John Hurt remem­bered by 1984 direc­tor Michael Radford

When Michael Rad­ford began pro­duc­tion on 1984, the sur­veil­lance state in which we now live had only just begun. But like George Orwell’s source nov­el, the film remains time­less: it reflects all the atroc­i­ties of the past, present and future onto the reader.

Choos­ing to make 1984 in the year 1984 was no gim­mick, but an inspired deci­sion by a film­mak­er work­ing at the height of Thatch­erism, and before Lon­don was gen­tri­fied beyond recog­ni­tion. Rad­ford was able to find loca­tions that were bare­ly stand­ing, eas­i­ly dou­bling for bombed-out landscapes.

The tim­ing also linked the film indeli­bly with how the dig­i­tal age suc­cess­ful­ly sold the pub­lic slav­ery through promis­es of free­dom: 1984 also marked the release of the first Apple com­put­er, an event pro­mot­ed with a Rid­ley Scott-direct­ed advert also inspired by Orwell’s novel.

With the recent pass­ing of lead actor John Hurt and the swear­ing-in of Don­ald Trump as Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, both 1984 the film and nov­el have returned to the fore­front of pop­u­lar dis­course, as well as the best­seller list. Here, Rad­ford talks can­did­ly about his mem­o­ries of work­ing with Hurt, and what it means when the Two Min­utes Hate can be tele­scoped into a Twitterstorm.

LWLies: John Hurt was sup­pos­ed­ly your first and only choice for the part of Win­ston Smith. What made you choose him?

Rad­ford: I bumped into John Hurt at some awards thing. I just went up to him and said, ​‘Look, would you play Win­ston Smith in 1984? And by the way, if you don’t want to do it, I won’t make the film.’ And I actu­al­ly meant it. It’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t say now, but I did at that time. I only did that once again, with Il Posti­no with Philippe Noiret. Hurt end­ed up just say­ing yes, and that’s how we met.

What do you feel he brought to the role?

He was just per­fect for the part. He was the per­son who had to play Win­ston Smith. He was so scrawny in those days and so unhealthy look­ing. At the same time, he had that sort of des­per­ate look in his eyes. And he was a good actor.

Was there a cer­tain film or per­for­mance that caught your eye?

In my mind he had always stuck out, from the moment he played Richie Rich in A Man for All Sea­sons. He had this extra­or­di­nary qual­i­ty. I can’t explain what it was… he was just such a good actor, such a pres­ence, even though this part he had was real­ly quite small. He just stole the film and I think that’s what made him film-famous. We made anoth­er film togeth­er, White Mis­chief. We became great friends for a long time, until he got mar­ried again and lived some­where else – he went to live in Kenya for a bit. I think every­body thought it was mis­take, but he didn’t realise that till a cou­ple years later.

Doing you have any inter­est­ing mem­o­ries from the mak­ing of 1984?

Despite being a film actor, he had a very the­atri­cal voice and a great, strong pres­ence, but he had a slight­ly ten­den­cy to over-act. He claimed I once said to him, ​‘John, you are an incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed actor, but for this movie I need only 10 per cent of that tal­ent’ – which was a polite way of say­ing ​‘stop over-act­ing’ – but I don’t remem­ber say­ing it. He was incred­i­bly ath­let­ic, I remem­ber that. We laid a track down… we didn’t have Steadicams in those days. You didn’t have visu­al effects, so I had to blow up a house in the mid­dle of him walk­ing by this cam­era track. He had to cross the track, which was built up so it was near­ly thigh height, and he was able to keep the same face and step over the track with­out his upper tor­so show­ing he had altered height. I was very impressed by that.

The oth­er film peo­ple always think of is The Ele­phant Man.

I used to tease him that he would only be recog­nised in Japan if he got off the air­craft with a bag over his head. He was fan­tas­tic in that, and I want­ed him to be in this new ver­sion of King Lear, but sad­ly I’ve missed that… I miss him.

What was your favourite film role of his, oth­er than 1984?

