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Features
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A Jolly Good Fellowes
Actor turned Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes happily parlays his and Tom Wilkinson’s Oscar momentum into the directorial debut Separate Lies.
Monday, October 3, 2005
By Brent Simon
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Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com
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The night that started it all
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For those doubting that an Academy Award still has the Cinderella-esque power to transform a career overnight, just spend a few moments talking to Julian Fellowes. A familiar face on British television via roles in Killing Me Softly, Fellow Traveler, Friends in the North, Aristocrats and Monarch of the Glen, Fellowes found himself catapulted to rich opportunity when his script for director Robert Altman’s sprawling 2002 ensemble Gosford Park scored the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Almost immediately, projects that had languished for years became the subjects of countless meetings and serious interest.
“I mean, I always wanted to direct,” admits Fellowes during a recent interview with FilmStew. “But as you know, if there’s anyone in this town that doesn’t want to direct, we can probably get them all on one bus.”
“And so you have to keep that to yourself until it becomes at least vaguely realistic,” he continues. “I’d gone up a different ladder, the acting route, and it’s hard to swing across those ladders until there’s a powerful motive to do so. And the wonderful thing about winning an Oscar — which I strongly recommend to all of you — is that it gives you tremendous choices.”
“Suddenly you’re offered all these things. I was allowed to write a novel and do a musical show in London, and to present a drama documentary series on the BBC. You would understand if I were just offered other scriptwriting jobs because I won it for writing a script, but it isn’t only that.”
Here, Fellowes pauses and unleashes a very un-British-like ‘Boing!’ before continuing: “The door springs open, and one of the things I was allowed to do was direct.”
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Wilkinson at Venice film fest
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Indeed. The sprung door in question is Separate Lies, an adaptation of the 1951 novel A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin that — in the vein of recent American independent releases like In The Bedroom and We Don’t Live Here Any More — takes a long, adult look at the infidelities, outed secrets and tangled emotional webs of well-heeled, upper-middleclass Brits, and the lengths to which they go to cover up their peccadilloes.
Tom Wilkinson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) stars as James Manning, a workaholic solicitor who commutes between London and the country house he shares with his younger wife Anne (Emily Watson). Ignored by her husband and bored with her homebound lifestyle, Anne falls into a liaison with roustabout divorcé William Bule (Rupert Everett). When the husband of the Manning’s cleaner is killed in a hit-and-run auto accident, a single hasty decision spawns a sticky, asexual dishonesty that reproduces and engulfs all in its path, leading to complications heretofore unseen and unfathomable.
Completed more than a year ago but held back by distributor Fox Searchlight for a theatrical release more in line with traditional awards season patterns, Separate Lies was a passion project of sorts for Fellowes, an adaptation he had held onto specifically with an eye toward — in some utopian future — making it his feature film directorial debut. (He’s previously helmed some children’s television work in England.)
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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The always intense Watson
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The reason he’d held onto it, as Fellowes tells it, has to do with the material’s inherent alignment with his own personal sensibilities. “You want to work on films you want to see,” Fellowes says pointedly, “and I like complicated, grown-up stories without these polarities — where the morality is difficult and you don’t know whose side you’re on and you keep changing and that kind of stuff. That interests me.”
“I’m not so interested in stuff where this is the good guy and this is the bad guy and she’s the heroine and that’s it,” he explains. “I mean, of course those films are fun too, I don’t mean to sound poo-poo — I like I, Robot — but for me personally to work on I wanted a kind of complicated morality, because I think life is complicated. We’re always making choices that are not good choices — that seem good [choices] at the time maybe, but a bit later you’re having to get yourself out of them.”
The choice of Wilkinson for the role of James Manning was far from incidental, either. “I wanted him to play the part and he wanted to play it, and we had tried to get some interest going,” relates Fellowes. “I mean, Tom had done The Full Monty, but I was just dead in the water at that point. And then we met up at the Oscars — where he was nominated too, for In the Bedroom — and he said, ‘I wonder if now this means we’ll get the money for the film?’”
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Rupert Everett
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It did, of course. Separate Lies smartly assays the murky, moral abyss in which its upper-crust characters are caught, tires spinning, and it does so with a particularly smart sense of tellingly banal gestures. With all this grey area in mind, Fellowes embarked on a one-week rehearsal process before filming that he characterizes as more of a talk-through than a walk-through.
He told his actors he was open to changing all sorts of things, but that at the end of the week, they would shoot what they had. “That concentrates the mind, rather,” he recalls. “A lot of what I write, what the characters are saying is not really what’s happening in the scene. So of course it’s doubly important that they know what is supposed to be happening in the scene. But then, [after that] for film acting half the work or more is done.”
If Fellowes — who recently wrote the book for the new stage musical Mary Poppins, which opened in December in London’s West End, as well as penned a critically praised debut novel, Snobs — is feeling any pressure with the bow of his first film, he’s not externalizing much of it. “As my mother would say, ‘These are the right problems [to have],’” he jokes.
“If someone [asked] what I wanted an audience to take away from this movie, it’s that life is complicated and that you should think before you make a judgment on someone because you almost certainly don’t know all the facts,” he adds. “Some of these characters are worse than others, but none of them are horrible people.”
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