One minute he has $20m to play with, the next it's $6m. The backers who 'love' his screenplay decide they hate it. And shooting in the Canaries turns into a windswept beach in Suffolk. Richard Eyre relives the making of Iris

Richard Eyre
Guardian

Saturday January 12, 2002

There are good films and bad films. They are all difficult to get made. And then there are British films. This is the story of how one British film came to be made.

March 1999. I'm in New York rehearsing Amy's View by David Hare with Judi Dench, who has just won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. She says she has been asked to play Iris Murdoch in a film based on John Bayley's books about their life together and Murdoch's death from Alzheimer's. I opportunistically offer myself as a director. I imagine an enterprising British producer has bought the film rights but discover that they have been bought by Hollywood - John Calley of Sony Pictures. I know John from his enthusiastic (but doomed) attempts to release Tumbledown (my BBC film about the Falklands war) in US cinemas. I contact him and lobby through all available channels.

November 1999. I'm in New York again, filming an interview with Arthur Miller in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge. "These are our cathedrals," says Arthur, looking up at the bridge. "I thought those were," I say, pointing to the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. "Oh sure, none of them were here when I lived here... " In the early evening I meet John Calley in the St Regis hotel - tea and scones. He asks me to direct Iris and we discuss possible screenplay writers. "Why don't you write it?" he asks. "You know about these things" - the "things" being Alzheimer's. I say I'll think about it, and we discuss possible British producers; I suggest Robert Fox.

December 2000. John is still urging me to write the screenplay. I accept but then decide that solo directing and writing is a shade too hubristic for me, so recruit Charles Wood, who wrote Tumbledown. Judi is only available in the autumn and there will be scenes that we will have to shoot in late summer. So the theory, which everyone says is impossible, is to deliver the screenplay in May, go into pre- production in August, shoot in late September. John says that if he likes the screenplay there won't be a problem. But I can't start working full-time on the film until the end of April, so we have very little time. Charles and I think we can achieve it between us.

January 2000. I tell a writer friend what I'm doing. "The job is to make the audience cry," he says. Charles and I now have contracts. We map out the screenplay: it will begin and end underwater; it won't be a chronicle of an illness, but a story of a relationship; there will be two tenses (present and past); it will be unsentimental, funny; the actors playing Iris and John will also play their young selves.

April 2000. Charles emails me a draft; I add and subtract scenes and email it back. We both have the same screenwriting software, and write as if sitting on opposite sides of a desk, 65 miles apart: Charles is in Oxfordshire, I'm in west London.

May 2000. I deliver our screenplay to John. It opens with these words: "John Bayley and Iris Murdoch are in their 60s and 70s, and throughout the film they remain the same age. In the scenes set in the 1950s the other characters are the ages they were at the time." John doesn't like it at all - too many flashbacks, too confusing, the idea of the old people playing their young selves doesn't work. If we're thinking of filming this year, forget it. "Give me a week," I say. I reconstruct the screenplay, simplify and reshuffle the flashbacks, and allow for young and old actors. I ring Charles in the morning in a state of demented excitement. We work on.

June 2000. We deliver the new draft. John loves it. We meet at the Dorchester hotel. There are no problems, we will film it this year, with a budget of, say, $20m. It will have wide distribution, reach a large audience. We discuss actors who might play Bayley. It's a sunny day. I walk though Hyde Park marvelling at the painlessness of it all.

July 2000. A silence of about three weeks, then a call from John. His "people" are not happy about it. "This is not the sort of film we make." Ah. "We're going to try to make it through Sony Classics [their small films division], but the budget will have to be around $10m." Ah. A long, detailed critique of the screenplay follows. It's fairly cogent, even if rather depressing - "Bayley needs to be more rootable... For those beyond the ken of Oxford, their life there is utterly alien..." - but it's a "potentially moving, intelligent, unsentimental movie".

