AW: You first started thinking about making an adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair seven or eight years ago. What led you to the script?
NJ: Because it was there. No, because I re-read it six years ago and I think everybody knows Graham Greene don't they, and everybody was acquainted when they were a child, or as an adolescent - I was.
I re-read it about six years ago and I was struck by the fact that it is a most powerful book, and I was struck by the naked honesty of this portrayal of this need and this terribly damaged relationship, particularly the pitiless portrayal of Bendrix and his jealousy and his obsession and his need to repossess what he lost.
And I also thought that there could perhaps be something cinematic at the heart of it - in the fact that at the heart of the events of the novel is a few pivotal scenes in the relationship between two people that is viewed in different ways, so it becomes a kaleidoscopic exploration of the same pivotal scenes and I thought that would be really interesting. I found Columbia had the rights to the novel and spoke to Stephen [Woolley] about it, we spoke to Columbia, they were very keen and I just kept thinking about it for a few years and finally I got down to writing a script.
AW: How long did that take?
NJ: It didn't take long, about three or four weeks... but a lot of thinking!
AW: That's fast!
NJ: I write fast, but after thinking about it for a long while. But it was only when I began to write it I saw that there really is a film there. I started with the guy walking across the heath, and the meeting and walking into the house and those flashes of the relationship.
AW: Did you look at the Edward Dmytryk film at all?
NJ: I didn't look at it until we were just about to make the film and then I got very depressed! [Laughter]. I'm not saying it's a bad film or anything, just that it's one of a kind of adaptations of novels they consistently made in those days and it alarmed me a little bit. Then I forgot about it and just went ahead.
AW: Stephen, what role did you have as producer. Did you go to Columbia with a treatment from Neil?
SW: No, Neil and I have made ten movies together and they've all been very different in terms of our relationship and how things have developed... Columbia had the rights because they had made the original 50s version and Neil wanted to do it.
I loved the book, I thought the novel was fantastic, and just the idea of making a film in London. I've been very lucky in that I've been able to work here. London is the place where I was born and I really love material that's about the city and this was so much about London, it plays a second, or third, or fourth, or fifth character in this film so the thought of making this film, putting it together was exciting.
Columbia asked me to produce it, partly because of our relationship. So that was really good and I was really pleased about that, really enjoyed it. But The Crying Game and Mona Lisa are things we've taken from a conversation, or something in a newspaper, this wasn't developed in that way. This was very much a studio picture to a certain extent and we were working with Columbia as a studio picture, not a high budget one, but a studio picture all the same which comes with all the good and bad things studio pictures come with, but they left us alone to be honest.
I don't think we ever met a person from Columbia throughout the whole shoot which was nice and I think the stuff that Neil was turning out was so beautiful and the performances were so wonderful that they just said, "Get on with it", and I think we came in way under budget and it was a really good relationship which I have to say - with the films we made with Warner Bros as well - that's been the case. The three movies we made with Warner's and David Geffen and the film we made with DreamWorks were also studio free in terms of shooting them. We've worked together so long there is a trust people have in us.
AW: Was there a green light to who you cast?
NJ: There were a few names mentioned who were inappropriate.
SW: It was really about, how much will the film cost you rather than you've got to cast X,Y, Z. And because Neil had quite a good track record with actors we felt that we would probably cast people that they would like - they trusted our take on that. I think that they would have been very disappointed if we had cast total unknowns, or cast inappropriately but we weren't really about to do that.
AW: Ralph, at what stage did you talk to Neil about the project? Was it one of dozens of scripts you'd been sent speculatively? How did you get involved?
RF: It was quite a coincidence, because a couple of friends, independently of each other, had said, "You should read The End of the Affair because if it's ever a film that's the part you might be interested in". So I had actually bought it to read but had not read it and then coincidentally Neil sent me the screenplay so I sensed something fated about it.
I read the book first because I had heard so much about it. I wanted to come to it not via a screenplay, and I read it and loved it and was very moved by it, and in fact the other Greene books that I had read I had loved and then thought the screenplay was a wonderful and truthful adaptation.
I mean, I had some questions for Neil about the changes but I've actually come to understand that in adapting there is a necessary mutation that has to happen and in the hands of a director it seems that the director would be redundant if they were just going to replicate a novel scene by scene, they have to weave into their own vision and that's really how it come about.
AW: What were the challenges of adapting The End of the Affair? What I thought was how remarkably faithful it was to the spirit and the dramatic impact of the book, but were there any main challenges?