Apart from A Man for All Sea­sons, he was pret­ty good as Steven Ward [in Scan­dal]. He has this won­der­ful­ly open, vul­ner­a­ble face. It’s so sur­pris­ing that he’s gone. I hadn’t seen him for a while, he got mar­ried again and I was a lit­tle tired of try­ing to keep up with who he is mar­ried to and what he was doing and all the rest of it. I spoke to him a about doing King Lear, but he was a bit pissed off: I think he want­ed to play King Lear him­self. He would’ve been good, but unfor­tu­nate­ly Al Paci­no is big­ger box-office. The best thing about mak­ing films in 1984 was you could actu­al­ly almost choose who you want­ed, as long as they were some­where in the pub­lic eye.

Richard Bur­ton must have been inter­est­ing on the set as well…

He was liv­ing in Haiti at the time and actu­al­ly wasn’t my first choice – that was Paul Schofield. He broke his leg, and then I looked at Alan Bates, then Mar­lon Bran­do was going do it for a bit, but we couldn’t afford him. He want­ed some­thing like a mil­lion quid and we had £80,000 so he didn’t want to do it. We went to Rod Steiger, who had just had a facelift. In fact, we got a telegram from his agent: ​‘Unfor­tu­nate­ly Mr Steiger won’t be able to do this film because his facelift has fall­en.’ I’m glad we didn’t have him, because he was a real beast.

Every­one was scared of Richard Bur­ton, because he was report­ed to be a drunk and very bad­ly behaved. I also did some­thing you could nev­er do these days, I cast him six weeks into the shoot. We were shoot­ing the film with­out hav­ing cast one of the main roles. He was fan­tas­tic. I had nev­er met an actor like him, he real­ly was a one-off. He and John gave up drink­ing dur­ing the mak­ing of the film, which was great. I think they went on a ben­der as soon as we fin­ished. Sad­ly, Richard start­ed again as soon as it fin­ished, and it fin­ished him off. He was only 58. It was incred­i­ble, he looked like an old man.

He real­ly didn’t have any psy­cho­log­i­cal input into his char­ac­ters, he just had this fan­tas­tic voice, which he could mod­u­late. He could read a tele­phone direc­to­ry and make it sound like Shake­speare. It was a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence, and I became the go-to direc­tor for sci­ence fic­tion for a while after that. I was offered Robo­Cop, which I turned down – I couldn’t under­stand it. That was a bit of mis­take, actually.

That would have been dif­fer­ent take…

I thought it was sort of a third-rate ver­sion of The Ter­mi­na­tor. It wasn’t real­ly, it was some­thing else. Ori­on Pic­tures flew me out to LA, and [pro­duc­er] Mike Medavoy said, ​‘If you like it, you start on Mon­day!’ And I thought, ​‘holy shit, this must hap­pen to every­body. Well, I’ll see if I like it.’ They were per­suad­ing me to do it, but by the end of the week­end I realised I just couldn’t do it. It was a pity, I thought I was doing the right thing because I real­ly want­ed to be a Euro­pean direc­tor and not a Amer­i­can one. With time I’ve come to see it as a major stum­bling block in my career. I could’ve gone on and made a huge amount of money!

You could have been Paul Ver­ho­even! Did you feel any com­pet­i­tive­ness with Ter­ry Gilliam, whose Brazil was in pro­duc­tion at the same time using some of the same loca­tions and crew?

No real­ly. The fun­ny thing was, we used the same loca­tion scouts. I found myself fol­low­ing Gilliam around, going to the same loca­tions. We shot ours at a place called Beck­ton Gas Works, where they’d pulled the struc­tur­al steel rods out of the rein­forced con­crete build­ings. Strange­ly, it left the place still stand­ing but kind of tot­ter­ing about, so it looked like the place had been just hit by a nuclear blast. Even though I got prizes for visu­al effects, there are no visu­al effects in the film. It was all shot for real which gives it a cer­tain qual­i­ty, and it hasn’t dat­ed in terms of its effects.

There’s a scene which today would most cer­tain­ly be done with visu­al effects, with John Hurt shav­ing and this heli­copter with black win­dows ris­ing up and observ­ing him shav­ing through the win­dow. That was done for real, with a real heli­copter. The tele­screens were all back pro­jec­tion, which made it real­ly dif­fi­cult because we couldn’t put the stuff on the tele­screen after­wards so you had to be real­ly care­ful about how you cut things for back­wards and for­wards, because it had to match.

What do you think the film and the book have to say about cur­rent events and the future?

