i
n t e r v i e w
spotlight may / june / july 1999
Reflections
Alan Bates interviewed by Gordon Gow in 1971
"... People will always
offer you what you've just done,
and it's very hard to break
that custom."
PART TWO (of
three). THE NEXT Bates film
was a major success: "Zorba the Greek," directed by
Michael Cacoyannis from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Anthony
Quinn loomed  large in the title
role, all freedom and impracticality, while Bates scored by diffident
contrast as the English writer who gradually adjusted to a foreign
set of values in Crete. This was a singular film, not following
any recognised trend; nor was it mimicked by the usual imitations
that flow in the wake of a lucrative film.
 "It's a sort of epic subject, which
wasn't made in the epic way in terms of money. It was an incredibly
simple script condensed from a very complicated book; as complicated
as "Women in Love" but even more sparingly adapted
for the screen. It dealt with very big issues in a very economical
way. I was a bit worried about playing it at the time because
the part is not image making -- the very opposite, in a sense."
He voices the term 'image making' with a
hint of retrospective shame, and laughs it off. "In a way,
it's unrewarding, though -- because an incredibly difficult thing,
on stage or screen, is to suggest someone who is in a permanent
state of doubt, and to whom things happen. Like "Zhivago,"
I suppose; hard to play someone like that. People always tell
me I'm good at it and so they give me those kinds of parts, which
makes me rather mad. It's a compliment, of course -- but what
I mean about it making me mad is that I have to fight sometimes
to get anything else. Less so now. But people will always offer
you what you've just done, and it's very hard to break that custom.
 "I
didn't make a film for eighteen months after "Zorba the
Greek" and then I did "Georgy Girl," quite deliberately.
Not only because I liked the script, but because it was completely
different. I had to fight a bit to get that part. Not that "Zorba"
wasn't a marvellous experence. Living on Crete while we were
making it. That was terrific. But the part of Basil was a problem
-- he just didn't know himself. It's the author figure, and you
can never get to the bottom of it when that's the case. I've
played about three or four." Notable among these was his
interpretation of the Eugene O'Neill figure in the London stage
production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night;" and
of course Birkin, the character associated with D. H. Lawrence
himself in "Women in Love."
"I think bombastic behaviour
is a sign of nervousness."
"You can never explore those
characters fully, because the authors haven't been able to do
so with themselves. They can write about their brothers and their
sisters, and all the other characters, fantastically clearly.
But not themselves. I think one gets very hung up on the commercial
aspect in films, you see, whether it means a lot to you or not.
Because that's how it's all set up here. So you always have at
the back of your mind a sense of what the part you are playing
might mean to your career. This was true -- it isn't now. You
can play anything now, and nobody thinks twice about it."
 The author-figure
question as aligned with another factor in the case of "Zorba
the Greek": a consideration that applies to any film or
play, namely the rapport between fellow actors. Probably "Zorba"
was a special case, since Anthony Quinn not only had the dominant
role but is by nature a potent personality. Bates says of Quinn,
"at his best he's a marvellous actor, and he's a very instinctive
actor. He has a sort of animal quality, although I think he's
got a bit stuck with it ... with that aspect of himself. But
all you can really ask of anyone is the emotional contact that
it takes for two people to act together, and he's got that in
abundance. When you meet eye to eye and you have a scene to play,
he does give an awful lot. He's a larger than life character.
He's that without trying, before he starts. He's not the easiest
man to work with by any means. He's quite temperamental. He gets
nervous very easily, I think -- I don't know whether he would
confess to that. But I think bombastic behaviour is a sign of
nervousness."
"...when I'm acting
I tend to sort of contain a nervous tension..."
One might assume that Bates himself,
being quite evidently a sensitive performer, would have his personal
moments of nervousness. He concedes that he does. "But mine
doesn't show itself in that way. Sometimes I wish it did. I can
let off steam all right, but when I'm acting I tend to sort of
contain a nervous tension -- which works in certain parts
very well. I think actually it's fair to say that the part you
play does affect your state of nerves, while you're playing that
given part. So if you're playing an extrovert, as Quinn was as
Zorba, your nerves will probably reveal themselves in that way."
I asked him if he had ever seen "A Double
Life," in which Ronald Coleman personified an actor who
became so identified with the character of Othello that he strangled
a woman in his offstage world, because his entire existence had
assumed such proximity to the mental condition of the Moor.
"I did see that, and I think it's valid.
I mean, I can't remember a case where it's actually happened,
but one has heard of some very near misses. I know for example
that if you play something like the other brother in "The
Caretaker" -- not the one I played, but the one Robert Shaw
did in the film -- over a period of time that can become a very
depressing experience, and you can in fact get deeply affected
and very low from a long run in a part of that nature. A man
so unable to move and so unable to express himself physically.
So to a lesser extent I had that kind of feeling with my role
in "Zorba the Greek." We were six months shooting it.
