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Michael Radford is the go to guy when it comes to adapting literary classics, but with his latest film FLAWLESS, Radford approached it in a way he had never experienced before. The Oscar nominated director's career took off by adapting the modern classic NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR by George Orwell in the same year which not only proved to be one of the more successful adaptations in modern years, but gave the final performance of the legendary Richard Burton. His most successful film, IL POSTINO (which earned him two nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay) was both heartwarming and haunting with the death of its star Massimo Troisi. He most recently tackled Shakespeare with THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons to critical acclaim. With the heist suspense film FLAWLESS, Radford went into uncharted territory as the director of a film he had no hand in the screenplay, but the tale of a planned diamond heist in 1960 London with Michael Caine in the lead role proved a surprising challenge, and an old fashioned film about revenge, manipulation, and determination. To promote FLAWLESS, the Crypt visited the offices of Magnolia Pictures for an exclusive interview with the director on the challenges of FLAWLESS, working with Michael Caine and Demi Moore, the keys to successfully adapting a screenplay, and other topics.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: The one thing very interesting with FLAWLESS is that it is the first film you’ve directed where you didn’t have any involvement with the screenplay? MICHAEL RADFORD: That’s right. I didn’t personally have any involvement but I had it rewritten. When it first came to me, it was a little dry. There wasn’t enough character in it but the basic ideas were there. I have to say I came to this as a director and it was kind of scary as I asked myself what I was going to bring into FLAWLESS because for the first time it’s not from a script that’s coming out of me, so I went “Let’s see what I can bring to it,” and I liked it. It was a very rewarding experience for me. It taught me a lot. CC: What were some of the things that you changed in the screenplay that you didn’t like at first? MR: It was written by Edward Anderson who is from Denver and I don’t think he knew much about England so the first thing I did was to make it believable. The basic structure of the story was all his; the crook idea, the heist idea, they were all Edward’s. That’s what attracted me to the script. I just brought a little bit of subtlety and characterization to it, mainly in the undercurrent relationship between Laura and Lambert Wilson’s character, the investigator. The script originally was focused mainly on the Michael Caine character and I thought that it was wrong because it was Laura’s story really. I just focused the film more on her. She was originally support for the plot. That’s what happens to any screenplay so there’s no way that it was not Edward’s script. He was very nervous about it being rewritten because he had written something he’s probably done fifty drafts of it and then somebody comes in and goes “I’m going to rewrite it.” You can’t help but initially think “My God.” (Laughs) CC: Were Michael Caine and Demi Moore the top choices for Hobbs and Laura? MR: They would’ve been in a sense that when you’re making an independent picture, you have to go with what you get. You either then say I’m going to make the movie or I’m not going to make the movie. With that having been said, Michael Caine was involved with the project right from the beginning so he came with the package. When Demi Moore said that she would like to do the film, I was very happy because although I originally envisioned Laura being English, I thought that the sacrifice we had to make to have Laura an American in England was worth it just for her presence as a movie star not just to sell the picture. Movie stars are movie stars for a reason, they fill the screen. She’s even more extraordinary than somebody like Al Pacino. You wouldn’t pick her as a movie star in life but she is one because she knows what to do. CC: I did say in my review that it is one of her best performances. MR: I’m very happy to hear you say that because I believe that partially that has to do with me. I think I gave her confidence in the fact that she knew what she could do. I sensed that after eight years out of the business raising her kids after the fact that she was the number one movie star in Hollywood which was no longer the case was rocky for her. I wasn’t sure if she was scared shitless, but you know what, she probably has been scared shitless all her life. It may well be the case. Whatever it was, I think I made her feel confident in what she could do. I think she’s taken a lot of schtick in people saying she’s not a good actress. That’s nonsense because she’s a great actress. CC: In contrast to Demi is Michael Caine, who when I saw his performance, it reminded me somewhat of his earlier films such as THE BANK JOB. What was it like working with Michael in particular? MR: The thing about Michael is that he is such a supreme, confident professional. He’s made so many movies, he’s a fabulously well oiled machine. You want to say, “I’m going to make a performance here for Michael Caine,” but when he comes on set he just blows you away. You do very little. All I did was remind him of where we were in the script or I’d say “Give us a few variations here Michael because