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| piccadilly jim
PARALLEL WORLDS
Brenda Blethyn and Hugh Bonneville. Director John McKay (below), .
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| “THERE IS A KIND OF TIME-
TUNNEL GOING ON IN THE STYLE OF THE MOVIE, BECAUSE I WANTED TO MAKE A
STRONGLY STYLED FILM IN
THE WAY THAT PG WODEHOUSE WROTE SUCH STRONGLY STYLED HUMOROUS PROSE” | |
John McKay on…
…PG Wodehouse
I’d never really read Wodehouse before coming on board. In actual fact, as a Scot, I had a sort of inbuilt prejudice about him: in complete ignorance of anything he’s ever written, I believed that he was some English toff who wrote silly stories about guys in plus-fours. Then I read the script of Piccadilly Jim, which is about a playboy, a bad boy: Jim is like the Liam Gallagher of the thirties! And I thought, ‘There’s more to this!’ So I began to read the original stories themselves and found that, actually, Wodehouse has been completely misrepresented and mis-served, particularly by telly representations of his stuff that have tended to focus on a rather silly, ‘hooray Henry’ side of some of his characters.
He’s actually completely anarchic and wild and tends to be taking the mickey out of posh English people as much as he is populating the world with them. Piccadilly Jim is a great story for that, because it’s actually all about Americans: it’s about this bad-boy American playboy in England, abhorring the English aristocracy, into which his stepmum is trying to buy her way. So stepmum Eugenia would like to be posh and high-toned and well-behaved, but Jim goes out drinking every night and spoils things for her.
…creating a parallel universe
I was sure that nobody wanted to see another respectful British period movie. And there was nothing in this material - which is about an outrageous womaniser chasing the one woman who doesn’t want to know him - that said this should be dusty and respectful in the way we’ve come to expect. I think PG Wodehouse inhabits a parallel universe to the period he is writing about, so we should find a parallel universe to suit this Piccadilly Jim. We thus decided we would make up our own ‘thirties’.
There are some movies where they go for what appears to be authenticity and say, ‘This movie is set in March 1933 therefore this ashtray, which was made in April 1934, cannot be in our movie’. And I thought, There’s no point in that; that’s not going to help our movie at all! We want to make a sense of the thirties that is exciting to a cinema-going audience now in the way it was to young people at the time - or more particularly, a sense of how exciting it was to go and see Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or those glorious movies which are like the thirties, but better.
In the movie, you will see that we often have original thirties things like an item of clothing next to a seventies thing, so a character will have a thirties top next to a pair of seventies trousers, and perhaps have a hat or a hairstyle or something which is completely reviving either of those times. There is a kind of time-tunnel going on in the style of the movie, because I wanted to make a strongly styled film in the way that PG Wodehouse wrote such strongly styled humorous prose. I also felt it should be disrespectful and groovy in a way that the comedies of that period - and, in fact, even PG Wodehouse - were quite groovy to the young people at the time.
…Sam Rockwell
Sam Rockwell is an amazingly adaptable and charismatic actor. He’s the kind of guy where you think ‘Sam Rockwell, Sam Rockwell…?’ And then you realise you’ve seen him a dozen movies and he was the best thing in them! In the last few years, he’s really come into his own as a leading man.
Sam was very keen to find a modern equivalent of the smooth, funny, dapper performances of the thirties. He knew that you can’t just xerox one of those performances because then you would wind up with some kind of museum piece. I think he sort of found the Cary Grant or the Clark Gable in himself.
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