Principal photography commenced on DORIAN GRAY during the summer of 2008 over a nine week shooting schedule on locations across London and at Ealing Studios. Based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, OLIVER PARKER directs and BARNABY THOMPSON produces from a screen adaptation by rising talent TOBY FINLAY who provides a modern edge to Oscar Wilde’s great classic.
Fresh from his success in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian British actor BEN BARNES takes the lead as Dorian Gray and is joined by COLIN FIRTH (Mamma Mia, St Trinian’s, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Love Actually) as the charismatic Henry Wotton. The actors are reunited in DORIAN GRAY after working together in 2008 on Stephan Elliott’s Easy Virtue.
Joining them in the cast line-up are BEN CHAPLIN (Me & Orson Welles, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The New World, The Thin Red Line), REBECCA HALL (Frost/Nixon, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Prestige), RACHEL HURD-WOOD (Peter Pan, Perfume), FIONA SHAW (Tree of Life, Harry Potter, The Black Dahlia), EMILIA FOX (Flashbacks of a Fool, The Virgin Queen), MARYAM D’ABO (The Living Daylights, Helen of Troy), PIP TORRENS (Easy Virtue,Valiant), DOUGLAS HENSHALL (The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Primeval), CAROLINE GOODALL (CSI, Schindler’s List), as well as exciting new acting talents JOHNNY HARRIS (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Atonement, London to Brighton) and MAX IRONS (Being Julia).
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in 1890 and it is considered one of the great works of classic gothic horror. |
The History Behind the Project
“I didn’t really want to corner myself having done two Wilde adaptations already, but I loved the book “The Picture of Dorian Gray”“ explains director, Oliver Parker, “so Barnaby (Thompson) got the idea rolling and originally my role was as co-producer. It took time to get the script really coming off the page, I’ve had a chance in the intervening years to do a few more movies, cleanse the palate. By which point I was ready to have another shot at Wilde and of course I didn’t want some other bastard doing it!”
Parker and producer Barnaby Thompson have as Thompson puts it, “Known each other forever”. The team’s filmmaking collaboration has also been a long one, “Making films is very hard; making films with people you know very well makes it much easier because there’s a freedom and a sense of relaxation in the way that you deal with each other” comments Thompson. “Also Olly’s strength comes from drama and because he was an actor he’s very good at handling actors. I tend to be broader in terms of comic approach and more concerned with how you present a movie as an event to an audience. I think we have a nice friction in the way we look at things; we have two very clear points of view”.
With Dorian Gray, Parker decided he didn’t want to do the adaptation himself; “If you’re writing and directing you often feel you have a responsibility to the words especially if it’s a classic, but if you have a relationship with the writer, there’s the chance for some valuable dialogue”. So, two years ago rising young screenwriter Toby Finlay became involved. “Toby made a great impression on this piece” explains Parker, “he brought a very strong identity”. Finlay was introduced to the project by Sophie Meyer, head of development at Ealing Studios who’d read some of his work and thought he was worth a shot. “I think it was a great hunch - he’s certainly attacked it with a lot of vigour and has a visceral quality to his writing” notes Parker. “With Toby, the script would breathe and expand and he was absolutely relentless in going back and reworking it and continually refining it”.
“One of the things that made this project more interesting to me was it wasn’t quite so hidebound by the structure of a play. This particular story has enormous potential for expansion and investigation which is very liberating” concludes Parker.
“The book still resonates today because of the fundamental theme of ‘what if you were allowed to do anything?’” explains producer Barnaby Thompson. “I think that’s a notion we can all grab onto because we’ve been taught there’s right and wrong and if you do things wrong you pay for it.”
“In modern terms, the first person I thought of with this piece was Mick Jagger” continues Thompson “he was a young man who became a rock ‘n’roll star and was able to do whatever he wanted and in some ways was above the law. We live in an age of celebrity, we live in an age where good looks and pop culture have become more and more powerful elements in our life and the idea of the power of beauty and what that gives you is as relevant now as it ever was”.
