Appropriately enough, My Talks With Dean Spanley began life at a dinner party, almost eight years ago. New Zealand-born producer Matthew Metcalfe was visiting a friend, when he slapped a short script on the table, penned by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp (best known for Rob Roy), and asked Metcalfe to take a look. It was an adaptation of My Talks With Dean Spanley, a novella by Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, published back in 1936. Metcalfe read the script, and thought it was amazing, but it was fifty pages long and there wasn’t really anything that could be done with it from a commercial point of view.
While many novellas lend themselves automatically to feature film adaptation, My Talks With Dean Spanley was structured around a series of dinners between the titular Dean and the story’s narrator, Henslowe Fisk, during which the former recounts his life as a dog in a previous existence. That is where the book begins and ends, but to expand the story Metcalfe and Sharp decided there had to be a reason why Fisk was continuing with his dinners with the Dean. Finally they concluded that maybe he was doing it because he wants to understand something important to him – that he was reaching out. That’s when the idea of the father came up.
Enter the character of Horatio Fisk, who had not featured in Lord Dunsany’s original. As Sharp’s script reflects, it’s his strained relationship with his son, the narrator, which helps form the emotional arc of the film. Thus reincarnation is swapped for reconciliation. It now reflected the situation where every father has, at some point, struggled to understand his son, while every son has struggled to understand his father. It was about how sons feel when their fathers don’t say they approve of them, or they appreciate them, or that they love them, or that they think they’re worthy. It’s about how fathers seem to struggle to communicate this to their sons, and how sons don’t feel they can pull their fathers up on this.
In November 2006 Metcalfe received a copy of Sharp’s script – still missing the final thirty or so pages but now definitely shaped like a feature – and decided to proceed. With the title now shortened to Dean Spanley, Metcalfe teamed up with UK producer Alan Harris and decided to set up an Anglo-New Zealand co-production to fund the film. The next few months were spent finding the finances, while Harris and Metcalfe decided on who should direct Dean Spanley.
Metcalfe felt very strongly that Dean Spanley should be told by someone who understood families. As much as it is a comedy, and it is wry, dry and acerbic, and eccentric, it is also possessed of a lot of heart. It was decided to go with the New Zealand-raised director Toa Fraser, an emerging talent whose 2006 debut, No.2, won the prestigious Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and which revealed someone who really understood human beings and the way they communicate.
Sent the script, Fraser read it and responded immediately. But for a script so dialogue-driven, he knew the casting process would be critical. From the outset he stated that he didn’t want to make it without a very good cast, and he got his wish, drawing on the crème-de-la-crème of talent from New Zealand, Australia and Britain. The first on board was Bryan Brown, the veteran Australian-born star of such films as Cocktail and Gorillas in the Mist. He was cast as the Australian entrepreneur Wrather, who befriends Henslowe Fisk and helps him lure the Dean into further revelatory dinners. In Brown’s words: ‘He can hustle up things. He calls himself a middle man or a facilitator. In other words, he intends to do well and he’s happy to get in and graft.’
At this point, the attention turned to the casting of Horatio Fisk. Metcalfe, along with Harris and Fraser, decided to ‘dare to dream’ and send it to eight-time Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole, who had also worked with Bryan Brown twenty-five years previously. Months went by, and Metcalfe was actually filming a documentary in Northern Iraq when he managed to listen to his voicemails through a satellite phone; there was the hoped-for message: ‘Peter is interested. He really likes the script. Is it still on offer…?’
As for O’Toole, reading Dean Spanley, and being reminded of its source writer, Lord Dunsany, was a blast from the past: ‘I’d not heard of him for fifty years. I looked through his credits, and I remembered him for three works. I knew him as a short story writer and I knew him as a playwright, but not for fifty years had I even heard his name. An amazing man, as we now know – and a great chess champion!’ He was also impressed with Alan Sharp’s adaptation, calling it ‘a most unusual script. It’s different. I can’t compare it with anything – except it’s a sophisticated comedy of a high level.’ O’Toole loved his time on the set, and summed up the story thus: ‘Take away all the occult, all the transmigration, and what it is, is a father and a son who are estranged by events. It is truly just a reconciliation – and very beautiful and on a simple human level.’
For Fraser the chance to work with O’Toole, who was Oscar-nominated for his lead role in Roger Michell’s Venus, was an intimidating task he took to with relish. Fraser described him as ‘a man who is at the very peak of his capabilities. He knows completely what he can do with his face, with his voice, with his body, with his heart. You can whisper one word in his ear and it changes his performance completely. He can just do that. It gives him an idea and sends him spinning to a different nuanced performance that’s really exciting, but at the same time keeps very faithful to making sure the scene and story works.’
