Shooting Churchill
Un entretien avec le réalisateur australien Jonathan Teplitzky.
Churchill, dans les salles le 31 mai, n’est pas une biographie comme les autres. Il ne raconte la vie de cette figure historique qu’à un moment précis : la veille du débarquement en Normandie. Interprété avec brio par Brian Cox, il met en avant l’homme avant la légende. Vous ne serez pas au bout de vos surprises ! Jonathan Teplitzky, le réalisateur australien de ce projet insensé, a accepté de répondre à nos questions. Vocable: How important was it for you to direct this film? Jonathan Teplitzky: As an Australian it's a very fascinating subject, because a big part of the film is about Churchill’s guilt and shame about what happened in Gallipoli and his desperate need to not repeat that mistake. Gallipoli is an important cultural and social element within the Australian identity. This story fundamentally is also about old age, and having to deal with all those things that you used to be in control of. When our story takes place, the Americans are basically running the Allied war effort in conjunction with the British High Command, unlike four years earlier when Churchill single-mindedly led the British through the Blitz.
2. Vocable: You don’t learn in history books that Churchill was so scared about D-Day… Jonathan: You think of Churchill as the person who's going to be really gung-ho but by that stage, he was 70 years old; he was drinking a lot and suffered from depression. This was obviously fuelled a lot by his emotional state. The idea of the film is to find the humanity in Churchill rather than just the great leader, which is how he's often portrayed. You look at the man; you look at the humanity, and then you make your judgements about the good and the bad. To me, his achievements are all the greater because he also had a lot of personal struggles that he had to deal with and overcome and fight against. 3. Vocable: What can you tell us about Brian Cox? Jonathan: Churchill had many iconic attributes. You think of the hat, and the cigar and all the physical elements. He had a way of talking, a way of walking… it's easy to do a superficial version of someone like that. We needed someone who could also get the complexity of this man who had a very vast emotional life in many ways. Brian captured that brilliantly. What's so ironic about Churchill is that he had this very famous sort of British emotional reserve but he actually was an extraordinarily open emotional person. He used to walk out into the streets and hug people and burst into tears…No matter what you think of Churchill, his care and love of the normal working everyday person was really sincere and really profound, and that was probably his greatest attribute.