'When
I was young, I was the worst kind of Beckett anorak,' admits Anthony
Minghella. 'I went to university in 1972 and discovered Beckett
the second I arrived. The following four or five years of my life
were defined by that discovery in some ways. I became obsessed
with the writing – its mixture of austerity and romance.
It's like Bach for me – the two major discoveries in my young
adulthood were Bach and Beckett. For both it's true that there's
this monkish, extremely rare and dry surface, underneath which
there is a volcano.
'My
unfinished doctoral thesis was on Beckett. Play was the first play I ever directed,
in a double bill with Happy
Days. There was a time, for five years, when I read Beckett
almost on a daily basis. The sense of language and poetry in his
writing has been the single biggest influence on me as a writer.
'The
way I've been working with actors on this project is antithetical
to everything I believe in. I don't believe in the martinet conductor/director.
But in this, I find myself invading the process and trying to
annihilate psychology, annihilate the organic creation of the
moment. It's not about that – it's a score in some way. And
we're all hostage to it.
'If
you are making a film of Play, you have to find a cinematic correlative to the light, which
the stage directions specify for every speech – otherwise
you are just filming a live performance. You can't have a light
moving and a camera moving – one has to be still.
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'When
I was teaching dramatic literature, I would say to students: Look
at the last page of Beckett's Play and the stage direction 'Repeat play'. There's no way you can
experience that on the page. In a novel or poem you can experience
the whole thing in your relationship to what's written, but in
the theatre or on film it's about the experience of time, and
time is very different when you're sitting in front of the play
twice. And obviously the Dantesque idea of his is that in purgatory
we'll be forced to revisit the same trivial pieces of our lives
again and again, in a kind of ironic version of life.
'The
great thing about movies is that the method of constructing film
is by repetition, by takes, taking one element and doing it again
and again until you've got it right, which is essentially what
the characters in Play
are doing: they're doing things again and again until they think
they've got it right and can therefore move on. I am not just
going to repeat the same piece of film twice. The repeat will
be a different version of the same words. The text remains exactly
as it's written, but I'm looking to get a layered quality to the
film, not just pressing the rewind button. I'm trying to find
a film correlative to actors repeating the piece twice.
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'It's
bleak, but what I think is healing in Beckett is laughter. There's
huge amount of farce in his work. It's a farce in repetition –
first time round, you laugh, and next time round it's harder to
laugh. I assume if it kept repeating it would get more and more
terrifying. When the actors have been trapped in urns for two
or three days, you start to get the claustrophobia, you start
to get terrified. Insects
and flies get in and start irritating the actors and you realise
that the idea of this is incredibly cruel and remorseless. I think
the healing gradually disappeared from his writing.
'Everybody
who loves Beckett will say the same thing: no matter how miserable
or dark or cruel it is, it is also uplifting in an odd way because
it's so honest and so true.
'In
the theatre, a blackout can be used as a powerful form of punctuation,
but you can't do that in film. Black in film means nothing. Instead,
I've tried to use run-outs, lead-ins, fogging, clapperboards and
so on for the filmic equivalent of punctuation. They are the same
kind of distancing devices.
'Beckett
is laughing at the characters, but on the other hand it is deeply
felt. He pokes fun at them, but he also feels for them.'
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