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My Week With Marilyn

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : In 1956 England, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) lands a job as a production assistant on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl," starring Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). Marilyn is also honeymooning with her new husband, playwright Arthur Miller, but the combined pressure of work and the demands of the Hollywood hangers-on is driving her to exhaustion. When Miller departs for Paris, Colin seizes the opportunity, to give Marilyn respite during a week in the idyllic British countryside.

Opened November 23, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 39 min.

 

Interview with Actor Eddie Redmayne

 

(Q) : As a public school boy it must have been a weird resonance to be playing this character that's this public school boy.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : There was something sort of weirdly meta about the whole film. I was saying to Ken Branagh, who's this extraordinary theater actor, film director, film actor, you had Dame Judi Dench, who's renowned for being one of the most generous spirited lovely women playing Dame Sybil Thorndike, who was also renowned.
 
(Q) : And she is in interviews too, I'll tell you.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : She's an extraordinary woman. And also I was playing a guy who went to the school I went to and showing this film star around that school and showing Michelle around that school. And we were shooting it in Pinewood in the same studio it was shot in and Michelle was in the same dressing room. There were moments when you were like woah, what's going on here?
 
(Q) : I'll just add as the second part of that question; and are you glad that you've grown up in this time as opposed to that time?
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : I think I probably am, yeah. Although having said, I don't know, obviously there's this wonderful kind of fairytale element to the film and there was something so nostalgic about the days in Pinewood, where we shot, and found out what films were being shot there at the same time and had all these actors dressed in appropriate gear and driving these extraordinary cars. It felt really romantic.

The rare moment, and it happens very rarely, because it never happens on stage because you can always see an audience, and it rarely happens on film because you see a whole load of camera crew, but that moment when I was driving into Pinewood and the camera was behind me at one point so I didn't see any of those people, I'm in this amazing car and you've got all these extraordinary extras. It is like you're in a different world, so there were special moments for sure.
 
(Q): Did you get the chance to see Colin Clark's diary and also the documentary they made?
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : I never saw his documentary but I read his diaries, both "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me" and "My Week with Marilyn." But also his twin sister came to set, which was extraordinary. They were just asking now about the idea that I was playing a character that's not iconic, like Ken and Michelle. They were asking was that easier, and I was like it was easier until this one day when we were shooting and suddenly I was introduced to his twin sister and his widow and his son.

But they were very generous and sweet. But it's lovely, I did a film called "Savage Grace," and that film was based on a book that was nonfiction and diary entries. The greatest source material for an actor is basically to go to this sort of bible, and it's great with "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me" and "My Week with Marilyn." It's there for you.
 
(Q) : Another thing that you've experienced which adds to this, I like the meta theme here, playing off your meta theme, is that you also are sort of in this period pre-digital and everything's all over the place so there still were moments where Marilyn is known and not known. You don't have all this preconception about Hollywood as much as we would have today. I mean everybody, like six year old kids, these girls that are four years old and they're already glitzing up, and there you are, you're this guy and what do you have? You've been in the countryside or the prep school and you've got your parents that are like living this life from some other century it looks like. And how is it to wear the clothes of that identity in terms of that innocence or that sort of lack of knowledge?

(Eddie Redmayne) : I think there's something really interesting that goes back to what we call public schools in England, which are very exclusive, expensive schools, and they would make, aged 18 you'd go out and you would go and become an officer in the army and aged 19 be in charge of a load of people who had been working, soldiers who had been working in the army. It's almost these schools made people who would go and become diplomats or ambassadors in other countries. It's like you went through those establishments to rule. And they give, or they did use to give this amazing confidence of the class system, but they didn't necessarily give you an emotional education.

It was this perhaps false arrogance or confidence, and for me the interesting part of this film is that he starts the film with all the cockiness of "I know Vivien Leigh, she's a godmother figure." But he does want to make his own way so he starts as a runner so he's sort of the lowest of the low, but at the same at those public schools you start in your first year and you're making tea for the boys in the top year and hierarchy is very rigid there. And yet by the end of the film I feel like what Marilyn's given him and Walter's character says "If she breaks your heart you needed it." He's had an emotional education. And that interested me is that he starts with all this charm but actually there were lessons he needed to learn.
 
(Q) : And if I may interject at that point, you also are the character, if there's anyone that goes through a true evolution. Everybody's kind of they have little moments of insight, Olivier, and certainly Marilyn, and certainly we see that one moment with Paula and she kind of like realizes her role. But you're the one that really has to have the burden on your shoulders as an actor that evolution of a character. I mean not just the evolution of your character but a character in that framework of a movie.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : It was interesting. I think that was probably the challenge. Because it's not massive, and it doesn't have moments to show, and because of the time and the period and the Englishness it's so repressed everything. So that was the sort of challenge was being a cypher for an audience but also being the eyes and ears, but also having his own education and his own transformation hopefully. I just felt like he's a bit more worldly at the end.
 
(Q) : I was curious that Colin Clark's father is a very well-known art historian. I was wondering how much influence he had from his father learning history and art and everything that might tap into working in the film industry.

(Eddie Redmayne) : Because I studied art history as well.
 
