Anand Tucker's moving film of poet Blake Morrison's unflinching memoir has a dreamlike quality - and Morrison feels it has replaced his own memories, writes Donald Clarke.
Anand Tucker, a small, delicate man with pointed features, is musing on the traumas that so often result from being some man's son.
"I just guess that all sons are programmed to hate their fathers," he says.
Well, yes. There was, I think, some ancient Greek play dealing with the subject and barely a week goes by without the publication of another biography detailing the tortures visited on a frail young writer by his brutish dad. The most distinguished recent exercise in this genre must surely be Blake Morrison's disconcertingly frank And When Did You Last See Your Father?Following the author - until then best known as a poet - as he sought to come to terms with his dad's imminent death, the book was unflinching in its depiction of Morrison's own moral frailties and the older man's repeated deceptions. It seemed that Arthur Morrison, a doctor, had long been carrying on an affair with a family friend and may even have fathered her child.
Key to the book's success was the implied ambiguity between who Arthur actually was and the man his son believed him to be. Tucker's interesting film version of the memoir cannot call on that particular class of irony. Arthur, in the agreeable person of Jim Broadbent, is there before us in bold colour.
"You can't do what writing does in a film," Tucker agrees. "Film can be a horribly simplistic medium. But we still strive to get across what it felt like to be Blake. Sometimes we see Arthur as an overpowering bully. Elsewhere we suspect he might just love his son in an overpowering way. Ultimately, I hope the audience begins to suspect that he loved his son, but his son was just a bit too delicate. But, yes, it can never be as subtle as the book. It has a different rhythm."
It must have been a very strange experience for Morrison to sit through the film. The period detail appears to have been assembled with considerable skill and the performances are uniformly excellent. But that is cuddly Colin Firth on screen, not flinty Blake Morrison.
I wonder if the writer was able to view the movie objectively as a piece of drama. "No, I don't think so," Tucker says. "I think he found it very moving. In fact, he said to me that the film has, in some way, replaced his own memories. It seems more real than the memories. He wrote the book 12 years ago and it was the first of its kind in the way it excavated memories. Now you can't move in book shops for 'the story of my life'." One suspects that it would take a poet to mistake And When Did You Last See Your Father?for anything approaching reality. Featuring wistful photography that purposefully recalls the Technicolor of the 1950s and an ingenious series of shots incorporating flawed mirrors, the film has something of the quality of a waking dream about it. But it certainly does put forward some troublingly convincing portraits of the Morrison family and its retainers. Tucker must have felt a heavy responsibility towards those still living.
"In some ways," he says. "But you would be a bad person if you deliberately showed somebody in a bad light just to make your movie more dramatic. That would not be a nice thing to do. I don't think that ever became a problem in this movie. Blake has seen it twice with his family and on both occasions he came out and gave me a big hug."
This is not the first time Tucker, now 44, has travelled through this sort of territory. In 1998, Hilary and Jackie, his treatment of the relationship between the cellist Jacqueline du Pré and her sister, managed to enrage a number of the cellist's associates with its references to sexual promiscuity and general bad behaviour.
Julian Lloyd Webber, another cellist, was particularly vociferous in his denunciations. Did Tucker end up regretting any aspects of that first feature? "Absolutely not," he says. "Not at all. Look, I loved Jacqueline du Pré from when I was a teenager. I read Hilary's book and I was deeply moved and had to do that film. Frankly, I am not sure how people who weren't part of her family had a right to say they knew her better. There is an interesting thing about famous people: everyone thinks they know them. Look. If you don't agree with the film, make your own film about Jacqueline du Pré."
TUCKER'S CAREER HASprogressed in irregular jumps and starts. Despite Hilary and Jackie'stwo Oscar nominations - Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths both got acting nods - he did not get to direct another picture for seven long years. In the interim, Tucker produced such films as Girl With a Pearl Earring, worked on the TV series This Is Modern Artand began a continuing romantic relationship with Sharon Maguire, director of Bridget Jones's Diary, but it was not until 2005 that Shopgirl, his treatment of a Steve Martin novella, finally made it into cinemas.
"It's just the movie business," he sighs. "I nearly made a number of films. For a long time I was making an adaptation of The Railway Man, a novel by Eric Lomax. That nearly got made a couple of times. But, you know, it is, in some ways, harder to get a second film made than a first. With your first film you are the new kid on the block. After that, everyone desperately wants you to make something that tops the first. That's hard."
Before Hilary and Jackiewas made, Tucker, whose childhood was spent in Hong Kong, Thailand and other parts east, had already clocked up a fair degree of experience at the BBC. After experimenting with drama school, he stumbled into the corporation in the early 1990s and quickly found work directing segments on the arts for the now-defunct Late Show. He was, however, still relatively young and full of grand ambitions when he completed Hilary and Jackie.
The most ill-fated of his schemes concerned the forthcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materialstrilogy. Long a fan of the books, Tucker was very publicly unveiled as the director of the fantasy series two years ago, but, somewhere along the way, became separated from the project. The first of the films, The Golden Compass, which arrives in cinemas this Christmas, was eventually directed by Chris Weitz.
"Well, I don't want to comment too much," he says. "I spent six months chasing that project and 18 working on it. I did a lot of work on that movie and, well, things just didn't work out. They are big beasts, Hollywood movies, and the ins and outs are complicated.
"It has not been easy. I won't bulls**t you. I poured my heart and soul into it. But that's life and that's the movie business." At least, in Maguire, he has a partner who appreciates those traumas.
"Yes. We have been together a long time and she does understand what I am going through. I produced her latest film, Incendiary, and it did prove that in this business it really is good to work with somebody you love and you can trust."
• And When Did You Last See Your Father? opens on Friday.
