Shooting the Actor

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Introduction to the 2003 Edition

First Sighting

Merchant and Ivory and Jhabvala

Introduction to the 1990 Edition

London

Zagreb

Bled

Zagreb

Dubrovnik

Zagreb

Last words

Coda

Cast and credits

Hollywood via Kansas

What It’s Like

Acting Credits

Also by Simon Callow

Copyright

For Matt Jones

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2003 EDITION

In 1990, my friend and first publisher Nick Hern, who had commissioned Shooting the Actor and was about to publish it, had the worst year of his life. The head of the company with which he had merged his independent outfit succumbed to a form of dementia and started to throw out his colleagues—literally, onto the street, with their filing cabinets and the rest of their office furniture. Accordingly, when the book appeared, it did so without much help from Nick or the parent organisation. It had a few reviews in obscure publications, and those few reviews were savagely dismissive. A year or two later, Nick relocated his organisation to Random House, where he met Frances Coady, publisher of Vintage Books UK. She read the book enthusiastically, and republished it under her imprint, when it was re-reviewed with some favour. I was very happy about this; I had always liked the book, manic-depressive though it sometimes is, as much because of Dušan Makavejev’s somewhat dyspeptic contributions as for my own. I believed, and still believe, that it offers an accurate account of what it’s like for an actor to be involved in a movie. This particular movie was not a happy one for me, but, pace Tolstoy, all movies, happy or unhappy, are happy or unhappy in the same way.

The book has remained in print in Britain to the present day, but when Frances, now head of Picador, suggested publishing the book in America, I seized the opportunity to write a little about some of the other films in which I have appeared, which happens to include some very successful ones. In fact, the book now constitutes a sort of autobiography in film, just as Being an Actor is an autobiography in theatre. The original text of Shooting the Actor—the main body of the book, needless to say—will be found in its chronological place, that is, after A Room with a View and before Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. At the end, by way of conclusion, I have added a section called What It’s Like, which (as in Being an Actor) reverses the telescope, focussing on the general rather than my particular experience of acting in film.

If I have omitted a film (and a list of all my films is attached as a sort of index) it is not because it’s unremarkable in any way, but because I don’t believe it adds anything to what I’ve learned about acting in movies over the last twenty years of being involved in them. And I haven’t written at all about the film I directed in 1990, The Ballad of the Sad Café. That’s another book altogether.

First Sighting

My life in film has been a completely unexpected bonus. I never expected nor particularly desired to work in movies, nor until quite late in my career did anybody seem to think that the movies were crying out for me. I had very little notion of what the process of making a film might be like, despite exposure to movies about movies like Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine, which I took to be as true to life as the film 42nd Street was to putting on a musical in the theatre—that is to say, total fantasy. When, during the late seventies, I was working regularly in television, film was regarded as a completely different activity, film actors a separate breed. The process of making television was not dissimilar to making theatre: there were extensive rehearsals followed by a very brief filming period, in which scenes were mostly shot in sequence.

It was my great friend, the literary agent Peggy Ramsay, who, believing that I should fill this gap in my education, arranged for me and my partner Aziz to visit the set of Quartet, a Merchant Ivory film being shot in Paris in 1980. It was an astonishing experience, and I had to offer my silent apologies to Truffaut: it was La Nuit Américaine all over again. The location was the legendary nightclub Le Bœuf Sur le Toit, and the place was swarming with gorgeously clothed people milling about under bright lights. Despite the twenties setting, it was impossible to tell where the film stopped and life began: there were waiters who seemed to be real, silent and weary actors (I caught sight of Maggie Smith in an exquisite beaded cloche, decoratively slumped in a corner) while highly animated other people screamed and rushed around. Makeup was being applied, costumes were being adjusted, microphones were being replaced. I had been told to find the producer Ismail Merchant, and this presented no difficulties: there he unmistakeably was, this immensely handsome, wildly energetic figure in a Nehru jacket and long flowing cotton pants, doling out bowls of curry to the cast and the crew on whom he bestowed seraphic smiles, punctuating this courtly activity with screamed instructions to various functionaries who were clearly failing in their duties. One of these, to whom the most savage outbursts were directed, was a taller, grey-haired man of fastidious demeanour who was calmly rearranging forks at a table in the centre of the restaurant. One phrase of Ismail’s repeatedly aimed at this man rose above all the hubbub: ‘Shoot, Jim, shoot!!’ This was evidently James Ivory, the director, who continued arranging forks. When he was good and ready, he murmured something to an assistant and suddenly the cry ‘Shooting!’ echoed round the four points of the compass like a Monteverdi motet: ‘Shooting!!! Shooting!! Shooting! Shooting.’ A deep silence fell, a little wave of tension ran through the building, and a great crane with a camera and a cameraman perilously attached to it proceeded to make its way down the room like some elegant dinosaur. Then suddenly the cry: ‘Cut!!!’ along with its Monteverdian echo: ‘We’ve cut!! We’ve cut! We’ve cut.’ Again and again and again this was repeated until the problem—whether mechanical or interpretative; it was impossible to tell—was resolved.

