Subject
Ralph Fiennes takes on Pouchkine (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Alphonse Vinh for the item below. The
article ist is copyrighted and for reading purposes by
our fellow Nabokovians only.
-----------------
From: Yinshih@aol.com
DAILY TELEGRAPH
ISSUE 1462 Thursday 27 May 1999
Ralph takes a shot at Pushkin
Ralph Fiennes's star power won't help him if the Russians don't like his new
film this weekend. He talks to Quentin Falk
RALPH FIENNES has never been exactly famous for embracing the publicity
machine. Despite a glittering career that has already contained a clutch of
award-winning stage roles and Oscar-nominated film performances, the
diffident 36-year-old actor is known for giving interviews with all the
enthusiasm of a man having teeth extracted.
So discovering him in a working men's club adjacent to the stark Trellick
Tower in west London seemed only marginally less surprising than hearing him
talk at full spate and with undiluted passion about his latest film, Onegin,
which sees him back on the big screen in his best form since that
trophy-laden spectacular, The English Patient. It will be released in the UK
later this year.
Fiennes is inordinately proud of his most personal project to date - an
£11-million adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, Evgeny Onegin.
He's clearly nervous about it, too. He is not only the eponymous star but
also executive producer; his sister, Martha, directed the film and brother
Magnus composed the music. His real-life girlfriend, Francesca Annis, even
has a sexy, blink-and-you'll-miss it cameo in the pre-credit sequence.
It sounds, on the face of it, dangerously like a mega-dollar home movie,
strictly for family and friends. Happily, the reality is somewhat different,
for what this American-financed collaboration between three of the six
Fiennes siblings has yielded is a quite stunning, intensely moving romantic
tragedy, set in a beautifully recreated 19th-century Russia - achieved with a
skilful mixture of St Petersburg locations, lavish Shepperton studio sets and
a handy local common.
But what concerns Fiennes much more than any accusations of nepotism is his
impending visit to Russia, where the film is to be the centrepiece of a
Pushkin festival beginning this weekend in St Petersburg. Not just any
festival, mind you, but the home leg of a series of worldwide celebrations to
mark the bicentenary of the birth of Russia's national poet, on June 6.
On the scale of nerve-racking, playing Chekhov's Ivanov at Moscow's Maly
Theatre - as Fiennes did a couple of years back, in an Almeida Theatre
production - was a mere shudder by comparison.
Pushkin is quoted by Russians in the way Shakespeare is quoted here. Fiennes
suggests twitchily that it's more like messing with the Bible, except that
Pushkin's work - which also includes The Gypsies, Boris Godunov and The Queen
of Spades, as well as reams of verse - is probably better known in Russia
than the Bible.
Yet, while acknowledging a huge sense of responsibility, Fiennes claims that
it would have been unwise in translation to cinema to be "too precious about
it". "You can't be hamstrung by national possessiveness," he says. "Of course
one rightly has to be aware of how the piece is regarded. I can't say how
Russians will respond, but they will inevitably be critical of certain
choices, of certain changes we've made in the poem. They know it so well -
it's almost like making changes in the Gospel story."
Or, as he politely warned a group of Russian journalists who were visiting
London to see Onegin for the first time, "it represents Pushkin's poem - and
a film is not just a projected piece of script."
The Onegin story - best known in the west as the Tchaikovsky opera, with its
great lyrical arias such as Tatiana's Letter Song and its magnificent final
duet - follows the mixed fortunes of a cynical big-city bachelor, whose
enforced stay in the country on inheriting his wealthy uncle's estate
triggers a compelling scenario of love and pain. At the heart of the piece is
an epically pointless duel that tragically presaged Pushkin's own premature
end in 1837, aged just 38.
