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hour of the woolf
A cast to die for and a location on his own doorstep. No wonder Stephen Daldry couldn’t resist The Hours. Steve Pratt reports
academy interview
How do you avoid the pres- sure attempting to follow up a international, award- winning box-office hit?
In Stephen Daldry’s case, he didn’t hang around to find out how Billy Elliot would be received, com- mitting to The Hours before his fea- ture film debut was even released.
By the time he’d joined the ranks of British theatre directors who’ve successfully made the move from stage to screen, he was well under way with his next project.
“It was not as if I was feeling particularly anxious about what I should do next. You can go mad worrying about those things ulti- mately. The Hours just seemed to be the best of the material that was around at the time,” he says.
The apparent ease with which 42-year-old Daldry has estab- lished himself on film perhaps results from a carefully consid- ered career that took him from the Gate, a small London fringe theatre where he built up an international reputation, to artistic director of the Royal Court.
He saw the theatre through a massive fund-raising and rebuild- ing programme. Meanwhile, his radical revival of J B Priestley’s 1945 play An Inspector Calls became a long-running hit all over the world.
His first foray into film came through UK production company Working Title with the BAFTA-nomi- nated short Eight. Then he made Billy Elliot for the company’s low budget spinoff WT2.
He remains loyal both to that company and the British film industry, brushing aside any idea that The Hours should be classed as American.
“This is a British film, and we argue very heavily that it should be a British film,” he says. “A British company was formed spe- cially to make this, and we set it up in Pinewood. People ask me what it was like making a Hollywood film, and I have absolutely no idea. I had nothing to do with the studio except to show them the film. I went to Paramount to show them, at the end of which they said, ‘Thank you very much’.”
Based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-win- ning novel, The Hours intricately weaves together three stories in three different locations at three different times. Virginia Woolf struggles to complete her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway; an unhappy 1950s housewife finds solace in the book; and a modern day Mrs Dalloway plans a party for a dying friend.
“The best thing about David Hare’s screenplay, and I was reading a lot of screenplays at the time, was that this didn’t seem like any other film.”
“We sent a lot of time before we started, like eight months, to know exactly what we were doing when we started shooting. This was not a film created in the editing room. The editing concerned rhythm and pace,” he says.
He also credits the screenplay with getting the cast — headed by the considerably starry trio of Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore — he wanted. “It’s an odd thing to say but we were very lucky. I put this down to David Hare’s screenplay. Everyone we asked said yes. It was pretty much our genuine wish list,” he says.
“We did a rehearsal period as I would have done in a play or as I did on Billy Elliot. That was useful. But you go through much the same process of intellectual and physical exploration of what the possibility for each particular scene is. There were minor differ- ences, but it was much more the similarities that struck me.”
The difference with Kidman, of course, was the prosthetic nose worn to make her look less Nicole Kidman and more Virginia Woolf. Surprisingly, Daldry says the false nose was very much a late deci- sion that arose out of rehearsals.
“We started to play around with shoes and dress and wigs, and it was part of that particular process. We thought why don’t we just try and see whether any- thing can happen if we try some sort of prosthetic on your nose. It never felt to us like a major issue,” he recalls.
“It was just something we tried that seemed to help Nicole. It seemed to release her, to give her permission to go into other areas, like any classical mask might for an actor.
“It took her about three, three- and-a-half hours every morning
to get it on so it became some- thing of a practical burden. But, by the time we made the deci- sion, we had already started shooting and couldn’t go back.”
As well as ten days location filming exteriors in New York – including the director’s own apartment building – and Florida, The Hours was shot at Pinewood and somewhere Daldry mysteri- ously, at first, describes as “a house just outside Luton”.
This turns out to be his own Hertfordshire home, which stands in for Virginia Woolf’s Sussex house. That property has been altered since her time and the National Trust wouldn’t let them film inside.
“It was all rather tricky, so we were looking for another house.
It was the location manager who actually suggested my house, which looked remarkably similar with certain changes. I loved film- ing there. Normally, I wouldn’t let a film crew anywhere near it!”
Photo: Nicole Kidman and Stephen Daldry
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