It was mightily impressive, but I didn’t quite know whether I liked it. It seemed ungraspable. How would one make one’s contribution? Alan Bates wandered by. We had been introduced at the National by John Dexter. He said, with a little roll of his eyes, ‘Filming!’ I said that I’d never done any. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that won’t last long, will it?’ After that, I suppose I started to nurture at the very least some curiosity about exploring the new medium. I saw Jim and Ismail again in London with their friend Felicity Kendal, with whom I was still acting in Amadeus, and all the conversation was about the roles that I might play for them. Nothing happened because I was acting on stage more or less continuously. I left the National shortly afterwards and did three plays in swift succession. When I was playing in J. P. Donleavy’s The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthasar B at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in the autumn of 1981, Jim and Ismail formally asked me to act in their film Heat and Dust, and for a while it seemed that it might happen, but the play—which was doing rather shakily at the box office—kept getting reprieved and finally they had to cast someone else. This was a setback, not only for my movie career, but also for my mother’s. Ismail had phoned me one day when it seemed more rather than less likely that I might be able to do it and said, How is your mother? He had never met her, but I reassured him about the state of her health. Would she like to come to India to be in a film? I need some very elegant older ladies to visit the harem. I assured him that I would enquire, though I never did. If I’d never acted in a film, I was damned if she was going to. Sorry, mamma.

Debut

In general, my brief exposure to film-making formed in me an impression (which I cannot say has ever entirely left me) of a madhouse run by the inmates. My first encounter with the medium as a participant provided more evidence for this intuition. It came about most unexpectedly. Milos Forman had been at the very first theatrical preview of Amadeus at the National Theatre. We learnt this from Peter Hall at a note session. Forman, it seemed, had loved the play, and remarked that Austria in the 1780s was just like Hollywood in the 1930s. Emperor Joseph II bought up all the available talent so no one else could have it, but then he didn’t know what to do with it. A good thought: Milos’s approval of the show was encouraging and just what we needed on that first preview. What we didn’t know was that Milos had decided there and then that Amadeus was to be his next film. He and Peter Shaffer shared an agent, the legendary Robbie Lantz, who was at the same performance, and immediately put the wheels in motion. Meanwhile, it was clear that the play was already the most extraordinary success, even without the reviews. When they came, most of them were ecstatic, and some were violently critical; the subsequent controversy ensured that it would be impossible to get a ticket for the show for the foreseeable future. We, the actors, knew nothing about Forman’s deal. Of course we knew that a film would be made, but what kind of a film? Starring whom? In London there had been a steady procession of megastars in the stalls, hovering hungrily around like legacy hunters at a sickbed. Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Robert de Niro all passed through. Any or all of them seemed likely candidates. Any of them, but none of us. Even Paul Scofield, at the very height of his fame and genius in the role of Salieri, wryly remarked that he doubted whether he was in the running.

When, eventually, Milos Forman’s name was announced to direct the film, that broadened the field. Forman was known to favour unknowns. Now a new question entered our minds: were we sufficiently unknown? It was pleasant to read in Screen International that Forman had cast Ian McKellen and me in the roles that we’d played on stage, Ian in the New York production which had just opened, me in London. However, neither he nor I nor our respective agents had been informed of this excellent arrangement, which seemed extremely careless, to say the least. A call to the producer, Saul Zaentz, established that no casting had occurred, but there was every possibility that one would be playing the role. In the fullness of time, one would be informed. Rumours started. Every week, it seemed, a new cast was announced. Hottest tip for Mozart was Dudley Moore. Why not, one wondered, revive the Arthur team, and cast John Gielgud as Salieri with Liza Minelli as Constanze? Further calls to the producer met with increasingly ominous vagueness. Shaffer was ensconced with Forman, wrestling with the screenplay. One day I bumped into him. Casting, he told me, was the last of their concerns. They weren’t even thinking about it till the script was right, which, as far as he could see, would be never. What’s Forman like? I asked. Peter replied with a long, feeling look, such as men use to tell of terrible wartime experiences of which it would be best not to speak. ‘It’s coming along,’ he’d say through tightened jaw.