I’m not sure if you should be angry or not, just be very subtle.” He comes utterly prepared, knowing his lines. He walks on the set and this wasn’t a stretch for him. He’s playing a 74 year old Cockney geezer and that’s what he is (laughs). He’s also physically incredibly strong. He’s 74 and he had to run up and down that corridor which was 40 yards long and he had to do it 15-20 times. I had hired a stuntman to do it for him after the first couple of times. Michael did it 20 times and then for the cutaways we used the double. The double did it twice and then had to sit down. He’s a very strong guy. CC: This is considered to be a heist film, but there’s no violence in it. Was the lack of violence in the script when you first saw it or was that something you were insistent on in the changes? MR: It’s one of the things that attracted me to the script. Suspense in a movie is a degraded commodity at the moment. People are afraid to trust it. There’s nothing better than people being nailed on that scene, wondering what is going to happen. I was going to produce a black card as a trailer that says, “This film has no sex, no violence, no special effects, and no real action… yet for 100 minutes it will have you nailed to your seat.” That’s really what I tried to do. CC: There’s a lot of development and back story on the diamond trade itself almost as if it’s a character in the film. Was that something that you meticulously looked at? MR: Seriously and meticulously. It is an incredibly secretive and strange world. It’s extraordinary, the thing about diamonds is that there’s a whole area in London that’s the whole diamond industry. They don’t cut diamonds there, all diamonds are cut in India now, and all the major industry of diamonds isn’t in the big diamonds anymore, it is in the worthless diamond chips that they sell in huge amounts. In those days, the diamond industry was big in London. When they carried diamonds around, you would think that they carried them in strongboxes, but they actually carried them in plastic bags because the only way to keep diamonds safe is to look like you’re not carrying them (laughs). I was sitting in this diamond cutter’s place and a guy walks in looking like he’s carrying his lunch. He takes this supermarket bag and reaches in and there’s about a hundred million dollars worth of diamonds in this bag (laughs). Now of course this was the diamond industry in the 1960s and at that time, they literally controlled the world. CC: With the film being set in 1960, it dealt with conflicts with two countries over situations that don’t exist today, being the Soviet Union dissolving in 1991 and South Africa abolishing apartheid in 1994. The themes are prevalent throughout the film. Why did you decide to put these conflicts into the backdrop of FLAWLESS? MR: The story was set there originally. I always said to myself if people are going to buy the fact that it is set in this period but actually I think that you do because it is historically correct and it is historically interesting. I’m not trying to make too many major political points. They are there at the surface of the plot. If you know about that period, it is a particularly devious moment. Nothing really was what it seemed because the Soviets were dealing here and there very underhandedly and in South Africa as well. It was when things were about to split apart. The 1960s just came and the whole rise against apartheid was starting to take shape. The Sharpeville shootings were in 1960. When that happened, the world of apartheid was never the same again. CC: Back to screenwriting, throughout your career you’ve adapted many works, starting with Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR and most recently with Shakepeare’s THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Could you explain the process you go through as a writer in adapting from a novel or a stage play for the screen in terms of challenges and perks? MR: Let me say first of all that ninety percent of all movies are adapted from books. A lot of them are books that you’ve never seen or heard of but there are very few original screenplays going around. It makes producers feel more comfortable when they have a book because they know what you’ve got even though you’re going to change it completely around. FLAWLESS by the way is one of the ten percent that is an original story. Adapting a major work which is well known is an entirely different ballgame because there are certain books which have their life in literature and trying to give them another type of life in the cinema would be a wrong thing to do. I think a lot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books are like that, people are very attracted to the idea of turning them into films but actually their life exists in the imagination. A lot of people confuse that with good books and bad books; bad books make good cinema, good books don’t. That’s not true. Leo Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA for instance is a story that anybody would want to adapt because it has a great narrative line and what you need for the cinema is a strong narrative. It doesn’t have to be an overtly strong narrative, but it has to be there. That’s why Jane Austen is easy to adapt because plot wise, the narratives are watertight. That’s the first thing. The second thing is when you are adapting a book is you want to give it life in the cinema. What I tried to do with NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR was I tried to have a vision of what this