THE FATHER
Director Florian Zeller on the movie that gave Anthony Hopkins the role of a lifetime at the tender age of 83.
SINCE ITS DEBUT in Sundance in 2020, Florian Zeller’s The Father has caused the sturdiest souls to weep. It paints a nuanced, affecting portrait of Anthony (Hopkins — the first name is not a coincidence), an 83-year-old man who is suffering from the inexorable effects of dementia while his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) looks on helplessly. Built around a tour-de-force performance by Hopkins (and a quietly effective one from Colman), plus smart, inventive filmmaking, it’s a small chamber piece that tenderly puts us inside the mind of a man who is becoming unmoored. And — perhaps unsurprisingly given its hefty themes, fêted cast and enough emotional beats to fill a dozen clips packages — it also dominated this year’s Oscars from the get-go.
“We started the ceremony winning Best [Adapted] Screenplay but we finished it with Best Actor,” recalls Zeller, still filled with giddy enthusiasm. “I dreamt about the film with Anthony in mind, so to share that moment with him was even more meaningful.”
The Father, based on Zeller’s 2012 play, is typical of his knack as a writer at dealing with thorny domestic issues with a mixture of intelligence and heart. His international theatre break-through, 2010’s The Mother, tells of the titular character’s depression after her son leaves home (like The Father it muddies distinctions between reality and hallucination). And his 2018 play, The Son, about divorced parents trying to cope with a troubled teenage son, is being adapted into his next film, starring Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern. “There are some echoes and connections thematically,” he says about The Son’s relationship to The Father. “It’s a father and a mother in the middle of a difficult
period with a 17-year-old son and they are trying to make the right decision to save him.” But it is The Father that is his masterpiece of exploring complicated family dynamics, with the ability to bring you to tears. Here’s his guide to turning personal pain into gut-wrenching art.
MAKE IT EMOTIONAL (BUT NOT SENTIMENTAL)
One of the most remarkable things about The Father is its ability to be emotionally direct without ever veering into being manipulative or sappy. If not strictly autobiographical, it is deeply rooted in Zeller’s own experience. The writer-director was raised by his grandmother just outside Paris and his relationship with her changed when she started to suffer from dementia when he was just 15.
“She was someone very dear to me, someone very important to me,” he recalls. “I was in that position where you find yourself impotent or powerless, where you can love someone and you feel that love is not enough.”
Zeller subsequently poured his feelings into his 2012 play The Father. Written for French actor Robert Hirsch and first performed at Paris’ Théâtre Hébertot, it became a worldwide smash, starring Kenneth Cranham in the West End and Frank Langella on Broadway. “It was the same everywhere, despite the cultural differences,” he says. “People were waiting for us after every performance, not to say congratulations or things like that but just to share their own story. I realised there was something really cathartic about that. And it moved me a lot, to tell you the truth. It’s as if the show was going on after the show itself.”
Zeller started to turn his play into a screenplay five years ago. In-between the stage play and writing the screen version, he saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, another film unflinchingly detailing the harsh realities of old age. Starring Jean-louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as a couple whose relationship is tested after one of them undergoes a stroke, it gave him a new insight into parlaying raw, real emotions on screen.
“What I learned through Haneke is this slight distance that he has with what he is filming. The distance leaves room for the audience. You have to find the distance without being absent, to reach the emotions without being sentimental. It’s an aesthetic question. Haneke is the director who impressed me the most.”
HIRE AN ACTING LEGEND
Zeller’s list of actors who could play his lead character on film was a list of one: Sir Anthony Hopkins. “I think he’s the greatest living actor,” he says simply. “That is something but it’s not enough.” The extra elements Zeller felt Hopkins could add were not only a lengthy beloved relationship with an audience — “in a way we all know Anthony as if he was part of our family” — but also a persona that would play into and enhance the drama.
“On screen, Anthony, to me at least, is very intelligent, always in control of the situation,” Zeller says. “I thought it would be all the more disturbing and profound to see that man losing control. It’s also about a man falling. If we start that high — Anthony is a legend — this fall would be even more disturbing. To me the
casting had to echo with what the family would experience in their intimacy.”
Everyone on Team Father, except Zeller, thought that Hopkins was a pie-in-the-sky punt when Zeller sent the screenplay to the actor. “I suspect my producers were like, ‘We’ll leave one or two months for Florian and then we’ll have a rational conversation.’” Even the director, for all his boyish optimism, didn’t think it was likely. “I was aware that it was not an easy dream to fulfil. Of course, because I am not crazy. I know who he is, it was my first feature film and I’m French. But often we are the ones who close the door on what is possible and what is not possible. I thought to myself: ‘Until he says no, it’s maybe yes.’ It was a way to leave room for what is possible.”
Two months after sending the script to Hopkins, Zeller received a call on his phone from a number he didn’t recognise. It was Hopkins’ agent, letting him know the actor had read the script and wanted to meet. Flying to Los Angeles with Christopher Hampton (who had previously worked with Hopkins on A Doll’s House and The Good Father), Zeller enjoyed a two-hour breakfast with his hero that resulted in a hug and a commitment to make the film. “This was in July. And he said, ‘I’m free in January. Let’s do it in January.’ In the end we did it two years later.”
Some dreams are well worth holding out for.
MAKE IT CINEMATIC
Zeller wanted to make sure that he was turning his play into a movie for the right reasons. “The idea was not, ‘Oh, it was a success on stage, let’s try to make a movie.’ It was really because I felt something could be done on film that was not possible in the theatre. I wanted The Father to be like an experience of what it could mean to lose everything, including your own bearings as a viewer.”