Then one day towards the end of 1982, more than a year since I’d left the National Theatre, a friend told me he’d been asked to screen test for the part of Mozart. I began to hear of more and more actors who’d been asked to screen test for the role. I became mildly bitter. Only mildly because everything one had heard or experienced of movies taught one that their makers believe themselves to be Nietzschean figures beyond the codes of ordinary human decency; it had been announced, moreover, that there was an absolute inderdiction on any actor appearing in the film in a role that he or she had played on stage. It was a surprise, then, to get a call from the producer saying that Mr Forman would like to meet me. ‘Meet me?’ I said. ‘He wants to screen test every other actor in London, but he wants to meet me. Well, I’m sure I’d love to meet Mr Forman. I’m sure he’s a very interesting man." And, in this captious spirit, I made off for the Connaught Hotel. When I got to Forman’s suite my worst fears were confirmed. The room seemed to contain every actor under the age of thirty who had had a good review in the last ten years. We stared at one another balefully. Then Richard Griffiths (who had appeared in Milos’s film Ragtime) arrived—surely not to play Mozart, one thought. We got chatting. After a few minutes, the door flew open and everyone’s idea of a Hollywood director strode in, chewing a very large cigar and bellowing in a richly inflected Slavic accent. He flung his arms round some of Richard Griffiths.

When he was released from the bear-like embrace, Richard introduced me. Forman sprang back. ‘Ah! You are Simon Callows. I wanted to look at you. Come in, come in,’ and ushered Richard and me into another room, which also contained the snowy-bearded, perfectly rotund figure of Saul Zaentz, the producer, looking like a recently retired Santa Claus from Macy’s. They were full of a recent phone call they had received from Columbia pictures, who had offered to capitalise the whole movie, ‘if in the title role you will use a great star which we in the studio have under contract.’ ‘Great,’ Milos had said. ‘Who is your star?’ A brief pause. ‘Walter Matthau.’ A stunned silence, after which Milos had spluttered, ‘But Mozart was thirty when he died.’ "You know that, Milos, and we know that, but does the American public know that?" So Hollywood really behaved the way it was supposed to. After this story, we made small talk for a minute or two, but this is not Milos’s forte, and his eyes began to wander. The trickle of anecdotes ran dry. He suddenly said to me, ‘I want to tell you something. I have seen ten Mozarts, and you are by far the best. Everyone else was either great at being an asshole or great at being a genius. You are the only one who combined the two. Yes, a really fantastic performance. Brilliant. No, really, great.’ He tailed off, deep in thought, before erupting with more praise. ‘Fantastic performance, amazing, incredible. I wonder,’ he mused, his brows furrowed, ‘what could you play in our film?’ He then started to scrutinise the cast list. Up and down the list his eyes went, but nothing seemed to suggest itself to him. ‘What?’ he asked me. ‘I really can’t imagine,’ I replied. ‘What kind of actor are you looking for to play Mozart?’ ‘A little one,’ he said, ‘like a bird’—he became a bird for a startling moment—‘and also a brilliant actor. Tell me,’ he looked at me accusingly, ‘where will I find such an actor?’ ‘I—I don’t know,’ I apologised. He grunted, looking again up and down the cast list. ‘Well, we must think of something for you to do. I shall think about it.’

Two days later, I was lunching at the Tate Gallery when the waitress came to my table and said, ‘You’re to phone a Mr Forman at the Connaught Hotel.’ To my great surprise, the telephone was answered by Mr Forman himself. ‘I was a fool,’ the bass-baritone growl admitted. ‘Of course I shall test you for Mozart.’ Accordingly, a day or two later I found myself in a studio being directed for the first time by Milos. Among the other actors testing were Judy Davies, Paul Rogers, Jeremy Irons. Milos was incisive, concentrated, sparing of words. Naturalness of expression was what he wanted, he said. ‘Be netcheral.’ He demonstrated what he wanted by acting out the emotion in question in a style that would not have surprised the audience at a Kabuki play but which was quite alarming at close quarters. ‘Mozart is happy,’ he would say, showing what the word meant by organising his lips into a grin that extended to the corner of his eyes, which were themselves gleaming with maniacal delight. ‘You see? Netcheral.’

