Director Roger Michell's latest feature, VENUS, from an original screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, was filmed during the winter of 2005/6 for eight weeks on location in and around London and at Ealing Studios. Its remarkable cast includes Academy Award and BAFTA winner Peter O'Toole, British veteran Leslie Phillips, recent Tony Award winner Richard Griffiths, and Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave.  The film marks the feature debut of newcomer Jodie Whittaker, winner of the 2005 Guildhall School of Music and Drama Gold Medal for Acting.
A wry, affectionate coming of very-old-age story, VENUS reunites the team behind both the award-winning film "The Mother" and the BBC television series "The Buddha of Suburbia": director Roger Michell, writer Hanif Kureishi and producer Kevin Loader.
Peter O'Toole, one of cinema's most celebrated actors, is best known for films such as David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" (1987), Richard Benjamin's "My Favorite Year" (1982), Anthony Harvey's "A Lion in Winter" (1968), Peter Medak's "The Ruling Class" (1972) and Peter Glenville's "Becket" (1964).  Leslie Phillips' many film credits include "Scandal", "Out of Africa", "Empire of the Sun" and the classic "Doctor" and "Carry On" series.  Vanessa Redgrave was recently seen in "The White Countess"; her varied film work includes "Blow Up", "The Devils", "Julia", "Howard's End", and "Wilde".  Richard Griffiths will soon be seen in the film version of Alan Bennett's National Theatre and Broadway hit "The History Boys", and counts the "Harry Potter" series, "Stage Beauty", "Sleepy Hollow", "Greystoke", "A Private Function", and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" among his many feature credits.  Jodie Whittaker, this year's Guildhall Gold Medal graduate, makes her debut in front of the cameras.
Roger Michell's films include "Notting Hill", "Changing Lanes", "The Mother" and "Enduring Love".  VENUS marks his second collaboration with Film4 [since "Enduring Love"].  Award-winning writer Hanif Kureishi's screenplays include the Oscar-nominated "My Beautiful Laundrette"; "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid"; "My Son the Fanatic" and most recently, "The Mother".

THE PRODUCTION
"After the 'The Mother' screened in Cannes, Roger Michell and I were coming back in a taxi and he said, We'd better do something else now; got any ideas?" recalls screenwriter Hanif Kureishi.  "I thought I'd do something about an old man having a prostate operation - clearly a very exciting premise for a film! - who was reminiscing about his sexual life, about what he'd done, how he'd lived, the pleasures he'd had.  I thought about this for a few months, and eventually it occurred to me that films have to be told in the present and not in retrospect.  So I thought of these breakfasts I regularly have with numerous old blokes - some of them even older than me* [see biography] - and I remembered one day when all the old blokes had their pills with them, and they were going, 'Ooh, the white ones are really great!' or 'These blue ones aren't so good - you should try the yellow ones!'  And I thought, 'This is it, this is the future. This is what I'm going to be doing: trotting down to the chemist, having a croissant and then going home for a lie down.'"
Armed with the bare bones of an idea drawn from his superannuated Breakfast Club, Kureishi met with director Roger Michell.  "Hanif mentioned that he had an idea for a film about grumpy old men inspired by his habitual breakfasts with Stephen Frears and other friends of his," says Michell. "I made the usual encouraging noises which I often do politely but I think, on this occasion, I actually meant.  About three weeks later, I received a scruffy e-mail with 16 or 17 pages and I instantly knew that I wanted to do this film even though it was just a sketch."
"Roger and I began to develop the idea which is how I like to work," says Kureishi.  "It seems to me you probably can't write a film without the input of the director - you have to try and make a film that he wants to make, too, and you have to find a method of working together.  I guess Roger and I already have that, after doing 'The Mother' and 'The Buddha of Suburbia'.  We started to meet every day to develop the script which for me is the best bit."
After weeks of working on the screenplay, Michell and Kureishi sent it to their regular collaborator, producer Kevin Loader, whose relationship with the writer and director goes back to 1993 when he produced 'The Buddha of Suburbia' for the BBC.  Loader subsequently produced their award-winning feature, 'The Mother'. 
