CORIOLANUS directed by Ralph Fiennes, written by John Logan from the play by William Shakespeare, with Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Jessica Chastain, Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave. A D Films release. 123 minutes. Opens Friday (January 20). For venues and times, see Movies.
Ralph Fiennes would be formidable even without the massive beard he’s sporting for a stage production of The Tempest.
The two-time Oscar nominee – at the Toronto Film Festival with his directorial debut of another Shakespeare play, Coriolanus, in which he also stars – carries himself with the same intense focus he radiates onscreen. The difference is that there’s no hostility.
His most memorable characters – the merciless Amon Goeth of Schindler’s List, the ravaged Almásy in The English Patient, you-know-who in that series about the boy wizard – are defined by their coiled potential for fury. Fiennes can summon that intensity almost unconsciously, as he does when we discuss the blocking of a battle sequence in Coriolanus and he has to stop himself from grabbing my head to illustrate his point.
It’s not intimidating, exactly. But it does say a lot about his process and how he applied it to this modernized tale of a ferocious warrior-turned-politician who’s rejected by his people when he refuses to pander to them.
Since so many of his contemporaries have made their directorial debuts with more modest productions – think of Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth or Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, which is also at TIFF – I ask Fiennes why he chose as ambitious and complex a work as Coriolanus for his first outing.
“When I did it onstage, I felt some dissatisfaction,” he says, fiddling with a cup of tea. “The production was very good, but I felt it landing as it traditionally always does, as a sort of difficult, slightly alienating piece. And I thought, ‘No, this shouldn’t be the case. There’s intimacy, there’s war, there’s a massive spectrum of location and theme going on in this. It’s a film!’?”
The vivid nature of the material didn’t hurt either.
“There’s a directness to the story,” he says. “There’s a purity to it, an austerity to the dramatic arc, which I love. I find it very beautiful and painful and raw. The whole thing is like a knife. I mean, I can see how appalling it is, but I think what attracts me is this extreme: ‘I will play my truth out to the end.’ There’s a kind of cathartic release of rage that I found very compelling. You’re playing with this total death drive.”
It’s an element that became even more pronounced in the screen adaptation, as Fiennes tried to make the text more accessible to audiences.
“The angry rhetoric of Coriolanus in the play is very inhibiting,” he explains. “He’s sort of a buzz to play, but for the audience the imagery is dense. It’s like difficult music if you study it, you say ‘Wow!’, but if you’re receiving it, it’s difficult.
“Strip it away, though, as I did with John Logan, and you come up with fantastic little one-liners or half a speech, which has more potency on film. And what you’re left with is this very dynamic, quite extraordinary tragic arc, which drives right through, of this man who comes and says ‘Fuck off’ to the people in front of him.”
Interview Clips
Ralph Fiennes on directing his first feature:
Fiennes on the location shoot in Serbia:
Fiennes on the homoerotic aspect of wrestling with Gerard Butler:
Fiennes on whether the Harry Potter films have won him new fans:
normw@nowtoronto.com
