Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (30 page)

Lord Carnarvon potters amongst us with good-humoured nods and bits of chat to the ladies. He looks like every American’s idea of a belted earl – down to his velvet carpet slippers with the interlinked ‘C’ monogram embroidered on them.

With hard and concentrated work we finish at eight o’clock in the great hall at Highclere. It’s goodbye to Phoebe, Graham Crowden (a lovely man, but a terrible worrier about his acting. As Ray C says, Crowden raises worry to an art form) and Rosamund Greenwood.

One of our unit drivers has left the picture without telling anyone, so I find myself driving in Richard’s Winnebago in a pelting rainstorm past Stonehenge at half past ten. It’s a stormy pitch-black night. We stop at a lay-by and RL makes toasted sandwiches for my birthday dinner.

On location by 7.45.

After a day and a half languishing unhappily at her hotel, Maggie is here, but looking rather frail. After an early shot in the hall, Michael [Hordern] is allowed off for a day’s fishing, and Maggie, RL and myself
rehearse lines and moves, alone, in the Chinese bedroom. The scene plays very neatly and both Maggie and I find it very funny to do. Feel quite pleased with myself – as a writer this time.

A long lighting set-up.

Maggie and I make a start on the scene, but it’s late in the afternoon and jolly tiring to act on the peak of form then. The very funny run-through in the morning, before the cameras were in, now seems utterly remote. We wrap at six o’clock and Neville, in the midst of his gloom, has to laugh when he tells me the news that Trevor Howard has arrived, but passed out in the lounge of the hotel, which he thought was his bedroom.

We talk for 45 minutes – Neville, Richard and myself – while the rest of the unit stream up the road to the birthday party I’m giving for them at the Bath Arms. Neville estimates a budget overage of nearly £200,000 if we go two days over at Longleat. It’s the confrontation with EuroAtlantic which he is trying desperately to avoid for he knows that once they start interfering his job will quickly become impossible.

Quite cloudless sky today, as we drive through leafy lanes up to Longleat. I discuss with Neville my thoughts early this morning – for cuts and reschedulings to help us through the week.

In mid-morning word goes round the unit that ‘Trevor is on his way’. Trevor duly arrives and is guided to his caravan. When I go to see him he grins glazedly, but welcomingly, like a great bear just hit by a tranquillising dart. We eat lunch together, then I give him script changes and he is loaded back into his car and driven off to the hotel.

Back up in the Chinese room, Maggie and I finally get into bed. The scene seems to play well and when we wrap at seven we only have two shots left to do. A showing of assembled material for all the crew has to be cancelled as we all sit expectantly in the library and the projector fails.

All wait with rather bated breath, but Trevor is fine. Fortunately he’s seated at a desk, writing to
The Times
, so he can virtually read his lines, which he does, writing them out carefully, with shaky hand, on the paper in front of him.

Meanwhile I wait around, unused to the inactivity. Every now and then a shout from Michael Hordern as he bangs his head yet again on some projecting part of his caravan. His head is now covered in wounds.

Outside the weather is gorgeous, inside it’s hot, difficult work as I do one of my few dialogue pieces with Trevor. He is sitting there trying to survive. We collect the lines on the most basic level – if he can put the words in the right order, that’s a good take. I find it a strain and cannot act with any ease or comfort. Richard feels impatient and the crew have to break the brisk momentum they’re into whilst lines are rehearsed.

Maggie’s cool and competent delivery picks up the pace again in the afternoon and we remain on schedule when we wrap at seven.

Met at the location today by news from Bobby Wright, second assistant – known affectionately by Maggie as Bobby Wrong. ‘Bad news, Michael. There’s a neg. scratch across the bedroom scene.’ Maggie and I had joked about this on Tuesday when we’d completed the scene in a fast, efficient, very hard day. But then I hear from Richard it’s only on two easy shots.

Finish the sitting room scene. Trevor much better today.

At lunch we’re invaded again. RL’s bank manager, two children, two secretaries, as well as the ‘NatWest House Magazine’ photographer
and
Richard’s mother and her two friends descend. There is no real relaxing over lunch today. ‘When you’re acting,’ asks one of the secretaries of me, ‘how do you know when to do all those expressions?’

