Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod Talks about "Bel Ami" and Robert with London Evening Standard

Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod Talks about "Bel Ami" and Robert with London Evening Standard

Their first film, Bel Ami, stars Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson and talented screen beauties from four generations: Kristin Scott Thomas, Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Holliday Grainger. But you couldn’t accuse Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of embracing the glitz of the movie world with indecent haste.

The theatre director and designer, romantic as well as professional partners, have been staging classic plays, and latterly operas and ballets, for 31 years with their own touring company, Cheek by Jowl, and at major institutions in London, Paris and Moscow. It’s eight years since producer Uberto Pasolini suggested they film Guy de Maupassant’s defiantly bleak 1895 tale of a former soldier, Georges Duroy, who clambers over the thighs of his betters’ wives to a position of journalistic and political influence in aggressively colonial France. Weirdly, the two men had both been reading the book with a view to a stage adaptation when Pasolini called.

“It just jumps off the page: it’s shocking insofar as it’s so vital and has no sentimentality to it,” says Donnellan, 59. “The themes become daily more relevant,” adds Ormerod, 61, who co-directed the film, handling the camera and technical set-ups while Donnellan drilled the actors. “It’s about a corrupt press, and corrupt governments invading Muslim countries for their mineral wealth. We got all that for free.”

The stellar cast didn’t come free but they did come cheap. Bel-Ami is, in Donnelan’s phrase, “an easyJet film”, with a paltry budget of around £7.5 million, Budapest standing in for Paris on 10 days of the eight-week shoot. Everyone worked for less than their usual pay cheque, including Pattinson.

“He read the novel and also a book I wrote about acting,” says Donnellan, 59, “and he insisted on four weeks of one-on-one rehearsal before we shot anything, which is unheard of in Hollywood. He wants to expand as an actor and he takes it very seriously. He has genuinely never said anything negative about Twilight but no one wants to be in a franchise for ever.”

Patterson clearly relished the chance to stamp on the romantic image of Edward Cullen, and Ormerod’s camera picks up something lizardly and quite ruthless in his handsome features. “He was determined to keep it tough,” says Ormerod. “That’s why he did it,” adds Donnellan. “He said, ‘I’m playing a character with no redeeming features’.”

The two men don’t so much finish each other’s sentences as constantly refine and sharpen each other’s ideas. Their joint credit on the film is a belated acknowledgment of a fluid working relationship that has always gone beyond the labels of director and designer. They choose, produce, cast and rehearse their stage shows together. And although Donnellan is ostensibly the more voluble, on the film set, he says, he’d be “huddled quietly in the corner with Uma, talking about French politics, while Nick was like: [shouts] ‘I want the camera over there!’”

They are funny about the agonising slowness of cinematic process compared with theatre. “The rule about films is that they just never happen,” says Ormerod. “I don’t know how people can survive as film directors because you have to free up so much time.” In the past they were slated to film Chicago, and Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, which was a hit for them at the National Theatre in 1988. “They all fell down because of time,” Donnellan says. “Six months is the limit to the time we can have lunches at Soho House, before we need to get back to the day job.”

That “day job” has been a constant since they set up Cheek by Jowl in 1981, though they arguably started on it as early as 1972. This was when Donnellan, then aged 19 and the Manchester-born, Ealing-bred son of an Irish farmer turned London off-licence owner, went up to Cambridge to study law and got the part of Lennox in a European tour of Macbeth. The Second Murderer was played by another law student: Ormerod, the Eton-educated son of a St John’s Wood doctor.

“It was love at first sight,” Donnellan told me in a joint interview in 1994, when the two of them decided to “stand up and be counted” in the face of the anti-gay Clause 28 legislation. Today he says of the relationship: “It was difficult to begin with, then it wasn’t, and we were living together by the time we were 22. We were never in a world where there was much discrimination and we have lived our lives very openly.”

After graduating, Ormerod realised “I would be a very bad lawyer” and retrained in theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art. Donnellan practised at the bar for six months but already knew he wanted to work in theatre: “I preferred being in a world where people weren’t so certain.” They set up CBJ after failing to find work in a theatre world that then seemed a closed shop — their mission to produce vital, portable readings of classics on a human scale. That their personal and professional lives mesh is normal, they say — like a couple running a corner shop or a farm.

A string of award-winning shows led to the two of them working at the National and RSC — the very institutions that earlier shunned them — as well as the Bolshoi and Maly in Moscow, the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and further afield. One of their first productions together was John Ford’s Jacobean shocker, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Their new production of the play will visit the Brooklyn Academy of Music when it finishes its run at the Barbican, their current regular co-producer, on March 10.

Funding from abroad enables them to maintain large casts and a longer-than-usual rehearsal period. They control the length of tours and the size of venues, which is essential to maintain quality. Running a venue in Britain “would earn us more money,” says Donnellan, “but we don’t want to sit in judgment over other directors and designers, we don’t want personal assistants or to wear suits, and we’d lose our overseas audiences. We simply want to do theatre as well as we can.” And film? “We managed it this time, and it worked out reasonably well,” he says pragmatically. “But no one knows when a film is going to happen.”

Source => London Evening Standard / Via => Robert Pattinson Life