IRELAND: HOST OF INTERNATIONAL FILM MAKERS ADAPT IRISH PLAYWRIGHT SAMUEL BECKETT'S ENTIRE COLLECTION FOR THE BIG SCREEN

Record ID: 392039

  • Title: IRELAND: HOST OF INTERNATIONAL FILM MAKERS ADAPT IRISH PLAYWRIGHT SAMUEL BECKETT'S ENTIRE COLLECTION FOR THE BIG SCREEN
  • Date: 1st September 2001
  • Summary: DUBLIN, IRELAND, (RECENT), (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) MICHAEL COLGAN SAYING "I do think that from knowing him he was extraordinary in his ordinariness. And people would think when you sit down with Smauel Beckett, you would be afraid to put two words together because of this great intellect. He was a very charming gentleman, you know? Very, very funny, had an extraor
  • Embargoed: 16th September 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: DUBLIN, IRELAND & VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: Ireland
  • Topics: Entertainment,General
  • Reuters ID: LVAA5CD9VL380RQ1RA41IRBRY7V7
  • 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. Now the films receive their London premiere at the Barbican.
    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, The Talented Mr. Ripley), Michael Lindsey Hogg, David Mamet (State and Main) 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. "When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and in fact throughout the century he was arguably one of the best known, if not the best known, playwright. And yet his work was arguably the least known. And that's because he's not really producer-friendly, you know? He'd make plays that are twelve minutes and 22 minutes. And it became that the avant garde students and people like that were doing the great works but you weren't getting the great talent."
    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.
    Neil Jordan takes Beckett's stage directions in "Not I" - for a mouth to be spotlit in a stage of darkness - and fills his entire screen with Moore's lips. Shooting her mouth simultaneously with multiple cameras and editing furiously between angles, the hectic result is a brilliant cinematic interpretation of the confused, distressed state Beckett had intended the audience to be left in. Moore delivered the 14 minutes monologue - which describes a woman's pain and anguish through various stages of life, birth and death - in one take.
    She agreed to do the piece immediately after Jordan asked her during filming of The End of the Affair.
    Colgan's co-producer on the project, Alan Maloney, said Jordan was one of the first "names" who managed to get the ball rolling. "When we started out everybody thought that we were stark, raving bonkers. People sort of launghed at us. We went to people to raise the money and people went oh yeah, right, you're going to do that, yeah. And it took a while to convince people that we were serious about what we were doing."
    Atom Egoyan directs John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape. The play again has one character, in this case a man at the end of his life, listening back to recordings of his voice during his earlier days. It was a bit of a different experience to Hurt's last role as Dr. Iannis in Captain Correlli's Mandolin and his upcoming role in the much anticipated Harry Potter film. "I got involved in the project because Michael Colgan chased me and said "I think you should play Krapp's Last Tape. It's a piece I was aware of, I hadn't seen it for some time, I saw Jackie Magaran play it and I seem to remember Albert Finney play it too, at Chichester and so on. So I knew what the piece was but it was pretty vague in my memory. I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to do Beckett you know. I thought, rather like a lot of other people, I thought it was going to be rather dry and sombre, and perhaps a bit boring now - to mention the dreadful word. But I have to say that I'm very pleased I decided I would do it. Because it became a very significant thing in my life to play the man."
    One man whose life has been directly impacted by the work of Samuel Beckett is the playwright Harold Pinter. He makes an appearance in Beckett's Catastrophe which David Mamet directs.
    The film also stars Sir John Gielgud. It was his last performance.
    It's not surprising that Pinter, Gielgud, Minghella...
    would have grown up steeped on the words of Samuel Beckett.
    Anthony Minghella was so obsessed with Beckett as a student that he used to model his handwriting on the great playwright's and sit in a cafe in Paris waiting for Beckett to come in. Minghella directs Play which is about people trapped in the banalities of life. Minghella uses the camera as an interrogator, grilling his three sad characters in their love triangle. 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.
    Along with the heavyweights, a team of younger Irish directors get to have a go at Beckett. Kieran J. Walsh makes one of the most beautiful interpretations of Beckett, with his Rough for Theatre 1. In the simple and poignant exchange between two men, the play has a similar feel to Waiting for Godot, which put Beckett on the map at the age of 47.
    The Beckett films open at London's Barbican on September
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