For Jeremy Northam, he saw his character’s journey in slightly different terms. ‘I suppose he thinks he’s doing something in order to lift his father out of his gloom, the stasis that he’s in. But actually, the son is in his own gloom. He’s in his own situation that he’s trying to resolve. A lot of people, certainly by the time they reach a certain stage in life, have fairly complex relationships with their parents, if they’re still around. But it seems that parents generally of a certain age don’t say to their kids what they think of them. It’s very easy for people to get crossed wires and the offspring to think that they’re not cared for perhaps. And it’s very easy for the parents to think that they’re detested by the children. I think that’s at the nub of their relationship.’
As the narrator of the piece, it meant that Northam was in virtually every scene – and was required to be on set for every moment of the 36-day shoot. With most of his lines spoken as voiceover, it meant Northam had less dialogue to learn than some of his peers, so he found his role a very reactive part.
Concurrent to the casting of Northam was the crucial selection of who to play Dean Spanley. Metcalfe says that there was only one name they ever talked about: Sam Neill. They never actually discussed another name and were unsure what they would have done if they didn’t have him. Yet according to Harris, the New Zealand-raised star of such prestige projects as Jurassic Park and The Piano was not easy to get on board. He turned them down a couple of times, but they just kept going back at him.
In the end, Neill decided to take on the role, presumably – as an owner of three working vineyards himself – taken by the idea that Dean Spanley always begins his canine recollections after two glasses of the Hungarian sweet wine, imperial Tokay. It also undoubtedly helped that, not unlike his character, Neill is also a dog lover, owning a Staffordshire bull terrier of whom he is inordinately fond. It certainly helped with his preparation: ‘What I’ve drawn on is embedded in myself: a familiarity with odd people and dogs!’
The biggest challenge for Neill was learning the lines. There was as much dialogue in this one film as he’d done in all the last five years. He recalls: ‘It was very unusual in that respect, in that it’s very dialogue heavy. It’s all about ideas and stories.’ In the final scene, for example, in which Dean Spanley recounts a crucial day in the life of his previous incarnation, he had to learn lines spanning some nineteen pages.
With the cast in place, Fraser and Metcalfe set about gathering the key heads-of-department. Not unsurprisingly, Fraser favoured a series of vastly experienced men and women, led by cinematographer Leon Narbey (Whale Rider), with whom he had worked on No.2. Also recruited was costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux, a three-time BAFTA TV nominee who had just come off Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. For production design, he chose the Auckland-born Andrew McAlpine, who has worked with numerous top directors including Danny Boyle (The Beach), Spike Lee (Clockers) and Jane Campion (The Piano).
Filming began in November 2007, in several locations around Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, including Elm Hill in Norwich as well as the city’s Cathedral’s cloisters. By late January 2008, the production moved to New Zealand where the second unit material (scenes where Dean Spanley recalls his past life) was shot.
Unsurprisingly, numerous stately homes in England were taken full advantage of. With scenes also shot at Holkham Hall and Peckover House, one of the key locations was Elveden Hall, near Thetford, which has featured in numerous films, including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The setting for the lecture where all the characters first meet – a mansion house belonging to the cricket-mad Nawab of Ranjiput – it required a bowling strip to be built in the great hall. Fraser says that the hard thing was keeping Peter away from the cricket ball. He actually recommended the guys who play the extras in the scene and put the director in touch with the MCC.
It wasn’t just Fraser’s ability to work with crews from the other side of the world that was called upon. One of the principal reasons he was brought in is because his background in theatre. He is a playwright by profession so very good with actors. Utilising those skills, in regard to working with the cast, was very important, yet it was crucial – and the ambition of the team – to make such a dialogue-driven piece as cinematic as possible.
Getting the tone right was the biggest challenge. Bringing what Harris calls ‘an adult fairy tale’ to the screen meant striking a delicate balance between the serious and the comic. It is a surreal story, but they played it very, very straight. The characters are talking about reincarnation, something that is very bizarre, and they’re believing it. What the film-makers tried to do, in regard to the way they shot it, was to lure the audience into a heightened sense of reality, so that they’re more ready to accept this surreal idea that there is a Dean who is actually talking about his previous life as a dog.
As to the question of who the audience is for Dean Spanley, when they first started putting the project together it was aimed at the older generation. But as the film progressed it became clear that this is the kind of story that younger viewers could actually find very interesting. They could be quite enthralled by the subject matter, a man talking about his life as a dog. Yet if it’s anything, Metcalfe believes it’s the central relationship between the Fisks that will grab viewers. ‘Film and literature is filled with father-son stories,’ he concludes. ‘Star Wars is a father-son story, as crazy as it sounds. And that’s what Dean Spanley is ultimately about – a father and a son bridging the gulf.’