The Winslow Boy (1999) commentary
3 Jan 2025 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritHello, I have been out, I am now not fully with it again, but in the meantime, have a post I made earlier when I couldn't actually post it!
This isn't a proper transcript, because I'm not up to that and would have killed my brain, but I knowsovay wanted to know if David Mamet said anything about the doors and possibly other things about it, so when I rewatched/relistened to The Winslow Boy as Yule-prep, I took notes and transcribed some exchanges as best as I could. I tried to be careful, but sometimes before I have still been really unreliable when doing this kind of thing, so I apologise if anything is incorrect!
The commentary has David Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon, Nigel Hawthorne & Jeremy Northam (& it sounds as if they invited Gemma Jones as one of the first things JN says when he & NH join in after about 10 mins is that he's sorry Gemma couldn't make the journey to join them.) I'm not sure how it got the miracle of a proper cast commentary, but I'm so glad, even aside from it improving my fic.
Also, if Robert/Catherine has one shipper, it's Jeremy Northam. In this commentary he will... ;-p)
I should say straight up that David Mamet does not explain the doors motif as such, but he and various others say at several points that he was set on having all the important family scenes in hallways. Alas, nobody goes into why, which is atypical for this commentary, but that is the penalty of the chat-based format.
***
It was cold and rainy throughout, plus some snow, although they still needed to rig a tent for fake rain. It was so cold in the 'hot' end scenes that Rebecca, Jeremy & Colin [Stinton, playing Desmond] were sucking on ice-cubes to stop their breath showing.
DM talks about deliberately using in-line cuts, which went out with the fifties, and then that Guy Edwards [kid playing Ronnie] had to spend a whole day in the garden in the fake rain with rubber suits on under his clothes. But, he adds, the laws on child actors "are different in England, you're required to mistreat them."
The music for the film is supposed to be reminiscent of Elgar.
- at this point joined by NH & JN.
DM apologises as he's going to be "glib and stupid."
JN: Have we the option of being glib and stupid as well? ... Nigel, do you have that option?
NH (amused at one of his own lines when nobody else is): Well, I laughed.
RP demands that David doesn't watch the kissing [her and Aden Gillett], "And nobody else is allowed to look."
JN: No tongues, though.
NH: It's almost like the hallway is the main focus.
RP: The choreography was meticulous.
Aden Gillett when to the Life Guards to learn how to move etc.
JN - talks about reading contemporary reactions to the 1946 play, which were often focusing on it in relation to the then new Labour government. He also says there was a national tour of it before it opened in the West End and that Rattigan spent a lot of it chasing down surviving members of the Archer-Shee family to explain why their characters were so different, especially Catherine's as the original daughter's politics were "somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan!"
NH - notes during scene of Rebecca passing him in the stairway that he wanted to give her a peck on the cheek and David wouldn't let him touch her. "Why not? He loves her, and David said, the audience knows you love her, you don't have to show them."
[Later on when JN puts a hand on Guy Edward's shoulder, NH immediately goes, "David, you allowed contact!"]
DM - asks NH and JN if they ever played Sir Robert before, and NH says no.
JN: I was surprised enough when you cast me. Traditionally, in the theatre you'd play him a lot older.
[I didn't note this down as I already mentioned it tosovay, but: Somewhere here DM and NH have an exchange where NH remembers discussing him asking Ronnie twice "Did you do it?" and DM tells NH that was him, he insisted on keeping it twice when DM wanted to cut it down to once, saying it was important, and that NH was right.]
NH took them round a Jacobean hall near the Inns of Court when they filmed there, where Twelfth Night was performed in the 17th C, & JN notes, having grown up in Cambridge, that the Inns of Court are exactly like Cambridge halls.
There are apparently little in-jokes of production crew's names used in the names on the doors that Catherine sees walking up to Sir Robert's office.
RP - Notes the "enigmatic and sexual" intro of Sir Robert [esp.the shot of him putting on the jacket, whcih she really likes.] "And now - are they destined for each other?"
DN: That was always your theory, wasn't it, Jeremy? That they look at each other, good morning, it's all over, they fall desperately in love.
