Almost from the beginning of his film and television career, director Roger Michell was one of an elite group of filmmakers bringing the works of writer Hanif Kureishi to the big and small screens, beginning with the 1993 autobiographical miniseries “The Buddha of Suburbia,” and continuing with original Kureishi screenplays for THE MOTHER (2003), VENUS (2006), and LE WEEK-END (2013).
Beyond those works and after a thriving career directing theater, Michell moved on to do such works as TITANIC TOWN (with Julie Walters and Ciarán Hinds); NOTTING HILL (with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant); CHANGING LANES (with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jakcson); THE MOTHER (with Daniel Craig); ENDURING LOVE (with Craig, Rhys Ifans, and Samantha Morton); MORNING GLORY (with Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams); and HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (with Bill Murray as FDR).
Michell’s latest film is MY COUSIN RACHEL, which he adapted from the novel by Daphne Du Maurier (which was originally made into a film in 1953, starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton). This latest version stars Sam Claflin and Rachel Weisz, as well as Iain Glen and Holliday Grainger, and it’s a psychological thriller that may or may not be a murder mystery as well. Certainly paranoia runs deep in the veins of this story, which is stunningly shot and beautifully acted, especially by Weisz (no surprise there). I had a chance to chat (via phone) with writer-director Roger Michell about his take on this fantastic film. Please enjoy…
Capone: How are you, sir?
Roger Michell: Good. How's it going?
Capone: Great. Let's just start at the beginning. What was your first exposure to this novel, and what do you remember specifically about it captivating you?
RM: Well, I didn't really know the book. I didn't know much about Daphne du Maurier. I knew she had been the source material for these great films like REBECCA and THE BIRDS and DON’T LOOK NOW, and of course, the original film of MY COUSIN RACHEL. One evening, I wanted something to read and I thought “I'd love to find a book that I know I won't want to make a film out of.” It's exhausting if you're reading a book and thinking, "Oh, this would make a great film."
So, I got this old copy off my shelf. It was my mother's old paperback copy of the book. I think she was quite a Du Maurier fan, probably in the ’60s. I thought "This will be like chick-lit, this will be a romantic thriller from the early ’50s. It will be fun, and I'll read a few pages and then I'll fall asleep." I read a few pages, and then I read a few more pages, and I was absolutely bewitched by it and couldn't quite figure out what she was trying to do, where we were going. It was just so full of surprises. Every chapter seems to end on a cliffhanger.
She's not being treated with enormous respect by the critical community, Daphne du Maurier. I think, partly, she's a victim of her own success. She was a very popular writer, and her association with cinema probably didn't make her get treated anymore seriously. But I started to think that this is a serious book, and it's got a dark secret at its heart. I was really intrigued by it. I thought, "Yeah, I'd like to have a go at remaking this."
I'd never seen the other film. I purposefully avoided seeing it once I embarked upon this process. There's something shocking about the book. There's something really modern about the book, particularly modern about this central character—such a powerful, independent and spirited woman who is really almost an anachronism to the period in which the book is set, which is the 1830s. Even really to the period in which the book was written, 1950. I think she's iconic, actually.
Capone: You bring this up about her being a very independent woman. I think that's one of the biggest shocks of the film, that a big reason people think she's guilty of something is because she may have slept with a few people in her lifetime.
RM: Yeah, that is exactly what it comes down to. She must be guilty because she likes having sex with men. That's such an interesting idea. It's partly because she's from Italy, and in the world of the film, Italy equals stilettos, sambuca, jewels, and sex—unbridled sexuality, etc.. In fact, the character is saying, "Well, why shouldn't I have sex? Why shouldn't I have ownership of my own life? Why should I be chattel? Why do you think you can buy me? Even if you can give me every brick and stick of this estate, don't you think that's buying my sexual favors or buying my love or buying me as a partner, as a wife?" That's a very modern sensibility. sambuca She wrote it at a time when, I imagine, the words “feminism” and “feminist,” I don't think she would have heard those words or even if indeed they'd been coined in 1950. I don't know. But she was an interesting person. She was not a straight-forward person. She came from an interesting family, and I think she had quite bifurcated, sexual interests and desires herself, which she found problematic and difficult to deal with it. I think all that wonderful, dark anxiety comes rushing through in this novel. It's like a post-Freudian Jane Austen novel.
Capone: You saw fit to adapt this yourself, which I think it's your first writing credit, at least in a film. What drove you to want to tackle that aspect of it as well?