"We've all worked together before and the process now has its own form which is that Hanif tends to send Roger quite a lot of early material and then we roll it around a bit," says Loader. "Sometimes the idea gathers moss and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it gets sent back to Hanif with instructions to turn it into a short story which he often does, I think. This one was funny from the beginning and it gathered moss very quickly.  Roger and Hanif started working intensively on the script and within six or seven weeks, it went from being a series of scenes and character sketches into a fairly shaped screenplay."
During the development process, Kureishi's Beckett-esque working title of Everything is Forgotten Gradually was succeeded by The Old Gits.  When the writer determined to shake up the time-tested friendship of his two elderly protagonists by, as he says, "crashing some girl into it", the title was revised to VENUS.  As their previous film addressed the affair between an older woman and her daughter's boyfriend, the filmmakers readily acknowledge that the new project, with its central theme of a May-December romance between an old man and a young woman, might be perceived as a companion piece.  However, they also quickly point out the differences between the two films.
"In a way, it's unavoidable to think of this film as 'The Father', but the more it developed the more separate and distinct it became," says Roger Michell. "It's a much more forgiving film than 'The Mother'; it's much less anatomising of the post-modern family. It's also much more to do with love than it is to do with sex. 'The Mother' was really about lust, carnality and the delights of sex. This is more about yearning and loss and love; it's a much sweeter film."
"In some respects, VENUS is a simple boy-meets-girl story," says Kevin Loader.  "One of the things about Hanif's writing is that quite often, behind these very complicated scripts, there's a very simple Hollywood template. So this is a love story - it's probably two love stories: it's a story of a friendship and the story of an infatuation. There's a real romance between Maurice and Jessie.  It's not sexual but it is romantic and they both get something out of it which is hard to define but it's there on screen."
"I've been thinking a lot about older people as one tends to as one gets older and it was a subject that I hadn't written about before, passion in older people," says Hanif Kureishi.  "In a sense, VENUS goes with 'The Mother' but it has a different tone to that film.  I read an obscure novel by Junichiro Tanizaki called Diary of a Mad Old Man, which is about a very old bloke, who's dying and keeping a diary of his illness, who falls in love with his son's wife. I was fascinated by this novel and reading it re-inspired me to go back to this idea of a man who's about to die but can still conceive a passion for somebody. I'm interested in the way passion sustains itself throughout a whole life and may even return at the end in some odd, almost perverse way."
"Maurice is, from beginning to end, absolutely true to his own integrity," says Peter O'Toole, the legendary actor who plays the passionate old man in question. "He cannot resist a pretty girl - he never has in the whole of his life and nor does he right at the end.  That's part of the wholeness of the man. The moment he sees Jessie, he doesn't know that he's not well so, of course, he would like to slip it to her given half the chance.  The arbitrary whims and urges of our sexuality are beyond anyone's reckoning. The heart has its reasons, whether it's an old guy and a young woman or whatever; it's beyond our understanding: 'The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.'  I'm only quoting from the bible but that's it - it's a great mystery."
"The thing about Hanif is that he just does see the world in a slightly different way to anyone I know; that's what's so rewarding about working with him," says Michell. "He can be intentionally provocative, sometimes irritating, but at the same time, he's profoundly sensitive and thoughtful.  I think that we are probably a good combination in that I can help him wrangle some of his more, shall we say, outrageous notions, and express his worldview for him in a way that's perhaps more vivid.  But he's the writer - I can only go down the corridors that he's opened up to me."
Although he jokes that theirs is an unequal collaboration insofar as the director is allowed to tell him to rewrite a scene but will not, in turn, let him move the camera, Kureishi appreciates Michell's very active contribution.  "I like Roger and I like to work with people I've worked with before because you have a sort of shorthand in terms of the method in which you work together," he says. "But the other thing is that he's developing as a director all the time. The style in which he shot the film is quite different to the style of 'The Mother'. In a sense, I look at the films that I've written to find out what Roger's thinking about.  I look at them and then I go home and I think about what he's thinking because I'm interested in what's going on in his head as much as I am in the way he has done the film."

