Established British stage directors are turning their attention to film in ever-greater numbers. Following the auspicious debut of Sam Mendes, who just won an Oscar for American Beauty, and Titus, the first feature from Julie Taymor (The Lion King), there now comes a premiere cinematic effort by Deborah Warner, founder of the Kick Theatre Company and Director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, who has also staged operas at the Glyndebourne Festival, the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera and recently directed a Lenten presentation of Bach’s St. John Passion.
Warner hadn’t intended to embark on a film career when Neil Jordan approached her with a script based on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, a largely-forgotten novel centering on Lois, a 19-year old coming of age in the southern Ireland in 1920, at a time when the Anglo-Irish aristocracy was facing the end of its world as a result of local terrorism and the imminent British decision to divide the island in two and allow the formation of an independent republic in the south. At first Warner resisted saying yes to Jordan’s offer to direct a film whose development he’d shepherded for some years–she expressed a dislike for period pieces in general–but after reading the book itself she reconsidered her decision.
“I think you only hop horses when you want so badly to tell a story and the best medium for it is, or was in this case, film,” Warner explained during a recent stopover in Dallas. “The inspiration was really the screenplay and the novel. There was such a cinematic edge to Elizabeth Bowen’s work that it’s quite remarkable that it hasn’t been worked through [on film]. It will be worked through now, I think, in the same way that [E.M.] Forster was discovered at one point or Henry James at another. I think that her time has come–she has an astonishingly visual eye. If a cinematographer were to write a novel, they would write as Elizabeth Bowen writes.”
Warner expressed admiration for the whole of Bowen now
largely-overlooked writing: “She’s out of fashion and we don’t know her work at all. This is a writer whose fortunes are merely on the tide of fashion…[but] I think one can confidently say that she’s one of the top ten writers of the last hundred years…. Elizabeth’s ascendant star sort of faded for a moment, but I have no doubt that she’ll be back on the map in a minute.” And, she added, The Last September is especially significant in Bowen’s oeuvre. In a preface to a reprinting of the book, she noted, “Bowen says, ‘Lois is me.’ She absolutely claims that young girl as herself.”
Still, the director was concerned about doing a film set in the past
correctly. “I was very, very conscious that I did not want the negative trapping of period film, that nobody’s really released the material from its costumes,” she said. “It was very important that the film be beautiful–we are being asked to look at a world that was very precious to the people who have it. But it was equally important to me that we weren’t being presented with an image of Ireland that we’d been presented with before–there’s a lot of cliched images of Ireland that have entered the cinemas. So it was really sensible to look for a cinematographer who would have quite a vibrant and particular take on that.”
It was this concern that led Warner to search out Slawomir Idziak, whose photography of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique she had found ravishing. “I went to the person whose work I most admired,” she explained. “I set about wooing Slawomir, because I knew I had to have him.” She also brought Zbigniew Preisner, who had done the score for Veronique, on board. And along with Fiona Shaw, with whom she’d worked regularly onstage, Warner attracted Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon to the project. Since she’d never had the opportunity to work with either of them before, nor they with each other, the casting was quite a coup. The final step was finding the right actress to play Lois, the lynchpin of the plot. Warner was very taken with Keeley Hawes, but initially thought she might be too old for the part. But “with each subsequent meeting [Keeley] seemed to shed years,” Warner said, and the director is very satisfied with the result.
One difficulty Warner encountered in moving from stage to screen was the limited time she had to work with the actors before shooting commenced. “The lack of rehearsal time on a film is quite sobering,” she admitted. So she invented expedients such as going to costume fittings with designer John Bright to help her stars work their way into character as they were trying on their period outfits. The technique seems, she says, to have worked.
Like Mendis and Taymor, Deborah Warner has no intention of abandoning her stage roots–she would soon be off to Ireland to stage an innovative production of Euripides’ Medea. But with The Last September, she’s found that film provides another avenue for her talents, one that she plans to continue exploring.