Feel-good with Colin..

VN: So are you impressed with the finished film? 

CF: "Yes, I think it works fantastically well. As far as I'm aware Richard (Curtis, the director) has something like a 100 per cent strike rate with everything he has done, and you just can't believe he has pulled it off again with such an ambitious project." 

VN: Were you concerned about him making his directorial debut with such an audacious and star-studded venture? 

CF: "The schedule started with three weeks of my stuff, and just before we left for France I had a panic attack on his behalf. I thought: 'How is he going to do this? How will he cope?' He's got 10 or 15 stories, some very famous actors, and he's going to jump in for the first time in his life and orchestrate all of that. It seemed an absolutely overwhelming task. He could have taken any one of these stories and developed them into a feature film on their own. In fact, I'm led to believe that they were all stories that he had been toying with as full length stories. It's as if he has put them all into one and left himself with a clean slate." 

VN: But you had no reservations about accepting the part? 

CF: "No, not very much. I just felt it's very hard to question Richard when he has got it right so often. You can't really bet against him. I think he has done something which is very hard to do in film, which is to write about middle class people." 

VN: Obviously the film's all about love... 

CF: "Yes, the story reflects different kinds of love. It's an optimistic film aimed around Christmas time, but it doesn't ignore the fact that love is painful. There's a scene between Liam Neeson and his little boy where the child has been locking himself in his room and behaving strangely and Liam's character is afraid that the boy is sick or on drugs. And it turns out the boy says: 'No; I'm in love.' The father says: 'I thought it was something much worse than that.' And the boy says: 'Worse? What could be worse than the total misery and agony of being in love?' And you can't really argue with that actually." 

VN: Your segment in France was the first to be filmed. What was Richard like at that stage? 

CF: "On a personal level he was extremely upbeat and cheerful. He expressed enjoyment at the process and he is far too intelligent to pretend he knows things he doesn’t, which is something you do find with directors when they are beginning. They need to prove they have done their homework, and yet it is very hard to have covered everything before you start. On the other hand he was very on top of it: he had clearly done a massive amount of homework, and he was already a formidable storyteller." 

VN: So how would you describe the movie to our users - a feel-good romantic comedy or something slightly deeper? 

CF: "I think it's a strange mixture. A feel-good movie implies escape, where I think the film takes a look at the kind of lives a lot of us lead. These are people who look like us, who dress like us, have jobs like ours. They are recognisable people and, I don't know, it's as if he has sprinkled magic dust over it all or something, just to give it all a lift and give an optimistic take on some of the more stressful and distressing aspects of our lives. He is not solving the problems of the entire world, but the kind of general difficulties a lot of people have, and the kind of things in real life we lose our sense of humour about. This film rekindles the humour and it can help to lighten one's view of those problems. And there's nothing wrong with that." 

By Neil Smith
 
 

Love is in the air... 

VN: What attracted you to the film in the first place? 

CF: "It was refreshing. It takes itself seriously, which is not a popular position in most films - it is safer to have your tongue in cheek these days. Not a lot big happens on the surface; it's a minimal, finely focused drama that must be made interesting by the characters. It's an exploration of how powerful a relationship can be..." 

VN: Not much is known about Vermeer. Was it hard putting flesh on his bones? 

CF: "The secret was in the mystery. Basically what you have in terms of historical understanding is mystery, and what Tracy Chevalier wrote in the original novel was also mystery. I was perpetuating that interpretation; in some ways it was a balancing act between fleshing him out and not revealing too much. We weren't trying to do Amadeus with this character, and I think preserving the enigma of the figure was something that had to be handled quite delicately. I felt that ultimately I was the final frontier in keeping that going, through all the various stages of interpretation." 

VN: So much of your love for Scarlett's character is left unsaid. Did you ever feel you might be doing too little? 

CF: "I think I speak for a lot of actors when I say I love doing less. Dialogue is often very limiting, particularly if it's anything other than excellent. Mediocre dialogue is utterly crippling; brilliant dialogue is a free ride; but no dialogue is a very liberating and inspiring thing to do, as long as you've got the confidence that your director will look at what you're doing. There's nothing more dispiriting than having a lot of ideas about what your fantastic performance is going to be when no one's at the other end of the camera." 

VN: So it was vital you had an understanding with your director, Peter Webber... 

CF: "I've got this complex view of this woman and I'm going to have to do it all with my eyes; it is entirely mutually dependent and symbiotic. We wouldn't have been able to do any of it if we hadn't known Peter was going after that. There were times when there were only two words being said but the camera would be turning for a very long time, and you were going to have to fill that. It gave us all an added responsibility." 

VN: It sounds like quite an intense collaboration. 

CF: "Working with a crew is a huge collaborative effort. Everyone arrives on set in the morning and the challenge of the day is to give life to the written word. But you have to be prepared to change the ideas you brought with you that morning, in order to keep the energy and carry the room. If you are in tune, you can feel that moment - it's palpable." 

VN: Did you learn to paint for the film? 

CF: "I've played around, but anything I could do with a paintbrush would be utterly irrelevant to anything that would be useful to Peter or the film. In the end, as long as you can point your paintbrush in a straight line and not look too closely at what you're doing, I think it's perfectly adequate. And besides, even if I had considerable skills, I don't know how long it would take me to apply them towards creating a Vermeer." 

VN: You have a splendid mane of hair in the film. How did that come about? 

CF: "When you read a script like this and accept the part, you know a wig awaits you. It was an alarming prospect, and had it been anyone other than [make-up designer] Jenny Shircore, who is fairly well known for being brilliant, it would have been the kiss of death. My fear was that the rest of the world would react to my wig the way that Scarlett did. There I am doing what I think is my best sexy, smouldering look and she's standing there sniggering!" 

By Neil Smith