The Unofficial Peter O'Toole Pages!

indieWIRE: "Death of a Ladies' Man: Roger Mitchell's Venus"

Death be not proud. One hears stories of men on their deathbeds who, lucidity gone, expend their last energy on a vain attempt to masturbate; of Viagra-boosted sex that climaxes in cardiac arrest. This stubbornness of the erotic urge, past physical failing, is the subject of "Venus": Why can't I get one last screw?

"Venus" stars 74-year old Peter O'Toole (has an actor ever sported a more phallic name?), his desiccation considerably advanced by legendary imbibing, as still-working thesp Maurice, a horny geezer fanning the embers of his libido for one last infatuation with his best friend's great-niece/ live-in nurse, Jessie (newcomer Jodie Whittaker), a philistine northern chav with nonexistent manners and a sideboard of an ass you could rest a cocktail on. Cue Pygmalion - O'Toole's done Henry Higgins before, of course. Or does the part call for a Casanova? Like Maurice, O'Toole's still jobbing, having just played that reminiscing lover on the BBC (he's a natural at wrecked beauty: "My God, how handsome you were," says estranged wife Vanessa Redgrave, watching one of Maurice's old film's on TV). Maurice has been skirt-chasing so long that his Don Juanism's become instinctual, but he's clearheaded enough to realize that he can't play seducer anymore (or consummate a conquest), so he digs into his repertoire, trying any tack-intimidation, pity, poetry-that'll expose a little of her skin, let him smell the nape of her neck.

The crux of "Venus" is the delicate bartering that takes place between Maurice and Jessie as they haggle the fine points of their transaction - she's unloved, hard up for someone to humor her ambitions... and she likes to be taken shopping, of course. Meanwhile, Maurice is only begging for another whiff of a little girl in bloom. So: Three kisses on the neck costs a pair of earrings. It isn't noble, but I can't see how "Venus"'s pragmatic chauvinism is more offensive than any number of movies where some sweet young thing falls, no-strings-attached, for a liver-spotted relic (the awful "History Boys" mounts its own pederasty apologia but muffles the implications in glibness).

There are elements familiar from past wasted nights at the movies that might ward a wary viewer off of "Venus": a graying star showcased for the Monday matinee crowd, an Unlikely, Mutually Enriching Friendship - and old folks playing up friskiness is always a trying spectacle; rent "Cocoon" if you don't believe me. What distinguishes "Venus" is that it strips the May-December cliche to the most basic equation, and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi isn't one to take the power of sex lightly ("The only pleasures that are possible as you get older are... under the aegis of death").

There's plenty of enervating comic relief and dross scenes to sit out - I could've happily lived my life without watching O'Toole wiggle around to Corinne Bailey Rae or hamming in St. Paul's Church (where Shaw's Pygmalion opens) with Leslie Phillips, an O.D. of nostalgic Brittania - but the movie survives. It's small-scale, workmanlike filmmaking, bolstered by O'Toole's unabashed perviness; the tone recalls the fragile creepiness of the late-era Kinks masterpiece "Art Lover," about a "connoisseur" ogling chicks in the park: "I've learned to appreciate you the way art lovers do / And I only want to look at you."

comingsoon.net: Venus Writer Hanif Kureishi

As part of our year-end focus on the screenwriters whose work is making a mark at the cinema this award season, we present the strange case of Hanif Kureishi. His name may draw blank looks from most people, but he's been a triple threat as a screenwriter, novelist and playwright for nearly thirty years. After writing a number of London-centric plays, Kureishi received acclaim for his first screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, before moving onto equally controversial films, novels and short stories in the years that followed.

His latest film, Venus, teams Kureishi with director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) for the third time, and it's getting a lot of attention for its star, Peter O'Toole, who plays an elderly retired actor who becomes smitten with his friend's 20-year-old niece.

Exhibiting the same dry wit as his good friend and long-time collaborator director Stephen Frears, Kureishi talked with CS Indie about his latest projects.

CS Indie: "Venus" is your third film collaboration with Roger Michell, and he's mentioned that you developed it together. How did the idea come about to do this after you finished making "The Mother"?
Hanif Kureishi: Well, I remember coming back from Cannes with Rog, we were talking about what we're going to do. Then we thought about doing a movie called "The Father" after "The Mother" as a sidepiece. It occurred to me to do a film about a guy having a prostate operation, a guy who was thinking of the women he'd been involved with during his life, an old man looking back, women he had sex with, women he desired, what he liked about women and all this stuff. So I thought about this for a while and it occurred to me that really you have to do a movie in the present tense. It's better to have it happening rather than him remembering. I guess I hang around with a bunch of old guys, like me and Roger and Stephen Frears and our pals in London, who sort of fumble and bumble about, full of insomnia and complaints and arthritis and pills and glasses, aching feet and stuff. So it amused me the idea of doing a film about a bunch of old guys. But to get the story going you need a girl really to kind of break it up or to make them envious of each other or make stuff happen. I thought of taking a rude girl and sort of throwing her into the middle of this bunch of men, and that was the genesis of the idea.