We filmed a couple of scenes. I heard nothing. One day, it was discovered that the part of Mozart had indeed been cast, but there was interest in my playing something else in the film ‘Schumacher?’ asked my agent. ‘Schickelbart?’ ‘Schikaneder,’ I prompted. ‘Yes, yes, Schikaneder. Who on earth is he? Was he in the play?’ As it happens, though he did not appear in the play, I knew all about the wonderfully ripe Schikaneder, librettist of The Magic Flute, first Papageno, leading actor-manager of his day, and the first man to play Hamlet in German. He had ended up in a lunatic asylum having provided the Viennese public with increasingly surreal and incoherent entertainments, a kind of Marx Brothers mayhem avant la lettre. But his role in the film was slender. More important, could I bear to watch some unknown Yank—I was sure that no Briton was going to be cast as Mozart—becoming world-famous in my part? Anyway nothing apparently came of it; I heard nothing. Until, suddenly, there was massive urgency. ‘They do want you for Schillerkrantz, darling, and you have to go to Abbey Road Studios on Friday to record a couple of arias and a duet with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Marriner.’ ‘But I’ve not agreed to play the part. And there’s singing. I daren’t even sing in my bath, let alone in front of Neville bloody Marriner. Just tell them thank you very much, but no thanks.’ Which she did.

The effect was most gratifying. When I reached home, four messages had been left on my answering machine—one from Peter Shaffer, one from Saul Zaentz, and two from Milos Forman. I called them all, the latter first, at home in Los Angeles, and again was amazed to get straight through to the man himself. ‘I’m very happy you’re doing the movie,’ he said. ‘I understand there’s some problem with the singing, don’t worry, don’t worry, if necessary we’ll dub it. Of course, it would be nice if you could really sing, but don’t worry.’ ‘Oh, OK,’ I said, ‘fine.’ Apparently everything was settled. Not so. He sounded suddenly anxious. ‘We’d better meet again to make sure we feel the same way about the part. Then we can go ahead.’ Back to the dear old Connaught the following week. The door was opened by Milos himself, all alone, again strangely bereft of lieutenants. ‘Schikaneder!’ he cried as I stood there in front of him, and I saw his point. I had turned up wearing my usual winter outfit: a sweeping black fedora, an ankle-length black overcoat, and a bright red carnation in my buttonhole. I was the music-hall idea of an actor-manager. We sat down and read a couple of scenes. Any attempt at characterization was stamped on. ‘No, no, simple, simple. Be netcheral!’ I felt I had a lot to contribute in terms of the psyche of the actor-manager. Milos was having none of it. ‘It’s you! I want you. I wish I could change the name of the character to Simon Callows.’

Nevertheless, he cast me. ‘Very good, very good. Perfect. Only one problem: can you ride whores?’ ‘Good God,’ I thought, ‘he’s auditioning my sexuality.’ ‘Whores?’ I said weakly. ‘Yes, whores, whores, clip-clop…’ ‘Oh, horse, yes, yes, of course, I mean, no, but I can learn easily.’ ‘Very good. See you next week. And remember—no acting.’ Things were looking up. The latest version of the script contained a much-augmented role for Schikaneder, and I finally discovered that Mozart was to be Tom Hulce, whom I’d met in New York two years before—delightful, funny, and very good, a veteran both of Peter Shaffer (he took over the part of Alan Strang in the Broadway production of Equus) and of John Dexter, who directed it. We re-met for two seconds at Abbey Road before being summarily plunged into Mozart’s musical world. We began, as usual with Milos, in media res. There was a scene in the screenplay which took place in Schikaneder’s country cabin with Mozart, Schikaneder and three of his actresses standing round the piano improvising tunes from The Magic Flute, drunk and debauched. This could only be a nightmare to perform cold, so of course that’s what we started with. Milos gave a vivid impression of how he imagined the scene: wild, sexy, anarchic, with raspberries and belches blown and belched, Schikaneder thumping the keyboard, Mozart giggling insanely, and the girls being very naughty—all within the framework of tunes being played, tossed around, transformed, stood on their head. ‘OK?’ said Milos, and went, taking Shaffer with him.

