Notes
On A Scandal tells a tangled tale of staff room politics,
as new teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) begins a tentative
friendship with veteran Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench).
Things become complicated when the seemingly happily married
Sheba begins an illicit affair with a student at the school,
a potentially explosive secret that Barbara uses to turn
matters to her advantage.
Adapted from Zoe Heller’s best selling novel by Patrick
Marber, who is a successful playwright himself with Dealer’s
Choice, Closer, Howard Katz and Miss Julie to his name. National
Theatre director Richard Eyre directs, reuniting with Dame
Judi Dench after the success of Iris.
Notes on a Scandal received three BAFTA nominations for
Best British Film, Best Actress for Judi Dench and Best Adapted
Screenplay for Patrick Marber. Dench and Marber also received
Golden Globe nominations, as did Cate Blanchett, for Best
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. The film
also received four Academy Award nominatons, for Best Actress
(Dench), Best Supporting Actress (Blanchett), Best Adapted
Screenplay and Best Original Score for Philip Glass
Notes on a Scandal opens at cinemas nationwide on February
2, with advance previews across the country on February 1.
Patrick, you’ve described adapting Notes On A Scandal
as being like an act of ‘benevolent piracy’.
How easy was it to adapt?
Marber: “It was very difficult,
I read the book many times and underlined all the things
I wanted to use and all the scenes I wanted to keep and
ended up using much less than I thought I was going to.
You find that after a few drafts the thing takes on a life
of its own, and you start to stray from the book. And you
find that you end up inventing a lot more than you thought
you would.”
The tone of it, in the end, is that
of an ‘unreliable
memoir’?
Marber: “I think I stayed true to the darkly comic
tone of the novel, or at least I hope I did. The thing that
seduced me about the book was the truth of it and the comedy
of it and the nastiness of it. And I think that’s all
very much in the film. The first thing that Zoe Heller said
to me, when we first met to talk about me adapting her novel,
was ‘I’m terribly sorry about Sheba’, and
I said ‘what do you mean?’ She said ‘well
I feel that I spent so much time working on Barbara that
I didn’t give Sheba enough time and character. So please
will you, in the screenplay, do some work on her?’ I
said I felt Sheba was very alive in the novel, but I know
what she means because the novel is from Barbara’s
point of view. I think I made Sheba a more Bohemian, and
slightly lonelier figure than she is in the novel. I think
in the novel she is scatty and posh and a bit of a flibbertigibbet.
Whereas I don’t think she’s scatty and a flibbertigibbet
in the film. You tell me [to Cate], what do you think?”
Blanchett: “There’s a
sort of plaintive quality to her in the novel which could
be a bit annoying on screen. And also the film is so much
more a literal medium, what you see is what you get, and
I think it was important to give Sheba her own voice.”
What were the challenges for you Cate, was it simply the
emotional and physical demands of the seduction scenes between
you and the 15 year old boy?
Blanchett: “I’m not interested in playing characters
who see the world through my prism, I think the journey of
understanding any character is to see how they tick and how
they differ from you. Probably the hardest thing was to liberate
her from my own morality. I was quite shocked at the tone
I took, the judgements I had of the relationship that she
embarked on. But it’s the stuff of great drama.”
How did you find working with an inexperienced actor, Andrew
Simpson, who plays the student Sheba falls for, Steven Connolly?
Blanchett: “I think the casting process was really
interesting, maybe this is my morality coming in again but
it was important to me that the actor was above the age of
consent. At the end of shooting he wrote me this handwritten
letter that made me want to weep, about what the film had
meant to him. It was then that I thought he was so young,
you just tend to treat all the actors like normal actors
once they’re there. It was a very welcoming environment,
and Richard made us very at ease.”
What other concerns did you have about those scenes, in
a practical sense?
Eyre: “One of the things I like about the film is
when her husband, played by Bill Nighy asks ‘why?’ and
she says ‘I don’t know’. I think it’s
great that the film doesn’t provide you with a neat
equation, either moral or psychological. The answer to your
question of how we did it is because they’re very grown
up about it, for all that Andrew is 16, there wasn’t
a coyness or embarrassment. They just approached it as a
professional task and the choreography of it was kind of
surgical.”
Blanchett: “It was a complete veneer, I’m
glad it was dark because I blushed my way through the whole
thing.”
Eyre: “Also Cate did something I think is completely
brilliant. Infinitely generous she endows this boy, and he’s
an attractive boy, but she endows him with a great sexual
allure. That is her acting achievement; by making you believe
in this passionate obsession that she has she made him seem
very sexy. That’s acting genius.”
Was there as much concern about the fight scene with Dame
Judi Dench?
Blanchett: “Both of us were dreading it to be honest,
because it’s about finding the pitch of a scene like
that. The stakes, and the expression of those stakes are
so high, but also it’s absurd, the things that they’re
saying to one another. I think what Patrick had written gave
the scene a buoyancy which was actually, in the end, quite
fun to play. But we did down a bottle of champagne after
we’d finished it.”
Marber: “I was very conscious throughout the shoot
that Cate and Judi were dreading the day they had to do this
scene. It’s monstrously difficult and it’s a
scene also where we the audience are watching two mad women,
two characters who have been driven almost mad by the events
of the story. We watched the scene appalled by where they’ve
got to with each other, but that’s the whole point,
that’s where the story has gone. It’s the purging
scene. And after that when Barbara is clearing up all the
rubbish that Sheba has created it’s a very, very quiet
scene. And their goodbye scene is sort of a stalemate, they’ve
come to the end of something.”
Blanchett: “It’s an interesting journey really,
a fascinating journey to play, someone who’s quite
fey and gossamer and coy in the beginning, who then ends
up being thrust out of a basement flat, screaming in her
pyjamas, dressed as Siouxsie and the Banshees, going after
the paparazzi. That scene had to get Sheba to the place where
that would be a logical, the only place for her to go.”
Marber: “I realised when we were making the film something
that never occurred to me when I was writing it. It’s
that actually Barbara doesn’t really go on any kind
of journey, she just sort of gets an obsession for someone,
it doesn’t work out and she’s upset about that
but she endures. It’s Sheba who goes on the massive
journey and Barbara who is he fixed point. But that only
occurred to me when I watched the film, what the true extreme
of it is.”
Was Notes On A Scandal written with your leading ladies
in mind, Patrick?
Marber: “What happened was when Scott Rudin sent me
the book, I think that was the first thing that happened.
He said he thought this would be great for Richard to direct,
and I said that was great. I read the book and said I’d
love to do it, and then there was another conversation where
everyone felt that Judi and Cate would be perfect for these
roles. They were then sent the book, and word came back that
they loved it and would both be interested to read the screenplay.
To answer your question I was conscious when I was writing
the screenplay that I had these two brilliant actresses waiting
to read it so it was a pressure, but a very pleasurable one
because I thought I could write at full stretch and hopefully
they’d like all these strange contradictions and twists
and turns that I was going to give their characters.”
Judi Dench has said she has known
real people like her character, Barbara – have any
of you?
Eyre: “Yes, is the answer. I
can think of somebody I knew who used to work at the BBC
when I first went to work there in 1978. She was a Barbara,
a poor, miserable, lonely woman. She used to drive people
away because her loneliness, her solitude was like a powerful
smell.”
Marber: “I think Zoe’s book recognises a peculiar
strand of loneliness that’s out there. I think if you
look around, if you go out onto the streets, you will see
a thousand Barbaras out there. I think that’s why people
like the film because I think it’s identified a particular
streak of modern loneliness in the comfortable middle classes
and the uncomfortable lower middle class of people like Barbara.”
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