film would look like. I couldn’t start before that. What I decided was that this was a vision in 1948 of a parallel universe, so it was science fiction envisioned in 1948. That’s what I had to start with. If you thought of the world in NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR which was when I made the picture in 1948 (the year before Orwell’s book was first published), what would it have looked like? That’s what when I started it. The other thing I tried to do was I looked at key moments in the book which made me feel cinematic. There was very little of the book left in the movie but one thing that is in both the sound recording and it was used in a completely different way. I thought the sound was a wonderful metaphor for somebody struggling to be an artist but not realizing that he’s being one when he’s doing it. That immediately came to me. If I’m looking at THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, that’s another different ballgame. There I’m acting in a funny type of way like a director coming into a screenplay that’s already written. What I’m trying to do is bring to it something else, and what I tried to bring to Shakespeare was clarity because I think for a modern audience sometimes it’s not clear what’s going on in his plays, particularly if you only see them once. One because of the language and two because sometimes it is set in a culture that you’ve just simply just forgotten and therefore it’s not understood. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE is set in a culture in which you could absolutely understand. First of all, you transport people to this decadent place. What better place is there to go than Venice at that time where woman had their breasts hanging out? It was extraordinary. People were shocked when they went there. It’s also a story about an immigrant. I don’t know whether it’s the same here but in England the immigrant community when they come in, they get hurled with insults but they cling to their own culture. The second generation then wants to get away from this culture because it’s boring and they want to be with the guys at the pubs, and that’s what it’s all about. Adapting Shakespeare, I realized what it was about Shakespeare that actually makes it really difficult to enter him into the cinema is that he enters in the middle of the action and you get your back story as the play goes on. That’s very confusing for anybody who’s going to the cinema. You have to show the back story. Instead of having Shylock announce to the audience that Antonio has spattered him while they were negotiating about the pound of flesh, which makes it into a scene of exposition, not a sceneof drama. If you show that at the beginning of the picture then when it comes to that scene where they are negotiating the money for the loan, you’re thinking “He’s spattered him and he’s asking for a loan, what’s going to happen between these two guys,” and immediately you’re engaged in the story. CC: Was the fact that Pacino was such a fan of Shakespeare as evident with LOOKING FOR RICHARD is what attracted you to have him in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE? MR: Yes. Obviously I knew it was going to help us get it made but that was a minor consideration. He’s a great actor. Anyone would want to work with him. What’s great about Al and I didn’t realize this until I started working with him is that he’s a method actor, and it’s painful for anybody involved. It’s much easier working with Jeremy Irons, a tremendous English actor formed in a different tradition of acting, it was difficult to meld the two together. Anyway, what Al does and I think this is unique is that he is so vivid in what he does, he is so clear and intelligent in what he does, that he manages to transform everyone around him where they get better. It’s quite magical to watch. CC: With Pacino being a Method Actor, and Irons being a more traditional British actor as you say, where does Michael Caine fit? MR: Michael Caine is a movie actor (laughs). He’s just one of those guys who effortlessly knows exactly the power of the camera and the measure of what happens between you and the public when the camera is focused on you. He is absolutely in the role when he does it. He went to drama school in England and he is formed in the stage tradition, but he is a movie actor, there’s no doubt about it. CC: What is next for Michael Radford? MR: There’s a couple of films which seem to be colliding into each other. I’m supposed to be in China filming a movie called RED MANSIONS with Renee Zellweger and Ken Watanabe but that’s postponed. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. In the meantime, I’m about to make a Spanish movie that’s part of a trilogy of films I’ve been making for over 25 years. The first film was ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE and the second was IL POSTINO (THE POSTMAN). The third one is this film called LA MULA and it’s about a muleteer in the Spanish Civil War. It’s basically a funny tragicomedy. All three are tragicomic movies set about small people living in the chaos of history if you like and they’re desperately trying to find their own way to live their dreams and this is about a guy who finds a mule and wants to hold on to it. It’s a great story and a great script. CC: I leave the last word to you. MR: Thank you Scott. FLAWLESS opens in theaters March 28th from Magnolia Pictures. (Special thanks to Caitlin Speed and Betsy Rudnick at Falco Ink)
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