But I feel about the final film rather as I do about "A
Kind of Loving": most of that film has a great purity about
it. Then I enjoyed "Georgy Girl" in the way that I
enjoyed "Nothing But the Best," although it wasn't
so unique or sophisticated. But it just had great life and energy
-- it was fun."
 So, presumably, was
the satire he made in France for Philippe de Broca, "Le
Roi de Coeur," set in an abandoned village during the first
world war, where Bates as an English soldier was sent to dismantle
a time bomb and stayed on to live in peace with the only remaining
inhabitants, fantasticated charmers of the insane asylum, who
regarded the outside world as a vast terrain of madness -- a
point will made when a battle took place before their derisive
eyes.
"Mind you, it's very hard to work with
a foreign language crew and cast. It's a double effort. But I
did it because Philippe de Broca came over to London and just
talked toe about it, and the idea appealed to me so much that
I didn't even read the script before I agreed. And of course
I liked his films -- I'd seen about three, including "L'homme
de Rio." He was very disappointed that "Le Roi de Coeur"
wasn't at all well received in France. That was strange -- it
did very well in New York and London in the limited art areas.
I think it was slightly too fantastic. The mad element of those
people should have been more intense, more real. Then the moral
of the film would have really worked. It was a bit too much of
a fairy story. Beautifully done, of course -- very light. And
the sequence of the mad people taking over the town was marvellous.
That poetic style wasn't really held right through. It was full
of smashing things, but it came scene by scene and one lost the
thread, and only in that sequence did it fully realise itself.
The madman going into the church and putting on the bishop's
robes and sitting alone there with a pigeon -- that was a marvellous
image, very movingly done."
Made in 1966, it must have been
an early sample as well of the significance of nudity as a gesture,
severing conventional ties. When Bates walked finally to the
gates of the asylum to join with the insane -- who stood for
a sanity beyond 'normal' man's grasp -- he was naked. I don't
think the full backward nudity was completely new to cinema then;
but to Bates ... "It felt new, I can tell you. And I don't
think he shot me all that well either. A bit too low down and
a bit too near. Genevieve Bujold, who was in it, was supposed
to be nude in one scene, and wouldn't; and she was full of --
well, I don't know whether it was awe at me doing it, or disgust.
To me it was a very witty way to end that story. It seemed absolutely
right, although it was a bit hair-raising at the time, in the
middle of a French town on location, with as many people watching
as could get near enough."
 Three films
later, of course, Bates and Oliver Reed were presented in frontal
nudity for the wrestling by firelight in Ken Russell's "Women
in Love."
"Originally it was scripted in a different
way. Larry Kramer, who wrote the screenplay, had taken the scene
and set it outside -- I don't quite know why he did that -- and
somehow it just didn't ring true. And then Oliver or somebody
who knew him, said that the scene ought really to be the way
it was in the book -- and that was right, for the wrestling and
a lot of other things too: we went back to the book constantly.
The run through the woods, for instance. I did that straight
out of the book. I'm not saying that Larry hadn't taken it from
the book, but one needed to read that chapter in the book again
-- and I've always been a great reader of Lawrence. And the run
and the wrestling were really what Lawrence was all about. Physical
contact. Contact with the earth, contact with the ground, contact
with each other -- expressed physically, not only sexually. The
point of discussion about that fight is -- yes, it's got sexual
undertones, but it's first and foremost a physical contact, as
an expression of need or of friendship. A need to expand yourself.
The reason they fight is because each of them is in a particular
extreme state in his life. They both lived in a very constricted
society. And to me that kind of explosion, although it's got
an intellectual side to it too, is a natural thing. It's extreme,
but it's not unnatural."
"... it couldn't be
more natural -- to have no clothes on."
The wrestling would presumably
have been shot under customary studio conditions, without the
gathering of onlookers who had to be braved by Bates on the location
for "Le Roi de Coeur." The naked run, culminating in
a fairly erotic role on the ground, was filmed outdoors but could
have been filmed with a minimum number of crew members. In both
cases, however, it was inevitable that a few jaunty quips would
be bandied about in the course of preparation for shooting.
"Getting rid of inhibitions is not my
hang-up. It's just the sense that you're the only one person
in a group of people (however small the group) who is naked while
the others aren't. You can forget the camera because you don't
see the result for months. Not completely, anyway. At rushes,
you see yourself suddenly while you sit in a little theatre with
some shocked publicity people, or whoever. But while you're filming,
it's all right so long as you are convinced it's being done for
a good reason in the right context. The wisecracks on the set
can be useful, to break the tension -- because there is an automatic
tension of people being very respectful ... not looking,
you know. That in itself creates an atmosphere which needs to
be broken. Christ, it couldn't be more natural -- to have no
clothes on." ||||
From Films and Filming, June 1971 © 1971
by Hansom Books
Part 3: "Far from the Madding Crowd," "The
Fixer," "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg"
Part 1: "Zorba
the Greek," "Georgy Girl," "King of Hearts,"
"Women in Love."
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