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Column
Twenty ways the '90s changed television
From "Twin Peaks" to "The X-Files" to "The Simpsons" (O.J. included), TV broke ground and rules in the last decade of the century.
By Joyce Millman
[12/22/99]

Movie Review
"Man on the Moon"
Jim Carrey has the eyes down cold, but the rest of the Andy Kaufman story melts after a series of smeared details.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[12/22/99]

Movie Review
"Angela's Ashes"
The epic, weighty adaptation remains faithful to the letter, but what happened to Frank McCourt's poetry?
By Stephanie Zacharek
[12/21/99]

Movie Review
"Girl, Interrupted"
Not even foxy sociopath Angelina Jolie can save this nut house drama.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[12/20/99]

Movies
"Three Kings," one "Witch" and a "Princess"
Salon Arts & Entertainment's critics pick their favorite movies of 1999.

[12/17/99]

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Without being too self-congratulatory about it: I'm sick of period films, not a few of which come from the United Kingdom. You look at them and they're not real. You say, "Yeah, OK, but where are the people?" I mean, I quite like "Shakespeare in Love," but it is plainly on a totally different trip from "Topsy-Turvy" because it's very healthily and anarchically a spoof and "Topsy-Turvy" is not -- it is absolutely serious. I wanted to subvert the costume drama. I could have done a movie about poverty in the East End of London in the 1880s if I just wanted to do a period piece. But to subvert what appears to be a "chocolate-box" subject by making it real seemed to me to offer a lot more scope.

You emphasize Gilbert's modernity as a theater pro. You include a hilarious bit with him getting the box-office take over the telephone, in code. How did you incorporate these historical details and still remain true to your technique of building characters through immersion in the material with the actors?

Oh, to be honest, I have nothing to report that's particularly remarkable except that we did the homework. We researched all the books on Gilbert and Sullivan and the music that there are, and all the archive material available on either side of the Atlantic. We studied everything you can think of -- society, politics, etiquette, you name it. And at the same time we did the hands-on, practical, physical-workshop stuff that we do, until the two kinds of preparation became one.

As far as language goes, just reading the dialogue in "Punch" cartoons of the period gives you access to how people talked of what was going on. And there were quite a few seasoned Dickensians amongst us. And a portion of what is said in the film is direct quotation. In the scene where Gilbert goes to see Sullivan in his apartment, where they sit on the sofa and eat lump sugar, and in the later scene in D'Oyly Carte's office, where the shit hits the fan and they reach their impasse, we use things that they actually said. Woven, I hope seamlessly, into both of those scenes are quotes from letters and correspondence. And then there are the Gilbertian epigrams that Gilbert says in the film, or things that sound epigrammatic --

Like "I'd rather spend an afternoon in a Turkish bath with my mother than visit the dratted dentist -- "

Some of them he actually said, some of them Jim Broadbent improvised, and some I contributed. Basically, you get the hang of it. And that's what we do with these films. You get the hang of a character and then you can sort of extend it and expand it.

Not just with language, but with body language.

Yes! That's partly to do with studying etiquette, but also, as always, with everybody rehearsing months in costume -- which I have to say if there was one major hassle in the film it was waiting for all those women to get into those bloody corsets, which takes forever. You realize why people had servants.

So many conventional period films seem to get the physicality wrong.

They don't wear corsets! They don't wear corsets! So they don't have the right silhouette. The question is, "How do you make something 'contemporary' -- i.e., for us?" My own feeling is that you don't succeed in doing that by compromising, because then it's neither one thing or the other. What we've tried to do is to say, "OK, let's really go for it." And then the texture comes alive and becomes as contemporary as anything. After all, if you could take a movie camera and get into a time machine and go back there and film the reality, it would be much more alive than anything that you would achieve by half-reconstructing it. I always think that film in some way should aspire to the condition of documentary. Which isn't to say you should try and make something like a documentary but merely that when you make a documentary, you never question that what you're filming exists in three dimensions or that whether you film it or not, it exists. Often I have all sorts of stuff which we don't film, but it's there. It helps give a kind of integrity to the bit you do film.

If you were able to travel back to D'Oyly Carte's theater in 1884 with a movie camera, you'd want to include matters that wouldn't be observed or spoken about in theater pieces of that era, including the intense preparations and gossip -- and the alcohol and drug use -- going on backstage.

If you're saying that the philosophy of what we choose to look at is very, very un-Victorian -- oh, absolutely. I don't quite know what sort of film it would be if you tried to tell the story from the parameters of these characters' perception. I mean, that would be, I suppose, a kind of spoof of Victorian drama. No, I am simply looking at them as people, according to the basic principles that we're born, and we die, and we get up in the morning and go to the lavatory, and that is what it's about, isn't it?

From the start, you put the audience in a humorous quandary: We don't know how to figure Gilbert out. There's a wonderful incongruity between the humor he comes up with and --

And his dourness. I know, it's fascinating. To tell you the truth, that's the reason why I went to such lengths (and lengths we went!), both in preparation and in finishing the film, to imply something about his parents and his family. His mother and father were certainly as balmy as we suggest, which gives an implicit indication as to Gilbert's own personality.

He is dour, and paranoid, and dogged. But if you are as smart as Gilbert is, and you are doing things that are new, you may feel you have to doubt easy victories and trust only your own critical faculties. We see the acuity behind his craziness in the rehearsal scenes; to me they are the core of the movie.

You're making me think of something that I hadn't actually thought of until this moment. Of course, we present Gilbert as, in fact, a pioneer of directing; but what hadn't occurred to me, in so many words, until now, is that he has the quality of an archetypal director. That ability to be both involved and detached.

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