JN: Well, I - I always felt it was something that one thought about if not displayed, find the moments where you chose to maybe show the audience... I always felt - caught off guard in my chambers by this whole family, then this beautiful woman shows up, and instantly, this little scene tells me exactly -
RP: Where she stands politically.
JN: Who she is.
RP & JN: They are poles apart, yes, poles apart.
DM notes Catherine was wearing violet in the scene, one of the suffragette colours. [There's a lot of praise throughout for Consolata Boyle the costume designer.]
They shot the interrogation scene for 6 days in an old manion, which they also used for Emma (1996), & JN says it took him a week to realise he'd been there before - they had gutted the inside.
RP: It was a very creepy place.
JN (Watching Sir Robert talk to the Winslow family when they arrive): "Yikes! It's like going to the dentist" & says he enjoyed doing the scene with the boy very much - he was so simple and direct.
NH then says they can talk all over JN's scene, but not to talk over his scenes.
RP starts talking about the "unglamorous" green room there, with bad sandwiches and "gas heaters that followed us about, gassing us" [to the different locations, I think] & that "Nigel entertained everybody for hours in the green room."
JN (attempts to describe the green room as a settee depository and winds up at "Settee suppository. Depository. Settee suppository?! Oh no, can we take that out?"
RP: No (& feels it's fair to the green room anyway.)
DM talks about the use of the details (like the copied out signature) and the increased use of them as the film continues signalling the rise of everyone's obsession with the evidence and the case, & Sir Robert being drawn into looking at it as well.
[All the cartoons were created for the film, and they were drawn from a mix of things, some completely made up, but also including at least one from the Dreyfus Case.]
JN (on the interrogation scene): My instincts were to be much more dramatic, lose my cool with the kid, bully him, but David, you were always saying no, if you want to get your answer with him, be kind. Be kind and you'll get the truth from him. I went back and looked at the original Rattigan and it was full of those stage directions that say 'with rising anger' or 'with biting sarcasm' and then someone was telling me the other day that apparently Rattigan himself thought that [slight disc jump] [?they were?] too kind of fruity, too big. I love that note you gave me. I think it's amazing how cleanly the scene reads without that form of histrionics.
DM: "Thanks" and says that it was about the kid, if he knows he's being manipulated, he would feel at liberty to do the same, but if Sir Robert is being reasonable, he feels honour bound.
JN: These were long takes, though.
DM: You kept playing it so beautifully, I think we did it about fifty times." And then adds again that the boy's being panicked about his denial is stronger if it's in response to Sir Robert being reasonable.
NH: Sometimes I wasn't there, physically.
RP says they all stepped out at different times.
JN (joking): And sometimes you weren't there. Nigel Hawthorne, lovely actor, but you can't work with him after lunch.
RP: We've all been there.
DM on filming the House of Commons scenes - got round it by building a set in a gymnasium and filming in a corridor that looked like the Commons, and that they used the same corridor [at Charterhouse School] as Spitfire (1940) [& it's a common enough solution that the same corridor has been used a lot.]
JN says that he found himself back at the same place where they built the Commons set later in the year for An Ideal Husband - they took him to the same location, to the same set [which was being reused] and sat him in the exact same seat - (RN: "Oh no!") - and he was "Help me, help me, I'm playing two characters, both called Sir Robert, and they both have a speech to make!"
DM notes another NH thing was that in the hallway scene with Gemma Jones, where Nigel says "For justice" turned away, DM wanted him to turn round, but Nigel insisted it was important, so he had to say it turned away.
Sandwich scene - RP says the sandwiches were good and she was hungry.
JN: It's funny that she accuses him [Sir Robert] of being cold hearted and afraid of his emotions and the same thing is said to her by her mum.
RP comments on her "Danny Thomas spit-take" with the sandwich.
DM (on Sir Robert patting her on the back after): Jeremy, you did something very nice, you say, 'I would look to her father for permission before I touch her.'
RP on David putting in the movements of closing together/jumping apart after explaining that Ronnie was smoking: "It's very sexual."
JN comments on the smoking - being part of her beliefs [as a Suffragette] but also shocking for the time and very sexual, "and the fact that we share that knowledge and no one else" also. "Someone said to me today he's - he's a very repressed character and I didn't really think of him in those terms, but he's unable to feel what he would like to feel, and I'm not sure that's the same thing - because of all kinds of reasons, because of her situation.
