A master of his trade
Sits down with Roger Michell: the director you’ve never heard of with the CV full of films you love.
Ed Potton
orry for the chaos,’’ says Roger Michell, in his fruity baritone, as he opens the door of his house in northwest London. The director of such contrasting snapshots of London as Notting Hill and The Buddha of Suburbia has been living in this corner of the capital for more than 20 years. His four children, aged between 5 and 21, have all gone to the same primary school round the corner.
Michell and his wife, the actress Anna Maxwell Martin (she is the mother of his two youngest, Nancy and Maggie; the elder two, Rosie and Harry, are by his ex-wife, the actress Kate Buffery), are in the process of moving some things to their new place in Suffolk. This one doesn’t seem chaotic at all, just a typical chatteringclass home: overflowing recycling bin, children’s bikes in the back garden and an airy kitchen, where we sit.
An urbane 60, Michell flits between film, theatre and occasionally TV in a less headline-grabbing way than, say, Sam Mendes, but over the past 40 years he has quietly amassed one of the most colourful and accomplished CVs in the business. Can anyone else claim to have worked closely with Samuel Beckett, Julia Roberts, Peter O’Toole and David Bowie?
He’s not a prolific director – a movie every other year – but there’s not a dud among them, from intelligent yet accessible Brit-flicks such as Enduring Love, in which Maxwell Martin appeared before they got together, to Changing Lanes, his successful detour into Hollywood with Ben Affleck and Samuel L Jackson. He has pulled out of two big movies: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, after having a heart attack (he is well now), and the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, frustrated by a delayed script. Lucky escapes both.
His latest is My Cousin Rachel, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s tantalising mystery set in 19th-century Cornwall, a book, Michell says, of ‘‘dark oddness’’. Sam Claflin (Their Finest) plays Philip, an orphan brought up by Ambrose, an older relative. Ambrose moves to Italy and falls for their cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz, superb), whom he marries. When Ambrose dies, Philip stands to inherit his Cornish estate, until Rachel, a sexually sophisticated woman 20 years his senior, arrives from Italy and beguiles him too. Did Rachel bump off Ambrose? Is she after Philip’s inheritance? Michell keeps us guessing, just as du Maurier did.
‘‘I think du Maurier couldn’t quite decide whether Rachel was guilty,’’ Michell says. ‘‘There are clearly some days when she was writing in her little shed at the end of the garden and thought, ‘Oh, f... it, she’s guilty.’ And then the next day she sort of screeches around a hairpin bend and writes something which makes it absolutely unassailably clear that she’s innocent.’’
Does Michell know? ‘‘I don’t, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. That’s the fun of life, these perplexing ambiguities that haunt us.’’ In this version, which he adapted himself, he has ‘‘levelled the scales a little bit more’’ so that even armchair sleuths who rewind the DVD should still be stumped.
My Cousin Rachel has also been adapted before, in 1952, with Olivia de Havilland as Rachel and Richard ‘I think du Maurier couldn’t quite decide whether Rachel was guilty. There are clearly some days when she was writing in her little shed at the end of the garden and thought, ‘Oh, f... it, she’s guilty.’’ Burton as Philip, a film that Michell was careful not to watch. Rumour has it that du Maurier hated it and felt that de Havilland was miscast. It’s unlikely that she would think the same of Weisz, who Michell thinks is ‘‘right in virtually every way’’ for the role.
Equally capable of exuding warmth and coldness, innocence and worldliness, under her lace veil she’s unknowable, Michell says. ‘‘She’s got this sort of Mona Lisa, f... you look about her.’’
At 47, Weisz was also exactly the right age to be his Rachel. In the book Philip is in his mid-20s and she is 10 years older, but, Michell says: ‘‘These days those kind of age differences don’t have any leverage at all.’’ So he bumped her age up. The director wanted it to feel like the virginal Philip was ‘‘f ...... his mum, that’s the kind of toxic fun of it’’. In one of the film’s best and weirdest scenes, Rachel and Philip kiss for the first time, then she shoos him out of her room, saying: ‘‘Go to bed like a good boy.’’
Michell has been here before. In 2003 he directed The Mother, in which a grandmother has an affair with a man half her age (played by Weisz’s other half, Daniel Craig). People are going to compare the two films, I say. ‘‘Good,’’ Michell replies. ‘‘I hope so.’’ Age gaps, and the tension between ageing and desire, ‘‘intrigue’’ him, he says. The themes figure in his real life – Maxwell Martin is 20 years his junior – and several of his other films, including Le Week-End (2013), about a couple celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, and Venus (2006), which starred O’Toole as an elderly actor who finds himself attracted to his friend’s grand-niece.
O’Toole, who died in 2013, was ‘‘a fascinating, complicated, quite grumpy old f ..... , who could suddenly break your heart with tenderness and lyricism’’, Michell says. ‘‘He wasn’t easy to work with, but I’m so pleased to have had that last hurrah with him.’’
Tricky in a different way was Roberts, whom he directed in Notting Hill (one of the most successful British films, grossing more than $360 million). Then the challenge was the sheer wattage of her celebrity. ‘‘I was frightened to begin with. But then I realised she was frightened, and it was my job to make her feel not frightened. It’s hard when you walk out of your trailer and everyone’s thinking, ‘Go on, then, what have you got? We know how much you’re being paid.’’’
Was he impressed? ‘‘She can fake spontaneity better than any other actor I’ve ever met. She’s so alive in front of the camera, and that’s why she gets the big parts.’’
Michell thinks that his ease moving between Britain and America, film and theatre, high and middle brow comes in part from that showbusiness staple, the itinerant childhood. He was born in South Africa, the son of a British diplomat, but lived there only briefly before the family moved to Beirut, then Damascus, then Prague. ‘‘There seemed to be insurrections wherever we went,’’ he says.
He was in Beirut for the death of Egypt’s President Nasser, he saw tanks