ROGER MICHELL: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

(Roger Michell, above.)

(I interviewed director Roger Michell in 2004, for the release of his film The Mother. This past month, he released his newest, Morning Glory. This article originally appeared in Venice Magazine.)

A Return to Notting Hill with ROGER MICHELL

By Terry Keefe

To see just how diverse a director Roger Michell is, all you need to do is compare the two very different versions of London's Notting Hill district that he has shown us on film. The first was the sizable studio picture, Notting Hill, which starred Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant and which was one of the biggest hits of 1999. A romantic comedy about an ordinary bookstore owner who finds himself in a relationship with a huge movie star, Notting Hill managed to be breezy on its surface level but also deceptively deep in its characterizations. And it also made you want to visit the charming and slightly magical Notting Hill of the film as soon as possible, so much so that Michell probably deserves a cut of the tourism spike that undoubtedly happened upon the film's release. His new film, The Mother, is also set predominantly in the neighborhood, but its dark nature definitely won't inspire you to jump on a flight to London any time soon, although it is nonetheless an excellent, disturbing, and extremely thought-provoking production.

Written by Hanif Kureishi [My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid], The Mother opens on a pair of grandparents, May [Anne Reid] and Toots [Peter Vaughan], who are visiting their adult children and young grandchildren in London from their small town in the North. The old couple seem lost in the big city, where everyone is in a rush. Even their own children seem to have little time for them. Then Toots suffers a fatal heart attack after dinner and May decides that she cannot stay in her old house by herself. She flat-out refuses to become one of those widowed old women who are invisible to society. So she insists that her children allow her to live with them. Her son Bobby [Steven Mackintosh] can't handle having May around, so she moves in with her daughter Paula [Cathryn Bradshaw], where she is welcome at first. Paula is a struggling writer who is involved in a fruitless relationship with a married builder named Darren [Daniel Craig], a selfish ego-maniacal, but also occasionally likable sort. Paula expects May to help with the care of her daughter while she pursues Darren and her writing. What she doesn't expect is for May to embark on an affair with Darren! Like many of her generation, May is a woman who married early and settled for what she could get. And now she is like a bird which has finally been let out of its cage, a teenager in some respects, although she is in the body of a 60-year-old woman. Anne Reid crafts a May who evokes both pity and rage from the viewer, as well as from her family. Daniel Craig is equally excellent as Darren, pulling off a performance as a man of many faces which never seem to be incongruous because they all come from the same selfish well.

(Anne Reid and Daniel Craig, in The Mother, above.)

Many filmmakers attempt to straddle the worlds of both studio and smaller, independent-flavored films, but few have ever been able to do it with the seeming ease that Michell has shown in the last few years. Even on his bigger studio productions, he always manages to inject very commercial material with some deeper themes. Sandwiched in his filmography between the two films set in Notting Hill is his 2002 studio film, Changing Lanes, starring Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson. A taut drama-thriller about two very different men whose lives become irreversibly intertwined due to a car accident, the film pushed all the right plot buttons to engage a mainstream audience but also had a lot to say about the class system in America. Michell's other productions include Titanic Town [1998], Persuasion [1995], and the award-winning BBC mini-series, "The Buddha of Suburbia" [1993], which also was written by Hanif Kureishi and produced by Kevin Loader, who is the producer on The Mother as well. Loader and Michell are partners in their production company Free Range Films and are in the middle of putting the final touches on their new film, Enduring Love, which is based on the novel by Ian McEwan, and stars Daniel Craig once again, along with Samantha Morton.

What was your reaction to the script of The Mother when you read it for the first time?

Roger Michell: I read it about four years ago. The bones of the story were all in place. There was the relationship between this old lady and the builder, and the relationship between this old lady and her daughter. I suppose what intrigued me was the shock of it. I was shocked by the sexual relationship in the film, and I began to wonder why I was so shocked by it. I began to think about why a woman's sexuality should apparently become invisible after the age of 47.

Were you shocked by it because you had never seen this type of relationship on film or...

I had never seen it before and I was bewildered by why it should be such a taboo area in our culture, in all cultures. And it's related to why we feel so odd about our parents having sex. The idea of our parents having sex is weird for us to comprehend. And the idea of our mother having sex outside of marriage is doubly weird. Although there is clearly a sort of Darwinian imperative behind that idea, in that men can continue to reproduce until they're nearly dead whereas women can't, it still seems to me bizarre that we have such strong revulsion at the prospect [of an older woman's sexuality]. In some ways, it's the last sexual taboo.

In casting for May, did you think of having a former sex symbol play her at first?

No, I never did, but other people did. Particularly financiers, who said, "Well, we might do this movie but only if you cast Charlotte Rampling or Julie Christie." It seemed to me that would really take all the stuffing out of the film, although they're both wonderful actresses. It seemed to me that the "fairy story" of the film is of someone who is almost dead already being brought back to life, like the frog being kissed by the princess. And she had to be a woman who not only didn't have a sexual present but, for all intents and purposes, didn't have a sexual past, either. If she was played by someone with the delicious baggage of Julie Christie, you'd think, "Well, I'd fuck her." Know what I mean? You'd think, "What's the story here? She's 60-something but so what? She's Julie Christie!" Whereas the film is not about that. It's about someone who is almost invisible. If you saw her at the bus queue, you wouldn't even pick her out. And then she turns into a kind of 22-year-old.

