My Life in Pieces (40 page)

Things were looking up. The latest version of the script contained a much augmented role for Schikaneder, and I finally discovered that Mozart was to be Tom Hulce, whom I’d met in New York two years before – delightful, funny, and good – one of the Alan Strangs in the Broadway production of
Equus
, so we had John Dexter in common. We re-met at Abbey Road, and from that moment, I never experienced the slightest pang.

We began, as usual with Milos,
in medias res
. Singing arias was bad enough but there was a scene (Mozart, Schikaneder and three of his actresses standing round the piano improvising tunes from
The Magic
Flute
) which could only be a nightmare. So of course we started with that. Milos gave a vivid impression of how he imagined the scene: wild anarchy, raspberries blown and belches belched, Schikaneder, thumping the keyboard, Mozart, giggling insanely – and all within the framework of tunes being played, tossed around, transformed, stood on their head. ‘Okay?’ said Milos, and went, taking Shaffer with him.

Eventually we did concoct something which satisfied him. Of its nature, though, it was almost impossible to repeat; and sustaining that level of crazy ebullience for a sound recording is a desperate task. ‘I know,’ said Shaffer, and disappeared, returning a minute later with two bottles of champagne. So it came about that the rather surprised walls of Studio One, Abbey Road, where some of the great classical recordings of the century had been made, witnessed a performance of certain tunes of Mozart by a gaggle of drunken actors shrieking and farting and hitting a priceless instrument.

My aria was another matter. ‘It’s a shame,’ I said to Milos, ‘and I’m very sorry, but if I don’t have to worry about the singing it’ll be better for my acting.’ ‘Acting?’ Milos’s eyes narrowed. ‘Acting? There will be
NO
ACTING
in my film.’ ‘But, Milos,’ I said, ‘he’s on a stage, in a theatre, acting.’ A dark and terrible pause. ‘Yes. Okay.’ Another pause. ‘But this will be the
only
acting in my film!’

A month later, I was in Prague, to rehearse all my scenes in one day. Tom and Meg Tilly (Constanze) had tottered off their planes, having been on them for sixteen hours. The set was built, and the moment we all arrived, Milos plunged in. He said nothing about the scenes, simply gave us our physical movements, and then told us to start. Within seconds, he would be on his feet, protesting. ‘No, no, no, no. Simple. Please. Not like this –’ a not entirely complimentary impersonation of one’s physical and vocal attributes ensued – ‘like this –’ a cartoon of the desired performance was now indicated, with many a grimace and grunt.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Tom. ‘We are graduates of the John Dexter school of acting. Nothing this man says can harm us.’ I was wrong. ‘No, no, no, no, NO!’ he would cry, time and again. It was as if he couldn’t believe the perversity of what we were presenting to him. How could we not be playing the scene the way he had envisaged it? Faced with the offensive performance, his technique was to destroy it by brute force. As far as one could judge, it was nothing personal: simply that this piece of wrong acting had to be expunged from the world. With mad energy Milos would assault it, raining insults, parodistic impersonations, reproaches upon its head, until, inevitably, it succumbed.

Basically, netcheralness was the goal; but Milos’s definition of what was
netcheral
was quite arbitrary. What it amounted to was that the way Milos saw it was netcheral — any other way, not. Moreover, ‘Remember that I have a camera here and this light is here so it would help me very much if you will keep your head low here and turn only thirty degrees this way.’
Netcheral
was a relative term, and one that became irksome. We found an antidote. During the interminable hours of piano practice I endured in order to play a twenty-second fragment for a scene, I remembered that in Germany the note B natural is called H. Thus whenever Milos would cry, ‘Be natural!’ I would murmur, ‘H.’ This was oddly consoling.

Over supper that night, Milos further expounded his theories of film technique. ‘Stage actors are wonderful, big, generous. But they can’t use film, always
acting
, always
doing something
. On film, you must BE. And you must
be yourself
, I cast you to be you. Otherwise I cast someone else.’
‘But Milos,’ said a slightly uneasy Murray Abraham, playing Salieri, ‘if you cast everyone to be themselves, well, Salieri’s a very nasty man.’ Milos stared at him for a long time. ‘Murray,’ he said, ‘you think too much.’

