By Anthony Frajman
In 2017, Australian director, Daniel Graham made a major entry and splash with his debut feature Opus One, which starred Willem Dafoe.
The experience and success of that movie created the path which led to his second feature, The Obscure Life of the Grand Duke of Corsica, starring British acting icon, Timothy Spall.
In the film, Spall plays plainly spoken, eccentric architect, Alfred Rott. Fired from his most recent job due to a vociferous disagreement with his clients, Rott has a chance meeting with a reclusive, dying billionaire in Malta (Peter Stormare), who calls himself ‘The Grand Duke of Corsica’. As the two men get to know each other, the tycoon offers Rott a commission to design a tomb for him. Initially repelled by the mogul, Rott begins to grow closer to the man and becomes determined to remain in Malta and complete the job – despite a deadly, looming malaria pandemic.
We caught up with the Australian expat and former FilmInk contributor, who is currently finishing his third feature Prizefighter with Ray Winstone, to discuss what drove him into making the film and how it came about.
You began developing this film soon after completing your first feature. How did it begin?
“I finished (my first film) Opus Zero with Willem (Dafoe) in Mexico in late 2016 and I came back to London and sat down to try to start to write a new screenplay. And I wrote something which doesn’t really resemble the final draft. I read it back and I thought, that’s really just Opus Zero part two, it’s virtually the same movie. I had the basic story of Alfred Rott (Spall’s character), but realised I wanted something to bring in another element alongside the central relationship of Alfred and the Grand Duke.
“Around about the same time, I kept thinking about a line in Opus Zero, where the main character Paul, mentions St. Francis of Assisi in a glib, offhanded way, which sparked my interest in reading about him again. There’s not much really written about him because they’re quite unreliable sources, as you can imagine [13th Century].
“So, all these disparate things started to come together to take the shape of the screenplay as it eventually ended up. In terms of the themes and ideas, (Corsica) is a continuation of the basic themes and ideas of the first film that I made, which is mortality, authorship, identity, and the idea that, yes, we die, but we don’t actually disappear. Everybody who ever lived is still here, albeit, as soil or air or water or whatever.”
Were those ideas also a spark for your actors, particularly Timothy Spall?
“Absolutely. It’s very interesting because Tim and Peter are such clever experienced actors that they could see all the ideas that were swirling around in the script. But what they realised cleverly was that what they had to do was to concentrate on making clear the journey of the relationship between their characters, because they knew that an audience would need something to cling to, to know what these two men mean to each other. In the movie, they clash to begin with, as they are very opposite people. I was really happy with the casting because they’re so different from each other. It’s like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, they’re just complete opposites. But they make it work. And that’s what they did. They invested their relationship with an emotional core.”
There’s a lot of references in the film to St. Francis. Why were these so important?
“In the film, there’s a scene where St. Francis cures a leper. Which of course, set him on his road to sainthood. All the leper ever really wanted was to be cured. And lo and behold, it happened – but then, it didn’t turn out so well for her. Then we discover St. Francis is an actor playing St. Francis. This was an attempt to illustrate a parallel story like the central one of The Duke and Alfred. The Duke was convinced that his mausoleum would be like the Pyramids of Giza, something grand and ridiculous, whereas Alfred doesn’t give him that in the end – he gives him not what he wants, but what he needs. That was an attempt to parallel those two things.”
What did Timothy Spall bring to the film, what was his contribution?
“Tim was fascinating to work with. The role of Alfred when I wrote it was based largely on someone I worked with. And when Tim interpreted the role, he based it on someone he’s worked with. He also brought a great sense of humour, and physicality to the role, because Tim himself has gone through very significant physical changes in the past few years. I think he was able to sort of transfer some of his real-world experiences with his illness into the understanding of this role. He also brought great venom and humour, and compassion and tenderness and ferocity to this role. There just is no one else who could have portrayed that role as well as Tim. It was originally written for another actor and now, I wish I just gone to Tim in the first instance, because I honestly cannot think of anyone who could have done that as well as he did. He’s known for playing risky roles that other actors probably wouldn’t. The movie is what it is, largely because of Tim.
“It was hugely enjoyable working with Tim. Actors like that can be blunt sometimes but that’s a good thing. Because you need to be blunt when you’re shooting, you don’t have time to dick around, you’ve got to get straight to the point. I just think Tim was brilliant and I hope he gets all the accolades that come his way from playing this role.”
Why does Rott become obsessed with The Duke and determined to stay, despite an impending pandemic? Why does he become so fascinated?
