‘It’s a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate’ … Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, in white skirts, as Rita and Sue, and George Costigan, far right, as Bob.
How we made Film
Interview
How we made Rita, Sue and Bob Too
Phil Hoad Monday 26 June 2017
George Costigan: ‘I watched the premiere with my wife on one side of me – and my mother on the other’
Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court theatre
Rita, Sue and Bob Too really happened. Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play and the screenplay, had an affair with a married man, having sex with him in his car, along with her friend Eileen. I commissioned the play as a follow-up to her 1980 drama The Arbor. Andrea was the most talented and original young writer I’d ever come across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbf477OqjI
Rita Sue and Bob Too
When she was writing it, she said: “What can you do in theatre?” I knew she didn’t want a lecture on Brechtian alienation. What she really meant was: “Can you put shagging on stage?” She found the sex – and even the violence – on the Buttershaw estate, where she was from in Bradford and where her work was set, exciting. When the play got a certain amount of disapproval from her community for being so smutty, she was quite vigorous in saying these things happen, people should face up to them.
Alan Clarke, who directed the film adaptation, cannily gave it an upbeat ending, which Andrea hated. She said: “You’d never go back with somebody who had betrayed you.” She told me not to go and see it. But the judgment of people involved with the film had been astute. It was successful, which did us a great service in terms of reviving the play, even if their version is a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate.
‘At Massimo’s funeral, his film double walked behind the coffin in homage – and all the Neapolitans thought it was his ghost’
Tue 23 October 2018
Michael Radford, director
Massimo Troisi was a huge star in Italy. He loved a film I’d made called Another Time, Another Place, about Italian PoWs in Scotland. We looked at various projects to do together, and he’d bought the rights to this Chilean novel called Burning Patience, about the death of Pablo Neruda and his friendship with a 17-year-old fisherman.
He’d had an adaptation written already, but it was awful. Massimo and I started again, working with Anna Pavignano, his former girlfriend, in a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica. We made the fisherman a 40-year-old postman, played by Massimo, and Neruda’s exile was our invention, too. One moment in the book stood out. In the 1970s, Neruda had asked the fisherman to send him tape recordings of his house at Isla Negra. I saw that it could be built up as an expression of the postman’s desire to do something creative. For me, that was the key.
I called up Philippe Noiret, who looked astonishingly like Neruda. Within an hour, he called me back and said: “If you give this to anyone else, I’ll be incredibly angry.” I also needed Neapolitan actors of 70-plus who looked like fishermen in the 50s. They came in, and I recognised many of them from Fellini movies. But they were all fat, completely unsuitable. I said to the casting director: “I can’t take any of them.” He said: “Thank goodness.” He pointed to a guy sitting in the hallway with a white suit, white fedora, white shirt, white shoes and a red tie. He was smoking with a cigarette holder. The casting director said: “He’s from the Camorra. He controls all actors in Naples over the age of 70. If you take one of them, he’s going to be on the set, he’s going to have a producing credit.”
Meanwhile, Massimo, whose heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever when he was a child, had gone to Houston for a checkup. When he came back six months later, he didn’t seem like the same person.
He collapsed on the set on the third day. He was in a terrible state. He could only film for about an hour a day, so we had to work our way around it. I just shot him in closeup. Whenever there was a wide shot, we used a double. In lots of scenes, he arrives on a bicycle, but that’s not him. Every dialogue sequence was done sitting down. I made him sit on a sound stage in Cinecittà and speak his entire dialogue just in case he didn’t make it.
In the most famous sequence, the tape recordings, he was never in shot. I got the telegraph worker character to wander around with the recorder and used my own hand to double for Massimo’s with the mic in the foreground. Philippe did all his lines in French, so in the scene where they’re discussing metaphors on the beach, he and Massimo couldn’t understand what the other was saying. Yet it looks as if there’s such understanding between them.
We ran completely over schedule. After Massimo’s last day, he went to stay with his sister in Ostia. I was listening to the radio in my apartment in Rome, and suddenly it was saying he’d died. I jumped in the car straight to his sister’s. I was crying as I was driving, and suddenly realised I was being photographed by a truckload of paparazzi. At his funeral, his double walked in homage behind the coffin; all the Neapolitans, who are superstitious as hell, assumed it was his ghost.