RL is shooting the entire dining room sequence on a master – dwelling longer on Maggie and myself and Hordern than on Trevor, who sits in splendid isolation at the far end of the table, a good ten yards from Maggie and myself.

About three o’clock we enter the hot, airless dining room and start to work on the scene, which has a soup-pouring slapstick joke in the middle of it, which requires quite a bit of working out. We do seven takes. RL enthusiastic about the last two. We manage close-ups on all three of us,
though one long speech (six lines) defeats Trevor utterly and we have to abandon it, in close-up, anyway.

General elation at completing dead on seven o’clock. Drinks with Lord Christopher and wife, who have been very kind and accommodating, and at eight Neville, Brian Brookner and myself are in the car heading east to London.

Suddenly we are within two weeks of completion.

TJ rings. He says he reckons doing
Meaning of Life
will be a doddle. I gather Peter Hannan has been sent a script and is first choice for cameraman.

Open house for the rest of the day – variety of children and friends in and out. The boys, much more independent now, up to the Lido with friends. Helen and Rachel together playing some all-embracing, mysterious game. How could I want to leave all this? I do value it so much and sometimes wish

I had a freeze-frame mechanism which could seal me in this present sense of contentment. But it is a fragment and soon the time comes for me to move on, collecting other fragments.

Wake in a Simenon novel – three in the morning, train stationary in a sodium-lamplit marshalling yard. We must be somewhere near Glasgow, where the train splits, half for Fort William, half for Inverness. To sleep again, lulled Lethewards by the friendly clatter of wheel on steel. Arrive at Aviemore a few minutes late at twenty past seven. We drive the 45 minutes to Ardverikie House.

Work progresses slowly as it always does with a new location and new people. We have period vehicles, including an 1899 Daimler, which prove temperamental, and the weather alternates unhelpfully between sun and cloud.

I have a room in the house, which is far less preferable to a caravan. It’s like being entombed in this cold, grey temple to deer slaughter. I start the day with rowing shots and wet feet as I clamber from Loch Laggan and run towards the house. Smoke guns in the birch groves on the opposite bank complicate (but improve) the shot, and Neville is already twitchy enough by lunchtime to confer with Richard and myself about
the Scottish schedule. Richard is bristly and will not compromise on rowing shots. Uneasy peace.

We are staying 45 minutes’ drive away from the location in the ghetto of the Aviemore Centre. A bleak and inhospitable attempt to create a ‘leisure complex’ of the late ’60’s style, which proves once again that the more impressive the surrounding landscape, the less impressive are the powers of human design and imagination. I have a suite, but it overlooks the car park.

Go to bed feeling a bit surly, after ordering trout and champagne on room service, which arrives quite efficiently, with a flurry of autograph books.

Drive to Ardverikie – on the way pick up a hitch-hiker with a dog, who turns out to be one of our extras, who’s missed the bus. A young man with a weather-beaten face, he’s a casual labourer with a wife and child. They sound like gentle people, ingenuous and idealistic. The £15 a day they are getting to do our ‘Chariots of Fire’ joke has, he says, ‘made all the difference’.

I know Richard is uneasy about this whole section. He says he’s not sure how to direct it. Both of us know it’s on the thin red line between us and ‘Two Ronnies’/‘Carry-On’-style mannerism.

‘You’re glum,’ says Maggie to me, in some surprise. ‘You never look glum.’

After lunch we set up for a grand shot of the procession leaving the house. Two cameras, a crane, lovely sunshine between the clouds, but both the old cars refuse to function properly and we have to abandon the shot. I climb in through a window, and that’s that for the day.

Back at the hotel, I eat with Maggie. Salmon is good and we sit and talk on until the place is long-empty. She does worry and things do get her down. She reminds me of Angela, bright, but brittle.

Looming clouds after much rain in the night. Lighting and planning the interiors takes time and I feel weary and unenergetic. Still can’t set my mind to anything else. Have hardly read a book since
The Missionary
began.

