Coverage of the Q&A for The King’s Speech from the London Film Festival…
In attendance:
- Tom Hooper (Director)
- Colin Firth (Prince Albert/King George)
- Geoffrey Rush (Lionel)
- Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth I).
Did you have concerns with representing characters in this film, the main concern being that some of the people are still alive?
Tom: Yeah. I was very careful about the accuracy of the film and I did a lot of research, and so did the actors. That [part of] history does matter to me and facts matter to me. At the same time it was a balancing act between verifiable historical truth and dramatic shape and that relationship is one we have constantly discussed. The great excitement of this film was the discovery, nine weeks before the shoot, that Lionel Logue’s grandson had all these papers in his aunt’s attic which were never before seen, unpublished diaries, fragments of autobiography, even King George VI’s medical report cards describing his rather weak diaphragm. To have these insights into this relationships was really incredibly exciting, particularly nine weeks before the shoot.
Is there a message for the challenges people with disabilities and their families face?
Tom: One I thing I would say that I think’s important in the film is that this film isn’t about the miracle cure. I had a screening in Mill Valley, San Francisco recently and a man came up to me very moved. His mother was disabled, had watched the film and wanted to pass on to me the fact that she was very grateful that we hadn’t made a film about someone that has an ‘I can walk!’ feeling at the end of the film. When Colin [Firth] and I listened to King George VI making his final broadcast he was still clearly a man coping with a stammer. We wanted to avoid any Hollywood climax where suddenly he was completely liberated and was Lawrence Olivier! I think for most people who deal with disabilities it’s not about a cure but working with it and I think that’s an incredibly important part of the movie.
Colin: I don’t really feel competent to address this [question] satisfactorily but the first question, did we feel a responsibility to the living members of the Royal Family is absolutely yes. But I think equally we were trying to address the disabilities that I tried to enact and to try and do it as honestly as possible and like Tom says I think good story telling is never about trying to provide answers. It’s about being honest, it’s about issues and problems and how we seek to eradicate them.
Colin, you gave a great performance in the film. How important is it for you on a personal level and collectively as a film, to be recognised with a flock of awards next year?
Colin: Thank you. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. The fact people are talking that way is a sign of how positively they’ve responded to it, which is incredibly gratifying. This certainly wasn’t a walk in the park by any means We exhausted every option available to us. But that’s happened to me many many times but then you just get a load of old cabbages thrown at you! There is no justice to appeal to in that respect, people don’t owe you gratitude just because you’ve tried very hard. On this occasion it’s wonderful to see the fact we care as much about something and so far we’ve been getting a lot of awards.
Question for Colin. As a person who suffers from a stammer myself I felt you did a very good job as portraying the King. How much research did you do in order the achieve the performance?
Colin: A lot! What was interesting for me was that you don’t just pull out your stammer from the draw, it really doesn’t work that way. That was an education for me because I thought I could!
Helena: All that hard work!
Colin: It’s not the same, it’s not going to be the same for everybody. It won’t feel the same. What you’re doing every time of course, what you’re really playing is not stammering and that’s really what you’ve got to arrive at. I researched it as an issue and I’ve spoken to people who’ve experienced it, including our own writer [David Seidler] who was probably out best source of all. He’d overcome a stammer himself and he talked to us about it. He was incredibly eloquent. It’s not so much what’s happening physiologically, which I had to try and find in my own way. Tom [Hooper] sculpted it a great deal, ‘how much do we need at this point?’, that sort of thing. There was a lot of very deliberate technical plotting of it, but then you have to do something that’s far more visceral than that, and what interested me the most, rather than what’s going on in a man’s muscles, was talking to David [the writer] about what the fears are. David would say for instance that when it was bad [the stammer] it was all he would think about. In a restaurant you don’t order the fish if you can’t say ‘F’, and your life can be like that, be dictated by that fear. It doesn’t matter what else is at stake in what you have to do that day and those things were very helpful to me in understanding the terror that this man felt. If you look at footage of him making that speech there’s kind of a little narrative to what he’s going through, or how to interpret what he’s going through. He gets to a word, and you can see he gets to a moment when he realises that word is not going to come out. You see the dismay. When you watch that you find out about him, that’s something heroic, there’s something epic going on. The you see him come back at it and carry on with the same desire, there’s nothing to do but move forward. I found that fascinating in understanding his character.
I was wondering if your views of the British monarchy changed at all during the making of this film?
Helena: No! I wouldn’t say that I was unaware to the extent and how chronic it was [the event of Prince Albert becoming King George VI] so it gave me a fresh angle on a very important piece of British history for us, the abdication. We came very close to a proper crisis in our monarchy. The pressure on this man was totally new to me. Also the story about a man who doesn’t want to be King just emphasises the hugeness of the job. I certainly would never want to be a Royal, although I seem to think I am at times! That’s entirely why I played this part because I knew I could play the Queen! I found the part really enjoyable. It was enjoyable you know just to pretend, and then you can take your crown off and not be like that anymore. The Queen Mother was extraordinary because she was a professional public figure and an expert at it. But she had character and confidence. She married a man who was not born to be King and wasn’t really constitutionally meant to be King, so you have to do a job that you’re not suited to. Luckily I think he drew upon her confidence where he lacked it. It was really a true partnership, and also about the woman behind the man. Sadly it wasn’t called The Queen’s Speech! The King’s Speech is about the man behind the man. In the background I’m just there!
