Richard Attenborough
Preferring fact to fiction in terms of filmmaking, Sir Richard Attenborough has put the lives of many real people on screen. His latest protagonist is Hemingway
Attenborough
It's probably not much more than a drop in the ocean to him, but my professional contacts with Sir Richard Attenborough, aka Sir Dickie, aka (these days) Lord Attenborough, go back quite a while.
They started rather ominously. The paper of which I was editor had broken an embargo on reviewing one of his films. If the review had been favourable, that mightn't have mattered. But it wasn't. So it did. Everything matters to Sir Dickie, and he wanted something done about it.
We compromised on an extended interview the following week, in which he would get to say all the important things about the film that my reviewer, inexplicably, hadn't. It wasn't a very principled paper (it's better now).
A large car was sent to speed me through West London to Beaver Lodge (stop snickering at the back: that is where Sir Dickie lives, in quiet elegance, on the edge of Richmond Green).
Except the driver didn't know the way, and spent 35 minutes negotiating the Richmond one-way system, most of which was no way due to roadworks. We finally happened on Richmond Green, more or less by chance, in one of those downpours where you can't tell whether the rain is going up or down.
Some 25 minutes later, by a process of elimination, we drew up outside Beaver Lodge. I had been told Sir Dickie had to be at the opening of the London Film Festival by 7.30. It was now 6 o'clock. I considered alternative careers. It was like being summoned to the headmaster's study and arriving an hour late.
The story rather fizzles out here, since Sir Dickie, already in full evening wear (" I always dress to receive editors!") was affability itself, ushering me into a small, comfortable study with a mantelpiece lined with awards - not ostentatiously, but not quite modestly, either.
We talked for half an hour or so, I wrote the piece, the row was forgotten, and Sir Dickie has greeted me like a lifelong acquaintance ever since. I know he does this to everybody, but it's still a nice change in this business.
I was reminded of my visit to the headmaster's study by the tone of Sir Dickie's answer when I asked, à propos In Love and War, why almost all his films - every one in the past quarter-century with the exception of Magic and A Chorus Line - have been about real people: political figures (Churchill, Gandhi, Biko) or writers (CS Lewis, Hemingway).
The answer comes in unmistakable form. It also evolves in such a way as virtually to absolve me from further questioning. "
Oh, Nick, dear, I think you know. I prefer fact to fiction. I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics. But I read biography. I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.
"And I love heroes, you know that. Denigration is so easy. Denigration is a cheap media passion being indulged at the moment beyond anything I can ever remember. And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by."
"And whereas I don't suggest for one second that Hemingway falls into the bracket of a heroic figure, he is nevertheless a very grandiose, a very flamboyant, a very theatrically evident figure, who unquestionably changed our views in relation to literature."
In Love and War, of course, deals with the relationship between the very young Ernest Hemingway (played by Chris O'Donnell) and his first love, Agnes von Kurowksy (Sandra Bullock), a Red Cross nurse and the supposed model for Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. It was, by all accounts (especially those of Hemingway's subsequent wives), a love he never got over. And indeed, the release of the film in North America has prompted the revelation that, when the writer committed suicide in 1961, he did so clutching a package of Agnes' letters.
What the film reveals is both a very young, somewhat over-confident American in Europe and, at the same time, the monstre sacré of 20th-century literature in embryo - the writer against whom Norman Mailer claimed all other American writers measured themselves. What you had to do as a tyro writer, said Mailer, nailing it as ever without regard for the sensibilities of others, is look at yourself, look at Hemingway, then decide "if you are (a) stronger than he, and (b) smarter than he, and (c) less queer".
In the film, Ernest is strong, smart and definitely not queer. "
It confirms his arrogance, it confirms his courage and his sense of humour, it confirms his egotism," says Attenborough.
It confirms his total inability to be able to forgive anybody or to condone anything that does not in fact go totally his way. You find it amusing, you find it fascinating, that this cocky little sod can behave in this way and get away with it."
In Love and War also confirms Sandra Bullock as a major actress. Having wooed her for the role, Attenborough admits, in language hyperbolic even for him, to being amazed by the result.
"She's never touched, never plunged, never attempted anything vaguely like it," he says.
"She's absolutely remarkable. I'd seen her in several movies and I believed that nobody had, in fact, challenged her to present a three-dimensional character. She was hardly ever asked to perform - to play, to act. She was a personality movie star. She depended on her slightly quirky, comedic, brilliant technical tricks.
"I went to see her in Washington, where she lives, to ask her to do it. And, at the end of dinner, she said, 'Look, I would love to do this. But you have to make me one promise: you have to swear that you will remove the Sandra Bullock that everybody expects to see from the movie.' So that was the deal.
"Every now and again, obviously, the problem came back. But all it took was a little secret sign where I raised my right finger and drew the letter 'B' in the air."
Meaning…?
"Meaning Bullock, of course, honey. Or bollocks. Or Bullock bollocks," says Sir Dickie, suddenly switching from headmaster to naughty schoolboy.And it worked.
"The two kids are as good as Tony [Hopkins] and Debra [Winger] in Shadowlands," he says. "
They are staggering, particularly she."
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