BRIGHT OLD THINGS
The protagonists of VENUS are a pair of ailing thespians, their glory days - such as they were - long behind them as they await the final curtain.  In other hands, the characters may have been reduced to little more than stereotypical figures of fun but this was precluded by Kureishi's and Michell's long experience of and respect for actors:  "Hanif and Roger have worked with actors a lot and both have enormous affection for them," says Kevin Loader. "If you go back to 'The Buddha of Suburbia' there are some very funny scenes about working at the Royal Court Theatre.  Hanif's always felt himself to be a close ally of actors as well as being able to poke fun at them a bit. Many actors resent the image of 'luvviedom' and the jokes about 'luvvies' that go around, particularly in Britain, about what it is to be an actor. This film is very true to the actor's life but it also shows that actors are capable of taking the Mickey out of themselves."
"I've got enormous admiration for actors because, although I work in the same profession, what I do is completely private," says Hanif Kureishi. "I don't have a load of people looking at me when I'm doing what I do which would be terrifying.  I'm amazed and impressed by the talent and the ability that actors have."
"I really like actors and I don't pretend that I'd be able to do anything at all in my job without their gifts," says Roger Michell. "It's true of any film that you are always trying to find a kind of heightened truth but one which doesn't stray into repeating the same old stereotyped lies about, for example, actors who are easily mocked, particularly these actors [in the film] who don't have any great claim to fame. They aren't especially good actors, they don't espouse any noble cause, they're just actors.  They've been actors all their lives and they are on the wane.  They're lucky to pick up jobs as semi-ambulant corpses in a TV hospital soap."
Unlike Maurice and Ian, their characters in the film, Peter O'Toole and Leslie Phillips are household names, successful actors whose careers span decades and whose faces are instantly recognisable to audiences around the world. "It was important to try and distinguish between Leslie and Peter and the characters they play because Maurice and Ian are far less august, celebrated and famous than Leslie and Peter are," says Michell.  "It was something we always had to remind ourselves of in respect of the design and the way in which the characters are perceived by the world within the film."
"Trying to draw a picture of two men who have lived their lives in the public eye was something that really interested me," says Kureishi. "What's it like to have people look at you all the time and say, 'Hasn't he aged!?  Hasn't he changed!?'  Presumably, if people know you and know your face, this is something that happens to you all the time; you are regarded from the outside by the public."
In spite of the disparity in their relative fame and fortune, Peter O'Toole and his character share a reputation for youthful perfection; the photograph of the young Maurice that appears in the film is, of course, the young O'Toole.  In addition to his tremendous gifts as an actor, O'Toole is unarguably one of the most beautiful men ever to have appeared on screen; the mention of his name still provokes sighs amongst successive generations of moviegoers.  "Like a lot of people of my age, 'Lawrence of Arabia' was probably the first film I was conscious of - we had the soundtrack album, and I remember 'Lawrence' being a big moment in my then-young parents' cinema-going lives," says Kevin Loader. "I think my mother's been in love with Peter O'Toole ever since, in fact."
Although O'Toole's youthful beauty is indelibly imprinted in the memory of anyone who has seen his earlier films and will continue to impress for years to come, the actor will be 74 years old in August 2006.  Even after breaking a hip while on a Christmas hiatus from filming (from which he made a full and remarkably rapid recovery) he claims not to have thus far suffered the cruelties or indignities of old age.
"I haven't yet found much cruelty for myself in growing old and I know neither has Leslie and neither has Vanessa," says O'Toole. "The cruelties, the disadvantages, the infirmities - they will come, but not yet."  He scoffs at the suggestion that he might achieve a sort of immortality through his work: "That," he says, "is for the gods.  I'll be in the stalls."
"I was completely haunted by this documentary about the re-release of 'Lawrence of Arabia' which I saw 10 years ago or more," says Roger Michell. "They'd found a missing scene and reconstructed it but it was minus the dialogue.  So David Lean took Peter O'Toole down to this basement studio in Soho and there, projected on the big screen, was as beautiful a vision of gilded youth as you could ever imagine. And peering enquiringly at this image of himself as a young man was Peter who had, well, let's say he had compressed a large amount of living into the intervening years. I was very affected by that and it's always stayed with me. I think that was the genesis of the scene where his ex-wife is watching Maurice on TV and he pops in and she says, 'Oh God, how handsome you were'.  Actors carry that terrible but wonderful knapsack of their mortality on their backs in a way that others don't. And Peter particularly, because he was such a celebrated beauty."