Doggedly pursuing his Pushkin project, in which he co-stars with Liv Tyler,
Toby Stephens and Lena Headey, rather neatly straddles Fiennes's acting
career to date. "At RADA," he recalls, "we had a wonderful teacher and
librarian called Lloyd Trott, who saw his role as encouraging the students to
have a wider breadth of knowledge about literature in general. He suggested I
read Evgeny Onegin. It may have been just coincidence that I was playing
Ivanov at the time, who's also a prime example of 'the superfluous man' in
Russian literature. Onegin was the first of that kind. I loved the poem,
especially in the Nabokov translation, and the character. From then on, I
carried it always in the back of my mind thinking, 'One day. . . what a
wonderful part. . .' "
By the time he completed his first film in 1992 (an ambitious if deeply
unsuccessful version of Wuthering Heights) the project had moved haltingly on
to paper. "I had scrawled some loose storyboard ideas," says Fiennes, "drawn
some pictures and even written a small treatment which I then showed to
Martha, who was doing commercials and promo videos. It wasn't a question of
just giving her a break, rather more my recognising, 'Hey, hang on - my
sister's doing some exciting work here.' I said to her, 'Look, we can develop
this together as a project which may or may not eventually happen.' "
So, while they then continued to pursue their separate careers - Ralph in
films such as Schindler's List and Quiz Show, Martha in award-winning ads and
music videos - first Michael Ignatieff and then a young writer called Peter
Ettedgui churned out various fresh drafts, after the Fienneses themselves had
jointly written an early treatment.
"The real lift was The English Patient," says Fiennes. "I was now perceived
as being 'bankable'. Doors had been open before, but nervously. After all,
here was a script about a man who first says no to the girl, shoots his best
friend for no really good reason, and then doesn't get the girl. When the
money began to get serious, the voices of compromise also began to come in,
but we were determined to do it the way we wanted.
"As for my extra role as executive producer, I didn't know quite what it
actually meant," he adds. "I'd seen people before called executive producers
who did absolutely nothing. I wasn't involved in the money. I was there to
support Martha, which mainly meant in terms of the script. We both discovered
how it was necessary to make wrenches away from the source material yet, at
the same time, still be true to it. It's about responding cinematically to
what's on the page."
Overall, Fiennes - who has since completed three roles in Istvan Szabo's
Taste of Sunshine, and is currently finishing his first foray into the world
of Graham Greene, playing Maurice Bendrix in Neil Jordan's new version of The
End of the Affair - seems content. "Between the two of us, I think we can say
this is the film we wanted to make," he says, adding just a little
enigmatically, "as much as one ever can."
Ralph Fiennes also takes part in Radio 3's 'Pushkin and St Petersburg'
festival, beginning on Sunday.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 1999. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information.
article ist is copyrighted and for reading purposes by
our fellow Nabokovians only.
-----------------
From: Yinshih@aol.com
DAILY TELEGRAPH
ISSUE 1462 Thursday 27 May 1999
Ralph takes a shot at Pushkin
Ralph Fiennes's star power won't help him if the Russians don't like his new
film this weekend. He talks to Quentin Falk
RALPH FIENNES has never been exactly famous for embracing the publicity
machine. Despite a glittering career that has already contained a clutch of
award-winning stage roles and Oscar-nominated film performances, the
diffident 36-year-old actor is known for giving interviews with all the
enthusiasm of a man having teeth extracted.
So discovering him in a working men's club adjacent to the stark Trellick
Tower in west London seemed only marginally less surprising than hearing him
talk at full spate and with undiluted passion about his latest film, Onegin,
which sees him back on the big screen in his best form since that
trophy-laden spectacular, The English Patient. It will be released in the UK
later this year.
Fiennes is inordinately proud of his most personal project to date - an
£11-million adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, Evgeny Onegin.
He's clearly nervous about it, too. He is not only the eponymous star but
also executive producer; his sister, Martha, directed the film and brother
Magnus composed the music. His real-life girlfriend, Francesca Annis, even
has a sexy, blink-and-you'll-miss it cameo in the pre-credit sequence.
It sounds, on the face of it, dangerously like a mega-dollar home movie,
strictly for family and friends. Happily, the reality is somewhat different,
for what this American-financed collaboration between three of the six
Fiennes siblings has yielded is a quite stunning, intensely moving romantic
tragedy, set in a beautifully recreated 19th-century Russia - achieved with a
skilful mixture of St Petersburg locations, lavish Shepperton studio sets and
a handy local common.
But what concerns Fiennes much more than any accusations of nepotism is his
impending visit to Russia, where the film is to be the centrepiece of a
Pushkin festival beginning this weekend in St Petersburg. Not just any
festival, mind you, but the home leg of a series of worldwide celebrations to
mark the bicentenary of the birth of Russia's national poet, on June 6.