(Q) : And what did you play before?
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Exactly. I think the answer is he gave him a lot, and Kenneth Clark became this. But again, for Colin Clark we assume seeing that castle that he came from aristocracy. But Kenneth Clark was an art historian at a period when no one knew what art historians were. So Colin Clark never admitted at school that he dad was an art historian because all his friends were fishing and shooting, whereas Colin had these sort of bohemian, quirky parents who lived in this sort of deteriorating castle they had bought in Kent. There's an eccentricity. He's not the stereotype. But his relationship with his dad is interesting. They then went on to make, Kenneth Clark made "Civilisation," but then when he fell slightly out of favor Colin produced some documentaries in America, which Kenneth sort of presented. So their relationship remained, had its ups and downs, but close.

(Q) : With "Red," did that brought to bear about everything you every possibly could have portrayed for it, then you played the character again. Did you sit there and go what is going on here? And you even won that Laurence Olivier award.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Do you know what it is though, there is something weirdly, and I don't know it's reassuringly fatalistic about that, about all these things sort of tying in. There was, for example, the play, "Red," I did at the Donmar, and Simon Curtis did the next play after us at the Donmar. John Logan, who wrote "Red" I think helped with this at one moment. There were so many aspects. And a lot of the cast, Judi has worked with  Michael Grandage at the Donmar. So there was a weirdly familiar feeling to this film, and I think hopefully it benefitted it.
 
(Q) : And interestingly enough, one of the things that we were talking about with Simon yesterday was that Marilyn had moved to New York and gotten away from Hollywood to feel that connection to this whole New York community and to be a part of that sort of same sensibility that you find both in the theater world of New York and in the actor world of London. It's not about the high profile ego, TV, film, newsreel, or as we now know, the internet. And that's one of the great things, that you sort of are situation in a community where everybody cannot have their airs. I think that lends itself to the film as well.

(Eddie Redmayne) : I think it does. I think it absolutely does. It was also for me, and I think for Michelle too, we were on set most days and every day Dame Judi Dench would come to us and Simon Russell Beale, Derek Jacobi would come, and it was like this kind of wonderful place for me to be, and to get to work with some of my favorite actors who I've admired on screen and on stage for years.
 
(Q) : But I think it lent an authenticity. You gave the audience, at least me as an audience, gave me a sense of really feeling situated inside of it because of that. I don't know if it's also because of the other circumstances, but you really did feel like everybody, while they're playing Olivier and all this and that, the characters don't resonate as Olivier, they resonate as oh this guy.

(Eddie Redmayne) : And that's what's so wonderful about having been someone that's so Hollywood. And then gradually when you start entering, going and doing read-throughs, or going and doing rehearsals, or meeting people of that status and stature, they are only people. The read-through is a read-through and some people give what Olivier was giving, which is his performance there and then, and some people will murmur under their breath, not wanting to give anything away.

Particularly with film acting everyone as a different process. No one knows how the alchemy works or what it is, whereas on stage everyone has to work under the director and take his process to this thing. On film it's like the director has to adapt to all these different actors with hundreds of different ways of working and really turn on a head. I think that was also really interesting to watch Simon have to do that with all of us having our own ways of working.
 
(Q) : It's that classic dichotomy of the theater experience being focused from the director, writer, and the film experience often from the actor out.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Absolutely. Yeah, exactly.
 
(Q) : I was fascinated about the person Paula Strasberg. Because imagining someone whose manager can be controlling them all the time like that it's mind boggling to me. You can't technically talk back to Sir Laurence Olivier if you're working with him obviously.

(Eddie Redmayne) : But it's completely true and it's completely doable because of the power in film of the actor because of the fact that they are the vehicle. And I've worked with some actors who you're staggered at how badly behaved it is, but producers will run around and do everything and accommodate them despite the fact that it's inhuman the way perhaps that people are behaving, because all that anyone cares about is that moment when the thing is on screen and the moment sort of plays. So anyone who has, particularly given that Marilyn was funding the film herself.
 
(Q) : Yeah we forget that she was the production company.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Exactly. When someone has her ear or as the ear it's like, I'm about to do "Richard II" at Donmar, it's like monarchy and the old historical thing of who has the ear of the most powerful people. It's power dynamic; it's a microcosm of that world.
 
(Q) : But on the flip side of that, what I think this movie taught us or what we got to see the inside of is that while we have this old Hollywood image that there were still all these flaws and failings and warts and all. Nowadays in the acting world when actors are going and interacting with audiences at Q&As and stuff like that I think it shows you that even then these are real people.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Democratized.
 
(Q) : Yeah and now it's more democratized where of course when you have science-fiction movies and it's the concept that carries the film it's different. Did you guys feel that or sense that? I guess you would agree with me that that's part of the charm of the movie.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Yeah, absolutely. I think it absolutely is. I agree.
 
(Q): But elaborate.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : I don't really know what to say. I think you're right. Will you specify the question?
 
(Q) : Well what I was saying is that you being the modern actor in this world making this movie, which is really about debunking that Hollywood thing that we see.

(Eddie Redmayne) : Distanced, you mean.

(Q) : Yeah again a loop upon a loop. We have this distance and this romanticized image of the actor and all and they get away with all this stuff, but in fact they only get away with it because they're so flawed. And we see the flaws that now we kind of accept as part of the process since we're always seeing the flaws with gossip magazines or online and all this and that. And I think that what makes the movie effective is that it sort of gives us that inside window to a period that we have over-romanticized.
 
(Eddie Redmayne) : Absolutely. And that it was still behavior, it was still happening like that, but now it's almost gone so far the other way, as Michelle said about the internet and that anyone can write anything whether it's true or false about someone and instantly a rumor starts or instantly behavior's dismissed and people are having to have it quelled. It's also interesting to see how little has changed. In some ways how much has changed and in others how little.

 

End.