NJ: The main challenge was its status as a piece of literature - that is kind of intimidating. I've got a theory that if something is finished as a piece of perfect work there is no point in trying to do anything with it. In this case I felt there was something to be done. There was something valid I could do to make it a movie, and it was partly the incredible ironic cleverness of the story, the way Maurice and Henry meet and have this conversation about an unknown lover, without Henry knowing that [Maurice] Bendrix is in fact the lover.
There are multiple ironies that begin even there. But the thing I've said about the love affair viewed from different perspectives and in particular I felt - and maybe people will disagree with me here - that towards the end of the novel there is a sense of Greene the novelist beginning to depart from it slightly, and I could feel Greene the philosophic obsessive beginning to take over and I felt the series of coincidences that were revealed about Sarah's death and the thing that led to her sainthood were slightly forced in a Hardy-esque way - you know the way Hardy would make his characters inevitably doomed - and I felt there was something for me to do there.
AW: Even though you've changed the person to whom the miracle happens - from the priest to the boy - I thought it was extremely brave to go for the realisation of the miracle.
NJ: Well, the book wouldn't exist without some relationship to some deity which Bendrix is fighting against and it wouldn't exist without some malignant force which is driving these characters towards a conclusion that they don't want. I was just re-reading it tonight actually because I was anticipating people saying, "Why did you do this" "Why did you do that?" [Laughter]. And what I've done dramaturgically is kept Sarah alive longer ...
AW: ... and taken her to Brighton! [Laughter]
NJ: I like Brighton. Brighton is a place where people used to go to get divorced and be snooped on in bed by a little private detective and that bit seemed right to me. But more importantly in the book after Sarah dies - she's cut down with a scythe, a novelist's impatience I think in a way: he writes her out with a stroke of a pen, "I'm terribly sorry, Sarah's dead".
He goes to Henry's house and he finds a letter from her that she sent to him, so the speech that she gives to Bendrix at the end when she is dying, the essence of her letter is there, so I think I've been truthful to the emotional movements of Greene's book. I just kept her alive longer. And the character Smythe, I never thought was successful - the rationalist preacher who gets this sudden kind of overwhelming conversion, I never thought this character was very successful. Those are my opinions and other people can disagree but that's why I did what I did.
AW: In interviews Greene later said that he regretted putting the miracle in the book at all.
NJ: Well, I thought that if a strawberry mark is removed from a 42-year-old atheist and he suddenly says, "Oh my God, I believe, I believe" like St Paul, I have to be a bloody believer to believe that, I have to take issue with the idea of faith to believe that. But I think those things do happen to adolescent kids, they go through changes in their lives, they're powerfully affected by emotional encounters and I just thought it was more ambiguous on a boy.
AW: How did you approach the character of Bendrix? Did you do much research on Graham Greene, were you trying to naturalise elements of Greene?
RF: I think when people talk about actors doing research it conjures up this image of someone travelling, poring over books, consuming information and in the end you can have a lot of knowledge but it doesn't help you act any better when someone says, "Action".
But there is a case in every part to stimulate your imagination because I think that is a key tool for an actor, and clearly, in this case, the love affair in the book is based or inspired by Graham Greene's own love affair with Catherine Walston, but I really resist when people say it's clearly autobiography, I don't think it is, I think like every novelist he's taken something of his own experience and extended it, fictionalised it.
It was useful to me read up about Graham Greene's life, to get a sense of his persona because I think some of his persona is in Bendrix and it was useful for me to read his love letters to Catherine Walston - or extracts from them - because they do reveal his neediness and his passion and his insecurity and his neuroses, and so putting bits of information together there is a picture of a man who didn't like to reveal his interior life to people, in fact went out of his way to put up smokescreens of information.
At the same time, in his love-letters to Catherine there was incredibly direct expression of need and emotion and I think that all helps. I had an interesting conversation with Norman Sherry, who is the official biographer of Graham Greene, who told me one or two little anecdotes about him as a person, just about the way he would speak, or the way his very blue eyes would follow you around the room. But those are Graham Greene details and they in the end were nice things to have heard - but they weren't Maurice Bendrix.
AW: Was there a particular element in Neil's script that allowed you to find the centre of the role?