Geoffrey you’re from a country that has mixed feelings about monarchy [Australia]! Does this film warm you more to the monarchy? You play the most unknown character yet possibly the most key character in bringing George VI to life.
Geoffrey: I’ve always had an intriguing fascinating obsession with the whole dynasty of British royalty. I find the complexity and history and shaping of their image interesting. And I suppose the House of Windsor which is still with us is to me the first sort of reality TV show. They became a family. I remember the first time they left the cameras in the palace in the late 60’s early 70’s was a sort of ‘At Home with the Windsors’, which was probably the beginning of demystifying them. I just find all that intriguing. I’d like my country to be a bit more adult and independent but I do find the presence of royalty and monarchy still intriguing.
It’s a wonderfully witty script with some fantastic characters, especially Lionel Logue. How much of it is true, how much did you have to fill in the blanks and how did you fill them?
Tom: I’m sure everyone knows about the Royal family and that their ability to control the flow of information from the palace is pretty formidable. I’m sure any press that try to get anything from the Royal family will have discovered that. So that affects our abilities to tell their story even when it’s decades later. The most valuable source for us was the diaries. Lionel only started writing them when Albert became King. When he was the plain old Duke of York I don’t think Lionel realised that this was particularly note worthy, which is quite interesting in terms of the sense of the Duke of York standing. I think when he became King the penny dropped and Lionel thought “I better start keeping a diary” so we had an account of that. But even in the diaries, which are being published later in the year, he’s still incredibly careful not to to talk too much about the detail of what’s happening in the therapy, and for me the things I got out of it were dialogue. At the end of the speech when Lionel says to the King “you still stammered on the ‘W’” and the King says “well I had to throw in a few [mistakes] so they knew it was me” is a direct quote from the diary. That was last spoken out loud by King George VI and Lionel Logue. In terms of where the therapy comes from, the content of the therapy comes out of David’s [the writer] imagination. He has a strong claim of understanding therapy in that period because he was born in 1937, he had a terrible stammer as a child and he went through therapy initially in England and also in America in the 40’s early 50’s, so it was ten or fifteen years after the period that Lionel Logue was practicing. Things like the swearing technique, which I’m often asked if that would have actually happened, we don’t actually know if it was used but the interesting thing is that it was a technique used with David in the 40’s. It was a breakthrough and that’s an incredibly powerful and important thing. In terms of the B plot, the therapy plot, I think the film is a personal exploration of the way David overcame stammering because we don’t have intimate details about Logue and the King. But the A plot, the historical plot, is obviously well documented. The key shift in the script is to compress the chronology because Logue and Bertie met each other a while before the abdication in reality and we compressed it in order to create the ticking clock of the abdication. I did force David to rewrite the script to obey historical chronology and it had a first act with absolutely no pressure that he would ever have to be anything other than the Duke of York, and I turned round to David and said “I just made your script worse! I’m very sorry!” But I had to do it to see if a more historical chronology would work. So it’s a mixture of imagination and fact.
How are you guys with public speaking? I know you’re actors and get attention but it’s not always the case that you like it. Do you ever get stage fright or anything like that?
Helena: I don’t like making speeches. It’s not my idea of complete joy being up here [at the press conference], as much as you are all lovely! I’m the kind of introvert actor, completely crazy. But at times I go for extroversion! But no, I’m not an extrovert. I’m not very good at public speaking, I have absolute sympathy for anyone that does have to do it.
Geoffrey: I’m asked a lot to speak at film festivals and I’m the ambassador for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and more public things like that. I’ve discovered now that I prefer to prepare notes or actually write the speech so I can really hone it down to be hopefully entertaining, I try and get a laugh by at least the second line and they say what you need to say. In the early 90’s when I was working in the theatre I did go through a very bad period for about 3 or 4 years of dread inducing panic attacks before going on stage. But then I got an international film career and they sort of disappeared! Someone said to me on a plane flying over Toronto “do you realise more people have a fear of public speaking than death?” Then he said “at a funeral most people would want to be the one in the coffin!”
Colin: I got appalling stage fright last time I went on stage actually. We had a show on the Thursday night, we had only had two weeks rehearsal, we hadn’t had a proper dress rehearsal and there were no prompts. I had to open with a two page monologue and I locked myself in the toilet! I wasn’t planning on doing that! I kept thinking ‘just take a deep breath’ but I couldn’t do it. I went out for some air out the fire door, which closed behind me, so I had to go round the front, through the audience, the very people I was terrified of! I had to walk past them one by one with full body contact on the way. And I couldn’t remember the pass code to get back, I had to beg to be let back in! Then I was told I had to go straight on stage and wierdly I remembered the lines and got on with it. It was like a car crash. So when this does happen there is that tension that can be debilitating and there’s a tension that you can, god willing, convert into something functional.
