“If she says your behaviour is heinous,” quips Cole Porter in Kiss Me, Kate, “kick her right in the Coriolanus.”
Somehow that course of action would never occur to you sitting opposite Ralph Fiennes, who has directed and starred in the brutally effective film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which opens in Toronto this weekend.
It was during the frenzy of last September’s Film Festival that Fiennes and I grabbed a quiet hour over lunch to discuss Coriolanus — the man, the play and the movie the 49-year-old Fiennes has made of it, which marks his directorial debut.
But it’s typical of this relentlessly honest artist that he begins by discussing a previous failure playing the role.
“I played it for the Almeida Theatre in 2000 on a double bill with Richard II. Coriolanus is a very difficult man, filled with high emotion and anger and a lot of rhetoric fuelled by rage and impatience.”
That’s a nice way of putting it. Many other people would describe this not-so noble Roman as a psychotic military hero with an insuperable ego who betrays his country rather than knuckle under to the demands of the proletariat.
“Yes, he’s a tough man,” Fiennes admits, “who simply wants to live his truth, but not all of us want to believe in that truth.
“At any rate, I felt a great sense of dissatisfaction that my portrayal back then just hadn’t quite gelled and I felt I had to revisit it.”
But this time around, Fiennes didn’t just want to indulge what he calls “the actor’s desire to have a second crack at a part he didn’t play right the first time,” but an increasing feeling that “what would really make this story work would be to tell it as a movie.
“It’s got a hard line, a strong, clear drive to it and it feels very filmic, in the way Shakespeare moves us from senate house to battlefield. I felt that if I could just get into people’s faces with this man and what he was going through, we’d have a chance of it.”
He found a willing cohort in John Logan, the acclaimed author of Red, as well the scenarist behind The Aviator, who wanted to do a modern version of Coriolanus as well and told Fiennes “the close-up will reinvent this role.”
It took Fiennes and Logan a while to settle on exactly how their modern approach would work.
“People are talking about how pertinent Coriolanus is right now because of the Arab Spring, but the point is that Coriolanus is always relevant. There is always conflict in the world and there are always military giants at the top playing with the common people like they were pawns.”
Since our conversation in September, the deaths of Gadaffi and Kim Jong II have made his point even stronger. But the multiplicity of events only underlines how wise Fiennes was not to try and pin his concept to any one leader.
“I brought John (Logan) a scrapbook full of images of politicians I had pasted together — Jacques Chirac, Madeleine Albright, Vladimir Putin — so we could look at who they were and what they represented.
“And we agreed that if we were going to make it, we had to make it on a certain scale. We wanted to go into real streets with real tanks and real soldiers. But we needed a country with cheap costs and an infrastructure we could rely on.”
At first, Fiennes was tempted by Argentina, but Eastern Europe eventually seemed the better bet, with Serbia winning out, largely because of the impressive presence of Belgrade.
“I needed a capital city with real weight. I needed a senate chamber with size and presence. I wanted a place where I could use the chambers and the corridors of power. The plotting, the planning, the people sitting in club chairs.”
And it all worked out the way he hoped. At the screening I attended in September, many people were wondering how much of Shakespeare had been rewritten to make the modern settings seem congruous and John Logan delightedly told me a few months later, “not a single word. It all fits like it was written to be played there. That’s the beauty of it.”
But Fiennes is also careful to point out that he has not slanted his film to be either for or against Coriolanus.
“I think you do the play a disservice if you give it a political spin or message. It simply says there are these problems, we all do what we must do.”
Despite the tranquility of our setting, Fiennes discovers himself being wrapped up once again in the passion of the man he played and without realizing it, his voice in volume and the veins stand out in bas-relief on his neck the way they did during the movie’s most dramatic scenes.
“It’s the equivalent of a Greek tragedy, where we witness the profound loss and waste that people and fate have inflicted on each other.
“Look, we’re all f—ked, actually. This is something we can’t ever stop.”
The cold blue fire in Fiennes’ eyes reminds you of some of the more frightening characters he has played, like super-Nazi Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, or Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon (“In that one, I had to eat Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face,” he quips, “which was rather a hearty meal”), but he still insists that “Coriolanus isn’t evil. I think he may have done very extreme things in a war context, but it’s hard to call them evil.”
But then he pauses, weighing his words.
“Still, it’s true that military psyches can be stunted. They can’t often afford to have the humanist viewpoint, which is why some great generals like Patton had an almost psychotic quality.”
The mention of psychosis seems to arouse the demon in Fiennes again and he recalls the film’s pivotal scene where he turns on the people of Rome in the awe-inspiring speech that begins “You common cry of curs …” and ends with “….there is a world elsewhere.”
“I’m drawn to his outrageousness, his elitism, I admit that,” confesses Fiennes. “I know that anger. I could understand that anger. I have it inside of me.”
He slams his hand once on the table, sending the crystal, china and silverware trembling.
“He’s gone to the f---king marketplace, he’s done what they wanted and they vote him in, but then the tribunes provoke him and it all comes apart. HE comes apart! And it’s because he betrayed everything he believed in.”
Fiennes’ face across the table for one moment has the same look of fear and anger that crossed his visage as Lord Voldemort near the end of the final Harry Potter movie.
“There could never be a Coriolanus in England today. Never. The people distrust military power too much.”
But then that wickedly endearing smile breaks out.
“America, however, is another matter. I think Sarah Palin would like Coriolanus. I think she would like him a lot. She might even have him as a running mate.”
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