“You could analyse for hours why myths endure but I think we’re all fascinated by the physical appearance of things, certainly of each other and our own physical appearance and Oscar Wilde seemed to make a religion out of beauty” observes actor Colin Firth who play Henry Wotton. “It was almost as though aesthetic beauty was more important than morality, so he was writing about something he cared about. The germ of the idea must have come from Oscar Wilde thinking ‘would I sell my soul?’ Everybody who has ever thought about appearance has grown up with all the clichés about beauty being skin deep and how its beauty from within that counts. There’s nothing extraordinary being dealt with here it just happens to be a myth that the story deals with in such a dramatic, concise and rather chilling way” concludes Firth.
“Today’s culture is very obsessed with cheating clocks and trying to stay young” notes actress Rebecca Hall who plays Emily Wotton, “I think human beings have always been obsessed with that. The fact that Oscar Wilde was writing about it then just goes to show. In any era there are different ideas of what is beautiful and what still looks young. - today it’s Botox and maybe yesterday it was dressing a certain way. It’s always going to be relevant and there are always going to be ways to try and stop it”.
“The theme of eternal youth is always fascinating” says Ben Chaplin (Basil Hallward). Dorian Gray is Faustian for a start and for some reason that fascinates people. Do we have to be responsible for our actions? Do we have to just live for pleasure and not pay the consequences physically and spiritually?”
For Parker, who started his film career in the horror genre with the legendary maestro Clive Barker, this adaptation of Dorian Gray posed an opportunity to dip his toe back into that water “It’s great fun to be touching on something that has an element of horror. This isn’t an out and out horror movie but it certainly takes me back to my early years in the business, which is a surprise to a lot of people. Having worked with Clive Barker as a young man this is really interesting for me and I’ve been able to join some of the dots in my career”.
“It’s great that Olly’s been given a chance to revisit his horror roots” comments producer Barnaby Thompson. “He set up a theatre company with Clive Barker and they did all sorts of horror shows and I remember going to see them when we were just out of school. You’d never guess it from anything else he’s ever done but he’s a big blood and gore man; his first film appearance as an actor was in Clive’s film Hellraiser”.
“With this film we have a great gothic horror legend and the fact that it comes from Oscar Wilde gives it another twist” says Barnaby Thompson. “We hope you’ll get the excitement and shock of a horror movie with the quality of dialogue and depth of emotions you’d hope to get from a writer such as Oscar Wilde”.
About the Casting
Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is a literary classic and anyone who has read the novel, has an image in their mind’s eye on what Dorian looks like, “Everybody has their own idea of perfection” notes director Oliver Parker.
This could have posed an almost impossible task in the casting process but Parker took the view that times change and that “If one was to choose the most glamorous man of the age today, he would be very different from when the book was written”.
Enter British actor Ben Barnes. Producer Barnaby Thompson had previously cast Barnes in Ealing Studio’s Easy Virtue and it was on the set of that film that he looked at the young actor as a possible Dorian, having arrived at the location straight from a script meeting on Dorian Gray. “I became aware of Ben’s interesting dark eyes and there was a moment when he turned to camera slightly and I found myself thinking ‘Oh my God he’s Dorian’. As a result, Thompson introduced Barnes to Oliver Parker and the two spent a couple of days working together. “I gave him a fairly rigorous audition, which he passed with flying colours. I became very excited about what he could bring to Dorian”.
“I think Ben’s done a great job; he has matinee idol looks, he’s utterly charming, but he can go from sweet charm to steel in just a flick of the head. This role is a real challenge: he starts as gawky naïve, he becomes rock ‘n’ roll superstar and then has to play himself looking exactly the same 25 years later and he’s done all those three things with aplomb” praises Thompson.
Parker and British actor Colin Firth are no strangers to collaboration, having worked together three times previously. “I think he’s becoming more and more exciting as an actor” notes Parker. “He keeps moving forward in an almost relentless way, looking for new ways to challenge himself. Henry Wotton is a fabulous role for him and not necessarily an obvious one considering the way people perceive Colin. But I actually know he’s a dark bastard at heart with evil thoughts so it was an easy choice in the end!”