Over the next six months I took fifty-seven planes in and out of Czechoslovakia, staying at the Panorama Hotel (the panorama being like a building site in Luton) and working at the urine-infested Barrandov Studios. There, where Milos had begun his career, he was the absolute centre of operations, exerting his massive concentration on the whole huge team. The shot would be set up without him, he would emerge from his room, and the scene would proceed.

If
the shot was good, ‘Very good, very good, very good,’ he would say, and withdraw back to his room to sleep while the next shot was set up.
If not
– if not, he would descend like the cavalry to root out imperfection. Sarcasm was the principal weapon. ‘Not bad, not bad. In your speech there were two or three lines where you sounded
almost
like a human being. This is very good, I like this.’

His preferred method of demonstration would sometimes conflict with what he was saying. ‘You come into the room, you open the door, you say “
HELLO!!!!
” lightly, like that.’ Praise was implied rather than stated, but, when it came, the sun certainly shone. One day, after rushes, he said to me, ‘What we shot with you yesterday was wonderful, strong, true, netcheral,’ then added, quite without malice, almost as if to himself, ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it was.’

The scene he was speaking about had been achieved only by dint of violent explosions and uncomprehending abuse – not really at me, but at the inexplicably wrong things I was doing – things I had no way of knowing about, because he hadn’t explained them to me. Why should he? he must have thought. They were so
obvious
.

When this piece came out – on the day of the British premiere of the film
– I was loitering in the cinema foyer when Milos, with thunder on his
brow, came over to me. ‘I rrread your piece in the
Gwaaaaaarrrrdian
,’ he
said. ‘I’m happy to have it. I just rrrran out of toilet paper.’ But he was
amused. Later, he asked me to share his cab on the way to the reception,
and I told him that I was directing a play by his old friend Milan Kundera
in Los Angeles. ‘Very good. I will come to see it. And I will review it for
the
GWARRRRRRRRRRDIAN
.’ If
Amadeus
was a gruelling film to make,
my next film,
A Room with a View
, directed by James Ivory and produced
by Ismail Merchant, was pure balm, from beginning to end. This account
of it was written for the
Sunday Telegraph
magazine in 1986, and it
charts the beginning of my fascination with the world of film-making.

Last May in Florence broke all records for rain. The sky was black, the grass was wet. For two days we could do nothing. On the third day a glint of sunlight made shooting possible, though not perfect. Eventually we had to shoot what we could regardless (Time is Money). If the light is good, it’s surprising how much rain you can have without it showing on the film. Mud is a different matter, however, and the first day’s shooting chiefly concentrated on the progress of two carriages through the Fiesole countryside. Denholm Elliott, Judi Dench and I shared a carriage. Our horse, Giacomo, had an unfortunate inclination to collapse from time to time. There was, moreover, the matter of the falling tree.

This marvel of mechanical engineering was designed to smash across our path, frightening the ladies and giving the men a chance to take command of the situation. It had to fall late enough to look menacing but early enough to avoid the horses. Every time it fell wrongly, we had to ascend the little hill again, walking through the mud to give the horses a break, clutching our skirts or gaiters. So there we are in our carriage, chattering away, and finally the tree is right. A good take at last. But we need another to be safe. Suddenly Maggie Smith, seconded by Judi Dench, protests. The Florence Fire Brigade has been in the bushes, simulating a sudden downpour that’s needed for the scene. The water has been bearing down on the horses’ heads. They’ve been shying away in fear. For the last take, then, the water, is, as they say, cheated to fall yards ahead of them. The effect is almost identical.

All this has taken over eight hours to shoot – we were on location at seven – and will result in under a minute of film. A brilliant minute, as it happens. About ten minutes out of those eight hours was spent in front of the cameras.

And so it goes for every day. Encamped in our villa at Fiesole, which is playing the role of Forster’s
pension
in the film, we are squeezed into our costumes, and gummed into our hairpieces, and our blemishes are painted out by the make-up artists. My motorcycling scar is a much-loved
challenge. After five minutes’ assiduous application, it’s invisible. Then, like souls in hell, we wait to be called. Unending supplies of coffee and biscuits and sandwiches appear at regular intervals and then lunch and tea and eventually supper. The Edwardian costumes have a way of making everyone look cross or at the very least severe, uptight, in corsets and waistcoats. Reading is difficult, writing impossible. All you can do is talk, smoke and eat. The talk becomes more and more abstract. Starting with theatrical anecdotes, by the end of a shoot you’re on to Zen Buddhism and the meaning of life. The most intimate and terrible secrets have been vouchsafed and friendships have been born, flowered, declined and died. As in Buñuel’s
Exterminating Angel
, or the plays of Chekhov, we are stranded together, cut off from the world, pawns of a capricious and inscrutable destiny: the director, the weather, the cameraman.