We work on the extra hour, until eight. Like yesterday I am only needed
in the last shot – to be squashed behind a door. For various reasons the scene between Corbett [David Suchet] and Lady A does not play right, and Maggie is uncomfortable. We wrap at 8.15, but, though the scene was satisfactory, neither Richard nor I felt it was exceptional, which is why we employ Maggie.

Back at the hotel after shooting, ring home, ring Ma, and settle down to watch a Ken Loach film set in Sheffield. Have ordered a halibut and champagne from room service. But Neville comes to see me, and another crisis has to be faced. The need to re-shoot the scene with Maggie and D Suchet tonight has really only confirmed Neville’s fears that we will not collect the Scottish stuff in eight days.

I have looked as clearly and constructively as I can at script and cuts, but I think back to the
Ripping Yarns
and how we always left the ‘adventure’ finales to the end of shooting and almost inevitably compromised. So we must get this one right.

Halfway through our gloomy discussion, the halibut arrives, ushered in by the maître d’hotel himself and two flunkeys, like some life-support machine. It’s already been delivered to Maggie Smith by mistake.

Not called early today, but cannot sleep very soundly after noisy departure of unit vehicles at seven. Feel very low for various reasons. Lack of central involvement with what’s going on is primary. Ring home and talk to Rachel and Helen, who says TG rang and raved about the look of what he’d seen of
Missionary
. Somewhat cheered, set out at nine for the first day on the moors location.

After parking car am driven up a steep and rutted track, along which two bridges have been built by P Verard and the construction team. On the side of a broad slope our caravans are perched, and a motley collection of minibuses, Land and Range Rovers, Weasels, Sno-Cats and other vehicles. This is base camp.

Half a mile away the picnic scene is being set up in a very picturesque bend of a stream. The champagne and the strawberries and the cut-glass set out on a table perched on a cart (a good idea of Richard’s) look wonderful.

Richard maintains he doesn’t ever want to direct sequences like this again. He wants to work on films of the scale of
The Last Detail
– with small locations and small casts.

George Perry of the
Sunday Times
is in attendance. He’s rather well-read and has wide terms of reference and I feel very dull and boring as I talk to him about
The Missionary
in my caravan.

Afterwards we wander down to the picnic location and it’s quite pleasantly warm and sunny as the unit lounges on the grass. I’m used for one shot about five o’clock, then come back to my caravan with George.

I gather that further down the track there have been ructions with Maggie as she does the last shot of the day. Can’t find out what’s gone on, but as she walks back to base camp she looks grim.

At base camp by eleven. Most of the actors wandering around in an unused state. Apparently no shots have been done yet as the Sno-Cat, go-anywhere, do-anything Arctic exploration vehicle has stuck halfway to the location, and toppled most of the camera equipment out.

Very slowly the unit straggles across the mountainside to the butts. Maggie in full Edwardian costume and wig looks very bizarre in the creeping caterpillar vehicles. I talk to her about yesterday. ‘How
is
Richard?’ she asks drily. She cannot understand his rapid changes from gloom to manic enthusiasm. It was this that threw her, she claims.

By midday our little army has been moved to the location, even as rumours are confirmed that we have landed again on the Falkland Islands. I note that the ‘conflict’, as they are still calling the Falkland confrontation, has been running almost exactly as long as our filming. Both seem to be reaching crisis point at about the same time!

After a Perrier and pork chop lunch, I walk over the hill to the location, accompanied by Bobby Wright, who occasionally screams into his walkie-talkie. ‘They want to know how many blacks Richard wants in the crowd at Liverpool? … No,
blacks
… Five percent? … Chinese? … Alright, no blacks, but five percent Chinese … ’ And so on … It all drifts away into the silent vastness of the Scottish hills.

The Scottish
Daily Mail
has hysterical headlines about our 5,000 heroes – the men who yesterday went ashore in the first official re-invasion of the Falkland Islands. Even the
Times
is full of diagrams with graphic explosions and heroically-sweeping arrows. It’s real war out there now
and the implication in all the reports is that it will escalate and many lives will be lost before anyone can stop it.