RF: I felt that the person I had imagined reading the novel existed in the screenplay. Lots of the scenes of dialogue are word for word what Greene had written. I felt there was no division between Neil's Bendrix and Greene's Bendrix in terms of character and I liked the cruelty of Bendrix, I liked his honesty about how much he hated Henry. I liked that, that was a man in pain and I liked his anger, it was just something I responded to and his humour, too. There's a cruel irony in some of things he says and does and I liked it. [Laughter]
AW: Stephen, the film started shooting in February 1999 and it was finished by the end of the year, you'd shot it, done all the post-production...
SW: We delivered it in October I think. AW: This is very fast, isn't it?
SW: I hate to sound like a film producer but it was a fantastic shoot. I think Ralph and Julianne and Stephen [Rea] and Ian [Hart] and our crew just got on like a house on fire. We all loved the work, everybody supported Neil in every way, we supported the actors any way we could.
It was an incredibly intelligently-made film in that there were no egos, no tantrums, it was very much that we wanted to get the best work that we could on screen, so the shoot went incredibly well - I mean there were problems and there were crises and panic, crisis-management things you have to get involved in but everybody did it in a really level-headed adult way - that's unusual for films.
Film-makers generally don't act like adults, they act like spoilt brats [laughter] and that includes everyone. On a film you can have a props person who will drive you completely crazy because of their antics and they can affect the whole unit. One person plays games and suddenly everyone's into it.
We just lucked-out with an A-team on every front and that is unusual. We shot the film quickly with a great deal of ease. Of course when you finally see the piece there are changes that have to be made because some things work splendidly, some things don't work so well but it was a real joy and a really easy, fluid experience and I think that's why we managed to deliver it so quickly.
AW: You surprised me when you said the film came in under budget because it looks like an expensive movie...
NJ: There are two ways to shoot a film. One way is where you shoot a lot of stuff with a lot of energy and fire a lot of squibs off in the dark and you make the film and you edit it - that takes a long time. The other way is to decide what the film should be like before you shoot it and that takes a shorter time and I prefer the second way!
But we confined it, we didn't try to turn the book into a wider, more epic, more sweeping portrait of London, or of the Blitz, or of the war, if anything we reduced it. Our energies did go into making this city and the wider experience of London to be an enabler to their relationship, the war was just seen through their bedroom.
SW: We didn't make a feature about the war, that was the important thing. It was as if that was going on so when the bomb actually comes it's actually quite shocking, it should be the moment when people jump out of their seats because it's so unexpected, given that although you do see war-torn London you don't really ever come to grips with the inherent violence.
During the love-making scenes when the bombs are dropping you feel it's not going to drop on the house. We used the locations very, very carefully and the atmosphere of claustrophobia that is there within the characters' relationships and the secretiveness is also there in those beautiful rain-filled scenes and moments where you feel things are encroaching on you. AW: Did you have a lot of rehearsals?
NJ: We had a week. [Laughter]
AW: Is that a long time, Ralph?
RF: For films that is quite long. I think two, three weeks is very generous on a film and very often there is no rehearsal. I think a week is good - ish. [Laughter]
NJ: We used the rehearsal because there was a script, there was me as director, there were the actors and there was the novel. I would say I used it selfishly because there were certain elements in the characters or in the characterisation or in the overall meaning of where the characters were going that could perhaps have been highlighted, or perhaps were underdeveloped in what I had written.
There was one scene in particular that I had written where Bendrix and Henry have a ferocious confrontation in Brighton and Ralph's instinct very strongly was that he would not shout at Henry and he said, "Look at the book again" and the character he does shout at is the priest. And I looked at that scene again and I rewrote that last scene and that's the thing that comes out of working closely with people who are really committed to their craft, and are approaching the subject with huge intelligence. [Pushes Ralph playfully].
No, I'm serious and there was another scene - the scene with the biscuits - where he apologises to Henry, those two things came out of conversations with the actors and there's other little bits I added when I felt things were missing.
RF: Those rehearsals were useful because you were open to suggestions about the dialogue. It may sound odd, but it's quite good not to rehearse for a film in the terms of "giving a performance" in the rehearsal room, because unlike the theatre I think that those moments that are unexpected and surprise even the actor themselves have to be protected.
NJ: They have to be avoided really until you begin. [Laughter] Otherwise you never find them. A point does come when I see the performance beginning and I get terrified, I say, "Let's stop now please" because I don't want to see that and I don't think the actor wants to see it either. Film is a different thing than theatre; I'd love to do it for theatre sometime to see what that was like.
AW: Did you use storyboards?