Eventually we did manage to concoct something which satisfied him. Of its nature, though, it was almost impossible to repeat; and sustaining that level of crazy ebullience for a sound recording is a desperate task. ‘I have an idea,’ said Shaffer, and disappeared, returning a minute later with two bottles of champagne. So it came about that the rather surprised walls of Studio One, Abbey Road, where some of the great classical recordings of the century had been made, witnessed a performance of certain tunes of the divine Wolfgang Amadeus by a gaggle of drunken actors shrieking and farting and hitting a priceless keyboard while Simon Preston, Master of the Musicke at Westminster Abbey, who was also involved in the musical preparation, looked benignly on. My aria was another matter. Papageno’s numbers are not complex, but my musical ear is so slow that I would have needed at least a month to feel comfortable with them. ‘Perhaps I could be dubbed?’ I said to Milos. ‘It’s a shame, and I’m very sorry, but if I don’t have to worry about the singing it’ll be better for my acting.’ ‘Acting?’ Milos’s eyes narrowed. ‘Acting? There will be no acting in my film.’ ‘But, Milos,’ I said, ‘Schikaneder’s on a stage, in a theatre, acting.’ A dark and terrible pause. ‘Yes. OK.’ Another pause. ‘But this will be the only acting in my film!!’ Having reluctantly conceded this point, he nevertheless thought that I should persist with trying to sing the numbers, so I did, with deep foreboding, which was, as it turned out, entirely warranted.

First in order of recording was Figaro’s ‘Non piu andrai,’ which you will recall starts with a useful little note on the cellos bearing no relation whatever to the sung note which follows. Three, four times I attempted the note, three, four times the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Marriner ground to a halt. Neville had perhaps been a little unnerved by having earlier that day attempted to conduct one of Mozart’s German Dances to the satisfaction of Twyla Tharp, who was choreographing the film. This satisfaction not being forthcoming, Neville, ever gallant, suggested to her that perhaps she might like to conduct it herself, whereupon without hesitation she seized the baton from him and did so. ‘Better,’ she said, approvingly. Anyway, on my fifth attempt at the first note of ‘Non piu andrai,’ Neville cried, ‘It’s quite all right, Mr Callow, I had the same trouble with Birgit Nilsson only last week in Stockholm.’ Gallant, indeed. He then very sensibly proposed that the orchestra should record the accompaniment and he and I would lay down the vocal track later in more relaxed circumstances. He next turned his attention to trying to make the men of the renowned Ambrosian singers sound like fifteen Czechoslovakian dwarves in the Don Giovanni parody which the screenplay had Schikaneder staging in his theatre. ‘In the pot/We have got/A soprano/And when you make a soprano stew/Any old, any old, any old soprano will do.’ The Ambrosian men were understandably tentative, but Neville had a solution. ‘May I suggest that you put your coats over your heads, gentlemen?’ They attempted this. Not quite right. ‘Perhaps if you got onto your knees?’ Still not right. ‘Could you turn your backs to the microphone?’ Still not entirely satisfactory. Then Neville had an inspiration. Kenny Baker, R2D2 from Star Wars, who was playing one of my acting troupe, was with us in the studio and Neville asked him, ‘without embarrassment on anyone’s part,’ to demonstrate the appropriate sounds to the singers, which he did briskly and with impeccable authenticity. The men of the Ambrosian took note, and, on their knees, their coats over their heads, and with their backs to the microphone, they gave the spirited rendition of the piece which today adorns the soundtrack. Remarkably convincing it was, I must say. Kenny certainly gave it his blessing.

A week later, Neville and I had our relaxed session together, alone in the studio with only Erik Smith, the recording producer with the session, as company. I sat opposite Neville, both of us wearing headphones as, bobbing and swaying, cigar clamped grimly between his teeth, he threw his arms in my general direction in an expressive but somewhat indistinct manner, which did nothing to improve my sense of rhythm. My sense of pitch was beyond salvation, which is perhaps what led Smith to suggest that I should simply act the number, rather than attempt to sing it. This I did, and, d’you know, when I heard it played back I thought it was really rather good. ‘It’s sort of Sprechstimme, isn’it?’ I said, pleased with myself. ‘Yes,’ said Neville, gloomily, ‘it is.’ ‘Perhaps,’ I continued vivaciously, ‘I could do Pierrot Lunaire.’ ‘I thought you were,’ said Neville. A week later, the admirable Brian Kay, late of the King’s Singers, was in the studio to record the arias under my direction: potentially a humiliating but in fact an exhilarating experience, with me encouraging him to give the performance I would have done had I been able.

