The Times, 13 November 1999
Report by Candida Crewe
 

        While the special-effects wizards have mastered every star war and intergalactic catastrophe imaginable, the rather more mundane matter of visibly cold breath has apparently eluded the best of them. To re-create it on screen is very expensive or rather hazardous. It entails either flying the whole crew to a freezing location, hiring a butcher's cold room and constructing the set therein, or getting the actors to suck ice cubes (after which their tongues are so numb they can't speak). As yet, there's no convincing computer-graphic alternative.

         This was one of the reasons that some scenes of Onegin, which opens on Friday and stars Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler, had to be shot in St. Petersburg itself. Even so, wherever possible, the film-makers got away with calling in Snow Business, a firm that specialises in spraying vast volumes of special paper dust. With their help, a waste land outside Watford was for three days last spring transformed into the snow-covered townscape of St. Petersburg - frozen River Neva and  eyeshadow-coloured buildings and all.  Luxuriant green lawns and fields near Basingstoke were also suitably whitened so that the stately pile they surrounded could be convincing as Onegin's country estate.

         "The process of film-making is so extraordinary," says director, and Ralph's
sister, Martha Fiennes, recalling the shooting of her first feature film.  "People wandering around in period costume, using mobiles, taking Sweetex."  She laughs with an amazement and modesty which belies her credentials as a film-maker who has been in the business for more of her 35 years than would seem just.

        The making of Onegin is a wonderful story of the creative vision, faith, tenacity and sheer hard work behind an inspiring sibling relationship. Ralph had heard and studied Pushkin's classic poem Eugene Onegin at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1984.  Set in 1820s Russia, it is a tragic love story. Onegin is a jaded and sophisticated young man who leaves St. Petersburg unexpectedly when he inherits a country estate. He is intrigued by his new young neighbour, Tatyana, a spirited beauty who surprises him with her passionate declaration of love, which he coolly rejects. Following a fateful duel, he disappears for several years. On his eventual return to St. Petersburg, he glimpses an extraordinary woman at a ball who looks vaguely familiar. The former Tatyana Larin has changed almost beyond recognition. She is poised and perfect and he falls desperately in love. The story was long ago made into an opera and a ballet, but never a film. It wasn't until 1992 that it occurred to Ralph that there might be a way of transforming it into one.

        "I didn't know if it would ever be a reality, but, I always kept coming back to it" he says. "I've always found Russian history, society, people and literature interesting. I don't know why. I've read more Russian literature than English. I very much wanted to play this part and believe I'm well cast for it."

         The moment he thought Onegin could be a film, he immediately took the idea to Martha.  While he knew he could be an influence forging a script, he also knew that she was the one to take the project a stage further visually.

        Martha was Ralph's obvious choice of collaborator. They are the eldest of a family of six children whose closeness and artistic gifts bestow a natural  understanding between them. Their younger brother Magnus is a talented composer and music producer, and also worked on Onegin; and Joseph a famous actor in his own right, particularly since starring in the much feted Shakespeare In Love. They were all brought up in Ireland and the West Country. Their late mother was the remarkable Jini Fiennes, a writer and painter. Their father, Mark, is an enlightened photographer and, as Martha attests, "an extraordinary man. He and my mother were extremely close. She was obviously a painter but he also had a great visual sense, especially for architecture, design, colour and form." It has been said that Martha and her brothers and sisters had a bohemian upbringing, but she disagrees.

        "It was eccentric, certainly, but not bohemian," she says. "My mother was extremely disciplined. People think that the process of creativity needs a mind that is always open to change and somehow lacking in boundaries and form, while I think that any good artist will tell you that discipline is crucial. After the inspiration, there's something very systematic which needs to be followed through. She taught us about application, concentration and putting in the sweat. She was always furious about dilettante flakiness, posing. Her basic message was that unless you applied yourself, the work wouldn't really be true."

        Ralph and Martha are close in age, though very different. Martha is naturally more chatty and open, with a stunning sense of humour that mixes winning girliness with acute intelligence. As Liv Tyler says: "She makes you feel safe, not like you're walking down the corridor alone on your first day of high school. She's the one who'd be your friend and go to the bathroom with you for a cigarette. I totally trusted her from the first day.  Even just before the most dramatic scene in the world, we'd be laughing together or asking after each other's fashion story." Martha has a beauty enhanced by tremendous warmth and style. (On set, everyone else was in ubiquitous jeans and T-shirts, while Martha was often to be seen with a flower in her hair, an elegant black skirt printed with flowers over flowing black trousers and vast boots. Although not against a bit of Prada or Gucci, her look is far more to do with wit and originality than fashion.)

