Mike Newell talks returning to his roots
“Not another Great Expectations” seems to be the general consensus when it comes to the latest cinematic adaptation of Charles Dickens timeless novel, yet ahead of the film’s November 30 release, we caught up with director Mike Newell as he explains why the time is right for audiences to indulge themselves in this tale once more.
Starring the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes and Jeremy Irvine – the film, adapted for the screen by David Nicholls, is Newell’s first feature since Prince of Persia, yet the director sees this as a return to his roots, as he discusses what it is like to come back home and make a movie.
Newell – famed for his direction of Four Weddings and a Funeral – also tells us of disappointment in the competition posed from the recent BBC adaptation, and his casting of Bonham Carter…
What is it about the Great Expectations story that attracted you to this project?
I wanted to come home. I had been away much too long and I had a lot of bad habits. My worst habit was that I thought that I could direct my way out of trouble; that it was all about directing. It isn’t, it is a script, it is about story. I wanted desperately not to live in a hotel room in L.A. anymore, but more than that I wanted to re-learn that one central thing that you can’t actually work without a decent script. I had $250 million to make Prince of Persia and it is not and never will be good enough because we never got the script right. I read this script and it was based on a novel that I have loved ever since being an undergraduate. It was a really good script and it was doable. I had been working on Dombey and Son, with a very good writer. Dombey and Son is a doorstop of a book, 1000 pages thick, fabulous characters and stories all about money in Victorian England. Then there is Great Expectations, which is about 500 pages long with at least a bit about Victorian money, so was more doable. I am sure that is one of the reasons it is so often done, because it is graspable, you can get your hands around it.
Did you re-watch any of the other adaptations and did they have an impact on your version?
I re-watched all of them. I stole from them, sure. But why not learn. One thing people say, “Do we really need another one?” The answer to that is “not if you don’t think we do, but on the other hand how often are people willing to go see Hamlet a year?” Every year there are multiple versions and at least two of them will be really good. I stole from the best; David Lean, a very good English director called Julian Jarrold and I stole from Alfonso Cuarón. I am proud and happy to do it.
What was your approach? It feels a lot darker this time around…
Well what I thought was that if it was going to connect to a modern audience, I didn’t set out to make a darker film, in some ways that it a clichéd term that doesn’t mean enough anymore. I was walking out of David Yates Harry Potter, which immediately followed mine, this big bloke was shouting across to his family above the top of my head and said, “They said the last one was dark and that was rubbish! This one was really dark and really good!” I just stood there thinking thanks! So to start with what I didn’t want to do was what Alfonso had done. I wanted it to be very hot, I wanted it to be sexually hot, I wanted them to want one another, in there heads at least. I couldn’t do anything about that on screen, that would be unthinkable and would shock people too much. I did however want to covey the lust as much as the love. I wanted it to be about money and how it screws things up, how it deludes people. That to me is very relevant for our times. I was really interested how in the novel as well as in David’s (Nicholls) brilliant script is that it is about abused children as well. The way these children get abused is by the adults who in their turn have been damaged and pass it on. There is the danger then that this becomes an endless cycle that you can’t break free of. That is also something that I feel is very condemnatory. I was trying to make a contemporary film in sheep’s clothing. I wasn’t going to change the C19th part of it, but I did think that I could bring the passion out in it.
What were your first thoughts when you found out about last years BBC adaptation?
Well, that wasn’t the best day in our lives. It came as a shock because we didn’t know that it was planned and we thought that we were the only ones in the race. It is even stranger because BBC Films considerably financed us, in part. Then what we thought was, they will go away, but obviously they were thinking the same thing and neither of us did. Finally and desperately we thought that maybe in someone the BBC adaptation would act as a kind of trailer for the movie. Then we stopped because it was too all too painful.
Did you feel because there was this adaptation that you needed to make your version more cinematic?
It didn’t change what I did. I made sure that I found out who was cast and I went to see some of their locations so that I could make mine different. I didn’t read it because it would have been a dodgy thing to get hold of their script. I watched it like a hawk when it came out. I learned lessons.
At what point were you in the edit?
I think we were about two weeks in.
Do you think that in the edit you consciously changed how you approached the movie?
Definitely not. The editor did not watch it. The editor was a very powerful and influential editor to me. I don’t think there is an overlap between the two versions. I think that they psychologised it very strongly. So for instance Havisham in the BBC version doesn’t die by accident, she burns her love letters and they fall to her feet and away she goes, which is a point of view.
I accept that there isn’t an overlap but I am interested to know whether there was a conscious decision to not choose a take or an approach to the edit, or grade, that felt similar to theirs?
No, as I say I went to see their locations. I was fascinated by one of their locations that they only used for a few seconds and it was a causeway across a lagoon on the East Coast, and I thought that we might simply steal it from them. Then I saw the shot and the location and thought actually that might not be so great. That in the end though wasn’t the struggle. The struggle was with money. Lots of investors turned around and said that they wouldn’t put money in us because it has just gone out on television. So, that did have an affect. We had to do an enormously difficult amount of tricks to get it made for the money. For instance, we had hoped to put the last scene, where Estella and Pip meet, in Cairo, because at the end of the novel Herbert goes off to trade in the east. First we were going to Cairo, then Malta, and then Morocco and we ended up in a muddy field in Shropshire because we didn’t have the money.
The casting of Helen Bonham Carter seems like the ideal choice, but there has been some criticism suggesting that she is too young for the role…
She’s not. She is the same age as Martita Hunt, who played Miss Havisham in the David Lean version. It is simply that she has flawless skin. She lives on a very high emotional plane; the Italians would call her, “la isterico”. She is a very sweet woman and we like each other greatly, which is why I can say this about her. But this is a very important aspect of Miss Havisham’s character; she should have these hysterical roots. She doesn’t want to move on from the time when she might have been happy; this is why she doesn’t change the dress, why she keeps the veil on and why she stops all the clocks. She believes that lover will return and they will be happy, that is a hysterical response. It predates Freud who after all famously dealt with hysteria in women, which was really interesting to me. At the turn of the century there were stories like Jekyll and Hyde, where Victorian authors know that it isn’t just what you see, this in some ways is Dickens’ Jekyll and Hyde. There was this wonderful account in the New Yorker, where every year there is a Dickens summer school where they pick one of his books, one year it was Great Expectations. At the beginning they have to write down their most urgent questions, one woman wrote, “Why is Pip such a little shit?” This was a transformation moment for me. Pip is cruel to those whom he should be, he might have been abused when he was growing up, but even after he has his wealth he never becomes a proper emotional hero who does right by everybody- he is treacherous. I think that the novel is Dickens’ tiptoeing into the great unknown.
What was it about Jeremy Irvine that made you want to cast him?
I loved the way he looked. He is so dark and a lot of the traditional Dickens’ heroes are blonde. Jeremy’s brother was blonde oddly enough. So I liked his looks and I could believe him as a country boy, he is simple and not a clever-dick. I am a clever dick and I am enough of one for a whole cast. He however is very believable as a blacksmith and he had this sort of way of knitting his brow, he is too serious for his own good, just like Pip. Jeremy manages to bit on this central aspect of the character that Pip is prepared to throw away and betray all the people who are best for him- those people who are kind and generous and good for him – that is an important quality to have.
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GREAT EXPECTATIONS IS OUT FRIDAY NOVEMBER 30