When Ralph Fiennes decided to film Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," he asked his sister Martha to direct.  Her inexperience mattered less to him than their kinship, for the Fiennes trust family above all others.
 

 By Nicci Gerard.  Photographed by Juergen Teller.
 

         Her eyes are dark, his are a startling pale blue; her style is vivd and original, and his is austere (except for his bright dandy's socks).  She leans forward when she talks, stares straight at you, intimate and engaged.  He sits quite still and turns his glance away, cagey and almost embarrassed.  She appears strong, energetic, impassioned, and he unexpectedly slim and shy.  She talks in long and eloquent paragraphs full of lush imagery, while he drops awkward, groping phrases into the waiting silence.  Yet Martha and Ralph Fiennes manage to seem a bit like each other -- something to do with the strong structure of their beaky, lovely faces, their spare and rangy build, a tentative quality to their smiles.  There's a vulnerability about both of them.  I have always thought that Ralph Fiennes possesses an intense rawness as an actor, which is what makes his performances so odd and sexy.  Maybe it's a family trait.

     Everyone knows the different faces of Ralph Fiennes -- corrupt in Schindler'sList; elegant in The Avengers; gauche in Oscar and Lucinda; smouldering and watchful in The English Patient.  There is always an ambivalence in his roles, a hint of perversity and duplicity.  He says he always prefers the B-side of the record; a person's tormented flip side.  But not many people know yet about his sister, Martha, who spends her life behind, not in front of, the camera.  She's directed music videos and commercials.  Now she is making her feature film debut with Onegin, the adaptation of Pushkin's great novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.  The film's originator, executive producer, box office magnet and star is her famous brother.  The composer is another brother, Magnus.  It's a family affair, and the Fiennes family is a large and extraordinary one -- as strange as fiction.

     Ralph Fiennes suggested the film to Martha many years ago because he loved Pushkin's masterpiece and thought that his sister's eye for beauty and oddity would suit it.  It's a project that has been simmering away on their double boiler before finally now coming to full heat.  He thinks that in Onegin Martha has found a distinctive voice:  "There are strong and singularly successful moments," he says, warmly.  "My instinct has worked."  He frowns when I suggest that there are dangers in sibling collaboration.  "I wanted her to direct.  She has a quality, something . . ."  He gazes out of the window at the steady fall of rain, then grinds to a halt.  He has a stern face and journalists have often complained of his chilly reticence, but he's not so much private as inarticulate and too aware of the power of words.  "They want sound-bites, opinions.  They ask me questions and I think "But I don't know what I feel" and I don't want to say what isn't true.  It's not that I don't want to say things, I just somehow find that I can't say them.  I try but I just can't.  I go blank and dry up."  He is endearingly unprepared for this interview, almost awkward.  There is no sense, in his answers, that here's one he prepared earlier.

      He says that on the set, the relationship between himself and Martha was
usually an actor-director one.  "There were moments when I felt a responsibility.  After all, I had suggested Onegin; I had persuaded her to do it and the financing was done on the strength of my commitment.  I didn't like that responsibility.  I wanted to be an actor and feel my way into the part.  And because I loved Onegin so much, the transition from book to screen was particularly painful.  It's not a work with a feel-good ending, you know, and Martha and I came up against all the forces of commercial cinema, which I'd never had to deal with before.  We knew we had to keep the roots of the film in Pushkin's work, not let it dilute into something that audiences are supposed to like.  Who are these audiences?  I've always found that audiences are very smart and know when something's being downgraded for them.  Often the films that do well are imaginative, fresh, unexpected -- and then other film-makers rush to copy that, and produce something tired, stale."  He is very serious about acting, fiercely idealistic.  He talks about being "in readiness" for his parts -- as if he were a coiled spring.  His body is tense in the chair and his long hands flicker restlessly.  When he and Martha pose for their photographs, however, he stares steadily at the lens; his withholding smile doesn't waver.

     Ralph Fiennes says that "95 per cent of the time" he and Martha agreed.  "I
took care of Onegin, explored and developed him, and she took care of Tatyana, played by Liv Tyler, the woman who loves him."  They understood each other, spoke in a kind of shorthand that the rest of the crew didn't get.  There was no friction, no rivalry, nothing eating away between the lines or under the surface.  He seems puzzled when I suggest this might be so, a faint and embarrassed smile playing round his mouth, his bleached eyes looking away again.  His experience of family is not of conflict, he says, but of creative closeness.