        Ralph is less easy going than his younger sister, and quieter. He is friendly and likable, but not slow to say precisely what he thinks, and firmly, so there is an intensity about him which people can find disarming, but which has contributed to the success of a variety of steely lead performances, from the title role in Chekhov's Ivanov in the acclaimed Almeida production, to Charles van Doren in  Robert Redford's Quiz Show.  "Our mother very much nurtured our individuality, so we are totally different," says Martha. "But there has always been a mutual respect between us. We are not the type of family that would smother one another in kisses, and of course we thumped each other and had pillow -- fight, but we never had fallings-out."

         Of course, during the making of Onegin, they had the occasional "diversion of agreement," but Martha believes that these would have occurred between any lead actor and director. "In the editing of the duel sequence, I believed I had a way of doing it that was looking after the interests of the story-telling, but Ralph was seeing it specifically from the point of view at which he played it. Others agreed and disagreed with us absolutely 50-50.  I don't believe in compromise because it means doing something not so well and nobody's satisfied. In the end, we found the third way and worked it out without us getting remotely aggressive with each other."

        They agree that the advantages of working together far outweigh the disadvantages. "I felt I could confide in her and ask for advice," Ralph says.  "Film sets are weird places with so much pressure, but you have to pretend there is no pressure. It helps that our sense of what we were aiming for was so much in tune. There was give and take in ideas. We had all been wary of working with our siblings because, as a family, we wanted to stake out our own territory. Martha's an amazing director, her sense of camera is extraordinary. I think it was a very healthy balance."

        Martha cites the principle of understanding, the shorthand between them, which they only really recognised when they did work together, surrounded as they were by others "who aren't quite with you."  The reference points, she goes on, "are solid with us, which in turn makes the working relationship very solid. I don't know why people are surprised by it. There are so many examples of families working together in film -- the Boulting brothers, the Coen brothers, and of course Coppola's father has famously produced scores for many of his son's great movie's."

        They just got on with it. She has always admired Ralph, Martha says, although as children you don't stop to analyse. "I was aware that there was part of him in his own world, but he always had charisma and a strong sense of self. He never lacked confidence. Ever since he was a child, he'd walk into a room and he had presence. I do remember whenever we were enduring the tedium of the washing up, and probably as the result of seeing too many bad war-time movies, Ralph would flick a rolled-up tea-towel at our legs, saying things like "Ve haf vays of making you tork."  There was faint amusement when I learnt he was going to be paid for doing this role."

         Eight years ago, Ralph, 18 months Martha's senior, was making something of a name for himself having starred in Wuthering Heights, but he had yet to appear as the definitive perverted Nazi officer in Spielberg's Schindler's List.  Martha, who had studied at the film faculty at Harrow College, was happily sweating away making award-winning music videos and commercials.

        "Ralph was interested in a certain sensibility in my work and was interested
himself in the thought of having a producer's role as well as an actor's," Martha says. "I remember typing a treatment [for Onegin] into the word processor with Ralph and thinking, what's the point? I felt so "not empowered." But you carry on because everything starts as an idea -- something around the kitchen table, so to speak. You have to nurture things with no foreseeable future. I showed it to a few people. Needless to say, there was no interest."

         Ralph introduced Martha to Ileen Maisel, then head of the former Paramount UK. A Hollywood executive, she summoned Martha to a breakfast meeting at Claridges, and proceeded to talk about everything but the treatment sitting by her coffee. "I didn't dare bring the subject up," Martha says.  "Eventually, she tapped the pages of A4, and said, " OK, I like this, I'll help you to make it." "

        Maisel went to agent Duncan Heath, the head of ICM, who had shown an interest in Martha's work. He took her on and the ball started rolling -- slowly. They need a script, which was a difficult hurdle to overcome.

         "Babokov said you can't translate Onegin," Ralph says. "But there are good translations which are witty and readable." A start, but the poem contained no dialogue. "We very much wanted the dialogue not to be pastiche period and were therefore going to have to go for a precision of speech, a certain clarity of phrasing. We wanted it to have a witty, colloquial feel." Michael Ignatieff was taken on board to write the first draft, but there was ongoing input from Martha and Ralph right up to the final editing of the film.