Did you see many actresses before you cast Anne Reid as May?

We saw a few but there was never any competition for the role once we met Anne. We felt that she was perfect for the role and that also something in her, some part of her experience, chimed particularly with this role and made her understand it. Made her understand great chunks of it in a very intuitive and instinctive way. I'm not saying that Anne is similar to the role in the respect that she has affairs with builders, as far as I know. [laughs] But she lived in the north. She was widowed. There are lots of bits of the role that she got.

You mentioned earlier that May is someone who is almost invisible. You really shot her that way, at least at first when she and her husband arrive in London.

I wanted the both of them at the beginning of the film to feel a little like ghosts in the landscape. They both dress in pale colors and they're in the middle of these big crowds at the station and in the middle of these big landscapes. They've kind of "had it" in the beginning of the film. They've kind of stopped living, in a way. There's the scene in the beginning where they're sitting across from each other waiting for the taxi to arrive. And then it just dissolves to the same thing, but they're sitting in the other chairs. And it's kind of like, "What difference does it make which chair they sit in? They're not really properly alive." So that was interesting. You can live in a bad relationship without even realizing that it's bad. You're so used to it that you don't realize what's happened to you. I thank that's happened to both of them in a way, but particularly her.

Each of the children and grandchildren seemed to have a different type of relationship with Anne, particularly in terms of how they behave around her. Did you give them each specific instructions as to how they should relate to her?

They all had different needs in the film and they all do things which could be seen to be very cruel, all of them. The grandchildren and the children. But my job as the director is let them "fight their own corner," not to let the film judge what they do. [It was important] for the actors playing the characters to believe that what they did was reasonable under the circumstances. That there were imperatives which made them behave in that way, that they had no choice. My own mother was widowed and I remember living in London with young children and thinking with dread about the prospect that she would want to come live at our house. Because I was very busy and I didn't think it was possible that I could have room in my world for this older person. So I understand only too well the conflicted feelings going through the grown-up children in the film.

Was it a challenge to keep May somewhat sympathetic but also make it clear that she's doing some horrible things?

Yeah, she's in denial about what she's doing, but in her mind, her daughter did say that she was fed up with this guy [Darren]. May thinks she's in the clear. She thinks she's not doing anything wrong but, of course, she's doing something terribly, fundamentally wrong. Wrong in a Greek tragedy way. But that's not what she tells herself. She's in the grip of an addiction, really. She can't resist him. So I sympathize with her, even though what she's doing is probably one of the worst things you can do to your daughter. It's Freudian textbook -- on the first page it says, "Don't fuck your daughter's man because it's bad news for everybody. It'll ruin your lunch." [laughs]

Daniel Craig had to be many things at once in the film. How did you help him develop his performance?

Well, we rehearsed the film for a couple of weeks before shooting. But he had a very instant, instinctive understanding of his character. You're very perceptive to say that he had to be lots of things, because he had to be the healer, the friend, the lover, the generous person, and, at the same time, he also had to be the bad man, the selfish man, the addict, the crazy, the man without control, the loser. And he has this great ability as an actor to play two things at once. He plays sweet and kind and gentle with his face, but with his eyes he plays, "Get me out of here, I'm going crazy." And it's a good tension to have as an actor.

When shooting the love scenes between Anne and Daniel, did you do a lot of talking beforehand or did you kind of just let them go with it?

We did a lot of talking. I think with any love scene, I find it much better to talk it all out with the actors way in advance of shooting: Where the camera is going to be. Who is going to be doing what to whom with which bit of their body. What the shot list is. What the story of the scene is. It's only with that kind of rigorous pragmatism that you can overcome their nerves about it. I think the worst thing you can say to an actor is, "There's a bed. You go over there and do your think. We'll kind of be over here somewhere with a camera." I think that's truly scary. I think by really nailing it down, so to speak, you can really liberate them to feel confident and free to pretend they're having sex. And I think all good sex scenes have lots of story. These scenes [in The Mother] are very particular. It's the story of a man whose primary aim is to give sexual pleasure to a much older woman without necessarily having a great time himself. That makes the scenes interesting to shoot and worth putting in the film.

Has London become as impersonal as it's depicted here?

I actually think the city feels very wonderful, particularly at the moment. It's very varied, very pluralistic in a very exciting way. But I think more and more families are split asunder by circumstance. It's very rare nowadays for people in big cities to live in the context of an extended family. And I think, in a way, this film takes on that issue. It's a problem that we'll probably increasingly find, as developed countries, as we pretend that our old family structures really hold together. Because they don't really hold together. From the beginning of recorded time until 1900, most people lived in extended families all over the world. It's hard to imagine that we could make all these transitions [since 1900] so quickly and expect to get away with it for free. There will be penalties. And I think at the beginning of the 21st century, we're trying to reinvent new ways to have families and to bring up children.

The film really examines the poison, so to speak, that is passed down from generation to generation in a troubled family. The kids in the film are really adorable, but...

You know they're going to be bad. They're going to turn out really, really wrong.

(Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, in Notting Hill.)

You've given us two very different versions of Notting Hill between this film and Notting Hill.

There's one camera position that's the same for both films. There's a shot when the two old people approach the house of their son for the first time, which I also used in Notting Hill for a bit of a car chase at the end of the film. Nobody's caught that, but I enjoyed the idea of making two films in Notting Hill which are so contrasting. It would be nice to put both films on either side of a DVD. [laughs]