The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses интервью с Домиником Куком

[blackcattal]

В Vanity Fair выложили несколько ответом Доминика Кука, режиссёра второго сезона "Пустой короны", которые он дал на Q&A 01.04.2016.

И несколько новых фото.

The Hollow Crown

There is much hype around the BBC’s upcoming Shakespeare series The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses—a triad of Henry VI Parts 1 & 2 and Richard III—and rightly so. It stars a host of British actors—Benedict Cumberbatch, Hugh Bonneville, Tom Sturridge, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo, Andrew Scott, Ben Miles, Sally Hawkins, Samuel West and Keeley Hawes, to name a few. The first cycle, the Henriad, starred Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons and Ben Whishaw and premiered in 2012; this, the second, airs in May 2016. Both are produced by Sam Mendes and his team at Neal Street Productions (Starter for 10, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, Call the Midwife), with the most recent series being directed by English theatre director and playwright Dominic Cooke. While Cooke has enormous experience in theatre—from 2006-13 he was famously artistic director of the Royal Court, where he was responsible for staging world-reaching plays such as Enron, Posh, Clybourne Park, Constellations, That Face and Jerusalem—The Hollow Crown marks his first foray into directing for the screen. We predict it won’t be his last. Cooke recently met writer and director Kinvara Balfour at the V&A to discuss his latest project.

“I got a phone call from Sam Mendes,” he said. “I was standing at Acton Central station and he said, ‘We just go the go-ahead from the BBC to do the next Hollow Crowns. We decided we want one director to do all three films, and we want that person to be you.’ And I was actually almost in tears. I couldn’t believe that someone would ask me, who had never made a film before, to do something on that scale.”

The scale is big. With 89 speaking roles (“including the best coup: Michael Gambon doing one scene!” jokes Cooke), six battles and four coronations, set in some of England’s greatest locations (Alnwick Castle, Dover Castle, Wells Cathedral, The Great Hall in Winchester), it’s a bold and beautifully filmic production. “Hats off to Neal Street Productions and hats off to the BBC for being so courageous,” says Cooke. “It’s a real risk doing a project like this. Sam has been extraordinary in terms of his support and his brilliant judgement all the way through. Quite remarkable. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.”

Cooke was well prepped for the role. “I was assistant director at the RSC, I was an associate director under Michael Boyd for four years and I am now an associate director at the RSC, so I have done a huge amount of Shakespeare. And as I did more and more, I realized that my responsibility as a director of Shakespeare is to realize the work for the here and now for an audience here and now. If anyone wants to read the play, they can do so—it’s going to live way longer than me. So my responsibility is to make a show for the present.” In doing so, he looked for to the cinema for inspiration. “I just wanted to make really thrilling films. I looked at a lot of war films, like the incredible opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, and Apocalypse Now.”


“We decided that really what these plays are about is the moral disintegration of England through the period of the Wars of the Roses, resulting in Shakespeare’s interpretation of Richard III (played brilliantly and chillingly by Cumberbatch) as a psychopath.”

“Shakespeare explores the nature of power, and what kind of personalities make good leaders,” says Cooke. “So Ben [Power, who co-adapted the sсript with Cooke] and I thought, let’s rewind and make sure everything in our films is about how that moral decay happens, moment to moment, to get to that point. And actually in history, when you look at Hitler, Stalin, the great psychopathic tyrants, the story begins 40, 50 years earlier.”

Shooting was not without its challenges. In a scene when Joan of Arc is burning at the stake, Cooke felt the heat. Literally. “Laura [Morgan] was absolutely brilliant. We melted a whole load of equipment that day. The fire was so strong that we actually broke it; the poor grip bought all this extra stuff in to place the cameras on and all of it was wrecked because the temperature was so intense.”

How much rehearsal time is there with an actor like Cumberbatch? When he has complex stunts to do whilst wearing a heavy costume, or a huge monologue coming up on a boat in the mist on a very cold day—is Cooke rehearsing on the day, minutes before the cameras roll? “I insisted on six weeks’ rehearsal. We didn’t have much time to stage the scenes when we were on set. Our schedule was insane. Hollyoaks had more time! There was one day when we shot 13 ½ minutes of screen time in one day.”

Next up, Cooke will direct On Chesil Beach, a film for cinema based on Ian McEwan’s novel, starring Irish actress-of-the-moment Saoirse Ronan. He’s ready for the next challenge. “I think you have to be quite bossy to be a director. Most directors have some sense of leadership; you’ve got to stand in a room and lead some pretty complicated and very intelligent people. I think people often underestimate the intelligence of most—certainly good—actors. All good actors are very smart and they don’t suffer fools gladly, so you had better be on your A-game.”

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses airs on BBC2 in May 2016: HENRY VI part 1 (May 7), HENRY VI part 2 (May 14) and RICHARD III (May 21)