IRELAND: FILM STARS AND DIRECTORS AT DUBLIN CASTLE LAUNCH PROJECT TO PUT PLAYWRIGHT SAMUEL BECKETT'S WORK ON SCREEN

Record ID: 390764

  • Title: IRELAND: FILM STARS AND DIRECTORS AT DUBLIN CASTLE LAUNCH PROJECT TO PUT PLAYWRIGHT SAMUEL BECKETT'S WORK ON SCREEN
  • Date: 1st February 2001
  • Summary: DUBLIN CASTLE (FEB 1, 2001) (REUTERS -ACCESS ALL) SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR NEIL JORDAN SAYING "She was remarkable. I mean it's a great challenge for an actor, it really is. But the engagement with the actor is as much with the body because Beckett insisted they be confined in a place where only the mouth could be seen. So the rest of the body could not move, you
  • Embargoed: 16th February 2001 12:00
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  • Location: DUBLIN CASTLE, DUBLIN, REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
  • Country: Ireland
  • Reuters ID: LVA4FY79MPQSVZVK2R01879W9LUX
  • Story Text: He's one of the most influential playwrights to have come out of Dublin and now a host of international filmmakers have decided it's time to put the plays of Samuel Beckett onto the big screen. Anthony Minghella, Neil Jordan, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Irons, Harold Pinter: the list of names attached to this extraordinary project is endless and all were at Dublin Castle to celebrate the launch of "Beckett on Film".
    It's a mammoth project and has taken two years to complete.
    But now that it is, every one of Samuel Beckett's plays has been adapted to the big screen.
    The number of directors who begged for a play to put their name to, is mind-boggling, from Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) to Michael Lindsey Hogg, David Mamet and Dublin's very own Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), (End of the Affair).
    Proof of the remarkable impact this Dublin-born playwright had on filmmakers and actors of his time.
    The artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theatre Michael Colgan has directed all of Beckett's plays in theatres around the world. But he decided it was time that Beckett's work - which was one of the twentieth century's greatest legacies should be made more accessible.
    They should be put onto the big screen.
    Colgan was given permission from the Beckett estate, but with strict guidelines. In his time, Beckett was known for his relentless control over the way his plays were performed, many feared that giving filmmakers absolute freedom could be potentially damaging.
    But careful selection of contributing artists, all die-hard Beckett fans, ensured Beckett would not have been disappointed.
    Minghella directed Beckett's 1963 play "Play". "What happened is that when I was an undergraduate I was passionate about Beckett. The first play I ever directed was "Play" and I was obsessed, I was the worst kind of Beckett anorak, I used to go to bed reading his plays, I had a vision of going to France to meet him, I did my postgraduate work on Beckett. He was really a significant part of my education. I was at that age of enormous suggestibility, even the way I wrote was influenced by his handwriting, everything. I really had a fantasy that I'd sit in a café in Paris and he'd come up and talk to me. So when the chance came to have a serious go at Beckett it was too good to turn down."
    "Play "- its environment is about people trapped in the banalities of their life in another life. The idea is, rather like Dante, that purgatory will be some place that has an ironic working out of your pecadillos in life. So there are three characters stuck in urns and they're forced to rehearse the vicissitudes of their personal lives. And quite clearly from the play, this is not just true of these three people but all people - all of us are to be sentenced to this terrible life where an inquisitor, some kind of interrogator will be pulling the truth out of us again and again and again, and then have to say the same things over and over again until we're released. And so I thought rather than having a theatrical version, what is a cinematic version in the theatre - a light swivels and makes people talk - well that's the theatrical idea. In the cinema you have a camera. It looms at me and I talk. And so I thought I would use that idea that the camera replaces the light and becomes an interrogator", Minghella adds.
    Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Juliet Stevenson do justice to Minghella·s startlingly innovative camera work.
    They have to fire off their words like machine guns, until all cadences and movement of speech were lost - leaving just a torrent of monotonous dialogue. A major task for any actor.
    For Jeremy Iron's too, his skills as an actor were put to the test. He stars in Beckett's more recent play written in 1980, "Ohio Impromptu".
    "It's about loss, it's about facing up to loss really, I think that's what Beckett was trying to explore. And the more we looked at it the more we thought, it's the same person. He has the two men dressed alike in white wigs which on stage you need to do. And we said ·no it's the same person. Now on film you can do that. I played both people and we used a motion control camera which allows you to duplicate exactly the movement of the camera so that you can move from one side and then come into another side and the camera will print you on the film at the same time. And so I can, so to speak, talk to myself. I used it in a film by David Cronenberg called "Dead Ringers" where I played identical twins. George Lucas developed it."
    Julianne Moore is perhaps the woman who had the hardest time with Beckett's words. Neil Jordan directs her mouth in the film "Not I", 1972.
    "She was remarkable. I mean it's a great challenge for an actor, it really is. But the engagement with the actor is as much with the body because Beckett insisted they be confined in a place where only the mouth could be seen. So the rest of the body could not move, you know, so in a way it's a bit like being put in a torture wrack or something. And the actor has to go through that experience by delivering it. So we approached it from that perspective which I think was Beckett's, yes," says Neil Jordan.
    Beckett was known for his harrowing, despairing take on life which is constantly revealed in his work.
    "Waiting for Godot" is the play that put him on the map finally at the age of 47, a play that meditates on the deadening routine of peoples' lives, fixed on waiting for something that is never going to happen. New York director Michael Lindsay Hogg took on this play which is bound to be an audience filler." It's still not quite ready for screening but shall be next week."
    Reuters will provide footage and interviews once it's ready, along with more of the Beckett films.
    After Dublin, the series of Beckett films will go to London and then New York.
    ---ENDS---
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