Life becomes real again when you work. Best of all is unremitting hard work, a thirteen-hour slog. Not only is it good to be at it, but you feel your existence is justified. You’re part of things, and of course from a solipsistic angle, you become the focus of the whole enterprise.

No one on the set looks more worried than Jim. It is as if we were filming a documentary on Hiroshima instead of an Edwardian comedy. He shouts ‘Cut.’ ‘Was that all right for you?’ he asks the cameraman. ‘I was a little worried about the shadow on X’s face, but if it didn’t worry you, it doesn’t worry me’. ‘How about the acting?’ one of us asks. ‘It was all right.’ ‘All right?’ I demand. ‘By which I mean sublime, of course,’ says Jim.

On the stage, you project. In film, it’s different: instead of offering yourself, you admit the camera into your aura. This is a little like being X-rayed. More like dreaming. At the end of a long session, you can feel absolutely transparent, as if the camera had passed through your veins and organs. Very exhilarating.

Denholm Elliott puts it another way. ‘I mean –’ he does the look he describes as his angry caterpillar look. ‘It’s only dressing up for Mummy and Daddy, after all.’ But he’s swallowed the camera lock, stock and barrel, if anyone ever has.

At the far corner of the set, concentrating harder than anyone, is Ismail. He’s willing the scene to be good, for reasons both financial and artistic; but he’s also wondering whether he can’t have another party soon. His therapy is culinary. The fatigue, fraughtness and fragility of filming has
one remedy: food. He will commandeer any unlikely space to throw a party. Up to a point, this is because cooking is therapeutic for him; but also it’s a very personal and charming hand-holding with all of us. And such is the excellence of his cooking that everybody’s good nature is restored. The phrase ‘to curry favour’ might have been invented for Ismail.

Louche dives are a necessary diversion from film acting. Somewhere to blow out steam, fall down, jump about. The work is concentrated and not usually very sustained. It is, in fact, not unlike very bad sex; it’s all over in thirty seconds, and it’s an hour before you can do it again.

So some sort of antidote is called for. In the case of Florence, and for the few hardy spirits who could brave it, it was a club magnificently called Chez Rudy GoGo, a transvestite discotheque much frequented by gay German dwarfs and immensely tall, five o’clock-shadowed, bulging-calved Italian men in natty little off-the-shoulder numbers. The feeling of the place was as of a tepid tribute to Weimar Berlin; but it was a relief from Edward Morgan Forster and the dog collar. Very friendly, everyone was, with no pressure of any kind. Julian Sands and I would weave a drunken path back to the Excelsior through the moonlit statues and arcades of Florence, after which I would retire to translate a few pages of a French play. This was another lifeline to sanity; something to show for one’s time.

It’s as well to have done something else by the end of filming. Judi Dench does embroidery, very beautifully. It was, I suppose, tactless of me to enquire if the reason it was called petit point was because there’s so little point to it; tactless – and wrong. She was making first-night presents for her next show.

We transferred to Kent after a month in Tuscany, and were plagued by the wettest summer that county had ever known. These climatic vagaries apart, the film continued on the even keel Jim and Ismail skilfully maintain; but the atmosphere is quite different when you’re within twenty minutes of London; it becomes more like an ordinary job. But there was a spectacular finale; the scene in the ‘Sacred Lake’, in which Mr Beebe and the two young men of the story, George and Lucy’s brother, take an impulsive dip, only to be surprised by the ladies. By now it was July. A pool had been dug and at the very least lukewarm water was promised. At the very most, as it happened. For three days we stood disconsolately around, the lads flexing their pectorals, I morbidly gazing at my Michelin Man contours, waiting at a moment’s notice and with the hint of the tiniest sunbeam to plunge into the arctic waters of Sevenoaks.