago that aren’t there any more.’
Sister X: ‘There were not. I’ve been here for nine years and there were never any names there.’
Me: ‘OK. This film isn’t going to be an attack on the Catholic Church. My parents are Roman Catholic. Judi Dench is going to play Philomena in a film about healing, about acknowledging the mistakes of the past and moving on.’
Sister X: ‘Hmmm …’
Me: ‘Thank you for talking to me. I appreciate it.’
Sister X: ‘OK.’
Me: ‘Goodbye.’
Sister X: ‘Goodbye.’
I walked back to the car and drove away.
Some of the research was tough, but it was a revelation for me to be expressive about things I wanted to communicate through the prism of what had happened to someone else.
And yet perhaps the even greater experience was seeing something through from beginning to end, from reading a newspaper article to seeing it on the screen.
CHAPTER 4
I HAVE NEVER written alone. I like to collaborate and I’ve never had an ego about the credit being divided. The smartest decision I ever made was to always find the most talented people to work with.
When I was writing Alan Partridge with Patrick, Armando Iannucci or, more recently, Neil and Rob Gibbons, we would record improvised scenes, transcribe them and shape a script. With Philomena, I would do all the parts and try to imagine the conversations. The characters in Woody Allen’s films all seem to talk with a similar level of articulacy, but I tried to imagine the rhythm of each individual’s conversation; I wanted Philomena to talk in that working-class way, with an eloquent brevity.
I’ve got a good ear for working-class dialogue and I grew up around Philomena’s generation of women. I will always remember my grandma saying, when I was full of maudlin self-pity following some self-inflicted personal crisis, ‘It’s like a cloud, it’ll pass.’
There was a rich subtext and a universal truth to her words; she certainly didn’t sit around using words like ‘duplicity’. My sister, Clare, used to talk about the people we met in Ireland in the summer holidays as having ‘a simple faith’ and leading ‘simple lives, well lived’.
I remember arriving at the moment towards the end of the script in which Philomena tells the nun that she forgives her for what she did to her. I had to think about how she could say it with conviction and honesty. The danger is apologising for it being powerful; you have to let it be powerful. Don’t be spineless and do a joke. Have the guts to see it through. It’s like discovering that the most powerful weapon in writing is love.
It may sound bizarre, but I like the fact that if you get something like that wrong, you look like an idiot. The challenge is attractive to me. But then I’m not a stereotypical writer. When I write with Jeff, I don’t look at the script on the page. I’m even superstitious about looking over his shoulder as he’s sitting in front of the laptop. I’ll stand on the other side of the room, imagine a scene in my head and ask him to repeat it back to me.
‘What’s the line before that? And the line after?’
Jeff will say, ‘Just come and have a look.’
I worry it will break the spell, but I will go over and look. I’m a visual thinker and so the transition between what’s in my head and what goes on the page is more evident to me than it might be for others.
We were very aware of keeping the story as simple as possible. I rail against wordy, intellectual writers whose characters talk incessantly, often for the sake of it. It always reminds me of Ken Branagh’s fantastic story about the time he met Liam Gallagher.
Liam: ‘You’re that actor, aren’t you?’
Ken nods.
Liam: ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you on the telly. You’re that actor in that series.’
Then he makes both his hands talk to each other, like glove puppets. ‘Talky talky, talky, talky.’
*
I didn’t want Philomena’s character to be over-articulate in order to communicate my ideas in the film.
Harvey Weinstein, who distributed Philomena in the States, tried to persuade me to add a line at the end of the film. He wanted Philomena to say to the nun, ‘I’ll forgive, but I won’t forget.’
It’s a terrible line. I refused.
No one would have a conversation with Harvey, so I had to speak to him on the phone.
He said, ‘Listen. I’ve got so many Academy Awards, I know what I’m talking about. You need to put that line in.’
We argued. At one point I said, ‘Harvey, it’s New Testament, not Old Testament.’