A month later, with this nightmare behind me, I found myself in Prague one Sunday to rehearse all my scenes in the film; I was acting in a play called Romantic Comedy in London with Pauline Collins at the time. Meg Tilley, who was playing Constanze, and Tom had just tottered off their planes, having been on them for sixteen hours. The set was already built, and the moment we all arrived, Milos plunged in. I had suddenly realised that he expected us to have memorised the scenes, which I did in a frenzied few minutes in my dressing room, adding to the generally febrile atmosphere. Milos said nothing about the scenes or the characters, simply giving us our physical movements. ‘Action,’ he said, and we were off. Within seconds, he would be on his feet, protesting. ‘No, no, no, no. Simple. Please. Not like this’—a not entirely complimentary impersonation of one’s physical and vocal attributes ensued—‘like this’—a cartoon of the desired performance was now indicated, with many a grimace and grunt. On and on the onslaught went for the whole day. I staggered back to London, thinking it would surely be different when the cameras were there.

I was wrong. It was the same, only more so. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Tom, ‘we are graduates of the John Dexter school of acting,’ a reference to the legendary martinet of a theatre director with whom we had both worked and whom we both, in some odd way, loved. ‘Nothing this man says can harm us.’ I was wrong about that, too. ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ he would cry, time and again. It was as if he couldn’t believe the perversity of what we were presenting to him. How could we not be playing the scene the way he had envisaged it? Faced with the offensive performance, his technique was to attempt to destroy it by brute force. As far as one could judge, it was nothing personal: simply that this piece of wrong acting had to be expunged from the world. With mad energy Milos would assault it, raining insults, parodistic impersonations, reproaches upon its head, until, inevitably, it succumbed. It was like being in the trenches. Most of time I simply felt shell-shocked. I was anyway struggling with my relation to the camera. I was at a loss as to where to pitch my performance—definitely not into the lens, I knew that, but then where? How? For what audience? I would try to be bigger, then smaller, then somewhere in between, all the while highly conscious of the figure of Milos just behind the camera, unconsciously twisting his features into the emotion he hoped would be passing across mine. Joy, grief, surprise, anger succeeded each other on his face with lunatic exaggeration. It was very peculiar. As related in my Manifesto diary, there was a problem, too, with the accent; officially we were speaking Transatlantic (a tongue known to no one in life except disc jockeys) but, after a take, Peter Shaffer and Milos would anxiously descend on me, Milos crying, ‘Too English!’ Shaffer murmuring, ‘Too American, dear.’ I had no idea who or what I was, as a character, as an actor or as a human being.

Basically, netcheralness was the goal; but Milos’s definition of what was ‘netcheral’ was quite arbitrary. What it amounted to was that the way Milos saw it was netcheral—any other way, not. Moreover, ‘Remember that I have a camera here and this light is here so it would help me very much if you will keep your head low here and turn only 30 degrees this way.’ Netcheral was clearly a relative term, and one that swiftly became irksome. I found an antidote. During the hours of piano practice I happily endured under the tutelage of a young virtuoso who, after winning international prizes, had been banned by the authorities from playing, I remembered that in Germany the note B natural is called H. Thus whenever Milos would cry, ‘Be natural!’ I would murmur, ‘H.’ This was oddly consoling. Over supper at night, Milos further expounded his theories of film technique. ‘Stage actors are wonderful, big, generous. But they can’t use film, always acting, always doing something. On film, you must be. And you must be yourself, I cast you to be you. Otherwise I cast someone else.’ There was a brief pause. ‘But, Milos,’ said a slightly uneasy Murray Abraham, playing Salieri, ‘if you cast everyone to be themselves, well, Salieri’s a very nasty man.’ Milos stared at him for a long time. ‘Murray,’ he said, ‘you think too much.’ I was certainly endeavouring to play Schikaneder as a variant of myself, my actor-self, at any rate, with a few touches of the young Orson Welles thrown in. By now I knew so much about Schikaneder that I was straining to add ever more fascinating details to the character, most of which were irrelevant to the film and would probably have been confusing. One day, Lindsay Anderson, who had come to visit us on the set, asked me who I was playing. I told him at great length about Schikaneder, becoming passionate in my enthusiasm. ‘But the film should be about Schikaneder,’ he said, ‘not bloody Mozart.’