“Rott says in the film at one point, where he visits the zoo, there was something about the Grand Duke that made him question ‘who he was and what he was doing’. Rott is not the kind of person who puts up with bullshit from people, he’ll just walk off. And that’s what he detects when he first meets the Duke, this guy’s full of shit. He just wants to glorify himself in death, which isn’t Rott’s bag at all. But he stays on, nonetheless. One of the reasons Rott stays on is after a trip to the cinema, watching a movie about St. Francis of Assisi he clicks to what’s going on with the Grand Duke. Rott realises that what he actually should be doing, is not prejudging the Grand Duke but actually focus on what this client actually needs. He realises what (The Duke) really needs is to have a useful death, as he says to him at the end. And that’s what makes Rott stay on. Also, this is a commission which he has not really done before and it’s going to challenge him in a way that hasn’t happened before. And as he gets to know The Duke a little bit better, Rott realises he can make a difference to this man’s life, even if it happens after he dies. And doing this will push him out of his comfort zone, giving him the impetus to continue.”
You’ve worked with two director’s actors, Willem Dafoe in your first film and now Timothy Spall. Were there any significant similarities in working with the two? How did the two actors differ? How did their processes compare?
“That’s a great question. Because Willem and Tim actually do have similarities. They both have incredible variety and range. They’re a similar age and do similar things. They have a similar temperament and similar sense of humour, a similar way of seeing the world, a no-bullshit kind of way of seeing the world. And they both bring a workman-like approach to their job, which is that they dig in, and they get on with it, and they inhabit their roles. Also, they are both very chameleon-like, especially Tim, who has the charisma and the magnetism of a leading actor but can transform into someone completely different. He just shapeshifts, as does Willem. They’re both fun and great to be around on and off the set, they’re great to socialise with, they’re very good company as well.”
You were finalising the production of this film, just as Covid-19 began. What was this like and were there major challenges because of this?
“The script was written well before Covid. We were shooting probably at around about the time that Covid would have leaked or perhaps first appeared in Wuhan, before it became a pandemic. Around the time that we were finishing the picture edit, Covid first started to become a news item. Then when lockdown started, around March 2020, I was mixing the film through the final stages. Going to central London to mix the film, I noticed that there was no one around, it was really a remarkable sight. I would go in on the tube, and there were maybe two people on the tube. I was wearing a mask and gloves. It was very surreal and very strange; I’d never seen Soho like that before. When we were editing the mix, we were wearing masks and had to keep apart. When we were doing the colour grading, the director of photography, unfortunately, couldn’t be there in person. So that was a big challenge, because you can’t do those things remotely. We were very lucky to have the exemption to be able to go in and finish the film.”
Being Australian, how did you first get a foothold in the British film industry?
“Well, I moved here in 2004. And I worked in distribution for a few years and a friend of mine introduced me to the Mexican director, Carlos Reygadas. When he came to make his film Post Tenebras Lux (2012), which had a few scenes set in England, he hired me as line producer for its UK shoot. And that went really well. That film won Best Director at Cannes, and Carlos became a really good friend and still is, and has been a huge help to me, many, many times. After I wrote Opus Zero, Carlos introduced me to Willem and he read it, and it took about a year and a half or two years to get it made from that point onwards. And that really was, I guess, what you’d call my lucky break. Because obviously, when an actor like that is interested in your script, it makes it less difficult to get it over the line, to get it greenlit. Although it took quite a while, had many challenges along the way, we were able to finish it and that is how it happened.”
Working on your second film, how different was the experience to your first?
“That’s a very good question. The way I approached the second film was mainly different in how I related to actors. I’d like to think I improved in the second film. Filmmaking is so practical, in that you learn so much on the job, as it were. So, all the practical lessons I learned, I like to think I employed in the second one, specifically working with the actors and the crew.”
Any plans to make a film back in Australia?
“I would absolutely love to. I have been offered a script to shoot in Australia next year. It’s a dystopian thriller. The movie I’m making now called Prizefighter, we were going to shoot in Sydney, but we had to change locations because of lockdown. It just became too complicated to work out when to do it and the time was running out, which is why we’re shooting in the UK and Malta, but I would love to make a film in Australia. So hopefully it will happen.”
What are you working on next?
“There’s one script I wrote about Richard Wagner called Wagner in Venice, about the composer, he died in Venice, a semi fictionalised screenplay, about the last six months of his life in Venice. I’m also researching a historical biopic about a woman in the Byzantine Empire, a co-empress, who was not just one of the most brilliant women ever but also one of the most brilliant people ever because she rose from the lowest depths of society to co-running the Roman Catholic empire in the East, and she helped disadvantaged people. She’s an incredible figure. So, I’m in the research stage on that at the moment. So hopefully, either Wagner or the Byzantine film.”