DM: I think he has a real sense of delicacy throughout that he is content to have people take it for coldness.
[JN had started to say earlier in the commentary, in response to DM saying that the romance isn't in the original, that he thinks it is, it's just suggested, ambigous & he and David are harking back to that here.]
JN: (on Sir Robert commenting on Catherine's hat) This is the point you know where I thought, you know, when he starts using words like feminine allurement that you know that he's been, er, affected.
DM: Oh, you're right, it is very gentle flirting, isn't it?
DM comments that they were the first [film crew?] to be allowed to film at the Horse Guards, because they couldn't afford all the extras to do it, and someone in the production was able to go through back channels to get permission.
[I lost focus for a second here and then next thing they all then seemed to agreeing that Aden Gillett would have looked amazing in a kilt as he has the build for it, but I didn't rewind it so I cannot swear to anything.]
[Back in the House of Commons set & the Charterhouse School corridor]
JN remembers feeling sorry for the poor extra who had to play the speaker, as he got overwhelmed trying to interject in the fierce arguing in the Commons between the actors.
RP: Jeremy kept us all entertained with his lovely piano playing. As did David - both very talented piano players.
Then they all discuss the corridor again:
JN: In fact, I seem to remember we shot An Ideal Husband in that same corridor as well.
NH: And I shot a Wheatabix ad there.
RP: A very good cereal.
NH compliments DM on not falling into the trap of having the trial scene.
DM: Oh, that's Rattigan - everything happens off stage, the way it does in real life.
They indicate the state of the family by removing items from the set as it goes on.
DM notes that the play is about what people owe each other, rather than what they feel.
JN talks about how Rattigan fell out of favour & why, but that it wasn't fair, people said of him, "'What good is craftsmanship without belief?' and yet it's full of belief, it's full of, his writing is full of generous values about human beings and positive things." [& likes TWB, DM immediately goes for The Browning Version as the masterpiece]
NH: I like Separate Tables.
DM, on the Desmond and Catherine scene: It's a great love scene, I think. It's funny that Rattigan doesn't give the great love scene, just as he has the maid announce the court room thing, he doesn't give the love scene to the principals. It's kind of marvellous, marvellous play writing.
RP comments that David had Desmond whisper what Sir Robert turned down so it would be an enigma, and NH says that's good, too, because the cab driver is there, so they would.
DM: I just did it because I didn't know what the heck the line meant, so I knew the Americans wouldn't either.
RP: But it makes it more impressive, because we imagine.
DM So much of the play is about renunciation. Everyone has to renounce throughout. That makes them noble.
DM notes that his favourite outtake was from when Desmond's cab drives away here, pulling back to reveal Rebecca with a bright red sled, because it was snowing.
DM & RP talk about her putting the collar on the dress afterwards - RP that Dave always likes to give actors props, so they have something to do, and DH that it was just that he shot the Desmond scene with the collar off because it fell too dressy for that moment, but Consolata [costume designer] said he must use it with the collar, it looks so different with it, that he agreed and this was how they got her to be able to do that.
[Sir Robert comes with the news after]
DM says it was Jeremy's idea to have him sit down [I think he must have meant while Sir Robert was sitting, or I wrote it wrongly], a very good one "the head goes back just for that one moment."
JN: I'm thinking whether, is it illness or that combined with the fact he's left alone.
DM: Oh, it's all over with Catherine as well.
JN: I always worked on the principle that he should be relatively at ease with the men - always a little bit flustered by her presence.
DM comments that RP plays this scene so straightforwardly, it's great.
JN (coming up the line fluff on "you are perfectly at liberty") I remember this day extremely well... It was at the end of the day and I think there was a photographer there and I was dreading [everyone hears the line] There we go.
(Everyone else likes it.)
JN: Yeah, I suppose it's just my pride saying, well if you wanted me to fluff the line, I would find - found a way of doing it.
DM: I didn't want you to fluff it, but you did, it was a magnificent piece of [?]
JN: It was a line I could not say. One of those ones when you feel you're a mouse on a wheel and you can't get off and time's running out.
[on the moment with Ronnie]
JN: It's a measure of today that so many people have said, But did he really do it?
