Press and Publicity

[Miss Chumley]

A couple of interviews to promote Parade's end

Telegraph

Photo on the Telegraph interview page very nice indeed!



Benedict-Cumberbatch-returns-in-Parades-End

Independent

Parade's End: A series to challenge Downton

[Sherlocked]

Lots of press pick-up following Benedict's Radio Times interview today.

Radio Times front cover:
http://www.radiotimes.com/photos/2012-08-13/coming-soon

Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvan ... he-US.html

Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... batch.html

Daily Mirror:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-n ... in-1259951

There are also interviews with Benedict/Parade's End features in the TV Times and TV & Satellite Week

[Sherlocked]

Excellent review of Parade's End in this week's Spectator (can't find online so here's the text):

**Beware mild spoilers**


Downton for adults - Alan Judd and Sara Haslam on Tom Stoppard's television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford's quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to do for three reasons: it is the world of Downton but not Downton. It is not what we expect of war novels. And it was written by Ford Madox Ford.

Ford Madox who? is the response that anyone writing about Ford has come to expect. He's often confused with the PreRaphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, his maternal grandfather, or even with Henry (no relation). Some have heard of his bestknown novel, The Good Soldier; those that have read it tend never to forget it.

Ford, who died in 1939 and who wrote Parade's End in the 1920s after wartime service as an over-age subaltern, has never been popular. But his work has attracted many modern writers - A.S. Byatt, Colm Toibin, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess - and inspired many more loyal readers. He was highly influential during the first two decades of the 20th century, one of our most original and engaging writers and an associate or friend of Conrad, James, Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound and many others.

Tom Stoppard had not written for the BBC since 1979 when he was approached to script Parade's End. He found a sprawling, non-linear novel in which much of the action takes place inside the head of the main character, Christopher Tietjens. What's more, a novel that depicts war without fighting; love and passion without explicit scenes; and the fragmentation of social structure without social comment. Most challengingly of all, perhaps, the hero almost always rolls with the punches. But within 50 pages Stoppard was hooked.

What he also found was a contemporary take on the Edwardian world, focused on an unlikely central figure who combined in himself 17th-century spirituality with the mind of an educated 18th-century gentleman. Add an errant and vengeful wife, flawed colleagues, fair-weather patrons, a priest with Tourette's, an attractive young suffragette and the slaughterhouse of the trenches, and life was no easier for such a man then than it would be now.

The book raises, says Stoppard, some very contemporary questions, dramatising such concerns as the ethics of social responsibility, the affordability of welfare provision and the role of women. Central to it all is one of the big questions - perhaps the big question - what is the good life and how do we get to it? The result, in Stoppard's hands, is a script that is double-edged Downton, with always more than one thing going on at a time.

Ford was unusual in being a much-married man (four wives, though only one recognised in law) who wrote perceptively about women. In playing Sylvia, Tietjens's wife, Rebecca Hall uses her Shakespearean eloquence to bring to the part a transforming sympathy and credibility. She has many of the best lines: 'If you had once in your life said to me, "You whore, you ****** . . .May you rot in hell . . . " you might have done something to bring us together.' Instead of taking the easy way and simply portraying her as an adulterous harpy (though Sylvia is that too), she shows us a woman struggling with the impossibility of being married to a man who is almost wholly good - but never boring - and who doesn't really need her.

Adelaide Clemens is Valentine, the pale and eager young suffragette who becomes (eventually) Tietjens's mistress. This, too, is a part that could have been played twodimensionally, with stridency-cum-sweetness, but Clemens endows Valentine with a humour, sensitivity and poise that make her a believable mate for Tietjens. It was her face that did it for Stoppard: 'When Christopher looks up it was that face - her face - I wanted him to see, ' he says. Clemens travelled from Los Angeles at her own expense to audition; I hope they paid her back, because she's worth every penny.

As is, unsurprisingly, Benedict Cumberbatch's Tietjens. It must have stretched him a bit to play a character who has the acerbity and quickness of his Sherlock Holmes but who has also to be shown as a man of deep passion averse to superficial display, a man of reserve, gravitas and understated wit who is put through the emotional and ethical wringer. (Cumberbatch was literally stretched, having to be padded in cheeks and abdomen for the more portly scenes. ) Approached by Stoppard before he became the star he now is, he was gripped by the book but still had to be fought for by director Susanna White in the teeth of opposition from HBO, BBC2's partner in the project, who protested they didn't know him. 'You will, ' she insisted, 'you will.' A year later, with the success of War Horse, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, Cumberbatch had become one of the most successful actors in Britain and there was no question about casting him. White was as right about Cumberbatch as she was about the many minor and often vivid characters (110 in all) who populate the 146 sets it took to make this complex film. The result is that you wake up next day with your head buzzing with scenes and resonances.

