This is a very long article about Ralph Fiennes. Part of it is about Coriolanus. I have included that part. If you would like to read the entire article, it can be found here:http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/arts/julie-kavanagh/ralph-fiennes?page=0%2C0
- Quote :
- For two years, Fiennes’s commitment—inordinate and unabated—has been to making a film version of “Coriolanus”, the springboard for a new career as a director. Why this particular Shakespeare play, seldom performed and less than lyrical, should hold such a fascination, he cannot fully explain. “Except that certain parts arrive for actors—like ‘Jerusalem’ for Mark Rylance—and I feel I can say something about Coriolanus, express some totality about him.” He admits, too, that the character allows him to explore “so much shit of my own”.
Coriolanus is a fearless Roman soldier, who refuses to toe the political line urged on him by the patricians and feign humility to the plebeians—which would secure his election as consul. “He’s like a jihadist,” Fiennes says, “a man who will not negotiate. It’s not something I can believe in myself, but that extremity is thrilling to investigate.” And yet Coriolanus’s absolutism sounds not unlike Fiennes. “Ralph’s never swayed by any entity,” Martha says. “He has a single-mindedness, a core of strength that allows him to do dangerous things and not be afraid of ridicule.” The psyche of the soldier is close to his heart: as a child he drew battle scenes and dreamed of being a marine, and he remains fascinated with military strategy. But the most crucial link may be this: “There’s no man in the world/More bound to [his]mother.”
When he played Coriolanus on stage, in a Kent production which ran in tandem with “Richard II” in 2000, Fiennes polarised spectators. I can still picture his arrogant, narcissistic Richard, but struggle to remember Coriolanus, apart from the spittle-flying venom of his words. One critic friend, Peter Conrad, admired “the pleasure Fiennes took in being hateful—so unlike the craving most actors have to be loved: as much a self-portrait as his Onegin”. Another, Alastair Macaulay, was dismissive: “You could hear everything he said, and you couldn’t understand a word of it.” The acoustics at the vast Gainsborough Film Studios were “horrible” for all the actors, Fiennes says, though in playing a character defined by rage his shortcomings were more conspicuous. Over the next decade the idea of playing Coriolanus in the intimate medium of film became an obsession. On camera he could contain the fury in a close-up, and show interior emotions that would not register on stage. “Shakespeare is internal,” he says. “I’m sure he would be writing for the cinema if he were alive today.”
As it happened, a Hollywood screenwriter who shared an agent with Fiennes was equally consumed by “Coriolanus”, and convinced that of all the plays this one would have more power on the screen. This was John Logan, whose scripts for “Gladiator” and “The Aviator” were both nominated for Oscars. “The miraculous thing was that we were on exactly the same wavelength,” Logan says, and Fiennes echoes him: “It’s been completely symbiotic.” They both wanted street-to-street fighting, with the Volsci presented as insurgents, and the language was to be one that film executives could understand. Coriolanus is “a sort of killing machine. A shark moving through the ocean. Ruthless and efficient”; and the great lines (“like an eagle in a dovecote, I/Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles”) would be offset by 21st-century asides, such as “Menenaus consults his BlackBerry”. They also agreed on the need to heighten the domestic drama at the heart of “Coriolanus”— the mother-son axis, which matches Coriolanus’s love-hate bond with his enemy, Tullus Aufidius.
While rehearsing “Oedipus”, Fiennes was also struggling to finance “Coriolanus”. The main investor, an American billionaire, withdrew after the financial meltdown, and the project collapsed. “It didn’t surprise me,” said Fiennes. “I’m an untried director, I know the reality.” Logan was even more pessimistic: “I would have bet against it happening. ‘Coriolanus’ is not only a Shakespeare play, it’s one not many people would rush to see. But Ralph is the proverbial iron butterfly—gentle and nurturing, with a spine of steel.”
When we met for lunch in spring 2009, Fiennes was about to go to Cannes in a last attempt to get “Coriolanus” on course for that year. His mood was sombre, but he became impassioned discussing the possibilities, putting his framing hands right up against my face. “Every soliloquy is a close-up. It’s about getting into people—behind the eyes.” The film would probably happen, he said, if he cast Meryl Streep as Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia, but he had promised the role to Vanessa Redgrave. “I wanted her from day one. She has infinite layers of spirit going on.” He was in a rare limbo; his only work that summer was recording Eliot’s “Four Quartets” for Faber.