There are six Fiennes siblings, seven counting their foster brother; a creative clan of film-makers, actors, directors, composers.  Their father, Mark Fiennes, was a landscape photographer; their mother, Jennifer Lash, was a novelist and clearly the dominant force in her children's lives.  She was a deprived, precocious, imaginative, neurotic and suicidal girl who became a devoted and charismatic mother.  The novels that she wrote in the corners of her crowded life (including the posthumous  Blood Ties) are bleak and gothic, yet they insist on the redemptive power of life.  So did she, says Ralph Fiennes.  "She was an extraordinary woman, lovely, very powerful.  She gave us all confidence.  She encouraged us in all sorts of ways that weren't conventional.  She saw the individual and the possibility in each of us."

     She died in 1993, after a six-year struggle with cancer.  They buried her in a home-made coffin, under a tablecloth with a map of Ireland on it -- a country she loved.  And now, he says, "I find myself thinking: if Jini was here she would tell me to do this, or that.  She'd give me a bigger perspective on my life.  If I went to her with an anxiety, or if I was being vain or pompous, she would say, "No, my darling, look at it this way."  She was the most perceptive woman.

      "I've accepted that she is gone.  That that is what has happened and I haven't got a mother any more.  But if you lose a parent you loved and who loved you, well, of course you won't stop missing them.  Always.  And feeling your own mortality.  But the keenness of the loss gets less.  And the memories remain.  We share those memories, as a family.  Life goes on and she's not there and there's a great deal of loss.  But everything comes from what you had as a child, and I must remember  that -- what she had and what she left to us.  Your childhood is your fulcrum.  I keep her as a beacon."

     He calls his mother Jini; Martha calls her Mummy.  She talks of her with
passionate tenderness:  "I miss her enormously.  I accept her physical absence now, but she's there for me still.  She's in this film.  What I've generated is not unconnected with her.  It's not tangible, but it's to do with what I was given by her: her energy, understanding, wisdom.  She used to say you have to be true to yourself, and honest with yourself.  Life will be hard sometimes, but remain honest.  Mediocrity, she said, is best avoided.  Everything is interesting, she said.  Life is full.  Look at everything."  Martha Fiennes looked.  She always adored photography, and from and early age she knew she would make films.  She loves the power and depth of the image.  When she describes texture and sound, her eyes widen; she leans forward across her cluttered desk and makes shapes with her hands.

Martha Fiennes has two young children of her own now.  Working on Onegin -
by the end, for 18 hours a day, seven days a week, so her home was just a bed and her children were memories she would weep over -- she became aware, more than ever, of the pressures on a working mother.  She passionately cares about work and about family.  Her mother continued to write and paint in the interstices of her own days.  "She never gave up, though she put things on hold.  God, she got frustrated sometimes.  I remember her screaming, stamping on her work, crying that she couldn't do it.  There were seven of us, after all.  She wanted us not to want her all the time.  We used to bring her cups of tea in her room, creep in so as not to disturb her.  One of her books was dedicated to her children "who gave me time out of their own time when there was no time"."  Martha Fiennes' eyes fill briefly with tears.  She smiles at me.  "Mummy always said that it must be possible to do both.  We have to take that on.  It is dangerous to give up work for children.  She used to tell us: do not absent yourself from yourself.  But she gave us real, solid love.  All of us recognised the truth of that great love she gave to us.  I try to give that to my children."

     Martha Fiennes insists that making a film with Ralph was not problematic.
"There are always difficulties with making films, but here there was more excitement than difficulty."  When she talks about her siblings she frequently uses the word "trust."  They all laugh together, she says, in a way that you don't with anyone except close family.  "Nothing is as funny, nothing is as understood, as with family.

     "With Onegin, I am the director.  Ralph is the star.  We started from a position of respect and trust.  We were trying to get to the same place together.  I have nurtured this project for eight years.  I watched him work: he is committed, passionate, charismatic, focused, charged, I identify with all that and I've known it all my life.  In Onegin we worked well together, and the film works.  It is ambitious, it's there, I'm proud of us -- all of us, everyone who worked so fantastically, all the struggles we went through together, for struggles are the weather of a film set.  All that adrenaline, the thrill of it...All that missing the children.  Organizing childcare.  Relying so much on my husband; I owe him.  Trying not to show any domestic anxieties on set -- there was one other woman with children on the set and our eyes just locked from the first day.  We knew something they didn't know.  Tiny lives we'd left, and that physical pain.  But someone once said to me:  "If you aren't on the set for one day, never mind the reason, you'll never work again."  And then, just the complications of directing a film and balancing the budget and trying to be everywhere at once and keeping everything going, everything -- the cameras and the music and the  editing . . .and the crew and all the problems and the hiccups and the wonderful alchemy of it."

     She says that as a process, making films is so fragile and complex and confused and oddly handmade, "like old tapestry is handmade."  And now "it isn't just jostling round in my head.  It is as here and as now as today . . . We did it."

     "Martha was good," says Ralph Fiennes, smiling his enigmatic smile, "Very
good."

      And she says "Ralph was great."