Producer Barnaby Thomson’s thoughts echo those of Parker, “Colin saw an opportunity to play a character he rarely gets to play. In a curious way if there’s a similar role he’s played it would be Valmont, where he had this real sparkle and sense of the Machiavellian and he gets to be the bad guy. Very often Colin is cast as Mr Reliable and anyone who knows him knows he is anything but!”
The Locations
The locations selected for filming on Dorian Gray very much reflect the evolution of Dorian, from his arrival in the big city as a naïve young man (Smithfields in the City of London was turned into London’s King’s Cross Station); to the carefree innocence of Dorian as he’s introduced into society by Henry Wotton, attending sophisticated parties in opulent London residences (the sprawling Witanhurst on Highgate Hill in London and Basildon Park in Berkshire); through his descent into debauchery as he frequents the dens of iniquity in the East End (the Café de Paris near Leicester Square became the Casino de Venise for the shoot and Crocker’s Folly in St John’s Wood became a gin palace and an opium den).
Location manager Pat Karam and his team were responsible for finding over fifteen locations in and around London and the south east. The first weeks of the schedule were spent at Witanhurst in leafy Highgate, north London. Witanhurst is a listed mansion built in the Queen Anne style and is London’s second largest private residence after Buckingham Palace. With its 25 bedrooms, 70 ft grand ballroom, eight bathrooms and eight reception rooms, it was recently snapped up by the richest woman in Russia for £50million.
Major London landmarks used include the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End, Bell Yard near the Royal Courts of Justice, Carlton Terrace and the British Academy, Highgate Cemetery, the Royal Exhange Building in the City and Chiswick Town Hall.
The all-important “attic” scenes, where the monstrous painting is kept, were filmed on sets built at Ealing Studios and a section of London underground tunnel and platform were constructed on Ealing’s Stage Two.
The Costumes
“I thought it was a fabulous script and a very fresh look at Dorian Gray so I wanted to take the Edwardian clothes and try to produce them in such a way that you’d see them through modern eyes” explains Oscar-nominated costume designer Ruth Myers.
Myers was adamant that she wanted to steer away from the look of a typical period film, “There was a glamour group during the era the film’s set in and I wanted to capture that. I thought of Dorian as a sort of Mick Jagger or Rudolph Nuryev. I wanted the look and the costumes to bring that 1960s or 1970s idea of glamour”.
“I did a lot of drawings to prepare because I didn’t want to slavishly reproduce what had been seen before. Luckily working with Olly (Parker) and Barnaby (Thompson) was a joy because they are a costume-friendly director and producer, which makes a huge difference to the way you can design a film”.
Lead actor Ben Barnes who plays Dorian collaborated closely with Myers throughout the entire process, “Ben came to many fittings and worked very hard with me. It’s a wonderful thing when you get an actor who can see his character through his costumes. Ben and I sourced a lot of modern clothes which we looked at converting, we looked at a lot of vintage and also made a lot of stuff from scratch. Ben was very brave with his costumes and he learnt to wear them well. We were also able to give him costumes that he felt completely at home in, which isn’t always the case with period pieces”.
One of the most interesting looks that Myers was required to create was for actress Rebecca Hall who plays Emily Wotton who is very much a modern young woman of the Edwardian era. “Rebecca so beautiful, she has such a wonderful face and almost looks like a 60s star like a Jane Birkin or Jeanne Moreau. She also has this amazingly expressive face so I really wanted to make her costumes simple so that you’re eyes are pushed up to her beautiful face. Also because of the nature of her character: the modern woman in Edwardian times, I wanted to give her a very modern look. Apart from the gorgeous red dress we made for her, which I’m very proud of, mostly she’s in blouses and long skirts which is exactly what the Suffragettes of that time would have worn. We gave her a very beautiful glamorized version of a Suffragette’s costume”.