"When I'm writing something, I'm aware that not only should it go to the director who will have an idea of how it should be, but, also, that the actors will bring an enormous amount to what I've done," says Kureishi.  "In a sense, the writer is creating a kind of structure and other people then become creative within it.  Roger and I both knew when we were writing 'The Mother' if we found a fantastic actress to play the part, then the film would begin to work. With this film, Roger insisted that we got quite far in the script before we saw any actors but we did talk about Peter O'Toole pretty early on.  He's obviously a great actor and I think he's an actor who's brave enough to show himself as an old man, not to be afraid or ashamed of what it is to be old and how shockingly different you look to the way you looked when you were 25, as he did once, a terrifically beautiful man. We had to think in terms of an actor who was brave enough and weighty enough to hold the film together."
For his part, O'Toole dismisses the notion that, at least as far as he is concerned, there is anything poignant about an elderly actor playing an elderly actor faced with the photographic evidence of the so-called ravages of time. "I'm exactly the same age I was when I first went into a dressing room when I was 21 or 22," he says.  "I haven't changed at all.  If you're in repertory, as I was for five years - it's something we all did 50 years ago - if you have the common vanities of adolescence or youth and you look in the mirror every day for your living, you start getting used to that as your 'meat'.  It's your living.  You put a bit on the eyebrows, you put on a false nose if you are playing an old man or whatever.  I don't think of it as young, old, anything.   It's just the meat that I work with, my features and my body."
"I think this is the first role for about 20 years in which Peter appears in every scene.  It looks like the part was written for him and when we were shooting the film people said, 'You obviously wrote this with Peter in mind'," says Roger Michell.  "But it's really more to do with circumstances and luck."
For O'Toole, who is perennially chilly, the really difficult part of the job was shooting a low-budget film outdoors on location in the wintertime.  He joked with his politically progressive co-star Vanessa Redgrave that when she and "her Trotsky department of the Worker's thingybob take over the country, all she'll have to do is open the window and I'll confess to anything."  The actor was provided with a pup tent and a gas heater whilst on location and gradually welcomed as many of the cast and crew as could fit into his tiny, collapsible shelter.  "You'd find it on Sloane Square, you'd find it on the Embankment, you'd find it in Regent's Park, you'd find it in Kentish Town.  You'd find it all over the bloody place, my little yellow tent," says O'Toole.
The frequent relocation and wintry weather, however, did not dampen O'Toole's enthusiasm for the project or his fellow cast members. "I got to work with my old mate, Leslie Phillips, my sparring partner, who is a remarkable man with a long and distinguished career in the business," he says. "He's done everything from serious stuff to frothy light-hearted farcical stuff, good stuff. He's a proper, brass-bowelled old pro."
For the character of Ian, Maurice's fellow actor and the other half of their odd couple, Michell chose 82 year-old Leslie Phillips. "Leslie is not famous for this kind of work," says Michell. "He's famous for a whole other world of brilliant Ding Dong! schtick. He was surprised and amazed to get the part.  In fact, he said, I thought I would never be offered a role like this again in my life.  He has great weight in the film; he's funny but he's also very fragile, and moving and real."
"We always said to Peter that we would discuss the casting of Ian and the girl with him because, obviously, the chemistry in both these screen relationships is terribly important to the film's success," says Kevin Loader. "Peter and Leslie haven't worked together all that much in the past but I think they kicked about a bit together in the 70s.  A few holiday snaps from Ibiza were produced... They get on really well and you can see that warmth on screen; there's a couple of lovely, very spontaneous moments between them."
"The joy of working with somebody like Peter O'Toole is that he has as much background as I have so you don't have to talk about it, you just know what you're going to give him and what he's going to give you," says Leslie Phillips.  "That's what it's all about - listening to each other, taking it in.  It's not about you talking, it's about you listening and becoming the other half of this strange and wonderful relationship.  We have almost a love affair; I think that's my main thing in the film - it's really him.  I've worked with Peter before so I know exactly what he's like.  I know all about him.  Everything about this film is very, very special including Peter O'Toole."