Harvey Weinstein bought the film to distribute. I remember him saying to me: “I’m going to sell poetry to the American people.” And he did. We were nominated for pretty much every big Oscar, and it made $21m, which made it one of the highest-grossing foreign-language films of all time. It was huge in India, though I don’t think anyone purchased a legal copy. I got a letter from Haruki Murakami saying it was his favourite movie. Everybody at some point thinks about writing a piece of poetry to express the better part of themselves.
‘You’re perfect as you are’ … Massimo Troisi and Maria Grazia Cucinotta. Photograph: Ronald Grant
Maria Grazia Cucinotta, actor
After five auditions, I got the role of Beatrice, who is wooed by Massimo’s postman. It was a complete shock. I’d had a few small roles on television, but it was my first time acting in a real movie. Massimo told me: “You’re perfect as you are. I need a quintessential southern Italian girl, so just be yourself.”
I’m from Messina, Sicily, so I grew up a little bit like Beatrice, a bit wild. The most difficult thing was not to move in a modern way. Women from the 50s were more sensual. So I watched lots of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida movies.
I was nervous among all these famous people. They were all very nice, apart from when they were shouting at me. But I deserved it. I needed to learn faster. Michael was the kind of director who needs everything perfect. I had to repeat the scene when I met the postman for the first time about 50 times. Michael said: “It has to be like you’re drunk.” I said: “I’m not drunk, I’m just in love.” He said: “Love is like wine sometimes, it makes you feel happy. But not exactly happy, more like you’re in another world.” It’s not easy to understand, especially when you’re not a professional.
The impact of the film was a shock. Before I was Maria Grazia, afterwards they started calling me “La Cucinotta”. In South America, I couldn’t walk by myself in the street. I was very young, only 24. I had my best friend crying on one side, me becoming so famous, and Massimo wasn’t there. But in a way, he’s still alive through the movie. I always say: he left his heart inside it.
Olla review – mail-order bride ruffles feathers in French suburbia
Romanna Lobach is the magnetic protagonist in this half-hour short about a mum-and-son household rocked by a new arrival
Phil Hoad
Wed 27 May 2020
This half-hour short film by Ariane Labed is a sparkily absurdist declaration of female independence that bucks against male fantasy. Romanna Lobach, blood-orange tresses blazing through the mist as she walks across a field in the opening shot, is the Russian mail-order bride shipped in by Pierre (Grégoire Tachnakian), a French bachelor living in a time-warp suburban house with his infirm mother. Fawning over his bride across the kitchen table, he christens her Lola and sets her to work as nursemaid.
Labed – who also acted in her husband Yorgos Lanthimos’s projects Alps, Attenberg and The Lobster – favours the medium shot, all the better for deadpan dispatch of character. Lola and Pierre shuffle around the living room in fabric shoe covers to walk and polish at the same time; she bonds with his mum by playing with the remote-control footrest on the pensioner’s La-Z-Boy recliner. The film builds up a nice head of quirk, underpinned by Lola’s outsider status. Even the many-headed hydra of estate ne’er-do-wells who greet her as one – “Dirty slut!” – as she trots past in ankle boots seems strangely endearing.
The fantasy turns sour after Lola gives a Nancy Reagan-style makeover to the old lady. Pierre’s displeased reaction pushes his bride to reclaim her real name and begin venting. Labed’s comic inflections degenerate into hysteria and violence – especially in the aftermath of one key dance scene – in a controlled manner that promises well for any full-length work she might have en route. The vermillion shade of Lola’s hair continues to bloom on the colour palette – in bathroom tiles, sunset glints on windows, her supermarket carrier bag – as if in solidarity.
