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The movie’s production notes state
that, back in the early 1980s, you
used to walk by the van parked on
Gloucester Crescent in Alan Bennett’s
driveway. At the time, did you create
your own narrative for it?
NICHOLAS HYTNER:
Well, I knew
Alan Bennett lived in the house and I
knew him very vaguely but not well
enough to…ask him what was going on.
I occasionally wondered, “Does he keep
his mother in a van?”… And then, when
I first went to visit him [in 1989], it didn’t
occur to me to ask, “Who was that?” I
later discovered that people, even when
they visited him during her life – well,
the English are so polite that they never
asked him, either.
You’ve had an enduring creative
partnership with Alan that has
resulted in film versions of his stage
plays
The Madness of King George
(1994) and
The History Boys
(2006).
Was the process of adapting his
play
The Lady in theVan
similar or
different?
This is the most contained and the
canvas is very small. But one way of
telling a story that has a kind of larger
resonance is to concentrate very hard on
one small corner of the world and one
small corner of experience, unlike
The
Madness of King George
, which goes
all over England. This is about one man
in his study looking out onto an old lady
twelve feet away from him. And most of
the movie happens on that tiny patch of
ground. And it never felt like a good idea
to try and pretend that wasn’t so…or to
find a thousand and one different ways
of looking at and experiencing that little
patch of ground because that was not
the experience of Miss Shepherd or Alan.
What did you enjoy most about
opening up the play for the big
screen?
The great thing was…playing out
the story in the very place it happened.
That’s what gives it its particular flavor,
not that it’s suddenly bigger. And I would
say this, because I’m a theater director,
but nothing is as big as the stage. A
stage can be anything at any time. You
can simply stand on a stage and say,
“This is now the Battlefield of Agincourt”
– and it is. So it’s not about opening it
up; it’s about returning it to the very
environment it happened in. It’s rooting it
in a reality that very few films based on
true stories can ever quite achieve.
When you approached Maggie Smith
about reprising the role of Miss
Shepherd, which she originated in the
1999West End stage play of
The Lady
in theVan,
was she excited by the
prospect?
Yeah, sure. And none of us could quite
remember why we didn’t do it fifteen
years ago. And yet she was absolutely
up for it.
Was there anything she wanted to
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