RM: Well, I actually have done some adaptations over the years. I've done quite a lot of work with writers on adaptations of other pieces, other books. I thought, “If I get a writer on to this, all I'm going to do is sit with them and say, ‘Well, I want to do this bit. I don't want to do this bit.’ Maybe I should have a go at doing that first. I've got a very clear idea of which bits of the book I'm interested in and which I'm not interested in.” In fact, that was really my process working through the book again and again and again, was just thinking, "Can I face shooting this scene? No, I can't. So, I'm not going to try. I'm going to cut it out." The bits that remain are the bits that really interest me about the story, and that was a principle that seemed to work.
Capone: Not that you’ve brought it up, what elements of the story did you want to emphasize or downplay?
RM: I suppose I wanted to really concentrate on the essence of the thing, which is this brutal, tender, wrong, sexual magnetism between this couple who are almost like mother and son. They're not literally mother and son, but she's his stepmother, and he's her cousin. I think partly, it's the wrongness of that that is an aphrodisiac to them. I think that's interesting and very powerful. If you corrupt that with money and ownership and power, then fucking hell. I mean, it's great. What more do you want? [laughs]
Capone: There's a great deal of, for lack of a better word, misdirection.
RM: That's a good word, actually.
Capone: As to people's motives, guilt or innocence, at every turn. How do you carry that off without feeling like your cheating the audience? I think at some point we realize we are a lot deeper into Phillip's head than we might realize. I guess that's part of it. How do you sort of pull that off without lying to your audience?
RM: I think that's a really very good question. I think one way of answering that is to say, that I tried to make a film where if you were geeky enough to go back over the DVD, there wouldn't be a moment where you would think, "Oh, that wasn't true," or, "In this scene, she's simply manipulating him," or "In this scene, she's faking being angry." I think that every moment, they are both emotionally truthful, and it therefore becomes really impossible to get a cigarette paper in between your thinking that she's good or she's not good, or that she's maybe even a bit of both.She's probably a bit of both, isn't she? I mean, most people are a bit of both.
That is the trick of the book and that is the trick of the film. There's no way around that. You either find that tantalizing and exquisite and satisfying, or you find it infuriating. So far, people seem to fall into the former camp and not the latter, I'm glad to say. Having said that, in the book there are moments in the book where the writer said, “When I got to the end of the book, I had no idea whether she was guilty or not.” She also said, "I was so in love with her by then I wouldn't have cared if she poisoned the whole village." Toward the end of writing the book, she'd go down to her little hut and she'd do a day's writing, and she’d write something which made it so unavoidably clear that she was guilty, and then the next day she'd go back and write something which was the opposite. Sometimes in the book, you feel the g-force as you go around the fucking bend.
Capone: As you're whipped back in the other direction.
RM: Yeah, exactly. Your neck snaps back against the car headrest. I think I tried to even that out a little bit, so that nothing was ridiculously implausible when it came to the switchbacks.
Capone: I was talking to Iain about this before, I feel like in the beginning of the film we're seeing the whole situation from his perspective—he's a little more removed from it, and he can see what he thinks is going on. But when Rachel is finally introduced into the film, she bewitches us as well as Sam, and like you said, we don't care. It's a testament to Rachel Weisz as an actress that she has such control over her performance. She can make the character look guilty and innocent at the same time.
RM: Yeah, that's exactly right. And of course Sam is unraveling. He stops doubting and becomes like a junkie. He becomes so mad with desire that he becomes someone who's untrustworthy. Even he acknowledges that. His character says, "I know you think I'm crazy, but I'm going to try to get her to marry me." That's wonderful. He, who we believed would be our way into the film and would be our conventional hero, turns out not to be that at all, to be something more unreliable and fucked up.
Capone: If she is manipulating him, she is doing so without asking for anything. She's either a mastermind, or he's just that vulnerable. I'm assuming that he's never been with a woman before. That also changes the dynamic, to a large degree. He is an innocent even though he is very masculine.
RM: Yeah, he's a virgin. He's a virgin who's been brought up in a household where women are forbidden. The only females are the dogs. He's been brought up by this charismatic uncle/cousin/father, who is a self-confessed woman hater who's single. All the mothers in the film are dead, and we don't really know how they died. There's no explanation in the books on how his mother has died or how Louise's mother has died. It's quite an odd and brilliantly unexplained world in which he's raised.
