"I love your magazine,” gushes Anand Tucker from his comfy couch in Galway’s Radisson Hotel. “It’s everything that the NME used to be but isn’t anymore.”
Oh, Mr. Tucker you do go on.
As it happens, the director doesn’t need to butter us up at all. It’s the morning after the world premiere of And When Did You Last See Your Father? And to say it was well received would be a mighty understatement. A heartbreaking adaptation of Blake Morrison’s coruscating memoir of the same name, the film had an entire audience scrambling for tissues as Colin Firth watched his philandering, deeply flawed father (Jim Broadbent) breathe his last.
“Even making it was a very moving experience,” says Anand. “I would turn around during those scenes with Jim to find big hairy hardened crew men actually weeping.”
The 1998 book of the same name, you may recall, was Blake Morrison’s memoir of his father, Dr. Arthur Morrison. In keeping with this source, Anand’s film presents a fragmented, multifaceted account of Oedipal friction that feels raw, if not verging on the voyeuristic.
“It was raw, certainly,” nods Anand. “I ended up asking Blake (Morrison) stuff about his dad that wasn’t in the book. Basically I pried a lot further into the family secrets. I’m a nosy parker.”
Given the intensely personal nature of the drama, did Morrison’s input into the script ever bring him into conflict with the director I wonder?
“Not at all,” says Anand. “He was very understanding that way. Very early on I told him to look me in the eye and take a leap of faith because I had to go and make my movie. And it has to be my version. I said I’d do my best but that he might love it and he might hate it. He was great and very supportive. I think when you’re making a movie, you need some distance. It has to become a fable or a story in order to universalise the truth. And then hopefully it becomes real again for an audience.”
It’s a tricky process that Mr. Tucker knows all about. Hilary and Jackie, his Oscar nominated account of the relationship between renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pré and her less talented flautist sister Hilary du Pré-Finzi, caused a kerfuffle in the classical community upon its release in 1998 when Jacqueline’s colleague Julian Lloyd-Webber dismissed the biographical film as total fiction.
“Oh, that was such nonsense”, says Anand. “I mean, there’s no such thing as the truth in this sense. You’ll go off and write up this interview with me and it’ll be your version based on what you’ve seen and filtered through your impressions. I’ll tell you what pissed me off about that. I spent a year researching that movie with Jacqueline’s sister. I spoke to everybody I possibly could from the very heart of the family and outwards. I only made the movie because I had Hillary’s blessing. So I don’t understand how someone with no particularly significant relationship with Jacqueline du Pré can come along and presume to know her better than her own family.”
At any rate, we are glad to have Mr Tucker back about the place. Between Hilary and Jackie and 2005’s Shopgirl, he did have quite the run of bad luck. His remake of Gambit fell through. A biopic of Cleopatra fell through. And tellingly, many disgruntled franchise-watchers are still terrified by the prospect of His Dark Materials as envisaged by Chris Weitz, a film that Anand was once slated to direct.
“I tried to option them when they came out,” he recalls. “I chased the job shamelessly for months. I was on the project for 18 months and I poured my heart into it. But that’s the movie business. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been difficult and sad. But Chris (Weitz) is a top man and I wish him all the best.”
Happily, given the capriciousness of his vocation, Anand does live in a two-income household. His partner, the documentary-maker Sharon Maguire, provided the inspiration for the ‘Shazza’ character in Bridget Jones’s Diary and went on to direct the film version. Two directors under one roof? Might it just be crazy enough to work?
“In some ways, it actually helps”, says Anand. “I don’t want to sound wanky but unless you’ve directed a movie then you can’t really know what it’s like. It’s the most stupid job in the world. I mean, we have a little boy who doesn’t give a monkeys about the film industry. And we’ve still got to get up at five in the morning with him. But yes, I’ve actually just produced a film that she’s directed. So we understand each other, even if saying ‘no’ to her at half ten at night never gets any easier.”