The majority of the film takes place in a moneyed, book-lined London flat that becomes a representation of the protagonist’s mental state. As Anthony shuffles around his flat in his pyjamas (often looking for his watch), the geography of the flat — which seemed very straightforward at the film’s start — slowly becomes a labyrinth. Almost imperceptibly, the interior landscape begins to change — a previously prominent piece of furniture is missing, the colours on the walls have negligibly changed. On stage, the lights would come up after a blackout and reveal another precious item had been lost; on film it is a much more seamless, destabilising, immersive experience.
“It was a way for me to play with that feeling of disorientation through the sets,” says Zeller. “It was not about providing a background to the characters as it is most of the time in movies. It was a way to tell the story. It was part of the narrative.”
While writing the script, he drew a floor plan of the apartment that became key in plotting out the subtle shifts in décor. Zeller was also adamant that the film had to be shot in a studio, so he could have full control of the palette (the flat was recreated at West London Film Studios, exteriors locating it in Maida Vale). Searching for a way into an environment that reflects the character’s ever-changing mindset, Zeller drew from “early Polanski films, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. The latter is two characters in an apartment and it’s nothing but cinematic.” The result all played into a key tenet in Zeller’s approach of making the audience participate in Anthony’s condition. “You cannot be passive and just sit and watch a story. You have to be part of it.”
Zeller has another trick up his sleeve. Without warning, characters suddenly reappear played by different actors. A conceit borrowed from the play, it was partly inspired by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. “It was the first time I discovered a film with a narrative that was like a puzzle, an incomplete puzzle, in order to play with the subconscious of the viewer.” But, again, Zeller souped up the one character/two actors gambit for film.
“When I wrote it for the play, it was another way to put the audience in an active position, to share the main character’s confusion: ‘What is going on? Maybe they are lying to him? Or gaslighting him?’ I wanted to go further with cinema, using repetition in the frame so there is a continuity of two actors playing the same character. The compositions were also done to make you feel like a stranger in your own apartment. It was a way to destroy the coherence of time and space in one frame.”
DON’T FORGET THE DAUGHTER
Anthony’s plight is not the only poignant aspect of The Father. Equally heart-rending is the predicament of the character’s daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). As the movie begins, she is planning to move to Paris with Paul (Rufus Sewell) so is interviewing caregivers to look after her father, who has bullied the previous home-help into leaving. The film captures the inevitable moment where the child becomes a parent to their own parent, which presented some interesting storytelling dynamics for Zeller.
“In most other films, you have to decide what is the perspective of the story,” he explains. “And here it’s like a strange exception because there are two perspectives at the same time. We are obviously in Anthony’s mind, but at the same time it’s as if we have also opened the door of the carer, to experience this painful process. It must be so difficult when you are in that position, because there are no right answers.”
It’s a potentially unsympathetic role but, in Zeller’s film, it becomes a compassionate study of a woman caught between love
for her ailing father and the desire to have her own life. For Zeller, Anne is at the heart of the story and he wanted a warm, vulnerable presence to bring her dichotomy to life. So he turned to, in his words, “the greatest actress working at this time”: Sarah Caroline Olivia Sinclair CBE, professionally known as Olivia Colman.
“She is the most lovable person in the world,” Zeller says. “Sometimes, what you feel about an actor on screen matches the reality of the actor in real life. Olivia is like that. As soon as she is around on set everyone is the best version of themselves. With her, it was very easy to shoot the idea that she is the loving daughter.”
BLUR THE LINE BETWEEN ACTOR AND CHARACTER
At his first breakfast meeting with Zeller, Anthony Hopkins questioned the fact that the protagonist shared his first name. Called André on stage, Zeller had changed the name to Anthony and gave the character Hopkins’ actual birthday: 31 December, 1937. The filmmaker convinced Hopkins that the switch had nothing to do with flattery and everything to do with blurring barriers between actor and character.
“To me, it was important to keep the character as ‘Anthony’ for many reasons,” says Zeller. “It wasn’t about faking a man with a disease. That’s not what I was looking for. It’s as if I didn’t want him to be protected by a fictional character. It was not about creating a character — this old man who has a disease — because the danger would have been just to imitate and to do something so clichéd.”
Hopkins’ acting in the film has no truck with anything trite and tested. It’s a performance full of perfectly modulated colours — in one scene he switches on a dime from tap-dancing exuberance to unvarnished cruelty — that beautifully captures a proud man trying to hold on to the fragments of his life as they start to slip away. Zeller was constantly challenging the octogenarian actor “with his own personal emotions and his own feeling of mortality”, the pair facing their biggest challenge when Anthony breaks down, crying desperately that he wants his mother. It’s heartbreaking to watch and, Zeller remembers, difficult to shoot. “We started to do it and it was brilliant because it was Anthony Hopkins and he is always brilliant, but it was not as truthful as I was looking for. It was not easy asking him to do it again. We had to fight a bit on that scene.” It took a moment of serendipity — Hopkins spotting a pair of glasses that reminded him of his father’s spectacles — to bring the scene magically to life.
“It reminded him of a time when he was five when his mother used to sing a lullaby to him,” says Zeller, “and we all saw him travelling through time, 75 years back in his past. He was not playing that child crying for help. He really was the child he used to be crying for his mother to bring him home. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life to see that happening. Everyone on set was crying.”
Have a hankie to hand; you probably will be too.
THE FATHER IS IN CINEMAS FROM 11 JUNE