This is absolutely ghastly. As soon as I heard the news I fell apart and ever
since I’ve been staggering about trying to take it all in. The death of
people you know is always a shock but with Ant the particularly difficult
thing is that he was amazing at enabling and empowering everyone around him.
This random thing that seems to have killed him is impossible to imagine –
as a writer and director he made things happen, he sorted things, he brought
out the best in people’s talents. So to have something as mad as this to end
all that doesn’t make sense.
When I think of Ant I think of him walking towards me, my heart opening up. It
didn’t matter how long it had been since our last conversation. He had held
it all, nothing was forgotten, almost as if some part of me was being
carried around by him. He did that for so many people. I remember his smile,
being bathed in it for the next few seconds or hours, this joyous exchange.
He was complicated, funny, challenging, never banal. Any encounter with him
was intensely rich.
Ant was sophisticated, intelligent and creative, both in his life and
everything around him. He was a huge person in so many people’s lives, he
was loved by so many people; and he fuelled that love with charm, and seemed
fuelled by charm in return. That was perhaps part of his Italian/English
upbringing: he was a big-hearted, passionate, tactile person. He would be
talking to you and rubbing your shoulder at the same time, but without any
sense he was invading your space. He was a great celebrator. And yet he had
a huge area of privacy reserved for his family life.
I’d known him for years, I was in the first play he directed for radio. I knew
him as a writer and how very different an existence that is to directing –
he would lock himself away, be very solitary. It’s a lonely process that
requires great self-discipline. The obituaries so far have focused on his
directing; no one is talking about his writing and in my view he was one of
our greatest writers. In Truly, Madly, Deeply he understood that the
rhythms of human speech connect to complicated internal loss. The dialogue
is extraordinarily rhythmic, coming from the heart, head and the mouth. With
beautiful music, it’s the same thing: so many emotions can be elicited in
one movement. Ant understood that people write in sentences but rarely speak
or think in sentences and so wrote films that are complex maps of how we
experience ourselves, relationships and language. It was a great gift.
Truly, Madly, Deeply was an extraordinary work in so many ways. With
most directors you start as strangers but Ant and I had worked together
before, so we both had short cuts to each other. It was his first film, and
first-time film directors find it exhilarating because they can make up
their own rules. When someone has as gigantic a talent as he had those rules
can be very exciting. He let his imagination fly.
He was good at directing women and had a great fascination for women and
actresses. Maybe that was down to his grandmother, who was very up on women
and down on men, and to whom he was very close. He wasn’t down on men, but
he was not afraid of the femaleness within himself. He was fully a man, but
he was very gentle, sensual and had equal friendships with men and women. He
adored and was loyal to his wife. When he spoke to you, you really did feel
as if you were the only human being in the world. He had the capacity to
bring the best out of you, to take you to the edge of yourself and elicit
your fullest potential. If he came to see me in a play, that night I would
absolutely be playing to him the whole evening, presenting the finest, most
sophisticated performance I could.
On a film set, the machinery and hardware are usually central, but on Truly,
Madly, Deeply he made the actors and characters the emotional centre of
the set. So if you were supposed to be grief-stricken, the whole crew was
tuned to that. If you and Alan Rickman were dancing around, the whole crew
would be dancing to bebop. He created this atmosphere and made everyone feel
extraordinary. He had an intense curiosity for people and was attuned to,
and interested in, their foibles, frailties and idiosyncrasies. Whatever
your status on the set he brought you in and invested in you. People would
do anything for him. He was very unjudgmental.
Ant could be tough but in a gentle and intelligent way. He was intensely
self-critical. I had a small part in Breaking and Entering. With most
directors you’d be in and out in half a day, but we spent hours and hours on
this scene, ad-libbing, extempo-rising, imagining, all for a scene that
lasted a few moments. He wrung out every last drop from every scene. He was
a perfectionist and very driven and had the highest expectations of people
in the best sense. You wanted to meet them. A film set is a huge family and
he once told me that directing reminded him of the family café his parents
ran, with people swarming around and doors swinging open all the time. He
had the capacity for both the writer’s and director’s life. He could be the
centre of a huge crowd and also extremely private.
Who knew he would start directing opera [Madam Butterfly for ENO]? He
was a giant figure in our cultural life. He would have seen being chairman
of the British Film Institute as an opportunity to revive an industry that
should be flourishing thanks to the wealth of talent we have. He wanted to
stop the drain of people to Hollywood.
This all sounds very serious, but Ant was also into self-mockery. None of the
obituaries, or lists of achievements, has mentioned his delicious sense of
humour. It infused everything, his work and family. He adored taking the
piss out of himself and me. “Why does everyone take you so seriously as an
actress?” he’d say to me. “The person I know is a complete lunatic, a
nitwit.”
He wrote that into Truly, Madly, Deeply. Everyone thinks it’s a tragic
film about grief but he captured all my stupid obsessions and paranoias.
It’s a comedy really. Onset, people were very focused but laughing,
laughing, laughing. He was so perceptive, he didn’t deal in stereotypes, and
so the film is a celebration of the complexity of life and relationships.
And he encompassed that too. Ant was many people. He was too big a person to
be just one person.
As told to Tim Teeman