DM, at end: I had so much fun shooting it, shooting it in London.
This isn't a proper transcript, because I'm not up to that and would have killed my brain, but I know
sovay wanted to know if David Mamet said anything about the doors and possibly other things about it, so when I rewatched/relistened to The Winslow Boy as Yule-prep, I took notes and transcribed some exchanges as best as I could. I tried to be careful, but sometimes before I have still been really unreliable when doing this kind of thing, so I apologise if anything is incorrect!The commentary has David Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon, Nigel Hawthorne & Jeremy Northam (& it sounds as if they invited Gemma Jones as one of the first things JN says when he & NH join in after about 10 mins is that he's sorry Gemma couldn't make the journey to join them.) I'm not sure how it got the miracle of a proper cast commentary, but I'm so glad, even aside from it improving my fic.
Also, if Robert/Catherine has one shipper, it's Jeremy Northam. In this commentary he will... ;-p)
I should say straight up that David Mamet does not explain the doors motif as such, but he and various others say at several points that he was set on having all the important family scenes in hallways. Alas, nobody goes into why, which is atypical for this commentary, but that is the penalty of the chat-based format.
***
It was cold and rainy throughout, plus some snow, although they still needed to rig a tent for fake rain. It was so cold in the 'hot' end scenes that Rebecca, Jeremy & Colin [Stinton, playing Desmond] were sucking on ice-cubes to stop their breath showing.
DM talks about deliberately using in-line cuts, which went out with the fifties, and then that Guy Edwards [kid playing Ronnie] had to spend a whole day in the garden in the fake rain with rubber suits on under his clothes. But, he adds, the laws on child actors "are different in England, you're required to mistreat them."
The music for the film is supposed to be reminiscent of Elgar.
- at this point joined by NH & JN.
DM apologises as he's going to be "glib and stupid."
JN: Have we the option of being glib and stupid as well? ... Nigel, do you have that option?
NH (amused at one of his own lines when nobody else is): Well, I laughed.
RP demands that David doesn't watch the kissing [her and Aden Gillett], "And nobody else is allowed to look."
JN: No tongues, though.
NH: It's almost like the hallway is the main focus.
RP: The choreography was meticulous.
Aden Gillett when to the Life Guards to learn how to move etc.
JN - talks about reading contemporary reactions to the 1946 play, which were often focusing on it in relation to the then new Labour government. He also says there was a national tour of it before it opened in the West End and that Rattigan spent a lot of it chasing down surviving members of the Archer-Shee family to explain why their characters were so different, especially Catherine's as the original daughter's politics were "somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan!"
NH - notes during scene of Rebecca passing him in the stairway that he wanted to give her a peck on the cheek and David wouldn't let him touch her. "Why not? He loves her, and David said, the audience knows you love her, you don't have to show them."
[Later on when JN puts a hand on Guy Edward's shoulder, NH immediately goes, "David, you allowed contact!"]
DM - asks NH and JN if they ever played Sir Robert before, and NH says no.
JN: I was surprised enough when you cast me. Traditionally, in the theatre you'd play him a lot older.
[I didn't note this down as I already mentioned it to
sovay, but: Somewhere here DM and NH have an exchange where NH remembers discussing him asking Ronnie twice "Did you do it?" and DM tells NH that was him, he insisted on keeping it twice when DM wanted to cut it down to once, saying it was important, and that NH was right.]NH took them round a Jacobean hall near the Inns of Court when they filmed there, where Twelfth Night was performed in the 17th C, & JN notes, having grown up in Cambridge, that the Inns of Court are exactly like Cambridge halls.
There are apparently little in-jokes of production crew's names used in the names on the doors that Catherine sees walking up to Sir Robert's office.
RP - Notes the "enigmatic and sexual" intro of Sir Robert [esp.the shot of him putting on the jacket, whcih she really likes.] "And now - are they destined for each other?"
DN: That was always your theory, wasn't it, Jeremy? That they look at each other, good morning, it's all over, they fall desperately in love.
JN: Well, I - I always felt it was something that one thought about if not displayed, find the moments where you chose to maybe show the audience... I always felt - caught off guard in my chambers by this whole family, then this beautiful woman shows up, and instantly, this little scene tells me exactly -
RP: Where she stands politically.
