STACK NZ Jun #74

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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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