Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A playwright and film director, best known for writing and directing the Oscar-winning film The English Patient.
On the island
Eight records
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Aria
The first record I've chosen is Glenn Gould, who's been a hero for me all of my adult life, playing the aria from the Goldberg variations. He was an extraordinary, extraordinary musician, and the combination of Bach in him is irresistible to me. And he has this ability to play music as if he's actually creating it. There's a sense of the music being formed by his fingers.
John Martin is a voice that I've listened to since I was seventeen or eighteen. I tried very hard to sing like him. And he too sings entirely from the heart and is not ashamed of the degree of passion that he feels.
Turandot: Act III: Tu che di gel sei cinta
Barbara Hendricks, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Eleven years ago now, when our son was one, I was working with the Royal Opera House and involved in a production of Turin Dot. She wanted to go on the tour that they took to the forest. They went to to uh Japan and Korea and our son was very small and so she asked me if I would go with her and I was the babysitter on this tour. So I went to this production of Turin Dot many, many times and it it it's indelibly etched into my psyche and this particular aria is a particularly beautiful piece of music.
St Matthew Passion, BWV 244: Mache dich, mein Herze, reinFavourite
Matti Salminen, Munich Bach Orchestra, conducted by Karl Richter
I have had a passion for the Matthew Passion box in Matthew Passion. And in fact, this aria, Marketiechman Hetzer Rhein, is one that I know and I have this fantasy that one year at the Festival Hall on Good Friday when they're performing it, they will call out for a replacement and I'll put my hand up and say, I can sing this, I want to sing this. I've had many dreams about this, I've sung it in the shower many times, I I don't think I'm quite as good as Mati Salmanen who's singing this.
Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord No. 3 in G minor, BWV 1029
Glen Gould again playing from Bach's sonata for Wau de Gamba. I I think I have every recording that Glen Gould ever made. His life was extraordinary, his playing was extraordinary, and he, in a sense, made me listen to Bach in a particular way. He makes you rehear it, I think. So much so that I had an idea to make a story uh in which people met up to play duets. And that was the tiny germ of an idea that became truly Matty Deeply, and this is the music they played on the film.
The Them featuring Van Morrison
I've chosen Van Morrison. I could easily have chosen every piece of music by Bach. I could easily have chosen every piece of music by Van Morrison. He has gone with me in any bag that I packed over the last ten years to any place I've gone to.
Cheek to cheek, we talked earlier about the fact that I like to bring music onto the set to create and evoke a particular mood for a scene. And this was a wonderful scene in the film of Joy, one of the few times that the joy note came out. And this is where the other residents of the monastery in Tuscany take the English patient for a run around the garden in the rain. And even though it's completely out of context of historical context, it's the wrong period, this arrangement. It was just irresistible.
String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata"
When I first went to Hull I I'd got so wrapped up in the noisy world of pop music and rock music and and and really had lost all contact with serious music which I'd learned to play as a as a child. And WH Smith had a a a bargain basement sell out of all their records, and I ended up sort of walking away with a lot of Suprafon recordings for about a pound each, I think, including, unexpectedly, um a Janicek quartet.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Was making [The English Patient] a do-or-die moment for you because it was absolutely what you wanted to make?
Well, that's right. I'd had an experience in Hollywood, uh in between Truly Maddie Deeply and that film where I felt that I'd learned that it's easy to make mistakes making films, it's better to make your own mistakes. And I felt that I'd surrendered the compass somehow. And once you've given up your own taste in film making, it's very hard to know what's good and what's not good. ... I was trying to behave myself actually and I felt quite green when I went there and I wanted to be helped and and directed and by the time I'd finished that film that I'd gone way off course really. So I thought that I should go home and think very carefully about what I was going to do and follow my own passions and that's what I did with this film.
Presenter asks
2:02Did you come under pressure from Hollywood money men to cast standard big names?
Well, what happened was, I think, is that the money they're prepared to give you for a project diminishes in concert with the casting choices you make. And I felt very strongly that I wanted actors that I believed in who were committed to the project and who weren't necessarily big marquee names. They disagreed rather politely with me and the money kept getting less and less and less until there wasn't enough to make the film. And I was faced with a very clear decision either to cast one of the actresses or actors they had in mind or give up. And we actually sent people home from Italy. We sent 150 people home three weeks before we were due to start making the film.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Keyboard Works of J.S. Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
I think I would take this uh all of uh if I could find a huge fat book which i accommodated all of Bach's writing for the piano. And I'd have probably all the notes and uh um um comments in Italian which would force me to improve my Italian while I was busy trying to learn it. I I've always wanted to be able to play the Goldberg variations. I can pick my way terribly through the aria and I'd like to have a long good go at learning the other thirty-two variations.
Presenter asks
18:34Why is Juliet Stevenson such an ideal portrayer of your work?
I think that the great shock to me when I first met Juliet was that she was the first actor I'd come across that when I wrote a line I heard the noise of the line, I heard the music of the line. When I heard her speak, she instinctively reproduced that. I felt that she was the voice I'd heard of women inside my head. ... and I started to write for her increasingly. I think everything I wrote after that had her in mind.
Presenter asks
29:21Why don't you write a novel instead of a play or a screenplay?
Because I love the idea of my voice being mediated by other voices, I love the fact that in the dramatized fiction. You're wrenched from one perspective to another. It's a much more healthy. Form, I think, than any other, because it forces you as a writer to reconsider something you may have a very fixed opinion on, because you have to inhabit an opposing viewpoint. You have to inhabit all kinds of opposing viewpoints.
Presenter asks
31:26If you had to choose between being a film director or a writer, which would it be?
I think that when I'm making films, I'm the writer from the very first day of work to the last day, to the last day of the cutting room, and I think I'm a director from the first day of writing to the last day in the cutting room. I don't see the two things as mutually exclusive. I know that I want to make, I've made three films, I like to make 33, but I also wouldn't stop writing for that. Because I feel most myself when I'm alone and I'm writing. That's the time when I feel most connected to who I am.
“I think that one of the purposes of fiction is to exercise the emotional muscle. You know, I think that's what we go for. We go to think and to feel. And I think that feeling somehow in England is at a premium. People are embarrassed to feel in public. Whereas I think that that's the luxury of fiction.”
“I never watch anything that I've been associated with after I've done it because I feel so exposed, I feel like I'm standing there for everybody to look at.”
“I'm helpless in the face of my own voice. Sometimes I hate my own voice, but you can't elect it. It's the voice you're given. You can fight it.”