In the autumn he spent nine weeks on the permanent “Harry Potter” set at Leavesden Studios, filming Part 1 of “The Deathly Hallows”, his fourth appearance as the evil Voldemort. “It’s quite fun. I’m looked after; it takes the pressure off the huge anxiety.” We had lunch in his trailer, Fiennes in full make-up, with a veined scalp, yellowy little teeth, and long stained nails emphasising his feminine fingers. I asked if anything was different in his life. “No,” he replied firmly, “I’m a single man and I intend to stay that way. I think, ‘shall I call up so-and-so?’ and then I decide I’m too tired.”
His fee was big enough for him to consider part-funding “Coriolanus” himself—“I couldn’t bear for it to go down”—and he had used an invitation to the Belgrade film festival to scout for locations. It was Serbia’s dismal, war-scarred capital that he had chosen as the “somewhere, nowhere place” he wanted—a setting that could just as well be Chechnya or Basra.
He played me the mood reel, which was brutally contemporary and included footage of the anti-Milosevic riots. “I want to use the Serbian police who were involved as extras.” Opening a folder on his MacBook, he showed me clips of the sugar factory he had chosen for the scene where Volumnia, accompanied by Coriolanus’s wife and son, begs him to reconsider sacking Rome. Two stand-ins slowly walked the length of the abandoned factory floor. One was Amanda Harlech, wearing a “Dr Zhivago” hat and ankle-length coat, the other the film’s Serbian line producer, Angie Vlaisavljevic, whose faith had touched Fiennes: “the most extraordinary friend”.
By October his luck with “Coriolanus” had changed. The producer of “The Duchess”, Gaby Tana, who is half-American, half-Serbian, had been intrigued by Fiennes’s concept of the play as a political thriller and found a young investor in Belgrade to put up significant money. With three producers now involved (including Colin Vaines, from “Lawrence after Arabia”), the next step was to halve the original budget and reach a figure that was marketable. A last-minute coup, in studio terms, was the casting of a Hollywood action man, Gerard Butler, as Tullus Aufidius. Fiennes had managed to keep on board his dream team, which included the cinematographer from “The Hurt Locker”, Barry Ackroyd, chosen for his documentary realism; Susanna Lenton, a script editor whose work Fiennes had admired on “The Constant Gardener” and “The Reader”; and Joan Washington, his voice coach from RADA days, to steer the actors to naturalism. On January 7th Fiennes flew to Belgrade, moving into a white, light, split-level flat in Strahinjica Bana—the Shoreditch of Serbia—to begin “the miracle” of shooting “Coriolanus”.
Eight months later, pushing his bike along the pavements of Soho after dinner, Fiennes relived the ordeal of watching the audience at a test screening answer questions about his film, hands shooting up, or not, like schoolchildren’s. The film was “locked” but there was time for small fixes—some responding to notes from Peter Brook, whose naturalistic “King Lear” had been an influence. I’d been out twice to Belgrade during the shoot and seen how close the feel of the shoot was to the mood reel. The film mingled organically with its locations: in a market scene locals picked over the produce; a restaurant frequented by Serbian gangsters had a genuine “no guns” sign on the door, and opposite was a fast-food kiosk that had been renamed Sausage Maximus. On the second trip I watched a rough-cut on Fiennes’s Mac: urgent, fast-moving action and close-ups so tight that you could count the rays on his irises.
To see Fiennes directing was to observe his many facets: his fastidiousness about details; his art-school eye guiding the framing of every shot; a playfulness which sunlit the room when he was elated; his Oedipus ferocity with hands circling his shaven pate in despair at the chatter between takes (even Colin Vaines was once a target of his fury, “which was quite scary”). At dinner on a warm May night he looked shattered by the strain of acting as well as directing. It was nearly midnight, and we were sitting on an empty terrace overlooking the floodlit castle walls, with gamey smells drifting up from the zoo below. He had struggled all day, he said, to find the truth of the lines “to reach that naked place”, while knowing he had to keep to the schedule. “I felt very alone.”
Those close to Fiennes are used to seeing his eyes go suddenly gauzy in mid-conversation. “I know when not to ask what he’s thinking,” Joan Washington says. “It’s not for you. He’s gone into his room.” Vaines calls it “Ralph going to Narnia—processing stuff. You know at some point he’ll come back again.” This is the prerogative of stardom—what Anthony Lane has called “that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve”. But “Coriolanus” brought out something new: a nurturing, even parental side to Fiennes, which empowered others and infected them with his passion. John Logan had felt reassured that “this was not a vanity project for an actor”. I left Belgrade with an equally strong conviction: Ralph Fiennes has reinvented himself, and “Coriolanus” is just the beginning.
Coriolanus is expected to open in the spring (Julie Kavanagh is the biographer of Rudolf Nureyev and a former London editor of
Vanity Fair and the
New Yorker.)
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Subject: Two Years With Ralph Fiennes 
Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:10 am
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