We compromised in the end by adding the line where Philomena says to Martin, ‘I do want you to write your book. People should know what happened here.’ It was a note of empowerment; she refused to live like a victim and didn’t seek to judge others as the nuns judged her. Forgiveness is proactive, not passive.
One of the agents at Independent Talent had a note for me about Philomena’s son, Michael Hess, who worked as chief counsel for the Republican National Committee when Reagan was in power.
‘You can’t have the son dying halfway through the film,’ she said. ‘It robs all the momentum of the film. He has to die at the end. Otherwise the script doesn’t work. You want to see his life in the White House. You’ve got to cast a really big Hollywood star as the missing son and make him a central part of the film.’
She said it with such conviction that I had to listen. I had a crisis of confidence.
‘That’s a different film,’ I told her eventually. ‘It’s not the film we’ve written. Our film is about two people on a journey. He thinks he’s saving her, but she saves him.’
Listening to her point of view and reacting so strongly against it was actually a good thing. It reinforced what Jeff and I had written and I felt more confident about the structure of the film.
I liked the fact that Philomena and Martin would never ordinarily have spent time together. He is, at points, exasperated with her naivety, and is irritated by her enthusiasm for the American hotel breakfast; but then reality kicks in for them both when he discovers her son is dead.
When Jeff and I were writing, I kept saying, ‘What would she or he really say?’ As well as talking for the sake of it, too often what people say in films doesn’t remotely resemble what they would say in real life. There’s a scene in Festen, the Thomas Vinterberg film, where the eldest son accuses the father of sexual abuse. The reaction doesn’t feel written; because it’s improvised, it feels very real. Some people snigger in the scene because they don’t know what to do; others look around the room, gauging reactions. It’s far more real than everyone saying, en masse, ‘Oh my God, he raped his children!’
You feel, watching that scene in Festen, that you’ve learned something about humanity. Vinterberg is brave enough to ask questions without pretending to have the answers. As Lord Byron said, ‘’Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.’
CHAPTER 5
PHILOMENA HAD ITS world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2013. I sat next to Judi Dench in a 2,000-capacity cinema. I felt incredibly nervous, partly because it was the first time the film had been seen, but also because we
were premiering it in a Catholic country. As producer and co-writer, I’d obviously seen the film before, but it was the first time Judi had seen it.
The audience made plenty of noise, almost as though they were watching a silent movie. Their responses were theatrical: I could hear sharp intakes of breath followed by loud applause in the scene where I say, ‘Fucking Catholics.’ There was, in fact, spontaneous applause throughout the film and, as soon as the credits were rolling, the audience was on its feet, applauding.
A light picked out Judi, Stephen and me in our seats on the balcony. The audience turned and directed their applause at us. We stood up, feeling happy but a little overwhelmed and almost embarrassed. The applause must have lasted for ten minutes; it felt like it might never end.
I looked at Judi, who simply smiled. I had nothing to compare it to. I didn’t know how to gauge it.
Someone leaned over and said, ‘This is very good. If they don’t like a film they boo.’
So, finally, I allowed myself to enjoy the moment.
The reaction in Venice was surreal. I had hoped for a positive response to the film, but I hadn’t been prepared for a standing ovation. And then journalists were voluntarily effusive, and I know from experience that journalists keep their counsel if they don’t like something. Some even came up to me on the verge of tears and said, ‘Thank you for making this film.’
It was a very strange experience. I felt like someone else. Disassociated. Much like I do when I perform live. Coming from a large Catholic family I have always been on the lookout for approbation, but I don’t really know how to deal with it when I get it, so I end up feeling disconnected.
We had a sense that we’d written something good, but we didn’t know how people would be affected by the film. The response from women in particular has been incredible. Sometimes three generations of women went to see Philomena, and if I met them after a Q&A they would say, ‘What a wonderful warm film. We loved it so much.’
It reinforced my earlier point about cynicism. There are films that deal with love and sentiment, but they are nearly always cynical. It’s almost as though the film studios have a cynical box that they ask writers and directors to tick. In my opinion, the only sincerity they admire is the big, broad studio type: sincerity that ‘tests well’.