It really didn’t have to be like this. Roger Michell didn’t need to be
sitting here in a rehearsal room in North London’s unlovely Kilburn. He
didn’t need to be earning rubbish money to direct an old play about
middle-class adultery in West London. He didn’t need to be spending his days
sticking period details from the 1970s up on the rehearsal room walls with
his cast (Toby Stephens, Sam West and Dervla Kirwan). He could have been
spending his days blowing up stuff.
Well, maybe that’s not what turns him on. Why else would you turn down the
chance to direct Daniel Craig in the next James Bond film? Why else would
you say no to a reported $8 million (£4 million) pay cheque and instead
mount two plays in the subsidised sector – first Joe Penhall’s Landscape
with Weapon and now this revival of Harold Pinter’s time-shifting
masterpiece Betrayal?
Michell is a tanned, slightly jowly man, pitched somewhere between Clive James
and a weary chorister. Sitting in his rehearsal room, he appears utterly,
unshowily, at ease. Which puts you at your ease too. If this is what he’s
always like, no wonder actors and producers alike coo at the very mention of
his name. But, at the very mention of the Bond money, he comes as close to
losing his poise as he gets during our interview. Which is to say, he clears
his throat and lets loose an involuntary smile.
“Well,” he says. “I did give up directing the Bond film. And it wasn’t quite
$8 million but it was a lot of money. It was because in the end I didn’t
feel comfortable with the Bond process, and I was very nervous that there
was a start date but really no script at all. And I like to be very well
prepared as a director.
“The Bond people – who are lovely – are used to going into these massive
productions in quite a chaotic way: ‘Oh, we’ll fix that later.’ I panicked
about this. And it was starting to make me feel very, very unhappy about
what I was doing and who I was. The more the money went up, the worse it
made me feel.
“I felt a bit like the character in Landscape with Weapon [a weapons
designer who pulls out of a massive payday after he gets cold feet about his
work] and a little bit like Doctor Faustus, and just decided eventually that
I’d be doing it for the wrong reasons. I’d be doing it for my friendship
with Daniel Craig. I’d be doing it for the money. And not really because I
yearned to do it.”
So, after months of talks, late last year Michell pulled out of directing the
follow-up to Casino Royale. And shoved off to Kilburn.
Michell is more art-house than Commander Bond is accustomed to. Over the past
few years he’s made audacious, alluring films such as The Mother and
Enduring Love (both starring Craig). Most recently he made Venus, which
earned Peter O’Toole an Oscar nomination. He also directed the hugely
successful Notting Hill (1998) and would have directed Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin (2001) had he not had to withdraw from filming after suffering a
heart attack.
And yet Michell carries with him a mix of surface civility and subterranean
single-mindedness that might have chimed rather well with 007’s
daredevil-in-a-dinner-suit. Tomorrow is his 51st birthday. He was born in
South Africa, to English diplomats who later took him to live in Lebanon and
Syria and Czechoslovakia. Sent to board at Clifton School in Bristol, he
first encountered Pinter’s work in the late 1960s. Its ultra-English comedy
of menace changed his life. “The first thing I ever directed was some Pinter
sketches in assembly. I remember being shocked and enraptured by the way he
drew attention to how language worked.”
Actually, pretty much all Michell’s work shares that fixation with coded
behaviour. And he’s happy to admit that you can trace that to his
background. “I’m sure that’s where I became intrigued by this behavioural
oddity of people not really saying what they mean,” he says. “My family is a
bit like that, in private anyway. But to see my mother quivering with nerves
and then opening the door and becoming a different person for the benefit of
the Greek Foreign Secretary . . .”
Michell went to Cambridge University knowing exactly why he was there: to
direct plays. He won a student theatre award, the prize for which included a
drink with Trevor Nunn. But when he met Nunn, the great man told him that
directing is a miserable, soul-sapping job and not to bother. “Which is the
best thing you can say to anybody who wants to become an actor or a director
or anything that demands such single-minded, miserable application,” says
Michell. “So of course I completely ignored his advice.”
Articulate and ambitious, he became successful, if not yet wealthy. Not long
after university he got on a trainee directors scheme at the Royal Court. He
assisted John Osborne, who was directing a revival of Inadmissable Evidence,
and Samuel Beckett, who was directing Happy Days. “They were wonderful by
way of contrast,” he says. “One man was deeply embittered and often very
drunk and abusive, very cruel to people around him.
“The other, 20 years older, was profoundly gentle, self-mocking, quiet,
self-effacing, funny, the only totally nondisappointing famous person I’ve
ever met. And a year or two earlier I’d been sitting in the library writing
dissertations on him.”
In the 1980s he became a director at the RSC (“one of the great lucky hits of
my life”), then in 1991 was the victim of a putsch by the new boss Adrian
Noble (“the other lucky hit”). He did a three-month course at the BBC for
theatre directors who want to work in film, which led to a job directing
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia for BBC television (1993).
True to form, initially he turned this big break down because he hadn’t
liked the script. But Kureishi agreed with him and they wrote a new version
together in six weeks.
Since then he’s returned to the stage every couple of years, working on new
plays (Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Honour,
Joe Penhall’s Blue/ Orange) along with the odd Pinter – The
Homecoming at the National in 1997; Old Timesat the Donmar in 2004.
So what’s working for the Donmar again got to rival working for MI6? “It’s
this play, that theatre, this time,” he says, “it all makes sense. And I
love spending time with Harold, I really think it’s an opportunity I should
grab while it’s there.”
So it’s not that Michell distinguishes between art and entertainment? “No, I
don’t. I passionately don’t. I think they’re absolutely one and the same
thing. And Betrayal is Harold’s most accessible play – it’s very
narrative-conscious, very well crafted.”
Michell has an outstanding track record in both film and theatre. And yet,
what do you remember about The Mother? Or Venus? Or Notting Hill? The
director, or the story? Michell is hugely effective, but unfixed as a
stylist. He’d have given the Bond what it needed just as he’ll give his all
to the Pinter. Because, ever the diplomat’s son, he knows that he’s not the
issue.
“Your job as a director is to serve the story,” he says. “I don’t think it’s
the job of a director in any medium to wave at the audience and say, hey,
don’t forget about me, I did an important thing here as well! You should
make the play shine and make the actors shine. You should be invisible.”
Betrayal opens at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 0606624), on
Tuesday 5 June, 2007