Inevitably, I found myself watching the actor actually playing bloody Mozart rather closely. As reported, when I discovered that Tom had been cast in the role, I was very relaxed about it. There was a curious moment, however, during that one day of rehearsal in Prague. Tom had been whisked into the make-up chair on arrival, and when he walked shyly out onto the set, I had the heart-stopping experience of apparently seeing myself walking towards me: he was wearing my wig, my coat, my shoes, the costume I had worn for the two years’ run at the National. He even seemed to have my face, long, like mine, and full-mouthed. In the wig he was indistinguishable from me: this was the image that had stared back at me in the mirror night after night at the National Theatre just before I went on stage. It was an uncanny moment from which I recovered soon enough, more or less, and was always willing and eager to discuss anything with Tom. In the event, we rarely talked about the man or indeed the script, which is probably just as well from both sides. Apart from anything else, it was clear that we had very different approaches to acting. Tom, like every American actor with whom I have worked, was primarily interested in truthfully representing his character’s emotional life, whereas what had interested me, above all, was his mind. Inspired by Peter Hall’s demand during rehearsals for the play that I had to convince him at all times that I had written The Marriage of Figaro, I had tried to allow Mozart’s thought-processes to take me over; in particular, I had sought to give a sense of his musical brain at work. I have no idea whether I succeeded in this or not, but the result was certainly very different from Tom’s conception. Apart from anything else, Tom brought a natural sweetness of disposition, a tenderness and a delicacy to the role which I could never match. Tom’s Wolfie was an over-exuberant child; mine suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. His death was deeply affecting and beautifully observed from a medical point of view; mine was deliberately grotesque, almost expressionist. The screenplay, anyway, was a very different entity from the play, which was possessed of a wild, distorted energy, an E.T.A. Hoffman-like exaggeration, lit by candles and filled with monstrous shadows; the Mozart of the play was, after all, the reminiscence of a dying and frightened man, and everything the audience saw was seen through that man’s eyes. Even the music was distorted by Salieri’s memory. The screenplay, by contrast, was a sort of realistic double portrait of Mozart and Salieri and the age in which they lived. The film’s Mozart was less a creature of Salieri’s deceiving imagination, more a real man, which moved millions of movie-goers, though I remained loyal to the play’s more extreme vision.

As I say, Tom and I scarcely discussed such matters. For the most part, we tried to find as many different ways as possible of forgetting the unremitting tensions of the film when we weren’t actually making it; and Prague, in the Communist decadence of 1982, its hidden city flowing darkly like an underground stream underneath the sometimes glittering, sometimes crumbling metropolis above, offered many delights, cultural, carnal, but not often culinary. After a while, thanks to our American dollars, we gained access to the restaurants reserved for the party elite, and like most of the citizens, we availed ourselves fully of the universally active black market. In the beautifully lit Old Town, there was a curfew from which we were, or presumed ourselves to be, exempt. Peter Shaffer and I would meander around it, half expecting a carriage to draw up and Mozart himself to leap out of it. It was, of course, a city that Mozart knew well. You can still see the adjacent hotels in which he and his librettist for Don Giovanni, Lorenzo da Ponte, stayed; da Ponte would toss the new pages of text across to Mozart to set in time for Giovanni’s premiere, which took place in the very theatre where we were filming the opera sequences. We went to the theatre and the opera and to concerts for the equivalent of a couple of bucks, and wandered round the free galleries and palaces, unaccountably restored with gold leaf while the rest of the city crumbled. Beth Berridge, who had replaced Meg Tilley as Costanze Mozart when the latter tore a ligament in her foot before a frame had been shot, joined us in our frolics, as did all the many actors who came and went. I was merely a visitor to the set, if a frequent one; Tom and Beth were residents. Over the next six months, I took fifty-seven planes in and out of Czechoslovakia, staying just outside of town at the Panorama Hotel (the panorama