         "As for the language, in a sense we were groping around in the dark at first," Martha says.  "We had to discover and position the dialogue. For example, " I'll wager " became for us a joke phrase, the benchmark of precisely the kind of language we wanted to avoid, determined as we were to get away from anything too florid. We had to find language that was accessible and economic, but at the same time not too self-consciously contemporary. I remember a phrase like, "So, what have you been up to?"  Though they wouldn't necessarily have spoken in such a way, it was the kind of line that was possible to deliver up with the sort of balance we were looking for. In the end, we managed by instinct, advice from all sorts of people and constant revision."

         Between 1994 and 1997 there were, as Martha puts it, endless meetings about the film. The casting of the young heroine Tatyana, came down to either Kate Winslet or Liv Tyler. "It was very, very close-run, " says Martha. " Kate is probably the more experienced actor. I have to say I was very excited by her, she is an extraordinary person. But with Liv there was something very raw and untapped, something that came straight from the heart. There is a truth about her, and a great and genuine access to feeling which is wonderfully unselfconscious. At the same time she is, of course, fantastic looking. A lot of the press on her has tended to hone in on the sort of "stunner-babe" areas that you might expect, but there's so much more to her.  She's genuine and highly instinctive, wonderfully easy and funny -- and hilariously kooky at times."

         The decision was unanimous, and in October 1997 the film went into pre-production. The following month Martha gave birth to her son. Earlier that year at a critical point in the proceedings, Martha had become pregnant with her second child by her husband, film director, cameraman and novelist George Tiffin, with whom she has lived in south London for ten years. All too recently she had been taken on board as the director of Serpent's Kiss (a film subsequently made, very differently from how she had envisaged it, starring Ewan McGregor) but dropped from it a year into its development after the announcement of her first pregnancy. That experience had made her very wary of what might happen when she fell pregnant again.

         "I can't pretend I wasn't alarmed when Martha became pregnant," says Ralph. "But even so, I would never have contemplated another director. It just wasn't going to happen; we didn't even discuss it. I worried about her well-being, having to cope with a film and a baby, but we had both completely committed ourselves to Onegin and I had given my word to her. I remember reading Kieslowski on Kieslowski,in which he said that your family has to take second place to film-making. Martha gave the film 400 per cent and never once appeared to be juggling."

         Martha was attending full-scale meetings within eight days of the birth and managed to avoid any impression of juggling simultaneous brand-new motherhood and the making of a $14 million movie. That was her mission, which she achieved admirably, but it wasn't the breeze she made it out to be.

         "I've pulled something off under enormous duress," Martha says. "He's a healthy baby and the shooting of the film went healthily, but I often felt like a sort of donkey-and-cart in a mad cartoon in which the donkey is pulling an impossibly large load which causes all four feet to splay out at right angles to his body. It required great concentration and planning, back-up in the form of two nannies and a very supportive husband. Shooting a film necessitates long working hours -- your home becomes simply the place where you sleep a few hours at night, for virtually seven days a week.

        "Juggling motherhood with this level of commitment is a real conundrum. You get to the 20th century and, as a woman of the Western world, you are given your right to be intelligent, to express yourself -- indeed many women have fought for you to be able to do so. And you are responding. Then, just at that point in your professional life when you are beginning to reap what you've sown, the biological clock starts ticking. Problem. We didn't see this one coming, girls.

        "I don't ever want to be seen as a role model, a perfect example that you can do both, because it is so bloody difficult. Even with the system in place, you worry about it all the time. I'm glad I didn't appear to be juggling: I'll never let on and you'll never see it. My work has my 100 per cent commitment - I love it -- but I'm clutching my mobile and, whenever it goes, my heart jumps and thinking it's something about the children.

        "I know I am not alone in feeling that one's children are very lame excuse for anything out there in the "working world." As a woman, my instinct is that you should make a great attempt to cover your tracks should your responsibilities to your children ever manifest themselves in a way that may cause the very least change to your professional working day. I'm not sure why this is, but it is strongly felt. Is it because the nurturing nature of motherhood so quickly lets nothing stand in its way? I can't afford dependents -- the film is my dependent, its economics demand it, and understandably so. Help!"

        She says the experience has not put her off film-making. She has plans for a futuristic film, "but of an entirely domestic nature -- no conquering of planets, no star wars. I want to examine what we all might be like in terms of what we eat and whether or not we'll still be aging. I want it to be a domestic saga and a satire of our culture now."

        The special-effects wizards are in for a good time if Martha pulls this one off, although it should be a doddle compared to creating springtime cold breath on the wastelands of Watford.