JN: Who she is.
RP & JN: They are poles apart, yes, poles apart.
DM notes Catherine was wearing violet in the scene, one of the suffragette colours. [There's a lot of praise throughout for Consolata Boyle the costume designer.]
They shot the interrogation scene for 6 days in an old manion, which they also used for Emma (1996), & JN says it took him a week to realise he'd been there before - they had gutted the inside.
RP: It was a very creepy place.
JN (Watching Sir Robert talk to the Winslow family when they arrive): "Yikes! It's like going to the dentist" & says he enjoyed doing the scene with the boy very much - he was so simple and direct.
NH then says they can talk all over JN's scene, but not to talk over his scenes.
RP starts talking about the "unglamorous" green room there, with bad sandwiches and "gas heaters that followed us about, gassing us" [to the different locations, I think] & that "Nigel entertained everybody for hours in the green room."
JN (attempts to describe the green room as a settee depository and winds up at "Settee suppository. Depository. Settee suppository?! Oh no, can we take that out?"
RP: No (& feels it's fair to the green room anyway.)
DM talks about the use of the details (like the copied out signature) and the increased use of them as the film continues signalling the rise of everyone's obsession with the evidence and the case, & Sir Robert being drawn into looking at it as well.
[All the cartoons were created for the film, and they were drawn from a mix of things, some completely made up, but also including at least one from the Dreyfus Case.]
JN (on the interrogation scene): My instincts were to be much more dramatic, lose my cool with the kid, bully him, but David, you were always saying no, if you want to get your answer with him, be kind. Be kind and you'll get the truth from him. I went back and looked at the original Rattigan and it was full of those stage directions that say 'with rising anger' or 'with biting sarcasm' and then someone was telling me the other day that apparently Rattigan himself thought that [slight disc jump] [?they were?] too kind of fruity, too big. I love that note you gave me. I think it's amazing how cleanly the scene reads without that form of histrionics.
DM: "Thanks" and says that it was about the kid, if he knows he's being manipulated, he would feel at liberty to do the same, but if Sir Robert is being reasonable, he feels honour bound.
JN: These were long takes, though.
DM: You kept playing it so beautifully, I think we did it about fifty times." And then adds again that the boy's being panicked about his denial is stronger if it's in response to Sir Robert being reasonable.
NH: Sometimes I wasn't there, physically.
RP says they all stepped out at different times.
JN (joking): And sometimes you weren't there. Nigel Hawthorne, lovely actor, but you can't work with him after lunch.
RP: We've all been there.
DM on filming the House of Commons scenes - got round it by building a set in a gymnasium and filming in a corridor that looked like the Commons, and that they used the same corridor [at Charterhouse School] as Spitfire (1940) [& it's a common enough solution that the same corridor has been used a lot.]
JN says that he found himself back at the same place where they built the Commons set later in the year for An Ideal Husband - they took him to the same location, to the same set [which was being reused] and sat him in the exact same seat - (RN: "Oh no!") - and he was "Help me, help me, I'm playing two characters, both called Sir Robert, and they both have a speech to make!"
DM notes another NH thing was that in the hallway scene with Gemma Jones, where Nigel says "For justice" turned away, DM wanted him to turn round, but Nigel insisted it was important, so he had to say it turned away.
Sandwich scene - RP says the sandwiches were good and she was hungry.
JN: It's funny that she accuses him [Sir Robert] of being cold hearted and afraid of his emotions and the same thing is said to her by her mum.
RP comments on her "Danny Thomas spit-take" with the sandwich.
DM (on Sir Robert patting her on the back after): Jeremy, you did something very nice, you say, 'I would look to her father for permission before I touch her.'
RP on David putting in the movements of closing together/jumping apart after explaining that Ronnie was smoking: "It's very sexual."
JN comments on the smoking - being part of her beliefs [as a Suffragette] but also shocking for the time and very sexual, "and the fact that we share that knowledge and no one else" also. "Someone said to me today he's - he's a very repressed character and I didn't really think of him in those terms, but he's unable to feel what he would like to feel, and I'm not sure that's the same thing - because of all kinds of reasons, because of her situation.
