And When Did You Last See Your Father? - Juliet Stevenson interview

JULIET Stevenson talks about why And When Did You Last See Your Father? appealed to her so much as an actress, and why the film carries a strong emotional resonance for just about every viewer… She was speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. What was the appeal for you coming to this role?
Juliet Stevenson: The truth is there are not many film scripts written for women over the age of 40, that’s the bald truth. Womens’ narratives after that age cease to become interesting to many writers. Let’s hope that will evolve and change. Of course, your appetite as an actor doesn’t diminish and while it’s fantastic to carry the narrative, for me the project was what was interesting. So it’s not really just the role by any means, it’s who’s in it? Who’s directing it? Who’s written it? And what ideas is it shaped around? I was drawn to the script, I knew that Jim [Broadbent] and Colin [Firth] were doing it and Jim and I had worked together quite a lot before and I love working with him.

I didn’t know Colin very well, but I was looking forward to that. I knew Anand [Tucker]’s work a little bit, so it was the whole project. I liked the book, I remember it coming out, it was serialised on the radio. There aren’t many films that are made that are about very universal subjects, subjects that can appeal to somebody 13 or 93, any age, race or class.

Q. And the story of course has such an emotional pull…
Juliet Stevenson: I do think this is a story that’s really available to everybody and its power is universal because it offers up two really important themes for me. One is this extraordinary odyssey we go on in coming to terms with who our parents are. They start off as these safe people in your life who look after you and feed you, and then you get to a certain age where you can see they are flawed and complicated, they have their own agendas. And the older you get the more you know about them, sometimes they become quite dangerous people and you have to come to terms with that. That’s partly Blake’s story, the strange agendas and secrecies that went on in his parents marriage to some extent.

Colin’s character spends a lot of time trying to understand it and get them to talk about, always faced with the normality that’s presented to him that he knows is not true. That odyssey that we’re all on with our parents from birth to death is a very interesting theme and this huge loss of a parent that we have all either experienced or we know we will experience, and what that means and what’s like. I’ve had that experience myself, so there were a lot of things about the whole project that drew me. And then I enjoyed putting together this strange… she’s an enigma actually because the story doesn’t focus on her but it’s great fun to have to try and find out what her reality is.

You can’t play somebody’s point of view, they’re a real person, so I had to go behind the point of view and piece her together with some help from Blake [Morrison] and a lot from the books. He wrote a book about his mother later. And then add a little bit, and try and make some imaginative leaps for myself. It was like a detective trail, I loved it.

Q. You mention personal echoes. Were there any more that struck a chord?
Juliet Stevenson: My father also died of cancer in 1992 and I did go down and make quite a lot of journeys down there. I did spend the last few weeks of my life with my mum, nursing him. It was uncannily similar to that situation, except that in the film, of course, I was playing my mum in my life and I was in Colin’s situation, being the child who went back. I was probably more hands on because I was nursing him quite a lot, but nevertheless there’s a scene in the film that’s really extraordinary for me because my father died in the morning. Just like in the story the cancer descended very quickly in the last few days. My mum went to sleep in the room, and I had to go in and wake her up when the undertakers came at about two o’clock.

I stood at the door, thinking: “I don’t want to wake her up, because she’d have to re-experience this thing.” There’s a scene in the film which is exactly that, except that I’m playing my mother and Colin is playing me. That was a very strange day, shooting that scene. I think for all the crew and the cast and everybody working on it there were quite a lot of moments when you could feel that the story we were all engaged in telling and recording, everybody had a connection to. And that really is the power of the film, not just that we all have perhaps who have died or will die, or that we’ve all been teenagers and have all been embarrassed by our parents, it’s not just those obvious things.

Actually, it’s that these huge things happen in our lives and we encounter them very privately, but the greater they are like birth and death, the more common they are. You go to the movies and a film like this – which is not a fantasy, it is about life as we know it – and you see other people having very similar experiences. That’s fantastically reassuring, and it’s very celebratory that we’re not undergoing these very difficult, huge events in our lives alone. There’s a commonality to it. I think that’s the huge power of this film, for whoever you are, whatever age and whatever race that’s one of the great things about it.