Throughout the project there was touching enthusiasm, from top to bottom, for being true to Ford's vision. When filming on the golf links at Rye - an important early scene in which Christopher first meets Valentine - the cast were keen to discuss their roles. Max Saunders, the world's foremost Fordian scholar, was deep in conversation with Cumberbatch about the importance of doing gravitas with a light touch; Adelaide Clemens transformed herself from a seemingly passive listener off-set to vivid intensity in front of the camera; and Patrick Moorhouse, a retired naval commander who has made a second career from doing bit parts, took about ten minutes to become a completely convincing Edwardian golfer. And Cumberbatch found his acting skills further stretched by the demands of this ancient sport. One scene, which involved a group walking and talking, culminating in Cumberbatch tee-ing off, had to be repeatedly reshot as words and bodies and timing got muddled. Finally, everything fell into place and Cumberbatch swung his club magnificently - unfortunately forgetting to hang on to it.

A shot of the valuable Edwardian golf club spiralling over the dune behind him would have made great cinema, but sadly not for this film.

'I do write talkies, ' Tom Stoppard confessed at the press preview, explaining why there's more dialogue in this film than most.

This was no surprise. Over lunch in Rye, he had expanded to me on why he is so unapologetically script-driven. Most film scripts have relatively little dialogue, usually very short sentences. Stoppard has more not only because of his playwright background but also because of his belief that it is through words that we become most fully human, that only words can simultaneously convey the seriousness and humour of life, that it is through words that we become what we are.

The result is a masterly compression that gets in all the important themes, an intelligent rendering where the Word is accorded its rightful prominence, as we should expect when one of the greatest novels of the past century is dramatised by one of the greatest playwrights. Ford would have approved.

[Sherlocked]

Overseas fans wanting this week's Radio Times can acquire one by emailing feedback@radiotimes.com

[Sherlocked]

Text from today's Parade's End article in the Daily Telegraph:

**WARNING - contains spoilers**

THIS WAS ENGLAND
Serena Davies meets Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall on the set of the BBC's new £12'm Downton' torpedo - a lustrous five-part adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End'

Rebecca Hall is wearing a "hobble" skirt. This is a garment that came into fashion shortly before the First World War and, as the name suggests, forces women to take tiny steps, thanks to a tapering at the ankle. It represented a "fetishisation of the female by restraining her and not allowing her to go anywhere", as Hall explains it later; a bit like Chinese foot-binding. "Because people who are really grand, they don't have to go anywhere, you see."

Hall, a Hollywood star, and daughter of the theatre director Sir Peter, is playing Sylvia Tietjens - femme fatale, career ****** and a woman who hopes that promiscuity and snobbery might fill the hole in her heart where happiness is meant to be. She is one of the three leads in BBC Two's forthcoming adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's four-novel magnum opus, Parade's End.

The scene being filmed on the day I visit the set is one in which Hall has to get down the stone staircase of a forbidding neoclassical pile in her outfit. It's a feat that elicits a scripted jibe from one of her costumed onlookers - Sylvia has indelicately chosen the funeral of her mother-in-law at which to show off her fashion sense - and a sharp intake of breath from the rest of us.

We are quite a group. The funeral procession to which Hall descends includes horse-drawn carriages, rows of servants and a clutch of top-drawer actors. Benedict Cumberbatch, television's Sherlock, is Sylvia's repressed, intellectual Tory husband, Christopher, complete with fat suit. Rupert Everett plays his brother, Alan Howard their father, Roger Allam the oafish General Campion, Sylvestra Le Touzel the nanny to the Tietjenses' neglected son.

Also in the cast, although spared this particular blustery day of filming in Yorkshire, are Anne-Marie Duff, Rufus Sewell, Stephen Graham and Miranda Richardson.

This constellation of stars has been drawn together because of Sir Tom Stoppard, who has written the script for Parade's End. He is returning to write for the BBC for the first time in decades, although he has scripted several films in the meantime, including Shakespeare in Love and Joe Wright's forthcoming version of Anna Karenina.

But if it is Stoppard who has reeled them in, it is Ford Madox Ford who is the revelation. None of those involved in the production whom I speak to had read the book before the script; and they usually hadn't heard of it. All found it brilliant. The drama's director, Susanna White, describes it as "an extraordinary piece of work"; Cumberbatch "absolutely loved it"; Hall was "really knocked out by it, frankly". Both Hall and White, indeed, express something approaching embarrassment at having Oxbridge English degrees that never introduced them to this book.