NJ: No, well for huge scenes like that bomb. Everyone has to know how high that window has to be so they can blow it up. A stuntman has to do an incredibly dangerous fall through three stories of a building, stuff like that you need to storyboard, and the explosion in the park where the doodlebug falls, but that's very basic stuff.
I don't know how you could storyboard a film like this, I think it would be rather silly. It is about performance and it's about atmosphere and it's about creating the haunted context within which these steamy emotions can exist.
AW: Ralph, do you agree with Neil here?
RF: I'm in complete agreement, that's what I was just trying to say. This week of so-called rehearsal is more a discussion and just simply reading with no indication of any interpretation, just reading it to get a sense of how it plays and I think you don't want to shoot your bolt before you've got a camera turning. Steven Spielberg didn't do a single rehearsal at all on Schindler's List - not one for that reason. He would be shooting rehearsals in case something happened. AW: What does that mean for your relationship with Julianne Moore, because The End of the Affair is such an intense love story...
RF: Lots of drinks [Laughter]. People say so-and-so and so-and-so have great chemistry but actors can't act chemistry. I think it's luck in a way if there's some kind of trust. Actually, I think Julianne and I found a shared sense of humour a lot of the time, especially during these love-making scenes because it is frightening and it is quite absurd isn't it - to create this very intimate thing with all these cameras around and lights and people holding things and everyone shuffling and looking very serious [laughter] and looking at their stopwatches and scratching their heads and Neil says "Action" and then you do it.
You do IT and then he says "Cut" and you stop IT. It's funny, it's absurd. You have to have a sense of humour and I think the humour makes you trust each other and from that relief that you can laugh, it's not so terrible, it's not so embarrassing, and then I think you can just get on and do it.
AW: On screen you and Ian Hart are a great double-act, but Parkis is a difficult character because it would be easy to make him a stereotype...
NJ: I think Parkis is a great character. He's a great character in the book and he's got - and this is how good Greene was because he's so specific as a novelist - he's got almost Parkis-speak hasn't he? As I was writing this I could adopt this mode of speech, it was almost Mr Gradgrind from Hard Times: "The party in question did this, the party in question did that". The particular way he'd use important legal-sounding words and stuff like that. And Ian is a very interesting actor.
AW: Let's talk about Stephen Rea for a moment because he's a bit of a talisman for you. His role struck me as one of the most difficult roles in the film - to be convincing.
NJ: Yes, it's probably the most difficult part in a way because how do you portray a good human being, particularly when that human has nothing to do? First of all you're demanding that an actor be passive, you're also demanding he be uninteresting. But I had a conception and I think Henry is different in the film than he is in the novel.
I think Greene was quite witheringly cruel to Harry Walston, that was a piece of real life that was in there. When Stephen spoke to me about the role first he said "This man is a dreary little cuckold, what can I make of this guy?" I thought it had to express the goodness of the ordinary person, the goodness of the non-dramatic human being, and as I began to talk about this with Stephen I could see he got interested and I was lucky I had a relationship which went over several movies so that I could persuade him to take a part which he had initially rejected. But those sort of parts need enormous subtlety and there's an enormous attractiveness to those parts. AW: Stephen, tell us about how The End of the Affair got its controversial 18 rating?
SW: The film was shown to the MPAA in America - the US equivalent to the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) here - and they gave it, on a technicality - the two love-making scenes - an NC-17 which means no-one can come unless they are 17+ under any circumstances. We resubmitted the film and said, "Please could you get more people to see it because we don't believe that the way this film's going to be released, the kind of audience that are going to see this picture, are going to be shocked and they in fact are going to be put off by that kind of certification because it would suggest that it's not an adaptation of the book at all, but something that's been modernised or changed or perverted".
So they looked at it again and said, "You're right, it's an art film and technically yes those two scenes are a little close to the edge but given the context of the film we'll give you an R". And an R means that anyone can see the film accompanied by an adult, anyone over 17 can see the picture, anyone under 17 can see the picture if they're accompanied by someone over 17. So then the film was shown to the Irish censor who immediately gave the film 15 with no questions asked.
Then we showed it to the BBFC and they came back to us and said, "It's an 18 because you have two scenes and there's a little too much movement from Ralph in one scene [Laughter] and the positioning of that shot is too long". And I said, "Could you please get Robin Duval, the director of the BBFC, to see it because I really think that if he sees the picture he'll realise that this film isn't an 18".