Then he fantasizes about how ghastly this woman is. That's one thing which we really lose out on in the film, because in a book, he has fantasies about her being very fat or very ugly or very old or very Italian or very Catholic, and of course, we all know that she's going to be very Rachel Weisz when she turns up. In a conventional movie, he'd meet her and they'd hate each other and then there'd be a middle act where he fell for her. But in this film, he meets her and that's it. He meets her and by the end of having a cup of tea in her room, you feel that he's lost it. He's completely beguiled by her. That's a great story choice by Du Maurier, and one which I think works surprisingly well in the film.
Capone: The scene I found most moving is the one between Phillip and Iain Glen's character, the scene where he's basically signing over all his worldly possessions to Rachel. You realize at that moment that Iain's character has known him since he was born, and his heart is being destroyed. Tell me about shooting that particular scene, because there's a lot of emotion happening.
RM: You're right. You've absolutely got it. It's so painful for both those men that at this moment of signing where something breaks between them, something which has been very important to both of them. Then Phillip can't quite leave the room. He says "Thank you, and thank you for looking after me and being my guardian and being so kind to me." Then Kendall, Iain's character, has the enormous generosity of spirit to smilingly agree to join him that night for a drink, and to go and sit and break bread with not only Phillip, but this ghastly woman who he thinks has really taken everything, and be civil and be sweet natured and kind. That's good writing by Du Maurier.
Capone: In the end, Phillip's plight really only resonates with an audience if they can identify with him to a certain degree. I'm sure a lot of us have been blinded by love. Was that something that you had to work at to make sure that it did feel universal to a certain degree?
RM: I think it's odd. I still think it's odd. I think it's good that the people around Phillip—his lawyer and his guardian—think it's odd. I think even Phillip thinks it's reckless, but it's putting all your chips on red. He thinks this is the right thing to do. He persuades himself that this is the way to bring himself and her happiness, the little mutt, the poor wretch.
Capone: Tell me about just landing Rachel for this part. How did you get this to her, and what was the process in getting her to sign on for this?
RM: Actually, I was working with her on another film. We were developing another film, which we were interested in doing. A modern film about adoption bizarrely, called THE MOTHERS. It came to the point where I could either make that film or this film, and I was more invested in this film and I wanted to bring her along with me into this film. She agreed. She really got it, instantly.
Capone: I've been seeing Sam in so many things recently. Did you see him in something that you liked him in?
RM: Yeah, I did. I saw him in THE RIOT CLUB. Did you see that?
Capone: Yeah, yeah. Lone Scherfig’s film before THEIR FINEST, which also has Sam.
RM: Right. I watched that film because I was particularly interested in seeing this gang of rather interesting young, British actors for this film, for MY COUSIN RACHEL. He absolutely stood out for me as a very, very fascinating talent. Then I watched him in HUNGER GAMES, and then he came in and he did a couple of tests for us. I thought he has this wonderful combination of being handsome and dashing and British, but also gauche and naïve and blustering, impetuous, reckless, obsessive. I think he's a wonderful actor.
Capone: To the point where, in the recent films I've seen him in, I didn't even realize it was the same person.
RM: What have you seen him in recently?
Capone: ME BEFORE YOU last year, where he was in a wheelchair. I just saw THEIR FINEST earlier this year at Sundance. THE HUNTSMAN sequel. You mentioned THE HUNGER GAMES sequels. Do you have any idea what you're doing next?
RM: Not really, no. I've just done a play at the National Theatre, by someone called Nina Raine. A play called “Consent,” which is about rape, actually—rape and barristers. That was fascinating. I think that will be wending it's way to New York over the next few months. But I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be doing in the film world. I'm reading and thinking and worrying about this opening.
Capone: I actually watched a lot of those National Theatre Live broadcasts. Will this be one of those?
RM: No, it won't be one of those, unfortunately. But I know what you mean. Are they good to watch, these works?
Capone: I have to admit, I've become addicted to them. I even watch the ones I don't think I'm that interested in, and they’re always tremendous. I just saw the one that they did from the Old Vic of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” with Daniel Radcliffe.
RM: What was that like?
Capone: Phenomenal. I was telling Iain, one of the first times I ever remember seeing him in a film was in Tom Stoppard's movie version where he played Hamlet.
RM: [laughs] Oh, did Iain play Hamlet in Tom's version? Oh my god!
Capone: He said, "Yeah, that's the only time Tom's ever made a movie.”
RM: Yeah, he wrote and directed the film.
Capone: I've always had a great affection for that film and that story, so it was great to see it again.
RM: That was a 50th anniversary production, wasn't it?
Capone: Exactly.
RM: Sgt. Pepper’s and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”
Capone: That’s right.
RM: How about that?
Capone: Pretty impressive. Roger, thank you so much. It was really, really great to talk to you and best of luck with this.