DM: I think he has a real sense of delicacy throughout that he is content to have people take it for coldness.
[JN had started to say earlier in the commentary, in response to DM saying that the romance isn't in the original, that he thinks it is, it's just suggested, ambigous & he and David are harking back to that here.]
JN: (on Sir Robert commenting on Catherine's hat) This is the point you know where I thought, you know, when he starts using words like feminine allurement that you know that he's been, er, affected.
DM: Oh, you're right, it is very gentle flirting, isn't it?
DM comments that they were the first [film crew?] to be allowed to film at the Horse Guards, because they couldn't afford all the extras to do it, and someone in the production was able to go through back channels to get permission.
[I lost focus for a second here and then next thing they all then seemed to agreeing that Aden Gillett would have looked amazing in a kilt as he has the build for it, but I didn't rewind it so I cannot swear to anything.]
[Back in the House of Commons set & the Charterhouse School corridor]
JN remembers feeling sorry for the poor extra who had to play the speaker, as he got overwhelmed trying to interject in the fierce arguing in the Commons between the actors.
RP: Jeremy kept us all entertained with his lovely piano playing. As did David - both very talented piano players.
Then they all discuss the corridor again:
JN: In fact, I seem to remember we shot An Ideal Husband in that same corridor as well.
NH: And I shot a Wheatabix ad there.
RP: A very good cereal.
NH compliments DM on not falling into the trap of having the trial scene.
DM: Oh, that's Rattigan - everything happens off stage, the way it does in real life.
They indicate the state of the family by removing items from the set as it goes on.
DM notes that the play is about what people owe each other, rather than what they feel.
JN talks about how Rattigan fell out of favour & why, but that it wasn't fair, people said of him, "'What good is craftsmanship without belief?' and yet it's full of belief, it's full of, his writing is full of generous values about human beings and positive things." [& likes TWB, DM immediately goes for The Browning Version as the masterpiece]
NH: I like Separate Tables.
DM, on the Desmond and Catherine scene: It's a great love scene, I think. It's funny that Rattigan doesn't give the great love scene, just as he has the maid announce the court room thing, he doesn't give the love scene to the principals. It's kind of marvellous, marvellous play writing.
RP comments that David had Desmond whisper what Sir Robert turned down so it would be an enigma, and NH says that's good, too, because the cab driver is there, so they would.
DM: I just did it because I didn't know what the heck the line meant, so I knew the Americans wouldn't either.
RP: But it makes it more impressive, because we imagine.
DM So much of the play is about renunciation. Everyone has to renounce throughout. That makes them noble.
DM notes that his favourite outtake was from when Desmond's cab drives away here, pulling back to reveal Rebecca with a bright red sled, because it was snowing.
DM & RP talk about her putting the collar on the dress afterwards - RP that Dave always likes to give actors props, so they have something to do, and DH that it was just that he shot the Desmond scene with the collar off because it fell too dressy for that moment, but Consolata [costume designer] said he must use it with the collar, it looks so different with it, that he agreed and this was how they got her to be able to do that.
[Sir Robert comes with the news after]
DM says it was Jeremy's idea to have him sit down [I think he must have meant while Sir Robert was sitting, or I wrote it wrongly], a very good one "the head goes back just for that one moment."
JN: I'm thinking whether, is it illness or that combined with the fact he's left alone.
DM: Oh, it's all over with Catherine as well.
JN: I always worked on the principle that he should be relatively at ease with the men - always a little bit flustered by her presence.
DM comments that RP plays this scene so straightforwardly, it's great.
JN (coming up the line fluff on "you are perfectly at liberty") I remember this day extremely well... It was at the end of the day and I think there was a photographer there and I was dreading [everyone hears the line] There we go.
(Everyone else likes it.)
JN: Yeah, I suppose it's just my pride saying, well if you wanted me to fluff the line, I would find - found a way of doing it.
DM: I didn't want you to fluff it, but you did, it was a magnificent piece of [?]
JN: It was a line I could not say. One of those ones when you feel you're a mouse on a wheel and you can't get off and time's running out.
[on the moment with Ronnie]
JN: It's a measure of today that so many people have said, But did he really do it?
DM, at end: I had so much fun shooting it, shooting it in London.