The majority of the costumes were made but even those that were bought in were altered, “Everything was pretty much created for the film” explains Myers. “The biggest challenge was that we had to turn things around very quickly and to make it look lavish and as though money was no object. It was a joy to do and hopefully that’s exactly how it will look. It was a joy to bring in this fresh light to a period film and I got enormous support from the actors, Olly and Barnaby”.
The Cast on Their Characters
Ben Barnes on playing Dorian Gray
“I read the book in my teens and I think for a lot of people it’s one of the first novels they read on their own. A lot of people read it because teachers think it’s forward thinking, exciting and shocking. Principally for me it’s always going to be the character in the context of the story. Getting this role was one of those massive challenges and it wasn’t going to get any greater than this”.
“I’ve loved playing the darker moments and I’ve really enjoyed playing the 46 year old Dorian. Obviously he looks the same so it’s been an interesting challenge to make him seem older and show the way experiences have affected him. It’s also very interesting to see how the other characters have responded to me on those days because they’ve often been aged in make-up - especially Colin Firth. On the days when I’ve been young and vulnerable he’s been bullying me on set; on the days when he’s made up to look 70 the tables are entirely turned and he feels a little bit vulnerable because he’s balding, so the joke is flipped! It’s very interesting to see people genuinely respond when you’re made up to look very different. Yesterday we filmed the very end and my portrait make-up and I morph into this disgusting, syphilitic, sinful mess of a man. I had three hours plus of prosthetics - even the producer couldn’t recognise me and the ADs couldn’t look me in the eye. It was very interesting to feel like a mutant and how powerful that was. It wasn’t so much the hideousness it was more the lack of responsiveness, the fact that they could only see my eyes, they couldn’t tell if I was smiling!”
“Working with Colin Firth so closely has been great. We filmed Easy Virtue together in 2008 and our characters didn’t really interact that much and it was a relatively unexplored relationship in the context of the story but in this we are the two protagonists. It’s just been a joy from start to finish, he’s just a great, great man, and very funny and very bright and worldly and I can’t praise him highly enough”.
“Olly Parker has half directed and half baby-sat me through this film. I felt a little bit sick at the beginning of every morning and I’d been looking at the script the night before and I’d be thinking ‘I don’t know how to make this believable or real’. But, I’d come in the next day and say to Olly ‘I’ve got a few ideas but basically I don’t know how to make this work, what do I do?’ Because Olly has been an actor it’s been really interesting watching him almost play it through. Sometimes in the middle of a scene, he’ll come over and give me a note and as he walks off you can see him playing with it... kind of doing it himself, and that’s almost more useful for me. Even when you’re doing something and you’re very passionate about how it feels, that might not be coming through on screen. You have to take the word of the people who are watching the monitor. You’re probably not always the best judge of your own work”.
Colin Firth on playing Henry Wotton
“As I see it, there are three primary characters in the story: Basil, Dorian and Henry and there’s a relationship triangle between the three. Both Henry and Basil are infatuated with Dorian in their own way. I suppose the painting is also a character in some way and this is the side of Dorian that’s kept from the world while Dorian becomes more fascinating to the world, either because he repulses people or because he attracts them. Henry wants to mess with Dorian’s beauty, to disrupt it. In my mind he does it initially to tease Basil, to provoke him, but as time goes on, for all sorts of tangled motives, he wants to break it down, he wants to see this phenomenon of beauty tarnished in some way”.
“Henry Wotton is a voyeur, he’s not prepared to get his own hands dirty. He doesn’t want to lose his family, he doesn’t want to pay the price himself and so Dorian is a kind of proxy for all. Either Henry doesn’t have the courage or he’s just not dark enough. I think it’s all just a game for Henry. In the book Henry doesn’t really change - he’s the only character who doesn’t go on one of these journeys of discovery, what we like to call the arc. I think we’ve altered that a little in this story by giving him a daughter - the stakes change and because of this, his character has to change. The fact that he has a daughter makes him vulnerable, he can no longer be flippant because something suddenly matters terribly; it gives Dorian a different kind if power and it gives Henry a different kind of urgency, he’s no longer a voyeur because he’s involved”.