I mean, there isn't going to be a lot of 16-year-olds who are going to be clamouring for this picture anyway, it's just that I didn't want to send out the wrong signals because a lot of people who will see The End of the Affair are, I hope, people who perhaps don't go to the cinema very often. I mean my mother-in-law and her mother who's 92 came to see the picture and just adored it because they're big Graham Greene fans, they don't go to the movies that much, when you're 92 you don't rush out every weekend to see a movie [Laughter].
But she came to the movie and just loved it and was bowled over. But when she and her friends get together to hire videos or they go to the movies they'll think, "Oh that's going to be like those terrible Scream movies, or it's violent and sexual and they'll be lots of swearing. The closest this film gets to swearing is when Ralph says, "She's a tart to your mumbo-jumbo", that's as hardcore as it gets.
The violence happens more or less off-screen, it's just those two scenes. The irony of this is that the censors said, "We don't want you to cut those scenes for a 15. We think it might harm the integrity of the movie. We don't want to be seen harming the integrity of the movie, but we'll give you an 18. It was just sending out mixed messages. And that weekend I immediately looking at other films with certification and I noticed that the Peter Greenaway film 8* Women got a 15.
I started looking at the reviews for that film and realised that it was probably the worst reviewed film of last year and particularly as it was reviewed as being a very sexist and nasty portrayal of women. I saw the film and it was pretty shocking. And then I noticed that the James Bond film got a 12 which is essentially a catalogue of murder and mayhem and people garrotted and blown up every two minutes.
It just seemed rather ludicrous that The End of the Affair... I want people to tell me it should have an 18 certificate because any 16-17-year-old teenager would, I think, benefit from seeing the movie if they stayed the course. Most 16-17-year-olds are going to see the Bond film but if anyone wants to see this movie I think they should be applauded for wanting to see it, not banned.
I mean a 17-year-old woman can do anything, and a man can as well, but they can't see The End of the Affair?! It's really, really shocking and I thought they would come back and say, "We're kidding" [Laughter]. It's like being on Death Row, any minute now the governors are going to come in with your pardon but they haven't come back with a pardon so we're releasing with an 18 and I do think that it will discriminate what will happen to the film because we would of course never cut it.
What will happen is that a certain audience out there, who would have loved the novel perhaps, who only go to the cinema a few times a year will be put off seeing this movie because people of a certain generation do not see films which have 18 certificates. It is worrying to me and if there is someone here who could explain to me that it's a good decision I'd like to hear it. AW: Why did you employ Michael Nyman to write the score?
NJ: He's got tremendous simplicity, he's written some extraordinarily great music. To return to Peter Greenaway, when I saw The Draftsman's Contract... Peter cut the movie to Michael's music because the bar changes happened on the cuts and it's really thrilling to see that merger. I loved what he did in The Piano. I wanted a score for this which was quite restrained and English, definitely. I met with Michael several times, we discussed it and he just went for it really.
AW: Why did you choose a composer instead of selecting a source, because it would have been quite easy with that period?
NJ: Well, it's weird. If you take the music from that period, Charlie Parker was playing, Benjamin Britten was composing, I think Ravel was still alive and obviously Gracie Fields was singing and George Formby was twinkling away. There's a huge range to choose from in that period but Michael came up with something beautiful and incredibly melodic which I loved. It expressed a sense of loss from the word go.
Question 1: I didn't like the movie. I found it melodramatic and boring. What added value did you bring to the book?
NJ: I didn't want to add anything, I thought it would be taxed afterwards. I thought I'd get VAT [Laughter]. It's hard to say, you want to make a movie because you respond to it instinctively. I can only disagree with you but your opinion is... valuable... definitely. [Laughter] But it's hard to say... when I see the movie I obviously like it otherwise I wouldn't be releasing it.
Questioner: But what did you add that is new?
NJ: The scene in Brighton! [Laughter]
Question 2: How do you feel about Julianne's character being the only woman in the book?
NJ: For me it was interesting to be dealing with a portrait of a woman who was uninformed by any contemporary ideas and is uninformed by any ideas of sexual politics or of empowerment, everything that goes with the gender conversation these days, but I just felt that Greene's portrait of that lady was actually very accurate and it was incredibly simple in a deep way and very true and what interested me was the way she went from this world of sexuality into this world of something other after this traumatic event.