‘Alter­na­tive facts.’ I actu­al­ly did a film last year for a Japan­ese tele­vi­sion com­pa­ny thing called WOWOW about sur­veil­lance. The dif­fer­ence between sur­veil­lance in 1984 and today is they want to do it secret­ly, and in 1984 they made you aware you were under sur­veil­lance. That’s what scared every­body. The thing about 1984 is it’s a kind of Greek myth, it col­lects all of the pieces of tyran­ny. The book was more about left-wing tyran­ny and the film is about tyran­ny on both the left and right. Noth­ing I recre­at­ed in the film wasn’t going on in the real world in 1984, I took a lot of it from doc­u­men­tary footage of exe­cu­tions and repres­sion from all around the place.

[Com­pos­er] Dominic Mul­downey said: ​‘Have you noticed that all fas­cist right-wing nation­al anthems are in a major key and all com­mu­nist ones are in the minor key?’ And it’s true. There is a rea­son to that, fas­cism was all about phys­i­cal repres­sion, and left-wing total­i­tar­i­an­ism was about crush­ing the spir­it, if you like. It was all about mak­ing peo­ple feel guilty about them­selves, mak­ing peo­ple believe they were trai­tors. You didn’t have make any­body believe any­body was a trai­tor in a fas­cist soci­ety, you just kicked them to death.

Anoth­er thing I learned was that although Orwell invent­ed the con­cept of the tele­screen, he had no idea of its pow­er. He knew tele­vi­sion was the new thing, but he under­es­ti­mat­ed its pow­er. In his mind tele­screens were kind of like gigan­tic radios with pic­tures. When we put them on the set – and some were 20ft high – the effect they had on peo­ple just blew every­thing else away. Nobody looked at the posters or lis­tened to the radio, the tele­screen just dom­i­nat­ed everything.

I shot a pro­pa­gan­da film, which I based on one writ­ten by Dylan Thomas dur­ing the war. We did this to the crowd of 2000 peo­ple in the open­ing scene of the Two Min­utes Hate. All we had was a leader, a nation­al anthem and a salute, and we shot about five or six takes and about 15 or 20 peo­ple faint­ed. Some­thing about the rhythm of it trig­gers some­thing in people’s minds.

What do think of the par­al­lels to Don­ald Trump?

Well, Trump is a old-fash­ioned dic­ta­tor: Hitler was elect­ed to pow­er, so was Putin. He just appeals to the knock-them-down, kill-them-dead the­o­ry of pol­i­tics. Peo­ple feel pow­er­less. Every so often when things hap­pen in the world, peo­ple want a guy who is con­fi­dent. He’s very believ­able when he says things peo­ple want to hear, and it’s real­ly the rea­son why Clin­ton lost. She lost because she’s not warm enough, you nev­er got the sense she was doing things for oth­er peo­ple, she was just doing things for her­self. It’s also why Bernie or Eliz­a­beth War­ren would’ve been bet­ter choices.

Where do you stand on the notion that Julia was a mem­ber of the Thought Police?

I don’t think she is a mem­ber of the Thought Police at all. I think she’s actu­al­ly the only non-polit­i­cal per­son in the whole thing. Win­ston wants to learn, and it’s one of the things I changed from the book. She doesn’t go and see O’Brien, it’s him who goes to her. She rep­re­sents the real free­dom, which is the free­dom to be. It’s very much a repressed pub­lic schoolboy’s vision of the school matron, which is what she was in terms of Orwell’s fan­tasies. I kind of love her for her kind of care­less­ness. I scoured the book for all sorts of under­cur­rents, and I think it’s wrong.

What are you work­ing on now?

A biopic about Andrea Bocel­li, who is the biggest sell­ing record­ing artist in the entire world as we speak. He’s the blind tenor. It’s quite an inter­est­ing sto­ry and a chal­lenge. He’s amaz­ing and I’ve learned more about blind peo­ple than I ever expect­ed to. Anto­nio Ban­deras plays the musi­cal mae­stro who gets Bocel­li back on his feet after he hits the bot­tom, think­ing he will nev­er get any­where and won’t be able to sing. King Lear is after that, and it all depends on Al Paci­no, but that should be com­ing up soon. That’s my hope, because he would be real­ly great.