It seems Sony Classics will only put up $5m. Will the BBC or Channel 4 come in as a partner? I call Alan Yentob and David Thompson (head of BBC Films). It's possible; they want to read the script. Channel 4 have read the script but don't want to know - it's "old-fashioned". Sony Classics' passion is now waning: the $5m budget would have to include a contribution from the BBC. With the commitments that John has made for fees to Judi, me, Charles, the book rights (predicated on a $20m budget) and the lawyers' fees, the cost of the film is grotesquely top heavy. To shoot this year we have to resolve the budget problems by July 31.

August 2000. The deadline has passed and John is "putting the project into turnaround" - ie, Sony aren't going to make it. But he says I can buy the project from them. I just need to find $238,000. I ring Scott Rudin who, as Bruce Robinson says in his memoir of life in the screen trade, produces practically every movie made in the US. I've known Scott for years and have worked with him in the theatre, and he has occasionally asked me to direct films.

Scott, Robert Fox and I meet in London - the Savoy this time. Scott has read the screenplay and is fired up - he has a million suggestions for the script. He counsels taking our time; the problems with Judi's availability will apparently take care of themselves. He says he can make it with Paramount, budget $12m. Job, apparently, done. Meanwhile, Judy Daish, my agent, has talked to another of her long-time clients, Anthony Minghella, to see if he would be interested in being involved in the film with his Mirage Films partner, veteran director/producer Sydney Pollack. Anthony is enthusiastic but, I tell him, it looks as if we're going to make the film with Paramount.

September 2000. It seems that Paramount aren't interested. A flurry of negotiations. The BBC are keen to be involved: they will buy rights to show the film on TV and distribution rights in the UK - ie, the rights to show the film in UK cinemas. Anthony introduces the UK/German/US film financiers Intermedia to the project. They will distribute everywhere except the US and the UK. Scott now brings Miramax on board: they will distribute in North America.

Like all films, Iris will be financed on money advanced against possible sales in three "territories": the UK, North America, and the rest of the world. But this one's a hard sell: no car chases, no fights, no special effects, no extraterrestrials, just a love story between oldish people, Alzheimer's and Judi Dench.

We now have the possibility of nearly $7m, and the certainty of eight producers - the last six of them "executive": Robert Fox, Scott Rudin, Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Guy East (Intermedia), David Thompson (BBC) and Tom Hedley (the publisher who sold the book to John Calley). Oh yes, and Harvey Weinstein, who produces (or at least distributes) as many films as Scott. They're rivals: both large men, two sumo masters.

We will all - actors, producers, director, writers - have to take "deferred payments". This is a comically optimistic oxymoron: no one ever receives deferred payments. It means you do the job for very little on the promise of your full fee when the film goes into profit - but going into profit is as rare as a successful British film.

Will this be a British film? We budget in dollars and talk of "green-lighting the project" and "watching the dailies", even though less than a third of our money comes from the US. When I made Tumbledown for the BBC we were told by a prospective American co-producer that the Falklands war was a "parochial subject". All too true of Iris, but I'm stubbornly determined not to make the film any less English.

October 2000. We're supposed to start production in the third week of November. I deliver another draft (our seventh) to Scott, who responds with several pages of detailed notes. I spend a day with Anthony talking through the script. He asks some thought- provoking questions. I distil the notes from Scott, Anthony, Guy East, David Thompson and their advisers, and Charles and I divvy up the work.

November 2000. The budget has shrunk to $6m. It's a huge sum by any reasonable standards, but the making of films doesn't adhere to any reasonable standards. A scene set in Lanzarote moves to Southwold beach. The shooting schedule shrinks from 45 days to 39. We're not starting in November; now it's to be January. But as yet the green light is still at amber.

December 2000. The BBC, now the majority investor, has provided us with money to keep us going. I get another three pages of notes from them. Charles and I digest these, feeling terminally churlish. We have to be wittier at the beginning and sadder at the end, apparently. We embark on another draft. Each time we finish one we say, "This is it - we've really got it right," and each time there is more to be done. We're on draft 10.