I found it very true and I responded to it very much and that's what I was looking for in the casting of the film and I've always found Julianne in the roles that she's played - there's such an honesty and a directness to the way she approaches the material whatever it is - something as raw as Boogie Nights or as subtle as what she played in the Louis Malle film, Vanya on 42nd Street.
She always seems to get beyond the surface aspects of the character into something quite simple and quite deep and that's what I wanted for that role.
Question 3: What is the universal theme that makes the film so moving?
RF: What I'm going to say is a bit of a truism, but I think there is something about white light shining through celluloid and showing actors' faces, human emotions coming through faces. When they are emotions that you recognise, when you believe in them and when they are phrased and put in a certain order they have the power on the screen to conjure up some quite unusual responses. That is why there is a cult of film, there is something unique about film.
And I think that telling stories in films, even if we've seen them before, we might have seen love affairs before, we might have seen murder stories before, but there seems to be something inherently addictive about it and I think that when all the bits of it are put together, music, text, image, light, when they're in a harmony through the director they can move you.
I think that it's a phenomenon, I don't think it's very easy to put succinctly why it has a universality. People fall in love, people have affairs, people die, people make war, people are jealous and I think that if the film has worked for you I would suggest it's because you recognise some fundamental truths in it yourself through it being projected on a screen.
NJ: There is something deeply uncontemporary about the affair and that's what I loved about it. The way in which they were forced to confront something that they couldn't explain. I don't think anybody who's had any deep contact, sexual or otherwise, with a human being ever loses it. I think a lot of people never survive the depth of affection, whether it be a parent, or a lover or a wife, and the way in which Greene pushed the question of the whole meaning of those relationships to bring up an idea as unfashionable as a God, or a destiny, I found very moving and worth re-examining. I think there is something quite true in what he wrote and I hope we've got something of that truth onto the screen.
SW: On a simple level I think that all of us would like to turn the clock back and look at the events that happened around relationships where you could chart back and say, "Oh my God, that was the point when it worked, when it didn't work, when it could have gone on, when it stopped". Why I feel rewarded by this fantastic film that Neil has made is that moment when you start to read the diary, you start to see the same scenes repeated and with a different aspect, for me that's dream-like and that's why it's very universal.
All of us would love to look back on a moment in their lives when someone has acted in some way untoward or seemingly cruelly and we don't get a chance to do that, to step back and re-see something that's gone wrong from the other person's point of view. I think that's what's absolutely fascinating about the film, and what makes the film absolutely moving for me is that you're suddenly in this other person's head after we've spent all this time in Bendrix's head. Suddenly the emphasis shifts to Sarah's head and her story. The story is written twice from two different perspectives and I think that's why people tend to go back to see it again and again.
Question 4: Is there a parallel between Onegin's suffering and Bendrix's suffering?
RF: I keep being asked why I'm always playing these tortured lovers [Laughter], and I can see honestly that there is an emotional constipation in both parts maybe. Certainly Onegin doesn't want to acknowledge his emotions, he's very detached to begin with from his feelings and they seep through during the course of the story but Bendrix - in my head anyway - he's someone who is venting his feelings onto the page, but he's not demonstrative of them to other people.
He's wearing a kind of mask when he meets Henry, he's playing another role of the benign friend and in that sense there is probably a connection in that they both carry a mask to a certain extent. But I do think that Bendrix privately is very connected to his feelings and Onegin isn't.
Question 5: Will the ruling on the certification of the film be overruled?
SW: I think that this has been such an issue now that I don't think so. I remember seeing Polanski's Macbeth at school for my English O-level. It had a fantastic effect on me. I loved it, I just thought it was incredible and I couldn't believe how great it was. I was studying this brilliant, sexy violent... all the things that were great about Macbeth are in Polanski's movie and it really fired me on. I think that it's so high-profile, this censorship thing, that this current board are going to walk away from this, they're not going to step down because they would look very foolish now.
So I think the only chance now is when this film is released on video there might be a way of cajoling, but I think that unless we cut the film there's going to be little chance of us getting anything below an 18. And it's ironic because Shakespeare in Love had a 15 certificate and yet that seemed to have the same combination of things that we have. But if you're 16 or 17 you can get into a 18 film. [Laughter] But it's not really about that, it's about the messages that that certification sends.
Question 6: Why did you make the love scenes so explicit when they weren't like that at all in the book?
