‘I love to work quickly, and he does as well.
We keep it fresh.’
– Ridley Scott
Russell and Scott’s decision to make the first movie they made together after Gladiator a romantic comedy was something of a perverse one – especially in Russell’s mind.
‘The fact that Ridley and I would get together again and do a low-budget comedy, instead of what people expect – a $150 million blood fest – I enjoyed that part of it. I do the stuff that I have some kind of emotional connection to. All I’m trying to do when I do my job is not be elevated in your mind … if you’re in the cinema and you have an emotional connection to the film, then that’s a simple reason for me to do my job. The reality is I just want to tell a story that’s gonna touch you. But it’s just a story. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to change bad political policy.’
Talking about his character – ‘an English banker who is an absolute arsehole’, Russell said to Film Review, ‘Uncle Harry taught him the difference between a good and bad red wine, the difference between a good and bad cigar and the importance of a blue suit. Unfortunately he taught him all of that around the age of 11! All the things his uncle put inside him as a young man are still there – they’ve just been reconfigured by life.
‘There is a saying in Provence: “You don’t own the chateau. The chateau owns you.” We’re basing the change in his life on that reconfiguration that happens, so all the things his uncle teaches him add up to something completely different than the way they’ve added up in his life. He goes back to the source of that knowledge and his life is changed and revitalised and he becomes a different sum of those parts.
‘This is a film that basically says people never die as long as you keep them in your heart.’
Russell agreed to do A Good Year after witnessing Scott’s sniffy manner towards the French people. ‘Ridley has had a house in Provence for the last 15 years, therefore the story of the Anglo-Franco dynamic is something that he knows absolutely.
‘In talking to Ridley he will casually abuse French people without even being consciously aware that he’s doing it in an English manner, just as my French friends will casually abuse the English in the same way. As an outsider and a New Zealander born in Australia this to me was very funny. I wanted to examine that dynamic because this is two countries that share so much more common ground than they’ll care to admit.
‘Yes, there’s a different language but there’s a sensibility and an understanding of life in both countries that is very similar, though neither would ever admit that. There’s been many times they’ve been each other’s strongest and closest ally.’
Russell and Scott’s exhausting work ethic hardly helped bridge the gaps, though, with Russell claiming, ‘Oh, the French crew were a little perturbed by Ridley and me because we tend to work at a certain speed, and have a “The day has started, let’s get into it” sort of attitude, you know? And I think after the first five days of shooting, the crew representative talked to the producer and said, “If these guys keep working at this pace, they’re going to kill us!”
‘We hadn’t really noticed that everybody was starting to freak out, that 45 to 50 set-ups a day wasn’t their normal pace. We had a great relationship with the crew eventually, it just took a little understanding.
Another reason was that his character’s love of wine aped Russell’s yearning for it too. He is a big appreciator of fine wine, with thousands of carefully vetted bottles housed in his ranch. Not surprising really for a man who grew up in a family that had a catering business and owned pubs.
Russell remembers one encounter where his expertise was needed, when he and Gladiator co-star Connie Nielsen went for a meal at a top restaurant in London to celebrate the beginning of the filming of the Roman epic. They decided to splash out on a wine that was made in the same year they were born. ‘This particular wine was Australian and, when it was opened and brought to the table, you could smell from two feet away that it was corked,’ Russell recollected. Forty-five minutes later, the waiter finally relented.
The film was a reunion for him and Ridley Scott. Not that Ridley hadn’t wanted his leading man to star in some of the other films he had directed. ‘He asked me to do Black Hawk Down but I had just done a movie where there was a helicopter in the background (Proof of Life) and I wasn’t interested. Then he wanted me to do Kingdom of Heaven, but I was in the middle of doing something else and said, “You’ll have to wait a year,” and he was like, “Well, screw you!”’
‘We’re really heavily connected now,’ Russell said in another interview. ‘We have a connection in aesthetics. We have a connection in work ethic. We have a connection in our senses of humour. He knows the thing that no one gets in articles: I’m a great lieutenant. I work for the boss.’
Scott said of his leading man, ‘The Cary Grant character is hard to find today. Not too many actors can actually pull that off. The original Cary Grant was remarkable in that that’s who he was. Although he did comedy, he was always trying to play drama, and no one would let him. And thank God. Russell crosses that border because he can do anything.’
It must have irked the actor to hear countless questions about swapping drama for a comedy. ‘If somebody is familiar with all the films that I’ve done, then they know there’s a gay, football-playing plumber in The Sum of Us and there’s the ice-skating sheriff in Mystery, Alaska. Comedy is not a place that I haven’t been to – it’s probably a full third of all the films that I’ve done.’
The film has more than a whiff of summer holiday about it – an accusation that was hardly denied by its cast members. ‘It’s just playing silly buggers with your old mate for 12 weeks in Provence. I mean, that’s a hell of a good gig, that.’
French critics were quick to slam the film for reinforcing rural French stereotypes. ‘Appalling from start to finish, A Good Year collapses under clichés of an ochre Luberon made for a loaded Anglo-Saxon elite,’ sneered Liberation.
Even Rupert Murdoch blasted the film, calling it flop during a shareholders meeting. Claiming that it would result in a $20 million loss for Twentieth Century Fox, he said, ‘You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.’
Talking about the film’s rather vitriolic reception, Scott remarked during an interview in 2007, ‘I think Russell did brilliantly in A Good Year. He and I loved that film and Fox loved it, and then they didn’t know what to do and we got beaten up. Russell got beaten up mercilessly, which I thought was disgraceful because I genuinely thought we had done a good movie about a man in transition which is also quite funny. And what’s really irritating and annoying is that I kept getting told later by actors, journalists, people outside of the industry, how much they enjoyed it. So anyway, fuck ’em. It was a good film.’
In another interview he said, ‘We basically got fundamentally beaten up mercilessly by the British press and French press. At the end of the day, you can’t give a shit. All you can do is actually be your own critic. That’s key. Doing what we do, you have to be your own critic and judge and adjudicate as to what you do and how it turned out. How it turned out, I look at it and I’m very happy about it. Actually I was thrilled with this and the process was really great. Apart from that, it was great fun.’
The film will always hold a special memory for Russell, as his second son was conceived at the French chapel used as one of the film’s locations. In fact the mayor of Bonnieux offered Tennyson Crowe honorary citizenship. He said, ‘It would give us great pleasure if one day, during a trip to France, they stop by Bonnieux so we can make their baby an honorary citizen.’