domingo, 2 de enero de 2011

Colin Firth: 'Stammer the wrong way and it is comedic' - The Guardian

AFI FEST 2010 Presented By Audi -
Director Tom Hooper and actor Colin Firth pictured in Hollywood in November 2010. Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

On the face of it, an entire film devoted to the subject of a speech impediment sounds risky – even when one learns that the stammer is a royal one, belonging to King George VI. Yet The King's Speech has got off to a tremendous and triumphantly unjittery start. It has been feted in the US, crowned at the British Independent Film awards – as best British film (with honours for its actors and for David Seidler, who wrote the screenplay) – and has most recently won seven nominations for the Golden Globe awards. It now seems certain that Colin Firth will be an Oscar contender for his role as the King – a magnificent, subtle, affecting performance in which his pristine appearance is in contrast to the painful disarray of his speech.

The film is about what it means to have – and not to have – a voice. Not a small thing, after all. The particular torment for George VI was that his voice had to do more than serve him. It had to speak for – and to – the nation as the second world war broke out. What made his role harder still was that he was a reluctant king, forced to the throne after Edward VIII ( Guy Pearce) abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. George's wife – the Queen – is played, with coquettish hauteur, by Helena Bonham Carter. Tom Hooper (who made The Damned United and superb TV drama Longford) directs with nuanced restraint. The result is outstanding and unexpectedly moving.

At the film's heart is the relationship between the King and Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a maverick Australian speech therapist. Their friendship (the screenplay drew on Logue's diaries) is unorthodox and indispensable. Friendship was also key to the making of the film. Hooper maintains that the friendship that developed between him and his leading men makes The King's Speech what it is. And it is true that when I meet Hooper and Colin Firth at a Soho hotel, their rapport is evident. They are animated talkers. Hooper himself points out the greatest irony: "Colin Firth is one of the best raconteurs and most engaging conversationalists I know… playing a man who cannot speak."

How did you learn to stammer, Colin?

Colin Firth: No one taught me. But I have had it explained – this is common to everyone who struggles with stammering: all you want is to get to the end of a sentence. To speak is your dream, content is often secondary. You'll order fish instead of beef at a restaurant because you can't get the "b" out. Tom would tell me how much stammering he wanted and where he wanted it, and whether he thought it was working and whether it was authentic.

Tom Hooper: We bullied him.

How did that work?

TH: There are so many pitfalls – if you stammered the wrong way, it might be comedic and that would be a problem. If it was too painful, audiences would start to wish they were not in the cinema. If it was too severe, it would slow the film down. The stammering had never to misfire. The other risk was that we would run shy of it and, because of our fear about pacing, not commit to it enough. So the rhythm of the stammer was key.

CF: Tom was like a conductor…

TH: The original script had two conceits. One was that when the King makes his final speech, he is cured… stammer-free… Laurence Olivier. The other conceit was that he was stammer-free with his family. One of the first things I did was to listen to an actual speech and it was clear he was not stammer-free – he was using pauses to manage his problem. The reality, for most people with a disability, is about learning to manage… I didn't want to make a film about a miracle cure.

And it is more moving having an ending that is truthful…

TH: And yet the moment Colin and I decided the King was going to stammer – to some extent – on every line was a big decision. The risks were legion but the stakes needed to be high. The film's structure is slight. Our constant fear was that the climax would not be climactic enough. But here is something Colin doesn't understand. On the first day of shooting, I had an extraordinary experience. We had to set the level of the stammer. When I pushed Colin towards making his stammer more severe, I was profoundly moved. It was intensely dramatic and powerful. I knew we were not running the risks we had envisaged. We had looked at archive footage from the 1938 Glasgow Empire exhibition – a long clip with decent close-ups of the King. What was so moving is that you can see the King wants to do the right thing. There is hope in his eyes. There is nothing subversive about him. And he keeps hitting these silences in which he starts to drown, then pauses, recovers himself, goes again… and drowns again. I had tears in my eyes at the end of the five-minute, juddery clip. I thought: my God, if it can be this emotional and we can somehow catch the spirit of this, we are not going to have a problem.

Was the King's stammer as calamitous as the film makes out?

TH: I think so. We don't know what he was like in private.

CF: And we don't have recordings of what he was like before he met Lionel Logue. But we do have accounts of his Wembley speech, which sound very painful.

What was the most difficult thing about this role?