NJ: It's a deeply erotic book. One of the things that surprised me was when I re-read it was that most erotic novels are written by women and very young men and this was an erotic novel written by a 42-year-old Englishman. That was part of the attraction for me for this thing and Greene has written an extraordinary thing. There is an enormous amount of sex in the book, it's perhaps not described in terms that you get in the book, but actually there is an enormous amount of quite graphic description in the novel itself.
That line, "You wouldn't recognise the sound" that we have a start of the film, that's straight from the middle of the book and in her diary in the novel she talks about how he touches her the way no-one else touches her, and Greene talks about orgasm quite beautifully with this terrible sense of loss. We had to show things I think otherwise it wouldn't have been an affair. And I think we had to show them quite bleakly in a way, because there is something bleak about that kind of passion somehow.
Question 7: Neil said that the irrational is very relevant to contemporary life and that's what drew you to the book. Would you elaborate on that?
NJ: I don't know what I meant by that [Laughter]. But I do know that I am drawn to stories where people do not fully understand the reasons for their actions and I don't know why that is. It's probably because I don't believe people do fully understand the reasons for their actions. I always think of Thomas Hardy. When his second wife died he lived to be a very old man and then he suddenly got this tremendous sense of longing for the woman he married when he was 19 or 20.
It's one of the most irrational bursts of poetry in the whole of literature really and I think that the emotions that affect us, particularly to do with sexuality, I do not believe that anyone understands them - President Clinton definitely doesn't understand them [Laughter] and I don't think Sigmund Freud understood them. I think that they exist in that strange realm somewhere beyond understanding and art in a way. I do think Greene touched on it. I'm not as tortured about religion as he was, I described it to myself as a battle between rationality and something else.
Question 8: Does the complexity of the chronology, particularly in the first half distance you from an emotional involvement with the characters?
NJ: There is a danger when you deal with two time frames and particularly when you deal with two different perspectives, of totally confusing people. But I don't think distance is a bad thing, people speak about lack of emotional engagement with characters as a bad thing but I'm not sure it's a bad thing. Some of the films that I really do love deeply are quite austere movies. I'm also tired of the over-emotionalism of, particularly, Hollywood cinema. I don't think that it's a bad thing that you can sit and make your mind up about these characters, that you can sit and have some distance from them. That was part of what I wanted about this film. Some people won't like it but...
SW: That wasn't an issue with the studio absolutely not, but I think the point of the movie is that you have to unravel it and I think that one of the things that is a joy about the film is that when Bendrix reads Sarah's diary the penny drops, it's true people who like the movie keep going back to see it again because they realised they've missed an aspect of it.
Question 9: Did you shoot the movie in the same way events are recorded in the book?
NJ: We didn't shoot it any kind of sequence at all. On films there's often basic facts of production, like we had to build an enormous set for Henry's interior so we basically shot everything that was in that interior first, in this case the entire relationship as it's played out in the series of drawing rooms and bedrooms of Henry's house. We went through the film from beginning to end without approaching an exterior so it was almost a tiny play of the entire movie.
SW: It's just financially and logistically impossible to keep returning to locations, because on a film like this, you're constantly seeing the same location and the same set but the action is taking place in a different way. You can't just keep closing the streets of London down, they don't like you closing them down anyway, they hate you to be honest - quite rightly in some respects I suppose. Middleton Square, where we shot the Smythe exterior, in which we come back to in many different ways. We shot all that at once so that's how you have to make films, unfortunately.
Question 9: How do you work so well?
NJ: I met Stephen after I'd made Angel. I was a novelist, I hope I still am. Angel was the first movie I made and it was about political violence in the north of Ireland. I didn't know what I'd made and Stephen saw it at Cannes and he rang me up and I came over here to meet him and at that time he'd set up Palace Pictures and his enthusiasm for film I found quite overwhelming and we then went and made A Company of Wolves together. We just kept working together really...
SW: The interesting thing was, we never had a contract. It wasn't like I signed Neil up for a three-picture deal or anything like that, or we said we'd make films together. The things Neil liked I tended to like, Angela Carter for instance. That was a great thing for us to work with Angela and to make that film, it was a wonderful experience for me. Similarly with Mona Lisa, the kind of subjects we were attracted to were quite similar so it never felt like uncomfortable, it wasn't as if, "Oh I have to make the horrible Butcher Boy or the terrible Michael Collins".