‘Very much a Jane Austen character’ … Kate Beckinsale, left, as Charlotte with Chloë Sevigny as Alice. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
How we made The Last Days of Disco
Kate Beckinsale and Whit Stillman on how their cult classic propelled them into a world of subway dancing, penthouse parties with DiCaprio – and free dessert
Interviews by Phil Hoad
10 July 1018
Whit Stillman, director
When I was living in New York and working on a newspaper, I’d get off work at 2am and we’d go to clubbing at Studio 54. There weren’t a lot of other places in the neighbourhood to go to. I had a tailor-made blue suit that was my sole legacy from my father. It was my magic charm for getting into the club. I was scared of Studio 54 at first – but it wasn’t in the least bit scary once you got in. My first date with my future wife was there.
Barcelonahad been a very troubled shoot: one of the few happy times was when we filmed in a disco that belonged to friends. I’d been accused of making only dialogue films, so I thought it would be beautiful if we shot a whole film in a disco. Castle Rock, who producedBarcelona, wanted to announce my next film – so they did, before I’d even starting writing The Last Days of Disco. This was a problem because another disco-era film,54, was also in production. Castle Rock did not want to come out second. It put our casting under huge pressure.I had this idea for this over-the-top character, a kind of world-beater. I happened to see John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm, and I could see Kate Beckinsale as very close to Charlotte in Last Days of Disco. Charlotte is very much a Jane Austen character, and Cold Comfort Farm was based on Austen’s Emma. We were about to cast Winona Ryder as Charlotte’s friend Alice, but my editor on Barcelona had been telling me how much I’d like Chloë Sevigny. The casting people were against her, but her audition was fantastic.
We had a $9m budget, and I wanted to knock everybody’s eyes out. We shot the club scenes in the Loew’s Jersey theatre, a baroque 1920s cinema. We were sharing it with Illuminata, a John Turturro film; they paid for the red carpeting, we paid for everything else. It was an enormous amount of work and money to fit it out, and then you have to people it with extras. In retrospect, I should have shot in a tiny little club like in Barcelona, where you put in 30 people and it looks massively crowded. But most of the extras worked as waiters, so I got many excellent free entrees and desserts in New York for the next few years.
‘I’d written it to warn my daughters of the perils out there, how guys are’ … Chloë Sevigny, Whit Stillman and his daughters, and Kate Beckinsale during filming of The Last Days of Disco. Photograph: Whit Stillman
I was in self-indulgent mode, and Castle Rock were really supportive. I elongated the shoot to 50 days, when I usually do it in less than 30. The final scene, where we break the realism and everybody on the subway starts dancing to Love Train, was shot in a defunct station attached to a transport museum; we could control a train going in and out. It’s a bunch of New York background actors who you’d normally never see dancing on screen because they don’t look young and cool. It’s great to have all these unlikely looking people cutting loose.
There were so many things working against us commercially. Boogie Nights, which came out the year before, whetted everyone’s appetite for a different kind of film: it made that disco era seem very porno and extreme. It only made $3m – the soundtrack was a bigger hit than the film. People said, “Disco wasn’t like that.” And I would say, “Which clubs did you go to?” And they’d say: “I only liked punk.”
Kate Beckinsale, actor
I only realised 20 years later that Whit had written the part for me. He never said anything, before, during or after making the film. I was offered the part at the same time as the opportunity to do Patrick Marber’s Closer at the National. I made my decision based on which made me the most anxious. This was such a stretch: I was very, very English.
I had watched quite a lot of Scorsese and turned up in New York frightened I was going to get cheese-wired on the corner of every block. Whit’s script was so funny. I remember looking at the scene in which the characters discuss the sexual politics of Lady and the Tramp, thinking: “My God, this guy’s deranged.” It’s like when you’ve got kids who are getting older and they’re having very intense philosophical discussions. It’s weirdly, wistfully amazing.
The dancing scenes weren’t hard – Whit didn’t want anything outre. We were all twentysomething actors, having a great time doing this job. Chloë, who at that point was the queen of everything cool, was really generous. She had this very fancy fur coat of a social life that she wore very casually and was very happy for you to try on. I’d find myself at a party in a palatial penthouse flat with Leo DiCaprio there.
I was OK with the film’s box-office failure, because that wasn’t how I measured its success. I had done the thing I found scary, and made lots of lifelong friends. And, over the years, I find people keep bringing up the film. Maybe its 20-year-anniversary tagline should be: why didn’t I watch it earlier?