On the scale of nerve-racking, playing Chekhov's Ivanov at Moscow's Maly
Theatre - as Fiennes did a couple of years back, in an Almeida Theatre
production - was a mere shudder by comparison.
Pushkin is quoted by Russians in the way Shakespeare is quoted here. Fiennes
suggests twitchily that it's more like messing with the Bible, except that
Pushkin's work - which also includes The Gypsies, Boris Godunov and The Queen
of Spades, as well as reams of verse - is probably better known in Russia
than the Bible.
Yet, while acknowledging a huge sense of responsibility, Fiennes claims that
it would have been unwise in translation to cinema to be "too precious about
it". "You can't be hamstrung by national possessiveness," he says. "Of course
one rightly has to be aware of how the piece is regarded. I can't say how
Russians will respond, but they will inevitably be critical of certain
choices, of certain changes we've made in the poem. They know it so well -
it's almost like making changes in the Gospel story."
Or, as he politely warned a group of Russian journalists who were visiting
London to see Onegin for the first time, "it represents Pushkin's poem - and
a film is not just a projected piece of script."
The Onegin story - best known in the west as the Tchaikovsky opera, with its
great lyrical arias such as Tatiana's Letter Song and its magnificent final
duet - follows the mixed fortunes of a cynical big-city bachelor, whose
enforced stay in the country on inheriting his wealthy uncle's estate
triggers a compelling scenario of love and pain. At the heart of the piece is
an epically pointless duel that tragically presaged Pushkin's own premature
end in 1837, aged just 38.
Doggedly pursuing his Pushkin project, in which he co-stars with Liv Tyler,
Toby Stephens and Lena Headey, rather neatly straddles Fiennes's acting
career to date. "At RADA," he recalls, "we had a wonderful teacher and
librarian called Lloyd Trott, who saw his role as encouraging the students to
have a wider breadth of knowledge about literature in general. He suggested I
read Evgeny Onegin. It may have been just coincidence that I was playing
Ivanov at the time, who's also a prime example of 'the superfluous man' in
Russian literature. Onegin was the first of that kind. I loved the poem,
especially in the Nabokov translation, and the character. From then on, I
carried it always in the back of my mind thinking, 'One day. . . what a
wonderful part. . .' "
By the time he completed his first film in 1992 (an ambitious if deeply
unsuccessful version of Wuthering Heights) the project had moved haltingly on
to paper. "I had scrawled some loose storyboard ideas," says Fiennes, "drawn
some pictures and even written a small treatment which I then showed to
Martha, who was doing commercials and promo videos. It wasn't a question of
just giving her a break, rather more my recognising, 'Hey, hang on - my
sister's doing some exciting work here.' I said to her, 'Look, we can develop
this together as a project which may or may not eventually happen.' "
So, while they then continued to pursue their separate careers - Ralph in
films such as Schindler's List and Quiz Show, Martha in award-winning ads and
music videos - first Michael Ignatieff and then a young writer called Peter
Ettedgui churned out various fresh drafts, after the Fienneses themselves had
jointly written an early treatment.
"The real lift was The English Patient," says Fiennes. "I was now perceived
as being 'bankable'. Doors had been open before, but nervously. After all,
here was a script about a man who first says no to the girl, shoots his best
friend for no really good reason, and then doesn't get the girl. When the
money began to get serious, the voices of compromise also began to come in,
but we were determined to do it the way we wanted.
"As for my extra role as executive producer, I didn't know quite what it
actually meant," he adds. "I'd seen people before called executive producers
who did absolutely nothing. I wasn't involved in the money. I was there to
support Martha, which mainly meant in terms of the script. We both discovered
how it was necessary to make wrenches away from the source material yet, at
the same time, still be true to it. It's about responding cinematically to
what's on the page."
Overall, Fiennes - who has since completed three roles in Istvan Szabo's
Taste of Sunshine, and is currently finishing his first foray into the world
of Graham Greene, playing Maurice Bendrix in Neil Jordan's new version of The
End of the Affair - seems content. "Between the two of us, I think we can say
this is the film we wanted to make," he says, adding just a little
enigmatically, "as much as one ever can."
Ralph Fiennes also takes part in Radio 3's 'Pushkin and St Petersburg'
festival, beginning on Sunday.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 1999. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information.