"My dad worshipped Leslie Phillips in the early 1960s, can you imagine?!" says Hanif Kureishi.  "If you think about the huge variety of peculiar things he's been in - wonderful things, too - you begin to get a real sense of what it is to have lived his life."
"I've been an actor for such a long, long time; I don't know any other actors who are still working after 70 years," says Phillips.  "Although I'm basically a stage actor, I've made something like 125 movies in my life, man and boy.  I wasn't a famous child actor but I did very well in the theatre and did a lot of movies which are still shown on television. When you do that many movies, they go round the world and so, of course, they follow you.  New generations come up who would never have seen some of those films and now they see them on TV. So your career becomes very big and it's brought back up again.  You're regurgitated."
"I'm fascinated by other people's jobs," says Hanif Kureishi.  "As a writer, you don't much come into contact with other people who are working. To work with actors is always very interesting. It's interesting to see what it is about their work that they love."
"We were in completely safe hands on this film," says Peter O'Toole. "There's nothing more horrible in the world than to turn up on some film set and there's an unlit lamp that calls itself the leading lady or the leading man.  It's awful and you meet an awful lot of that.  But here, I was working with old friends and professional colleagues who knew each other. Leslie, Richard Griffiths and I have worked together before. I remember Vanessa when she was a young thing.  It was wonderful - like working with an old company again."
"I finally met Vanessa Redgrave!" says Leslie Phillips. "I've worked with both of her daughters so I knew a lot about her.  I even worked with her father in a film some years ago, way back in about 1938, would you believe?"
"You aim as high as you can and sometimes you get lucky and they say 'yes' - it's as simple as that," says Roger Michell of casting Vanessa Redgrave as Maurice's ex-wife. "Vanessa is manifestly over-qualified to play a role of that size but she brings an incredible weight to the scenes she's in and it feels like she's playing a leading role even though it's only a few minutes of screen time."
"What can you say about Vanessa Redgrave, really?" says producer Kevin Loader.  "She's just one of the finest actresses. I think the key to what she does in this film is that it's a performance totally without vanity, a performance so searingly truthful that, with very few scenes, she manages to convey a whole life and a whole failed marriage."
Roger Michell acknowledges that the different requirements of his septuagenarian and octogenarian leading men were taken into account on set. "It was very, very different from working with younger actors. You wanted to take account of their rhythm and their needs and their abilities to remember lines or not remember lines.  All those considerations were built into the schedule and we then tried to build them into the way in which we worked day to day. But Peter and Leslie were marvellous.  I mean, in the middle of the shoot, Peter fell over and broke his hip and for him to come back from that was a sort of Michael Owen-like miracle.  He came back from a bad injury and three weeks later, he was crawling around on the floor looking for toenails.  It's extraordinary - his courage and his sheer bloody-minded, stubborn will to finish the film - it really impressed everyone around him."
O'Toole credits his early training as an actor with forging this iron determination and not letting something like a hip replacement get in the way of a job to be done:  "I remember when I was a young drama student under Sir Kenneth Barnes - he was the principal of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - if you had a cold and you didn't come in, you'd be sacked.  No stamina. You can't be ill if you're an actor," he says.
"I was working with actors of a collective age of 185.  It was a wonderful experience.  If you love actors and you love the history of theatre, it's amazing having these guys on set," says Michell. "They just never stop; they talk and talk about the remarkable, fascinating things they've done over the last 70 years."
O'Toole insists that there's nothing particularly remarkable about the constant banter of a bunch of old actors: "Leslie and I were talking about cats most of the time because his cat was ailing and so was mine. Vanessa and I usually talk politics or reminisce about old friends like Robert Shaw because we were all together in those early, silly days. It is a common misconception that we actors spend our lives gazing in the mirror and eating crumbs from a bubbling stream while talking about past performances.  It's bollocks."

BRIGHT YOUNG THING
AROUND LONDON, MOSTLY KENTISH TOWN, AND A MIDWINTER'S DAY AT THE BEACH
FUNNY HA-HA AND FUNNY PECULIAR

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