The Ford novel most people do know is The Good Soldier (1915), an elegantly told tale of adultery and the devastation that follows it. Parade's End, published between 1924 and 1928, is four times as long and much more ambitious. Its focus is a love triangle between Christopher Tietjens, Sylvia and Christopher's young admirer, the suffragette Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens), where each character represents, respectively, the past, the anguished present and the future.

Their tale is set against the backdrop of the Great War, in which Ford himself fought and was shell-shocked. The whole is presented in a style rich with wry humour and irony, "not least the irony that the assassination of two people caused the deaths of 16 million more," as Cumberbatch points out. He summarises Parade's End as: "basically an essay on the death throes of the aristocracy before and after the First World War".

It is also a highly sophisticated piece of modernist writing, coming two years after James Joyce's Ulysses was published. It fractures time, recounts streams of consciousness and quotes different literary forms. Its fans stretch from Graham Greene - who called the tetralogy "almost the only adult novels dealing with sexual life that have been written in English" - to Julian Barnes, who thinks it is a masterpiece (as does Stoppard, well, "a sort-of masterpiece"). The philosopher John Gray recently said he thought it was possibly the greatest 20th-century novel written in English.

No pressure then on White, chosen by the BBC and the American network HBO, which are co-funding the £12million production, to make the adaptation. White's best-known television work in Britain is Bleak House, the BBC's Bafta-winning 2005 adaptation of Dickens's novel that presented the story in EastEndersstyle half-hour chunks.

"If in Bleak House we went back to Dickens as an episodic writer who wrote in instalments with cliffhangers, what we were trying to do with Parade's End is be true to what Ford was doing and really challenge people," she tells me. "To make demands of the viewer as Ford makes demands of the reader."

Which means, essentially, that viewers are going to have to concentrate hard. Stoppard's script is "at once spare and verbose", as Hall puts it. It takes few intellectual prisoners and doesn't do exposition. White uses fractured images and elegant artistic references (to Picasso and Paul Nash, among others) as she introduces the drama's 110 speaking parts, presented across its 146 locations (a colossal number for a five-part television serial).

"You can happily go off and make yourself a cup of tea in Downton Abbey and pick it up again," she says. "You can't make yourself a cup of tea during Parade's End, or you'd be lost."

Downton, of course, set in the same era, is an obvious comparison point. And no one is holding back on that score. Not even, amusingly, Downton's own Dan Stevens, who has been calling Parade's End "the Downton torpedo". Parade's End is definitely "not a long soak in the bath with s----- milk chocolate like Downton Abbey," says Cumberbatch.

"This is like Downton Abbey meets The Wire in some ways," says White, referring to the complex American television series set in the Baltimore drug world. White worked with The Wire's creator, David Simon, on his Iraq war drama Generation Kill. As with Simon's work "there are bits of dialogue that at first sight you won't understand at all," she says. "But you'll have to trust that it's going to pay off. The effect is cumulative."

Having seen the first two episodes, I can say that the first episode is given over, largely, to scene-setting, but that pay-off comes soon enough in episode two, when Stoppard starts to colour in his characters.

Sylvia, for example, comes across as a catty prima donna in episode one but then gets a speech in episode two of such darkness and brilliance that it is unlike anything else you will find on television.

Standing naked before her husband, to whom she is serially unfaithful, Sylvia says: "Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels: stuck between the two in our idiots' Eden. God, I'm so bored of it all. Guarding or granting permission to a temple no decent butcher would give to his offal tray. I'd rather be a cow in a field..."

Absent from the set on the day I visit is the third segment of the love triangle at the heart of Parade's End: Valentine Wannop. Australian actress Adelaide Clemens is not yet a star with the cachet of Cumberbatch and Hall, both in their thirties, and the 22 year-old had to fight for her part, having become "obsessed" with the book.

"I recorded myself on tape every weekend [and sent them to Susanna] and kept getting a 'No thank you very much, you're not British'," Clemens tells me when we speak on the phone. She took to bombarding White with begging letters, even flying over to see her; and finally turning up to the audition in period garb. She says Stoppard spent hours with her making her do everything she could with a "high British accent" to test its elasticity.

