Notes On A Scandal Behind The Scenes Interview

27-01-2007 17:36

Cate Blanchett, Richard Eyre, Patrick Marber

Notes On A Scandal tells a tangled tale of staff room politics, as new teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) begins a tentative friendship with veteran Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench). Things become complicated when the seemingly happily married Sheba begins an illicit affair with a student at the school, a potentially explosive secret that Barbara uses to turn matters to her advantage.Adapted from Zoe Heller’s best selling novel by Patrick Marber, who is a successful playwright himself with Dealer’s Choice, Closer, Howard Katz and Miss Julie to his name. National Theatre director Richard Eyre directs, reuniting with Dame Judi Dench after the success of Iris.Notes on a Scandal received three BAFTA nominations for Best British Film, Best Actress for Judi Dench and Best Adapted Screenplay for Patrick Marber. Dench and Marber also received Golden Globe nominations, as did Cate Blanchett, for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. The film also received four Academy Award nominatons, for Best Actress (Dench), Best Supporting Actress (Blanchett), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score for Philip Glass

Notes on a Scandal opens at cinemas nationwide on February 2, with advance previews across the country on February 1.

Patrick, you’ve described adapting Notes On A Scandal as being like an act of ‘benevolent piracy’. How easy was it to adapt

Marber: "It was very difficult, I read the book many times and underlined all the things I wanted to use and all the scenes I wanted to keep and ended up using much less than I thought I was going to. You find that after a few drafts the thing takes on a life of its own, and you start to stray from the book. And you find that you end up inventing a lot more than you thought you would."

The tone of it, in the end, is that of an ‘unreliable memoir’

Marber: "I think I stayed true to the darkly comic tone of the novel, or at least I hope I did. The thing that seduced me about the book was the truth of it and the comedy of it and the nastiness of it. And I think that’s all very much in the film. The first thing that Zoe Heller said to me, when we first met to talk about me adapting her novel, was ‘I’m terribly sorry about Sheba’, and I said ‘what do you mean?’ She said ‘well I feel that I spent so much time working on Barbara that I didn’t give Sheba enough time and character. So please will you, in the screenplay, do some work on her?’ I said I felt Sheba was very alive in the novel, but I know what she means because the novel is from Barbara’s point of view. I think I made Sheba a more Bohemian, and slightly lonelier figure than she is in the novel. I think in the novel she is scatty and posh and a bit of a flibbertigibbet. Whereas I don’t think she’s scatty and a flibbertigibbet in the film. You tell me [to Cate], what do you think?"

Blanchett: "There’s a sort of plaintive quality to her in the novel which could be a bit annoying on screen. And also the film is so much more a literal medium, what you see is what you get, and I think it was important to give Sheba her own voice."

What were the challenges for you Cate, was it simply the emotional and physical demands of the seduction scenes between you and the 15 year old boy

Blanchett: "I’m not interested in playing characters who see the world through my prism, I think the journey of understanding any character is to see how they tick and how they differ from you. Probably the hardest thing was to liberate her from my own morality. I was quite shocked at the tone I took, the judgements I had of the relationship that she embarked on. But it’s the stuff of great drama."

How did you find working with an inexperienced actor, Andrew Simpson, who plays the student Sheba falls for, Steven Connolly

Blanchett: "I think the casting process was really interesting, maybe this is my morality coming in again but it was important to me that the actor was above the age of consent. At the end of shooting he wrote me this handwritten letter that made me want to weep, about what the film had meant to him. It was then that I thought he was so young, you just tend to treat all the actors like normal actors once they’re there. It was a very welcoming environment, and Richard made us very at ease."