CF: You can't know what it is like to be a member of the royal family. It is not the same as being an actor. You are born into it and that is everything you have known. I think you can only guess at that. So that was a tremendous mystery. Tom has been talking about all the things that could go wrong if you misjudged the stammer. But things could also go wrong if you misjudged the level of agony and pain. It was important to touch on things in this man's childhood that indicated he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and yet we had to avoid it becoming a poor me or poor-little-rich-boy story. Self-pity would have killed us.

Yet there is a little boy lost in your performance…

CF: I drew that from images of him. I feel he had never quite been encouraged out of his childhood. He hadn't been given responsibility. He joined the navy and saw action, but health problems meant it was over quickly. He was never expected to be the King. Most people didn't have much faith in him to do anything. He stayed where he was… At 43, a series of immense shocks meant he had to grow into something else.

The film seems to be about what it means to have a voice. Do you think you have a Colin Firth voice?

CF: Everyone else would think so.

But not you?

CF: No, because the voice of the writer I am interpreting is always going to be different. It is terribly important to me…

… To be different?

CF: No – I am not looking for transformation. That is a banal pursuit. I want to try to make it authentic. It is not about this guy has a nasal voice… or is gruff… or has a funny accent. I am not looking for those things – that is trickery for me. What I am looking for is a way of inhabiting the writer's voice.

Would you say the voice is the self in a way?

CF: My sister is a voice therapist, and has written a thesis on voice and identity and how closely connected they are. I struggled with minor voice problems in my 20s. I developed an injury on a vocal cord. It produced a node and I had it chopped off. This impeded the way I spoke. It had a huge effect. I remember the therapist saying: "People don't appreciate how much distress can be caused by vocal limitations, particularly by someone who has got a big mouth." It can be hard to shut me up…

I gather there was a "raconteur rule" in rehearsal?

TH: There was. I imposed an anecdote limit on Geoffrey and Colin in rehearsal, of about two minutes. On the shoot, it was a strict 30 seconds.

There was a controversy about the film's rating – originally 15 in the UK, which was reduced to 12A on appeal; but R in America. Was that imposed because of the scene in which the King swears copiously?

CF: What infuriates me is that in America violence is judged in context, whereas language is not. So with language there is an arithmetic that says: one fuck is a PG 13, two fucks is an R. They don't say: one bullet through one head is a PG 13, two bullets through more than two heads is an R.

TH: In our film, the F-word is used in a therapeutic context. It is an extremely funny scene. I defy anyone to carry any long-term trauma as a result of seeing it.

Colin, you seldom give interviews…

CF: You are right.

I wondered if this was because journalists tend to typecast you and Darcy continues to be a burden?

CF: No – what is interesting is that people want him to be. It is a myth people have been fascinated with from the moment I played the character. Darcy has never been a burden. They have manufactured it. They have said: "If he is so grumpy about Darcy, why would he go and do Bridget Jones?" Because I'm not!

Yet as an actor written up as a pin-up, you must sometimes feel similar to a reluctant royal. Doesn't it make you feel an affinity with the King?

CF: I am not dismissing the truth of what you are observing about my situation, but I don't find it easy to apply. I know the pin-up thing happened and I didn't find that helpful. But that has nothing to do with wanting to shake off Darcy. I pulled that role off. It was a hell of a stretch. I was bombarded with people telling me I wasn't right for Darcy, that I wasn't sexy enough…

TH: Also, our film doesn't really deal much with the celebrity aspect of being a monarch. It is more about Colin being a stammerer than a royal.

The fact that the therapist is Australian gives him special freedom. Tom, was your Australian background helpful?

TH: This is the most personal film I have ever made. I have never felt so at home in a story. My mum is Australian. My father is English. He lost his father – a bomber navigator – in the war and was packed off to boarding school at five. It was the era of five-mile runs before 6am, cold baths in winter, outside loos with no doors, corporal punishment. My mother was open within the family about how this would affect his ability to parent and how we needed to unlock him. I went from having a father who was not very engaged to a father who now describes me as one of his ribs. I have my mother to thank for that. She is extraordinary. So this story was familiar to me – the cultural interchange between an Australian and an Englishman in London was something I knew about.

How nerve-wracking is it to think about the film's future and the awards that it might win?

TH: I'd like to have space to celebrate the awards we have won. I am proud of the audience award in Toronto. There were more than 400 movies at the festival – we were chosen by the festival-goers. And to win the British Independent Film award was thrilling. It is a trap to keep looking ahead. You can't control the future.

The King's Speech opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday 7 January

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