Welcome back, Ralph Fiennes. The great man is at Dublin International Film Festival for the Irish premiere of Uberto Pasolini’s take on the closing section of The Odyssey. The Return casts Fiennes as an older Odysseus making his way wearily back to Ithaca 20 years after leaving for the Trojan wars.
Can I compare that journey with Fiennes stepping back to (or near to) the soil on which he grew up? Probably not. Let’s not get carried away. But he moved, with his parents, from England to west Co Cork in 1973 and went to Newtown School in Waterford. “It was a great mad adventure,” he told me a few years ago.
He has been back often. It is only a few months since I saw him perform TS Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Abbey Theatre. By that point he was already deep into awards-season duties for Edward Berger’s Conclave. Now he’s doing this. Later in the year we will see him in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, the long-anticipated second sequel to the director’s 28 Days Later. That’s an impressive work rate. Does he sleep?
“It’s been a bit relentless, yeah, but I do sleep,” Fiennes says in his hesitant fashion.
I feel we are being edged back to a discussion of The Return. Fiennes is not alone today. Pasolini, an experienced Italian producer, who secured a best-picture Oscar nomination for The Full Monty back in 1998, joins us for consideration of a serious-minded film that makes evocative use of its Mediterranean locations. (Confusingly, Pasolini is, indeed, nephew of a renowned Italian director, but that’s Luchino Visconti, not Pier Paolo Pasolini.)
So what is it that keeps drawing creators back to Homer’s epic poem? We are talking in the city where James Joyce set his immortal take on Ulysses. Somewhere out there Christopher Nolan is directing an all-star cast in what we expect to be a noisier version of The Odyssey. After 2,800 years the text is still being reinvented.
“I think that it has a lot to say about the human condition,” Pasolini says. “But it also says it in different ways for different ages. It speaks to people who, when young, are fascinated by the fantasy elements of the original. But it also speaks to older people about the nature of families and fatherhood.”
The current production must have particular resonance for Fiennes. Juliette Binoche is regal as Odysseus’s famously patient wife, Penelope. The two actors have history. Most will think first of their performances opposite one another in The English Patient, from 1996 – for which Binoche won a surprise best supporting actress Oscar – but the connection goes back further than that. Fiennes’ cinematic debut was as Heathcliffe opposite Binoche’s Catherine in Peter Kosminsky’s peculiar take on Wuthering Heights, from 1992. That must have been fun.
“We’ve stayed very, very good friends over the years, and we’ve been to see each other in our different theatre shows,” Fiennes says. “I’m very close to Juliette as a friend. And I think we had vaguely talked about what we should do together. She teases me because it was Uberto who said we should do this.”
He gestures to Pasolini.
“You said, ‘What about Juliette?’ I thought, fantastic. That felt so right. I called her, and she said, ‘Send the script.‘”
It’s worth walking through his journey to that Wuthering Heights. Fiennes was born in Ipswich, in eastern England, 62 years ago. Mark Fiennes, his dad, was, among other things a farmer and photographer. Jennifer Lash, his mother, was a distinguished novelist and painter.
Indeed, the extended family is composed of endless creatives in endless fields. His brother Joseph was the star of Shakespeare in Love. His sister Martha is a busy director. And onwards and outwards. One is not all together surprised to learn that, before going to Newtown, he was schooled at home by Mum. It sounds like that sort of family: creative, bohemian, unconventional.
“It was a bit like that,” Fiennes told me in 2014. “That was the atmosphere. Home schooling was very much like that. She did feel that the local schooling was a little too simple, and she decided to teach us herself. She had to change her mind eventually.”
He had a notion to be a painter and spent some time at Chelsea College of Arts, in London, before making for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The talent was singular and unmistakable, but he was over 30 before, in 1993, his terrifying performance as the Nazi commandant Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List made him an odd star.
Or is he a star at all? Amusingly faltering, seemingly puzzled by the normal world, he has a complicated relationship with the gloss and the glam. His reticence and amusement at the outgoing awards season have, ironically, made him something of a hit. People love that lugubrious delivery. We speak days before he is to head to Los Angeles for the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
“Yeah, look, not every film gets the sort of response Conclave has got,” he says. “It’s very hard to make a film. So it’s good to celebrate – especially with the people you’ve worked with.”
Anyway, Fiennes, though busy at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British National Theatre, came to Wuthering Heights as a cinema novice. He had done a bit on Prime Suspect. He’d been the lead in a TV movie about Lawrence of Arabia. But nothing on the big screen. In contrast, Binoche had already worked with André Téchiné, Jean-Luc Godard and Leos Carax.