CS: You also created a relationship between Maurice and Ian, who are almost like a squabbling old married couple. Does anyone in your group have that sort of relationship?
Kureishi: I guess we needed one character in the group to be sexual, Peter O'Toole, and you couldn't have everyone else being the same, so you need to balance it out. There are three love relationships in the film, the Leslie Philips and Peter O'Toole, Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave, and Peter O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker. I was just amused by the idea that the Leslie Philips character couldn't cope with this girl, he didn't like her, he was just fastidious while the Peter O'Toole character adores her. You set up a movie or any kind of story or novel, it's the balance and the contrasts that you're looking for all the time.

CS: When you're working with Roger on the script, how much do you actually do together, before you go off and write on your own?
Kureishi: Well, I go up to Camden sometimes, while he comes down to Notting Hill and we sit around a Starbucks and go "Oh, should he be a farmer? No, he should be a policeman. No, he should be a doctor or an accountant." There's no point me sitting at home writing far into the movie, and then Roger says, "It's really crazy. He should be a policeman rather than a doctor." So we kind of agree we need to talk and then I sit down and I would write quite a lot of scenes probably. And Roger would say, "I like that scene, I don't like that scene, that's not working, that's good" and we'd talk about it, and eventually, after a long time actually, we'd come to some kind of agreement.

CS: Saying that you and Roger meet at Starbucks kind of shatters the illusion I have of you meeting in a quaint café somewhere.
Kureishi: Yeah, I know it's disappointing. I do apologize.

CS: When you're done writing the script and hand it over to Roger to make the movie, do you let go or do you go on set in case he needs something changed?
Kureishi: I don't go on set, but we cast them up together. We sit around and lots of girls come in, and then we talk about "Should it be that one, should it be that one?" and again, in the casting, you're always balancing the parts. If you cast Peter O'Toole in the beginning of the production process, than you have to cast around O'Toole. You don't want a lot of other tall, handsome ex-movie stars. Then we sit around and talk about it together. I think it's fun for all of us to do that.

CS: I imagine Peter O'Toole must have been one of your first choices while writing it. I can't really imagine anyone else delivering that kind of performance. Did you have a second choice in case he couldn't do it?
Kureishi: Well, there aren't that many movie stars of that age who can play that part actually. Maybe Anthony Hopkins.

CS: Or Ian McKellen?
Kureishi: Well, McKellen is younger. McKellen is 66, O'Toole is 75, and we needed someone who was much older, you know what I mean? If you do it with McKellen or you do it with John Hurt, it's less poignant, because they don't look like they're about to die, in a way that O'Toole does. We needed somebody who was more than 70, rather than someone who was more than 60, and then the contrast between the youth of the girl and the age of the man makes the movie work.

CS: Is Peter O'Toole at all like his character in real life or was that just really good acting to portray Maurice?
Kureishi: Well, he's a much more successful actor to start then the part he's actually playing. The guy, Maurice Russell, is a slightly disappointed man. He's not a huge movie star, he hadn't been in "Lawrence of Arabia" this guy, so he is acting to a certain extent.

CS: Is he as flamboyant and does he have a lot of quips and anecdotes to share?
Kureishi: I don't really know what he's like, but he loves to tell stories. He's a real good old boy and will talk for hours telling wonderful stories, and he's a very intelligent man, very well read and a smart guy.

CS: You seem to have this thing towards including sexuality with a perverse edge in your movies, whether it be the relationship between these two characters in this or the one in "The Mother." Is that just a part of you that comes out when you write these movies?
Kureishi: Well, you take the sexuality out, than you don't have anything. You just have an old guy and a woman walking down the street. What you need is the charge between them. It's like "My Beautiful Laundrette." When I wrote that originally, it wasn't a homosexual movie. There was the Daniel Day-Lewis character and the Gordon Warnecke character and they were pals who owned a laundrette together. Once you put the sexuality in, the whole thing charges up obviously.

CS: Right, like you said that "Venus" originally was a different kind of movie in that it was just about Peter's character looking back on his life…
Kureishi: Yeah, but then you put a woman into it and he wants to f**k her, he's 75 and she's 20, then it's alive.

CS: All of your movies have been set in London, so do you feel at all proprietary when filmmakers like Woody Allen arrive and want to shoot their movies there?
Kureishi: Well, when Woody Allen goes to London, he's going to shoot Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, he's going to shoot tourist London. Whereas we live on the street, every day, so we know bits of the city. At the end of my road, there's a café like the café that the old guys go to in "Venus," so we obviously have a different take on the city, and we know parts of the city that outside filmmakers don't necessarily know. On the other hand, outside filmmakers make wonderful films about the city, too. I mean, Patrice Chereau, in the film he made of one of my novels "Intimacy," had a wonderful take on London in that movie actually, really good.

