Who made The
English Patient - and made it so well?
Great movies do not come out of nowhere and showing The
English Patient again has prompted
me to look at the team that made it.
First of all, who put this team together? Saul Zaentz, previously
a professional gambler and record producer had bought the rights to, and then
produced, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadaus, and The Unbearable
Lightness of Being. Zaentz was one of the last great independent
film producers. He used his own
money, recruited his own team, and kept control of the final product in his own
hands, rather than those of nervous investors or Studio heads. He took risks, which so often
paid off handsomely, not only financially, but artistically. He said ‘It takes five
years of my life to produce a film, so I don’t do it to make money, I do it
because these are the films I want to see made.’ Many people follow
Directors, and so do I, but most of them take what they are offered, while
Producers choose the films they make, and are worth following too.
So Zaentz chose Anthony Minghela, the
script-writer and director, who had written British TV scripts for shows as
diverse as Grange Hill and Morse, but had only written and
directed one critical cinema hit, Truly, Madly /Deeply.
John Seale however, the Australian director of
photography, had worked on Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness,
Children of a Lesser God, Gorillas in the Mist, Rainman and Lorenzo’s
Oil. Seale had worked with Peter
Weir of course, a director who always has something to say in his movies. Later on he filmed Ghost’s of
Mississippi, The Perfect Storm and Cold
Mountain, as
well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Stuart Craig had been the Production Designer
for The Elephant Man, Gandhi,
The Mission, Cry Freedom, and Dangerous Liaisons. He later worked on all
the Harry Potter movies.
Both of these key men had worked on ‘committed’ films, films
with something to say rather than blockbusters or popcorn entertainment. Zaentz has not worked with either
before The English Patient, but he knew what he was looking for.
And then, as editor,
there was the multi-talented Walter Murch who has worked in
various capacities on THX 1138, American Graffiti, The Conversation,
Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather III. Safe hands indeed, but Zaentz was
a gambler, and here he surely took a risk by using Minghela, who had little
film experience, and Kristin
Scott Thomas. She had done
well as Anne in Richard III, courted by Ian McKellen’s fascist usurper, but
only made a popular impact in Four Weddings and a Funeral. We had seen
how well she could do ‘cool’ but could she also do passion?
And to put her alongside the luminous Juliette Binoche was surely a
risk. Although four years
younger than Scott Thomas she had already starred in the Three Colours
Trilogy, Damage, The Horseman on the Roof, and The Unbearable
Lightness of Being – the latter produced by Saul Saentz.
Ralph Fiennes had come from the
theatre, but had impressed in Schindler’s List and starred in Quiz
Show
and Colin Firth had come fresh, dripping from the pond in
the TV Pride and
Prejudice. So an
interesting and talented team had been brought together, and the film would be
shot in Tuscany and the desert,
bringing their own distinctive qualities.
But of course none of this could have happened without the
original novel. Michael Ondaatje's poetic and oblique
1992 Booker Prize winner. This
was a difficult book to adapt for
the screen. Ondaatje
‘wrote of the injured man sifting through his memories. This dreamlike,
nonlinear tale moves in much the same way, swooping gracefully from past to
present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to
the topography of the desert sands.’ (Janet Maslin, film critic of the NY Times) and as Edmund
White, the NY Times Book Critic said
‘The
most impressive feature of the book, Ondaatje's prose, can't be caught on
celluloid. Much has been said
about the richness of Ondaatje's writing, the sensuousness of his physical
descriptions and his poet's gift for using well-timed silences and ellipses to
speak volumes. It may come wrapped
in musky perfume, but Ondaatje's prose could go a few rounds with Hemingway and
probably knock out Kipling, too.’
One passage
in the novel reads
''She
walks towards his night tent without a false step or any hesitation. The trees
make a sieve of moonlight, as if she is caught within the light of a dance
hall's globe. She enters his tent and puts an ear to his sleeping chest and
listens to his beating heart, the way he will listen to a clock on a mine. Two
A.M. Everyone is asleep but her.''
White
commented that Ondaatje does not use
‘the poetic prose of false sentiment and highfalutin' diction, rather
the true lyricism of fact, myth and tragic vision. The running narrative tone
has a majestic, almost Biblical cadence to it, but one that can assimilate all
the details of modern life, from air pillows to land mines.’
So 'The
English Patient' film is a stunning feat of literary adaptation
as well as a purely cinematic triumph. As
Janet Maslin said ‘Mr.
Minghela manages to be
astonishingly faithful to the spirit of this exotic material while giving it
more shape and explicitness, virtually reinventing it from the ground up. The
film has so many facets, and combines them in such fascinating and fluid style
that its cumulative effect is much stronger than the sum of its parts.’
Roger Ebert, the late lamented doyen of literate film
critics, wrote
‘Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, ‘The
English Patient’ searches for answers that will answer
nothing. This
poetic, evocative film circles down through layers of mystery until all of the
puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed
love remains. It is
the kind of movie you can see twice - first for the questions, the second time
for the answers.”
There
were objections to the way the novel ended, with the news of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Caravaggio tried to explain why Kip is so upset, saying that Kip knows ‘They
would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.’ But Kip has
also spent the whole war trying to prevent explosions. He had risked his life, time
after time, to save Allied lives – and now the Allies had killed millions at a
stroke.
I
regret the omission of this passage from the film, though I understand how
including it could have impacted negatively on the crucial American
audience.
In
the book, Kip says “if they can explain this away there is no hope for
us’. But of course we did explain it away, and our leaders
still explain away more than 8000 nuclear warheads that exist today with no
military justification and pose a potentially disastrous risk. But that is another issue, as
they say.
One reason I choose to show this film is that I hope
it might persuade those who se it to read the book. It is even richer than the film, and the
author’s voice is wiser than any of the characters, except maybe that of
Kip.