Was there a moment, especially during the swearing scene, when you thought ‘was the Royal at the film premiere?’ and ‘what will the Queen make of it when she rents the DVD?!’
Colin: It’s crossed my mind! It’s something we have sort of touched on on several occasions. I don’t know, I really don’t know. I think it’s highly unlikely we’ll get anyone to verify this as inaccurate. I just like it too much and it’s quite a significant moment [when the swearing helps combat his stammer]. He goes from almost a complete relapse in front of his brother to a feeling of actual rage. It’s an expression of general panic and also the breakdown of this relationship. You can’t really get that arc without that feeling. Had I had my script version of it the swearing would have been worse! There was a moment when the producers kept running in saying “you can say and that, but you can’t say that! You cannot finish it with that word if you want it to be shown anywhere in the country!” It was frivolous, we weren’t directing it at anybody, we actually felt it had a genuine place as part of out story and as part of the therapy.
Geoffrey: Did you say “poo bum” for the airline version?
Colin: We haven’t got there yet!
So what will the Queen make of it when she gets the DVD?
Colin: I can’t possible comment!
Geoffrey: I can’t imagine Her Majesty has her laptop on and puts that scene on a loop!
Colin: I’m not convinced that there was anyone alive that didn’t know those words.
I particularly enjoyed the comedy of the children and it’s a shame mine won’t be able to see it in the cinema because of the rating. I was wondering what your thoughts were on the decision by the BBFC [to rate it 15] considering that more violent things have lower ratings.
Tom: My head is in my hands with that. I go to see Salt where a tube is shoved down Angelina Jolie’s throat and a water is then poured down to simulate drowning, that’s not a problem. The Daniel Craig scene in the last Bond where his bollocks are smashed in by a chair with no bottom, another torture scene, that doesn’t get a [age restriction rating of] 15. This extraordinary division between language and violence and sex and violence I find hugely uncertain.
Colin: Especially in the context of this language [used in this film].
Tom: Those two scenes I just mentioned are still in my head and I don’t want them in my head. There troubling me. The context of the swear words [in this film] is a) this was done in the 1940’s, we’re now 2010, b) it’s therapeutic, c) it’s not being used to describe anyone, it’s not being used in a sexual meaning… I’m just bemused by it.
Colin: It would be very interesting actually for someone to do a study to whether people would complain about that stuff [swearing in this film] before they complain about violence. I’d actually like to find out.
THE KING’S SPEECH HAS SINCE BEEN GIVEN A 12A RATING
Helena, when you’re playing a real character like this do you delve into the research or do you just go by the script? And also do you try these people out at home to see how they’re going to play?
Helena: It’s only when you’re playing a real person that you feel a real sense of responsibility. I did read William Shawcroft a bit but then it got a bit ‘vainy’ to be honest. I read an unorthorised biography [about the Queen mother]. I didn’t actually have that long, I had about two and a half weeks. I think I was playing a witch in Harry Potter at the same time. My son who’s six used to say “do you have to be a witch or the Queen tomorrow?” Anyway, you do all the reading and I took what was relevant and I watched a bit [of footage]. Normally I don’t look like her, I hope… I don’t mean that in a bad way, I meant her last years, actually… oh dear! Well, Colin doesn’t really look like him [King George VI] but you try and capture some kind of essence.
Colin, what did you know about King George VI before you took on the role and do you think he is underrated and Helena, did you ever meet the Queen Mother and if so did it affect your role?
Colin: I didn’t know much. My parents were children during his reign and I think I heard my mother talk about his reluctance to take the throne and about what a crisis that would have been for him personally. I have admiration for him. I remember my mother telling me about the stammer and that’s as much as I can remember. That would be about it, I knew nothing else at all.
Helena: I did meet the Queen Mother. I think she came to premiere of A Room with a View. I got what i think most people got from her. She had this great faith, was great at being gracious. I think underneath it, having read about her, she had a huge amount of inner strength. Someone once said she was a marshmallow but made by a welding machine! I tried to get that duality.
As we move into the future without the UK Film Council is there a need for leading British film actors playing more important roles in supporting British cinema?
Geoffrey: I think they should!
Helena: I agree, I mean we don’t create our own roles. If people wrote good parts and offered them all to me…
Colin: If you get good material and we do it justice then we’re more likely to give it a go. It’s basically the whole business together working as hard as possible. That’s presuming we can even get off the ground. I think the Film Council will just have to be remade in another name. Something like will have to exist.
Read our review of The King’s Speech here.
Jon Dudley is a freelance film and television journalist and his 17-minute short film Justification was shown at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
