Lost memories
THE FATHER I Florian Zeller’s celebrated stage play is ready for its close-up.
In the eight years since Florian Zeller’s play Le Père premiered at the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, it’s toured the globe, scooping Molières, Oliviers and Tonys in the process. Not content with conquering the stage, Zeller himself writes and directs this feature adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins as a man in the destructive thrall of dementia. “What I didn’t want to do was just to film the play, because I think that’s boring and not very challenging,” Zeller tells Teasers. “I worked hard to make it as cinematic as it could be.”
Though technically set in the West London apartment of Hopkins’ Anthony, it would be more accurate to say that The Father is set in a rapidly deteriorating mind where the viewer, like Anthony, can’t trust what they see. Zeller sought to “tell the story from the inside, as if we’re in the main character’s head”, devising a modular set tailor-made for rapid change to cultivate a disorientating viewing experience that mirrors Anthony’s loose grasp on reality.
“In a way, the film is like a puzzle,” explains Zeller, who wrote the play from experience, as his grandmother was diagnosed with dementia when he was 15. “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Who is this character? Is it before or after? Where are we now?’ You’re sometimes lost in this maze. When you let go, you can understand the whole story on another level – a more emotional level.”
Numerous actors have played the eponymous papa on stage – including Alfred Molina and Kenneth Cranham – but Zeller wrote this feature adaptation with Hopkins at the forefront of his mind. “This is the reason I wanted to do it in English, to have the opportunity to work with him,” says Zeller. The French playwright collaborated with his longserving translator Christopher Hampton on the screenplay, and says, “I was convinced it would be special, because we know him as a man of control, a man of intelligence. And I thought it would be so disturbing to see him losing that control.”
Also starring Olivia Colman as Anthony’s long-suffering daughter Anne, and a small supporting cast with a slippery, constantly shifting presence throughout the story, Zeller considers the film the definitive staging of a story he conceived almost a decade ago. But anyone familiar with Zeller’s work will know The Father is part of a loose trilogy, alongside The Mother and The Son, and he hopes to be back behind the camera on a thematic follow-up in the near future.
“The Son is another play of mine that I really want to adapt for film,” Zeller notes. “The thing I’m obsessed with now is to do this film. So I’m actually working on it now, to make it happen... if shooting is possible in the next year.” JF
ETA | 8 JANUARY 2021 / THE FATHER OPENS IN CINEMAS NEXT MONTH.