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| HACKS TO GRIND
rag tale
SET IN THE OVER-HEATED WORLD OF TABLOID JOURNALISM, RAG TALE IS A FILM WHICH NOT ONLY LIFTS THE LID ON
THE TABS BUT TIPS THE POT OVER AS WELL.
NICK RODDICK TALKS TO WRITER/DIRECTOR MARY MCGUCKIAN (BELOW) ABOUT THE PLANNING, MAKING
AND THINKING BEHIND THE MOVIE.
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It could hardly have been more of a contrast with her previous project, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a $24-million period drama starring Robert De Niro which was shot on location in Spain. But now that Irish director Mary McGuckian is a week away from locking the first cut of her new film, Rag Tale, she knows she made the right decision.
“It’s worked out even better than I could have hoped for,” she says from the London cutting room where she has been working her way through 90 hours of HD digital material since just before Christmas. “I mean, I was really, really astonished. It looked great in theory, it’s just that we didn’t know how it would work in pactice. It was the most fun, fabulous thing to do and they were all great.”
‘They’ are the cast of Rag Tale - a line-up which is every bit as impressive as the De Niro film, with Malcolm McDowell as Richard Morton, the publisher of a tabloid paper whimsically called The Rag; Rupert Graves as his editor, Eddy Taylor; and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Mary Josephine (MJ), who is Morton’s wife and Eddy’s deputy - as well as being Eddy’s lover. For the moment, at any rate.
Also in the cast are John Sessions, who plays The Rag’s political editor, Felix Sty; Simon Callow as ‘Fat Boy’, the features editor of The Rag who is addicted to freebies of any kind; and Ian Hart as Morph, the pap who is alleged to have come up with a certain famous toe-sucking photograph that altered the history of the British royal family, and who is addicted to absolutely anything he can sniff up his nose, put in his veins and drop down his throat. Just an ordinary bunch of hacks, in other words.
“The idea came up in a conversation I had with Jim Sheridan about a week in the life of tabloids,” esplains McGuckian. “And then I made up this process, which is about trying to make film work in a way that would be new and contemporary, and which would answer the question, ‘How do you get the best performance out of people?’
“You do something like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is really traditional,” she explains. “You might get three set-ups a day, actors are hanging around, it’s hard to keep the performance level up with all the distractions of costume, design, whatever… And I just so wanted to do a film that was about the performances. It’s not that different, it just has a different emphasis.
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