“I’m drawn to characters that are hard to pin down. I’ve played plenty of characters you can pin down according to their ‘Englishness’, but I’m talking about what actually motivates this man (Henry) is very, very hard to put your finger on. There’s a big mystery to him. One could continue to ask the question about why he behaves the way he does, about his continuing fascination with Dorian which provides an opportunity for a cruel game; is there some kind of paternal love there? Some kind of sexual love there? I actually think all of those elements are there. He destroys Dorian completely - it’s Henry who initiates the process of Dorian’s self-destruction by proxy. I think there’s a kind of self-loathing that he projects”.
“In this film I obviously have to play Henry as an older man. One uses one’s imagination when you’re playing older. I’ve had to play an age other than my own in the past. I think it’s how you view the world. If it’s a well-written script and the things that are happening around you are all in place then I think it happens naturally. The minute I’m made up to look a certain way it has a bearing on how I hold myself. As soon as Ben Barnes sees me with a bald wig he wants to help me to my chair and give me some medication and help me change my colostomy bag! He can’t help patronising me when I’m old!”
“When you’re playing older it’s to do with how your eyes see the world, it’s not to do with how many wrinkles you have. There’s no alertness, no sense of being introduced to every new sight. I think Ben is also at some level following that rule. Young Dorian is someone who’s always a bit surprised, a bit awkward and you feel like the world is always ambushing him; old Dorian is very hard to have an effect on. Olly (Parker) was always saying wisely that Henry holds himself in a certain way that says ‘I’m not old’, but there’s a huge power shift when Dorian comes back from his travels”.
“The older I get, the less I’m inclined I am to do something that I don’t enjoy, it’s as simple as that. I don’t care what masterpiece comes out of it, if I’m not enjoying it it’s not worth it, but Ben Barnes and I had a lot of fun on set. One of the great draws for me was that Ben was doing this. It helps us, and it helps the work. There’s a playfulness between Dorian and Henry and a bit of our own relationship spilled over into that”.
“Olly Parker has proved, like a lot of the best filmmakers that getting some kind of ‘film family’ together is beneficial: your trusted DoP, the team of actors you know - not just because it’s a comfort zone, but also it means you have a shorthand that you’ve developed. There’s an awful lot of territory you have to cover very quickly when you work together in order to find all the intimacy and trust and security that you need. I think being directed by an actor, as Olly is, helps a lot for all the obvious reasons. There’s an understanding. Olly was a good actor and he knows the tricks that actors pull; he knows how you like to hide - he’s got the language for that”.
Ben Chaplin on playing Basil Hallward
“Basil’s obsessed with Dorian and the painting. It’s a sort of love affair... certainly from Basil’s perspective. I feel that Basil hadn’t done anything truly creative until he’d painted Dorian; he’s as obsessed with that as he is with Dorian himself”.
“That’s something I recognise in myself. When you’re feeling most creative, you feel the most alive. I’m never happier than when I’m at what I feel is my most creative”.
“When I took the role, I wanted to make sure Basil was more than just a plot device. I didn’t want him to be just a cliché, some sort of moral police. He’s an artist and in some ways he’s really culpable for what happens to Dorian and I wanted that to be the case. I didn’t want him looking down on Henry or Dorian from a moral high point. It’s not about changing the script it’s more to do with how you play it. That was something I discussed with Olly before we started shooting”.
Rebecca Hall on playing Emily Wotton
“Emily appears later in the film, just as the suffragette movement is gathering pace and she’s very much of that era”.
“I read the book and saw the black and white film when I was a young girl. I think I was far too little as it made quite a lasting impression on me! I remember it as being quite scary."
“It was really interesting reading the script because Toby Finlay has definitely made a version of it that is different yet still holds the central concerns. If you take a novel and turn it into a film it’s never going to be the same - naturally you’re doing an adaptation anyway - they are such radically different forms. You have to adapt to the medium you’re telling the story in and I think he’s done that really successfully”.