“It was overshadowed by the fact that she was French playing a classic heroine from a famous English 19th-century novel,” Fiennes says. “So the press were negative about that aspect. But we were in it. And there were some discordant elements in the production. But we were happy to be there. We got on and nothing that was not quite harmonious on the set affected that friendship.”
The English Patient was an altogether happier experience. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel about a doomed European combatant in the first World War was an Oscar phenomenon. It secured 12 nominations in 1997, winning nine awards, including best picture, best director and best supporting actress. Binoche, as the young nurse Hana, got past Lauren Bacall to win that last prize in a famous upset. Fiennes lost to Geoffrey Rush for Shine – and, amazingly, was not again nominated until this year.
“We were in the hands of a great director, Anthony Minghella, who had written these two wonderful parts and we had these great scenes together,” Fiennes says. “It was amazing to watch her play Hana. And the scenes were so delicately written and beautifully judged. Anthony has that sensibility for his own work. The way he nurtured and guided actors. So it was a very rewarding time on The English Patient.”
He was never complacent after that. He stretched his talent and risked shifts in tone. Intense in Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair. Unnerving and pathetic in David Cronenberg’s Spider. Somewhere in there he signed up for Harry Potter duties as the malign Lord Voldemort. Over the last decade or two he demonstrated a gift for comedy in films such as In Bruges and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Fiennes arrives to The Return as a known property but also as a continuing mystery. There is a swirl of confusion to his technique, the faintest inflections distinguishing villain from hero, amiable duffer from sinister manipulator. I have stared closely but still can’t quite tell how he does it.
“I remember working with Ralph and I just get moved even thinking about it,” Pasolini says. “In the scene where he talks about the war to the swineherds I literally forgot I was looking at Ralph. I was in front someone who had come back from war and was talking about that and his experiences. Who was talking about his pain and his guilt.”
I wonder if Fiennes is able to step away from the character when he goes home at night. One would not want to live a second longer than necessary with Göth from Schindler’s List. But strands of those transformations must occasionally be hard to shake off.
“I think you try to enter into some space which is the character, which is hard to articulate,” he says. “It’s a sort of fusion of your own imagination, your sense of someone other. It’s a subconscious, imaginative place which every actor is completely different about.
“I don’t know what that process is in terms of words. It’s an interior journey. The words and the feelings of a text have to come from you in the present tense. It has to live in you so when you respond to someone else that reality is as crystal and as present as it can be.”
Fiennes is impressively articulate on his art, but he poses the problem rather than offering the solution. He explains where he has to go but, by his own admission, can’t say how he gets there. If the immersion is so great as he suggests, it must be a wrench to come back to the real world. To make tea and replace the pillowcases. To walk among everyday citizens.
“When you finish the shoot and that’s the end of it you have a period of saying goodbye to what you’ve been through,” he says. “On a film with a larger role that can be six to eight, or more, weeks. You’ve grown something in you – which is that place that you go to when you’re filming – and then it stops. It can be a bit like grieving. It is a bit of a loss. It’s a bit like the end of a relationship.”
So, to swivel around again, could he offer any hints about how another actor might capture this mysterious ability to place every line in the present?
“I can’t say I have a formal process,” Fiennes says with an implied shrug. “I have a process. But I don’t like describing these processes, because they’re quite private and personal. If I did I wouldn’t find it embarrassing. It’s just that it’s so intuitive that I can’t really describe what it is. The best book on acting is Simon Callow’s Being an Actor.”
I’ve read that. I remember he was vehement about the (occasional) tyranny of directors.
“Yes, and he says, when you’re hungry to get into a part, any exhibition is useful – a film, a piece of music. You’re looking for things that evoke some feeling or response. Ultimately it’s your imagination. People ask if you research. I research a bit. But I didn’t have time to sail a boat around the Mediterranean.”
[ Ralph Fiennes: ‘English society is built on hierarchies’Opens in new window ]
He may not have had that nautical backup before embarking on The Return, but I wonder if he had deep knowledge of the classics. Someone from Fiennes’ background would once have had Homer drilled into him as a boy, but there was a deal less of that by the 1970s.
“I didn’t study classics,” Fiennes says. “But I did come across The Odyssey when I was [a] small boy. My mother or father read tales from Homer to me. That’s my memory of it. I’ve always loved the Odysseus myth.”
Fiennes remains a singular personality. You get a sense he’d be happy not talking about himself but, when encouraged, he can ramble on with endless articulacy. Despite the pressures that work puts on him, he seems happy to take on the hugest challenges. He’s no great age yet. But nobody would complain if he relaxed the pace just a little.
“No, no, I don’t feel any need to slow down,” he says. “Wonderful opportunities seem to come my way – and I can’t say no.”
The Return is in cinemas from Friday, April 11th
