Dance of deception
The Good Liar director Bill Condon praises ‘legends’ Helen Mirren and Ian Mckellen
THE Good Liar – starring Helen Mirren and Ian Mckellen – is a slow simmering alchemy of Hitchcockian suspense, Sophoclean tragedy and the dramatic minimalism of a two-person play.
“I’ve gotten a chance to make bigger movies in my life, where you have armies of people on the set,” said director Bill Condon. “And for me, when you’re in the middle of those, you dream about having a clever script and a few great actors. This movie, specifically, is really a two-hander between these two legends.”
The story of lifelong conman Roy Courtnay who’s set his mark on Betty Mcleish, a widow worth millions, The Good Liar pairs Mckellen and Mirren in a delicate dance of deception, as Roy lures Betty into a relationship built entirely on lies and Betty, too, spins a terrifying web of deception around her predator.
“There’s nothing like watching two actors in a room having it at each other,” screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher said. “It’s a play, really, and it turns out the space these two characters inhabit is a stage.”
A movie about lying and deception is inevitability a film about performance, and that impulse to mine the theatrical talents of Mckellen and Mirren in creating an intimate and chillingly suspenseful drama was a creative strategy of Condon’s.
“The characters are great actors, and you need great actors to play great actors. So, the act of performing is a central part of the story,” he explained.
“All of the amazing Shakespeare villains that Ian has played inform what he does here. He’s just so conversant in the whole range of human nature, of human emotion, that he can fill in the blanks.”
That Shakespearean model of abundantly filled stages, lavishly orchestrated with an entangled mess of characters, holds as much sway in the theatre as it does on screen. But to divest ourselves of that scale in favour of the minimalist potential of two actors in a room, of drama reduced to its most intimate and destructive form, is what makes The Good Liar worth seeing.
“Part of forming relationships is that first blush of putting on your best face, where everyone’s an actor,” Condon said.
“On the first date, we’re all good liars, a little bit. But the question becomes, as the onion gets peeled away and more is revealed, can you stay in there and continue to expose yourself? In that intimacy between two people is great tension and suspense.”
Mckellen echoed that notion. “It is a story a bit about acting,” he said. “I think that’s what human beings do, isn’t it?”
“Animals, you may have noticed, don’t pretend to be anything other than a giraffe, a dog or an elephant,” he continued.
“But we’re all sorts of human beings; we dress up on occasion.
“We show different aspects of ourselves, too, depending on what company we’re in. And these characters are exaggerations of that. And the audience has to work out if they’re both liars, performers in that sense, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say they both are.”
Adds Mirren, walking the red carpet with partner-in-crime Mckellen: “In that sense it’s also very filmy. I see it as Hitchcockian in the sense of telling and misleading the audience, of taking them up the garden path, so to speak. And you can only do that with very masterful filmmaking.” – Reuters
The Good Liar is scheduled to open at GSC International Screens on Dec 12.