Theatre credentials are not necessarily right for filmmaking I might not have them
“Theatre credentials are not necessarily right for filmmaking I might not have them. A lot of film directors find the emotional language of characters monosyllabic.”But Daldry is also big enough to admit he still has a lot to learn. “From the theatre, I’ve brought skills in dealing with character, paradox and contradiction. Daldry is perched on a pavement in Poole grabbing a bowl of fruit salad and a fag in a hurried lunch break.
His white jeans are torn and smeared with the camera grease that always seems to breed on film sets He looks haggard But, he maintains, it has been worthwhile He reckons he can contribute something new to film-making. “Back on the location of Eight, film-making doesn’t seem that glamorous an option. Students say `let’s check out the new Scorsese’, as opposed to `let’s go and see the new version of Hamlet’. At a party, you’d be much more interested in a film-maker than a theatre director. As an ambitious young director, film is what you want to do.” Levy concurs: “Theatre has stagnated over the past 30 years It’s not pulse-of-the-nation stuff. Film is the happening place for young artists to be.”Isn’t film the medium of the century?” asks Unwin “It’s just very groovy. Like Daldry, they may be better versed than the older generation in the alphabet of film.
The theatre director Nicholas Hytner has already made a smooth transition with such movies as The Madness of King George and The Crucible. If you look at American directors like Scorsese or Minnelli, the camera will be emotionally part of the scene. Stilted British kitchen-sink or costume dramas are just flat observations of actors at work.”All that may now be changing as younger, hipper theatre directors such as Sam Mendes, Deborah Warner and Matthew Warchus switch to film. They have a theatrical way of approaching film – they just point the camera at a scene and shoot it. Those directors are unable to feel the camera is part of the creative process – to them, it’s just an observer. Alan Levy, whose film 1977 was shown at the London Film Festival last year, admits: “I have looked down my nose at theatre people trying to do our job. The Trevor Nunns and Adrian Nobles are always going to be old farts, they’re never going to rock the kasbah Making boring, wordy adaptations of Shakespeare is passe.
You have to have a completely different head on.”Understandably, many young film-makers who have struggled to get projects off the ground feel miffed about grand theatre directors swanning in with little or no technical training to make well-financed movies. Rather, they operate on a subconscious level, in the language of dreams That’s the vernacular of film. Movies work in an emotional rather than an intellectual landscape. “A lot of theatre is rooted in the re-creation of authentic experience, whereas a lot of great movies are not about authentic experience at all. I’ve seen experienced theatre directors come a cropper by not realising the power and the dynamism of film.” The implication is that while actors are paramount in the theatre, in the cinema they are often, as Hitchcock remarked, mere cattle.Daldry does not demur.
To have a theatre director’s alchemical skill to pull actors together and produce good performances is one thing, but to see the shape of a film and to tell stories in a visual rather than an oral tradition requires quite different talents. The crew knew that just because I could perform well under pressure at the Bristol Old Vic didn’t necessarily mean I could make films. “Film and theatre are very different arts to master,” he says. “When I first directed a film, I encountered a degree of scepticism.