Clemens looks alarmingly like Carey Mulligan, and sports a short haircut in the drama to suggest her progressiveness. "I think if Valentine had long hair she'd probably sell it as a wig," says Clemens. "She doesn't have time in the morning." (For the pedants: the cut is historically accurate as a boy's haircut, although it did not come in for women until several years later. Also, it is not a bob.)

Clemens is, like the character she plays, fresh, artless and exceptionally passionate about what she is doing. She spent her time off from rehearsals sitting in "that beautiful old book shop in Piccadilly [Hatchards]" reading every history book she could find on the period "from when it opened to closing time, because I couldn't really afford to buy them all".

White says she believes Clemens has the "spirit" of Valentine. And adds: "She is so beautiful you can't take your eyes off her."

From Valentine Wannop's startling haircut; to the "glorious monster" (Hall's words) that is Sylvia Tietjens; to the complex philosophy of Christopher, a man who is both feudalistic and progressive at the same time: the hope from those behind this television serial is that Parade's End will surprise, and even shock.

As Rebecca Hall imagines it: "Everyone's going to sit down and go, 'I know the period, I know that it's cosy costume drama.'

"And then they're going to get slapped in the face."

Parade's End starts on BBC Two on Friday

'You can't make yourself a cup of tea during Parade's End, or you'd be lost.'

[Sherlocked]

Here's the excellent Radio 4 Saturday Review discussion. Beware mild spoilers and a short bit of dialogue from episode 1 (The PE review is the first item on the programme):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01lz7yh#synopsis

[Sherlocked]

Great profile piece from the Observer's Euan Ferguson:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2 ... h-sherlock

And beware substantial spoilers in the Mail on Sunday's review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2 ... h-sherlock

And finally the Sunday Express:

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/340712

[Sherlocked]

Boyd Hilton was on Richard Bacon’s show earlier today reviewing Parade’s End. He described it as “brilliant” with “incredible performances”. He particularly singled out Benedict, saying “there is so much going on in his eyes”.

The review starts 1hr 54 mins in:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b01m0p2f

[Sherlocked]

Benedict is interviewed in this week's Time Out London:

"Christopher is the most adorable, long- suffering, virtuous character I’ve played"...

http://www.timeout.com/london/feature/2 ... arades-end

[Sherlocked]

There's a great in-depth profile on Parade's End in this week's Broadcast magazine:



Mud, sets and tears in WW1

I missed the preparation time on this WWI-era drama, but having Tom Stoppard writing on set for an A-list cast helped us negotiate the challenging conditions, says Susanna White.

Credits
Parade’s End

Production company Mammoth Screen
Commissioners Ben Stephenson, Janice Hadlow
Length 5 x 60 minutes
TX BBC2, 9pm from Friday 24 August
Director Susanna White
Writer Tom Stoppard
Executive producers Michele Buck, Damien Timmer (Mammoth Screen), Ben Donald (BBC Worldwide), Simon Vaughan (Lookout Point TV); Judith Louis (ARTE France)
Producers David Parfitt, Selwyn Roberts
Production designer Martin Childs
Post-house Galaxy Studios NV

Summary Adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s four-volume series of modernist novels focusing on a destructive love triangle that develops as the looming World War I threatens to shatter society’s values.

Susanna White
Director

Like all directors, I need a game plan. Whenever I go into a shoot, I draw graphs of the characters’ emotional journeys, plan blocking of scenes and work up storyboards of key sequences to bring my vision to the screen as effectively as possible.

With Parade’s End, shooting five hours of drama multi-episodically, with dialogue by Tom Stoppard, involving 110 characters who age over 10 years, this would seem to be more essential than ever.

But such were the challenges of this unique project that I sometimes found myself walking onto one of the 146 sets for the first time on the morning of filming. Or I’d be a week away from shooting a complex scene and one key actor short because there hadn’t physically been time to cast them all before the end of prep. It wasn’t that the read-through was lacking in names – younger actors walked in wide-eyed to join Rebecca Hall, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Graham, Rupert Everett and others. The huge room in Lincoln’s Inn was full.

A year after I read the scripts, the right constellation of stars came together to satisfy the broadcasters and we suddenly found ourselves hurtling headlong into production. We had a small window of opportunity with Rebecca and Benedict and needed to start shooting a key episode centred on the 24 hours around Midsummers’ Day before the end of September, while there were still leaves on the trees and the hope of sunshine.

What I missed most perhaps was the opportunity that rehearsal brings to define the tonal quality of the piece and refine timing, particularly around comedy. There is a key scene in episode one where Benedict’s character visits the home of a mad clergyman suffering from Tourette’s. Tom’s writing veers brilliantly between farce and deep emotional undercurrents and it was crucial to keep it feeling real. But with Rufus Sewell confirmed only a fortnight before filming and the likes of Stephen and Miranda Richardson busy with other commitments, we could not rehearse until that morning. I was glad it wasn’t my first job.