It was great, what a joy that we can make these quite strange, somewhat subversive pieces of entertainment and how lucky we are to do that. We have a new company now called A Company of Wolves which DreamWorks are funding. It's basically a development company where we're looking for projects and now we do have a signed deal so I should think that the next announcement is that it's all over. [Laughter]. We've actually signed a piece of paper for the first time to produce and direct future projects so I... I've just read that Neil's signed a deal to do a project with Salman Rushdie so that's the end of it anyway [Laughter].
AW: You dipped your toes into production with Onegin. Are you going to do any more producing?
RF: Yes, but I wouldn't undertake it lightly. I think as an actor I was quite protected from putting a production on, you have no idea unless you've been on the production side. I was quite ignorant about the level of work and time that had to go into nurturing a film and to put the elements of production together. I have a completely different regard for producers and directors and I don't think the public really know the hours and the detailed structuring that has to go on. I think I would have to feel very strongly about something to want to do it again.
Question 10: How much freedom did Neil give Ralph to improvise?
I suppose we didn't improvise much if at all. It never came up. I always felt that the dialogue was superb and it was beautifully written and I think in the early stages I suggested that one or two lines didn't seem right but that was a very subjective response but actually in shooting... if Neil had said to me "Improvise" or "Change it" or "That doesn't sound good" then I would have done it, but I think I took my cue from him.
If I had felt that the dialogue wasn't sitting I would have probably have asked to change things in the moment of shooting it, but it never really came up. I have improvised on films before and I've been encouraged to do so by the director and quite enjoyed, but I think that if he or she and the actor doesn't want you to I think it has to be set up by the director in the first place. In this case it was a path Neil never chose to go down and I went with him.
AW: Is the theme of Catholicism what appealed to you in The End of the Affair?
NJ: Of course, Greene being an English Catholic convert - which means Protestant [Laughter] and me being a Irish Catholic - which means doomed [Laughter] it's for me who grew up with that stuff. Irish Catholicism is more to do with magic - it's a very superstitious set of lessons you learn when you're a child. It's quite easy to abandon them but they never leave your sensibility, so for me to see someone grappling with these problems of faith and believability which he had encountered in his early 20s - and he had a very dubious relationship to them all his life - I think he liked the cruelty of Catholicism in a strange way.
He liked the way it implied punishment but it was a punishment deferred. And I found it fascinating to encounter his encounter with those set of ideas which I had encountered as a child but I think they were with him for his life as an intellectual construct and they've not been with me since I was 19 to be honest.
Question 11: Did Bendrix's repellent character appeal to you?
RF: They don't appeal to me as things I try to emulate in my own life. [Laughter]. I think dramatically, as an actor responding to a part, they're strong meat to play, they're what the part demands of an actor, they're just fantastic, just in terms of what you show, what you don't show, which scenes you get to play.
I take your point completely, he is manipulative, he is duplicitous, there is a smear of snobbery with the Smythe thing but I think he's an unhappy man and I think at the end, I don't think he's redeemed but I think something is opened up for him that he has never considered before. I think this friendship with Henry - and there's this tender moment of giving the milk and biscuits - I think that very slowly something is unlocked in Bendrix and I always feel that in the moment of looking at Lance's face at the end.
However much he's resisting it he can't ignore it and indeed the very last moment is "I hate you God, leave me alone forever", but the conceit of that is I think that for ever on Bendrix has a dialogue even if he's saying he hates him. So I think it's complicated but I don't think he's all the things you describe. There's other things moving on but I think Greene probably delighted in making him a bit repellent.
A friend of mine was reading the novel and saying "God, he is repellent" and this friend was laughing as she was reading so maybe we enjoy a villain taking us into our confidence. I don't think he is a villain but he is full of a negative quality yet he takes us - the viewer or the reader in - and I like that about it just from a dramatic point of view.
Question 12: You described your portrayal of sex as quite bleak, but the churches are quite sumptuous and seductive. Why did you do this?
NJ: I don't know... What I found interesting is the portrayal of passion in the novel itself, and as I made the movie, [I was thinking of] how spiritual transport in, say, Renaissance painting is portrayed - showing the human body in a state of sexual transport as well.
There is a logic to that, and if you go round churches you see these beautifully modelled torsos - mainly male. And to my mind they're not two sides to the same coin, but they belong together somehow in some way I'd like to understand. But I didn't actually mean to make the church beautiful.
We were actually looking at a very grey church. It was one of these huge grey interiors somewhere in Islington and I went downstairs and I found this tiny little chapel and it was full of all this gold and I just wanted a photograph there. Perhaps it is a bit too beautiful but I actually do like churches.