CS: Was there more of the Vanessa Redgrave subplot than we saw in the movie?
Kureishi: Yeah, there was quite a lot more of that and there was a wonderful speech that she made at the end, which was a delight to write for Vanessa Redgrave. Imagine having Vanessa Redgrave read your speech.

CS: Did Roger end up shooting it?
Kureishi: Yes. Roger's quite ruthless. It's just cut and cut and cut and eventually, you get Vanessa Redgrave on the cutting room floor. Too bad. We'll put it on the DVD.

CS: Over the course of your 20-year career, your characters have generally gotten older, since your early movies seemed to be about younger people in London.
Kureishi: Yeah, they're young hip guys hanging around in the '70s, and now I'm writing about a guy who's 70-years-old who's about to drop dead. They're parts of me but they're not me. I'm not 75 and I hope I'm not going to drop dead. The next movie we're going to do is about a couple who are around 50 or in their late 40's I guess. It's really the story that we look for. The age is kind of a concern, but really it's the story that I look for, I think both of us, 'cause these movies are cheap. There's no car chases or explosions, it's only the talking and the stories that make them move.

CS: Do you feel that you're writing for older audiences these days?
Kureishi: I like older audiences! I mean, I've got teenage kids, so they love "American Pie" and "Napoleon Dynamite," and they love MTV. I watch all that stuff all the time with my kids, so I'm aware of it. I really enjoy it. I love American comedies. But I can't write that stuff. I can't write in their voices. I mean, they need to write those movies. And I'm amused by older people, and to be honest, how fantastic to write for Peter O'Toole, to write for Vanessa Redgrave, to write for Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths. These are fantastic actors, so experienced, why not write for them?

CS: With all your experience writing novels and plays, how do you decide whether to turn an idea into a movie screenplay or a prose story? Was "Venus" always considered as a movie since you did it with Roger?
Kureishi: Yeah, I guess. There's an idea I've got at the moment that I want to do with Rog, but I'm also maybe thinking it's really a short novel or there are other ways of telling the story. But what I do is how I make my living, so I have to think I'm going to spend five years writing a novel, and I'm going to have to support myself during those five years, and I'm going to have to support myself maybe by writing a movie. Or if I'm sitting at home writing short stories, I can't make any money writing short stories, nobody does, so it's partly pragmatic what I do. I gotta make a living out of this game.

CS: So your next movie is also going to be with Roger?
Kureishi: We're just talking about it, yeah, maybe. I'm shooting a short next weekend. I'm not directing it myself. It's called "Weddings and Beheadings," it's a ten minute film about a guy who video tapes beheadings, set in a Baghdad basement. It's made by a guy called Emir Jamal, based on a short story I published in Francis Coppola's "Zoetrope Magazine." It's going to be shot in a basement in London.

CS: You've done two movies with Stephen Frears and three with Roger Michell. Is it always about finding a director you like working with, or do you ever envision writing a script and letting a director find it?
Kureishi: The relationship with the director is very important because the director stimulates you and you stimulate them, and finding the relationship with the director early on is important. This guy that I'm doing the Baghdad basement movie with, he put me in a documentary that he made. I liked him and he came over to my house and we met for a drink and talked, and then we went, "Why don't we do a film together?" It's really to do with working with people you like and enjoy being with.

CS: That must be different in London, because Hollywood writers don't really have that luxury of picking the directors that make their movies. Do you think you'd ever want to write a script, sell it and then let it go?
Kureishi: I've never done that and I wouldn't really know how to do that. I wouldn't want to do that. It seems to me if you're going to do a movie, then it's a collaboration. I'm interesting in the director's ideas, because they have good ideas that fortify your own ideas. I've always worked like that, and I think I learned to work like that with Stephen Frears. He did the first film that I wrote, and we'd sit around and talk about it.

CS: Writing a novel must be a lot more secluded experience, so do you still enjoy that process as well?
Kureishi: I've been working on a novel for over five years, quite a substantial novel that begins in the '70s and ends in the bombings in London in the subways last year. But even then, I work with the editor. He says, "What about this section? Why don't you do a bit over there. That's not working." Even though as you say, it's more you I guess, there's always other people involved.

CS: In your earlier movies, you dealt a lot with the Indian and Pakistani community in London, but you've gotten away from that recently. Have you said pretty much all you want to say about that aspect of your life?
Kureishi: I wrote a memoir called "My Ear at his Heart," that was published in England that was partly about that subject, it was never published here. Scribner's and Simon and Schuster, my American publisher, said my books would stop selling here. My current novel is concerned with an Indian family, and it's about race and about Islam and all that stuff, terrorism. It's not as though I got tired of that subject.

CS: Since you were nominated for an Oscar at the very beginning of your film career, what is your take on awards?
Kureishi: It's nice to get an award and it cheers me up for half an hour, but what's distressing is the amount of time and money that is spent on the whole thing, which seems to me to be rather a waste of effort. I would rather the money be spent on the movie. We can spend another week shooting rather than spending a quarter of a million dollars trying to get an Oscar for Peter O'Toole. (You can't write that obviously.)Oops.