NEW YORK, NY, Feb. 8, 2002–There’s plenty of Academy Awards talk in the air, but what Australian director Fred Schepisi and Oscar-nominated actress Helen Mirren had on their minds last week in New York was Last Orders, a road pic for adults starring some of the biggest names in British cinema.
Mirren, whose performance in the all-star Gosford Park earned her an Oscar nom, is part of yet another sterling ensemble cast in Last Orders. In this latest, Mirren co-stars with Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Ray Winstone in a drama about a group of lower middle class suburban Londoners whose lives have intimately entwined in surprising and emotionally wrenching ways.
These dramatic connections are revealed after the death of Caine‘s character Jack, a southeast London butcher, dies, leaving his “last orders” to his wife (Mirren), son (Winstone) and friends (Hoskins, Courtenay, and Hemmings)–that they disperse his ashes in the ocean off the seaside town of Margate.
The coincidence of landing roles back-to-back in such stellar ensemble films as Last Orders and Gosford Park proved lucky for Mirren, who noted that because she has been doing so much theater, her ensemble commitments fit perfectly into such a demanding schedule. In fact, only a few weeks ago she exited Broadway’s Dance of Death, in which she co-starred with Ian McKellen, yet another Oscar-nominated–and beknighted–English acting legend.
Schepisi, a seasoned director who has notched more than a dozen features, including the critically acclaimed Six Degrees of Separation, credits the original material, Graham Swift’s Booker prize-winning novel of the same title, for attracting Last Orders‘ amazing cast. “There were a lot of actors knocking on our door,” he remembers.
Mirren hails her co-stars as “such iconic people. They are like a concentrated history of British cinema and much of why I wanted to do the film.”
Caine, of course, is well known to American audiences as is Hoskins, who began his career co-starring with Mirren in The Last Good Friday and earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Both Courtenay and Hemmings starred in indisputable classics of British cinema, the recently revived Billy Liar and Blow-up, respectively. And Winstone, who plays Caine‘s son, co-starred with Oscar nominee Ben Kingsley in last year’s arthouse smash Sexy Beast.
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Mirren also points out that the cast “all comes from my part of the world, east London.” She recalled the day trips her own family would take to Margate, Last Orders‘ final destination, remarking that the film’s terrain is “so much a part of my personal history.”
Schepisi adds that for Caine, too, the milieu was all too real. Caine attended school in the film’s southeast London neighborhood and, nearby, his father had been a fish market porter. Not a butcher, but close enough. Schepisi remembers Caine telling him, “I knew I’d be playing my father some day.”
Also close to Last Orders‘s story, Caine only learned late in life when his mother died that he had a mentally handicapped brother.” In Last Orders, every week for decades Mirren‘s character has visited her mentally handicapped daughter, whom her butcher husband had refused to recognize.
Schepisi was attracted to the book’s wealth and depth of human experience. “I liked the humanity of the book, the fact that it’s about ordinary lives but, in fact, there are no ordinary lives. Everybody’s life gets complicated. And to get through, you really need friends, and if you’ve got any sense you get good friends and you depend on them and suffer their foibles and weaknesses. And the book really explored that, and I hope that I got that in the film.”
Mirren believes he did, in spite of the fact that the novel is very interior, constantly shifts back and forth in time, and presents different the story in different chapters from different characters’ points of view.
“The novel was hard to develop into a script because of the time elements and its subjectivity,” Mirren says. “But [Schepisi] did such a wonderful job keeping all the stories there and clear.”
In spite of Schepisi’s attraction to the material, author Swift didn’t make acquiring the rights easy. Schepisi explained that Swift’s previous experiences with the film world weren’t the best, so he was extra careful with allowing an option on his book and Schepisi had to jump through a lot of hoops.
“Basically, I started with a six-month option to write the script,” the director said. “Then the next step as the option progressed was to get the casting commitments. And the final option period was about budgeting and financing. It was a stupid thing to enter into and highly unusual as option agreements go.”
But as Mirren noted, the arrangement worked. “Things can stay in development for years and nothing happens.” At least author Swift found a way to either get the ball rolling or call an end to the game.
Schepisi calls his casting coup “lucky,” especially since he didn’t have actors in mind when he was reading the book. The only wrinkle encountered was that Courtenay, who plays Caine‘s quiet undertaker pal Vic, was intent on playing the more colorful character of boxer and boozer Lenny, the part Hemmings got. Remembers Schepisi, “I almost lost [Courtenay] three times because he kept trying to convince me he was right for Lenny. But I insisted there’s a lot more going on with Vic, that he’s so important as a kind of umpire and referee and that [Courtenay] helps that.”
Mirren, in her role of the butcher’s wife who is devoted to a daughter too handicapped to even recognize her, delivers yet another remarkable performance. Mirren professes no tricks or techniques in understanding her characters. Rather, “It’s always helpful to go to the places where the characters come from. I didn’t have much time to prepare with this role but I did go to the East End of London and drove around, went into shops and watched and listened to people.” She jokes that she unfortunately wasn’t able to hang around a vast estate for her Gosford Park role, but she did have some books she used for reference to help her understand her housekeeper character.
Next up for Mirren will be Showtime’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which she calls a “make,” not a “remake” of the 1961 film about a middle-aged actress’ fling with a handsome young gigolo in Rome. Anne Bancroft plays her dear friend and “a lot of very interesting prospects” are vying for the gigolo role, which a young Warren Beatty made infamous in the original film. Asked about the long talked-about feature to be made of her acclaimed British TV series Prime Suspect, Mirren exhales a long sigh of exasperation. “I never have an answer, “she says. “Maybe it’s better that something just stay alive in the place it was created for.”
Meanwhile, Schepisi is only five weeks away from cameras rolling on Smack in the Kisser, which stars Michael Douglas, his father Kirk, and even features Michael’s ex-wife Diandra. “Do I look nervous?” asks Schepisi, who does laugh rather nervously.