Trench warfare

Fortunately, Tom was often on hand to talk to. I welcomed his presence on set. When extra lines were needed he’d write them rapidly, but the existing dialogue was there to be explored, not changed – so much thought had gone into patterning and layering across the five hours. It wasn’t a set where actors could improvise.

When it came to the war sequences, my gaffer Paul Murphy had one request: hold back the mud. He’d had his fill of it on Jane Eyre and Nanny McPhee. But this is a World War I drama and that means trenches. We dug a system of them at Branchon in Belgium. Tom and I had visited the set of Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, trenches stretching as far as the eye could see, wide enough to gallop a horse down. How could we compete? We took the opposite approach and drew on documentary photographs to come up with narrow channels through mud walls, only just wide enough for two men to squeeze past each other. We shot on two Alexas, with some additional material on the Canon D5.

We pared it right back – few duckboards, few sandbags, opting instead for organic curves of pure mud with bare shattered trees, like the spare landscapes in paintings by Paul Nash. One shot of the battlefield at night is a direct quote from a Nash painting, brought to life with moving flares and explosions. Ford Madox Ford was involved with the Cubists and Vorticists and there are references to paintings throughout. The era is the end of the Pre-Raphaelites and the costumes have a lot of the rich colours associated with that movement, particularly Sylvia’s.

We went for a much more subdued palette for the trenches and the images become more fractured as the characters’ Edwardian values are shattered. The three mirrors of the opening titles, modelled on Vorticist photographers, become a recurring motif as things start to break down.

The trenches were so narrow that the only practical way to work in them was to shoot from above with a technocrane. I wanted the focus to be on the men, not the hardware of war.

Our production design team built a model of the trenches and our evenings were spent plotting where the explosions would be, which areas would be flooded, where the cranes would go. The plan was to create a stretch of trenches with a flat view into No Man’s Land and to extend them in CGI. We borrowed authentic WWI weapons from Belgian museums. War Horse producer Kathleen Kennedy kindly lent us some military costumes.

On 11 November, we were at Aalter, filming in a chateau that we used as General Campion’s HQ and some London interiors. Rupert Everett and I stood side by side observing the two-minute silence, knowing that during the war the inhabitants of that chateau would have been able to hear shelling rather than the birds we now listened to. The whole trench shoot was a humbling experience. If our days were long and cold, it was nothing compared to what the real troops went through.

My tricks of the trade
Hold your nerve over casting. Don’t go with second best – drama stands or falls on the quality of the casting and how well the minor parts are played.

In emergencies, think of drama like documentary. If you only had one chance to shoot a scene, where would the camera be?

Surround yourself with the best possible talent. I had Oscar winners. If you need to delegate, be able to do it with confidence.

Belgium: the best and worst
Martin Childs
Production manager

It’s inevitable that on a drama of this scale, certain decisions have already been made before the designer starts, so work can never begin with a blank sheet. With a script by Tom Stoppard of such range, ambition and percipience, you almost welcome someone else to make the first mark, and in this case someone had attached a big, day-glo post-it note to the blank sheet that read: BELGIUM. To me at least, Belgium was unknown territory.

At best, it meant shooting trenches where there had actually been trenches, with the right landscape, 360 degrees of authentic, unspoiled horizon, the right flat light. It meant finding chateaux the like of which I’d never seen, one a deliciously apt oxblood pink for General Campion’s HQ, another with the potential for a parade ground and a dead straight tree-lined avenue beside it for an infantry base depot, and a third so surprising that its exterior could pass for Scotland, its interior for Germany. And so they did, with help.

At worst, Belgium meant faking England, in a story where England should be seen at its most English. Thanks to his usual empathetic collaboration, first AD Phil Booth produced a miraculous schedule where, in spite of sets numbering in the hundreds, ‘at best’ prevailed. We only faked England in two Belgian interiors that could be sandwiched between English locations, and in a hundred metres of English hedgerow made from Belgian hedgerow in pots, a lot of pumped fog, and some brilliant lighting from Mike Eley.

Authenticity of location helped with our wishes to see trenches that looked, felt, and even smelled, like the real thing – flooded, unstable, nightmarish. Accommodating a camera crew was low priority, capturing the hell of it top priority – something of the ‘abysses of chaos’ that Ford Madox Ford evocatively described.