We decide to offer the part of Bayley to Jim Broadbent. But he's in Rome shooting Gangs of New York for Martin Scorsese. They can't guarantee a stop-date for him: stalemate. Judi is due to film The Shipping News in Newfoundland; her dates are wholly incompatible. Both her film and Jim's are Miramax films, so there is hope - but not certainty - of co-operation. Robert suggests that Kate Winslet would make a good Young Iris.

January 2001. We're still hoping and waiting: no bad news, no good news. Robert now seems to be in a state of perpetual meeting with the BBC, Intermedia and lawyers, or on the phone to Scott, who is in semi-permanent conference-call with Miramax to try to sort out the log jam with Judi and Jim's dates. I have to fight hard not to shout: "Please just give us the money and let us get on with it!"

Kate has accepted: universal jubilation but no more money. Judi is going to do three weeks on The Shipping News, then five weeks with us, then back to The Shipping News. In order to fit between Judi's dates, we'll have no room for error, and will have to work mostly six- day weeks. I'm really worried - her husband, after being ill for 18 months, has just died and she is worn out from grief and looking after him. No progress on the Jim front; in despair I fax my editor friend Thelma Schoonmaker, to see whether she can intercede with her director, Scorsese. He says we will have Jim, but his executives are somewhat less convinced.

February 2001. We are in pre-production at Pinewood even though the light is still flickering between amber and green. We're like castaways waiting for the sign of a ship on the horizon: waving, screaming, lighting bonfires, despairing, hoping. Our production office is situated within an archipelago occupied by Tomb Raider, a film that has been shooting for over three months, is still shooting now, and is due to be released in mid-June. The line producer tells me that his allocation for transport is larger than our entire budget. They might have got Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft but I don't mind. I've got Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch, and I've almost got Jim Broadbent as John Bayley. I want to cast Hugh Bonneville as Young John but Scott doesn't know him.

Pinewood is Britain's most celebrated film studio, but it's not, as Fellini said of Cinecitta, a "temple of dreams". Its grandeur, such as it was, now has an air of dispiriting shabbiness. While the films of Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Visconti Antonioni, Malle et al were being made, Pinewood was host to James Bond and the early Carry On films, celebrated in a corridor of fame decorated with faux blue plaques paying tribute to Hattie Jacques, Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw.

March 2000. I'm feeling like the old Fry's Five Boys chocolate ad - "Desperation, pacification, expectation, acclamation, realisation... It's Fry's!" Jim is going to be available, and we have the green light. We even manage to get him back from Rome for a day to do a read-through in my kitchen. It's terrifying: Judi, Jim, Kate, Hugh, two other actors - Samantha Bond and Kris Marshall, Charles and five of the producers round my kitchen table. We celebrate our luck in having these wonderful actors (Scott is bowled over by Hugh) and decide we need more script changes and more cuts to fit the schedule.

April 2001. My friend Stephen Frears recommends seeing a good film before one starts filming (on the grounds that it might rub off?), so I go to the video shop.

"Have you got Fanny and Alexander?" "Do you mean Fanny and Elvis?" "No, Fanny and Alexander." "Fanny and Elvis is good."

Barely a year after we had a first draft, we're shooting. We have had a charmed life.

May 2001. Thirty-nine shooting days later, we've finished filming and, like an astronaut released from a capsule, I re-enter the earth's atmosphere. After weeks insulated from the routine and obligations of daily life, I start reading newspapers, stop eating sausage, bacon, egg and fried bread at 7am each morning, and discover that an election is taking place.

The film is shot, but that's barely half the story; we just have the stone from which the film is carved. Months of editing, screening, composing, recording, mixing, testing, all the while listening to an inexhaustible flood of (sometimes conflicting) opinion and changing, changing, changing have to come to an end, our cash exhausted.

December 2001. The film has its premiere in New York. It goes down well - tears and applause - but it's too early to celebrate. A distinguished American producer asks me how it went in the UK. I tell him it's opening in London in January. "Watch out," he says. "They eat their own over there..."

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