Page 8 - Fujifilm Exposure_10 Longitude_ok

SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Turning a bestseller into possibly one of the last great television dramas of the 20th Century
The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.” It sounds almost the perfect pitch for an epic historical movie. In fact, it was the front page paperback blurb for Longitude, surely a candidate for one of the most unlikely bestsellers of recent years.
This slim volume by American science reporter Dava Sobel began life as a magazine article before being developed into a gripping full-length narrative tracing the 40-year obsession of 18th Century Yorkshire clockmaker John
Harrison with building the per-
fect timepiece.
In his day, thousands of mariners were being stranded or killed as they had no way of measuring their exact position on the seemingly infinite oceans. So in 1714 a govern- ment-appointed board offered £20,000 to any man who could solve the knottiest nautical poser of the day - accurately measuring longitude at sea. While others looked for answers in the stars, Harrison thought he could make a clock that would still be able to keep time accu- rately on board a ship - some- thing that everyone else deemed impossible - allowing sailors to chart their exact posi- tion and avoid tragedy.
Perfect for a movie? Not
quite so obviously as you might first think, according to writer-director Charles Sturridge, who made Brideshead Revisited and Gulliver’s Travels. He recalled feeling even when he first read the book that “it had none of the ingredients of the conventional film. It took place over forty years, the central character aged from forty to eighty and it was essentially a repet- itive series of events - invention, discussion, trial, and then all over again. It was unwieldy in every respect.”
Then last September he was approached by Granada Films who said they were desperate to turn the book into film, simply didn’t know how to crack it but if he could find a way of telling the story, Channel Four would definitely make it.
Said Sturridge: “It was like having a green-lit film without a film. At the time the concept was immense-
ly attractive: that if I could solve the intellectual and dramatic problem the financial problem was already done.” He had just three months to come up with two two-hour scripts for what Channel 4 is now regarding as its cornerstone Millennium drama, co-starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons.
“I simply didn’t know what I was going to write so I had to research it first. I hadn’t, like most other people, ever heard of Harrison (played by Gambon) before reading Dava’s book. It’s a documentary novel and I needed to know much more about what hap-
pened in order to make it dra- matic. Certainly you could say her book was the ‘inspiration’ for what I did.”
The main key to unlocking the drama, said Sturridge, was the character of a Lieutenant Commander Rupert Gould who in fact appears almost as a footnote towards the end of Sobel’s book. It was Gould, a British naval officer, who in the 1920s, began the mammoth task of restoring Harrison’s clockmaking legacy.
One phrase in the book, “his unhappy marriage and sep- aration”, particularly fascinat- ed Sturridge who somehow felt Gould (played by Irons) was absolutely crucial to the telling of the story: “I went to the National Maritime Museum and spoke to the curator Jonathan
Betts who confirmed my thoughts. So he’s now an intrinsic part of the narrative. His obsession in the 20th Century mirrors Harrison’s two centuries earli- er. His own personal fight between sanity and clock- making created a whole line of thought which became the spiritual underbelly of the film. The two stories manage to dovetail in the most extraordinary way.” Two men, you might say, whose lives literally become linked by time.
After research - which also included his exciting discovery of important new material which actually advances Harrison’s amazing story beyond what Sobel herself had managed to uncover - Sturridge was left with about five weeks actually to write the scripts. He delivered them just before last Christmas, the official “green light” came in very early January
and pre-production on the £5.5 million green-lighted project began almost immediately.
“In effect”, said Sturridge, whose feature films include A Handful Of Dust and Fairytale - A True Story, “we’re making two big costume feature films for the price of a Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. We have almost one whole film with Jeremy which took three and a half weeks. It’s set entirely in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties going on through the Second World War. Then, there’s a whole section set in London in different states of 18th Century preservation. That took us over two weeks. There’s a courtroom drama, featuring the Board Of Longitude which we shot in Oxford.
“Now,” explained Sturridge, as he prowled the claustrophobic gun deck of HMS Orford on
Photo above: Charles Sturridge, director of Channel 4’s Longitude.
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