A Fish Called Wanda (1988) with writer/star John Cleese
Comments on the Film
On Charles Crichton
Of all the reasons for doing this
movie, the greatest was Charlie Crichton. Charlie, who is sadly no longer with
us, was a really wonderful director. He started cutting film in 1932 and he
always announced that he was an editor before Hitler came to power, but I never
knew quite what the connection was. In 1946, after 14 years of editing, he
started directing and became one of the great Ealing comedy directors, and I
nearly worked with Charlie in 1967 or 68. The producer, for some extraordinary
reason, wouldn't touch Charlie and didn't want him on the movie, so I walked
away from it. I said to Charlie – who was the most expert director I ever
worked with – "We'll do something one day," and my God, how many years later,
19 years later we did work together. We started by meeting up in France and we sat
at a little table by the swimming pool drinking coffee to work out the story,
and Charlie, if you can believe it, celebrated his 77th birthday
while we were shooting. He was nominated both for an Oscar and by the
Director's Guild of America, so it was the most extraordinary swansong. After
this he was offered a couple of movies but I think he knew this had been a good
experience so he turned down all offers, and instead he bought a place in
Scotland where he could spent his time fly-fishing. He was famously irascible –
it was never serious, just his way of communicating – and the place in Scotland
was called Grumbles.
On dialogue
This scene probably contains one of the best-known
lines in the movie, when Kevin says "I'm DISAPPOINTED!" It's an interesting
kind of line because it's almost impossible to write that when you're sitting
at a desk. It comes out in the course of rehearsing. One of the things I was
able to do with Kevin was to stop for ten days before we got anywhere near
shooting the movie, and I went through the movie with him, all the scenes, just
to see what he would come up with. He came up with some wonderful lines – like
this one – and also some wonderful physical stuff, like sniffing under the
armpit. All of that came about because we were very loose, very relaxed, we had
lots of time and we were just able to play. Jamie also contributed a lot of lines;
I was sending her early drafts of the movie, particularly asking if there was
anything colloquial from an American point of view, because I don't feel I
write very good American dialogue. So Kevin and Jamie were constantly phoning
me and faxing me with suggestions; in fact, I'm rather proud of the fact that I
think 13 different people contributed to the dialogue.
On Ken's stutter
One of the things I started with when
I was trying to work out Michael's character is that I simply had the idea of
the scene at the end of the movie. In fact, I think that was the very first
idea I had for the movie, of someone with a stutter trying to get information
out and not being able to. The reason I knew that would be beautifully played
by Michael is that his father had quite a stutter, and he was able therefore to
observe it throughout his childhood. There's a very obvious way to do a stutter
that I guess most actors would do, which wouldn't be right and wouldn't be
funny. It's the little sort of subterfuges, the little tactics, that people
with stutters use to try and hide it that Michael knew about and was able to
incorporate in his performance.
On playing a romantic lead
I have to tell you that
this is the first time in my entire life that I had played a proper romantic
scene, for obvious reasons. But on this occasion I was playing one, mainly
because I had written it. I had no idea how to play this kind of scene and
Jamie was very helpful. But there's a moment when I used a little trick I'd
seen in a movie called Outrageous Fortune, when I was very impressed with the
way one of the actors indicated to the audience that he had fallen in love with
someone. It was a particular look at the other actor's mouth that did it, and I
actually pinched that moment. I think it works reasonably well.
On loosening up his acting style
In comedy, I believe
in endless, endless, endless rehearsal. Do it again and again, because each
time a little smoothness creeps in, you discover something else, you find a new
rhythm. Jamie said to me that it isn't like that with a romantic scene, and she
said she didn't want to rehearse this. She would catch me rehearsing my lines
in the corner and she'd wave my finger at me and say 'No'. So for the first
time in my life I suddenly found that acting is not about this strict rhythm
that comedy demands – like I had no idea she was going to pick up the wig there
– and it was rather fun. When you're playing comedy normally, the demands of
the timing are so great it sometimes seems to me like there's a huge metronome
at the back of my head, just clicking. I've got to do everything on the click –
line on two clicks, another line three clicks, turn head on another click – and
I can get it very grooved. I can reproduce almost exactly the same performance
again and again, and it surprises people but I am a very technical performer.
So going into these scenes with Jamie having no idea how we were going to play
them, I found that intensely liberating. I was suddenly released from the
metronome and was just able to play in the moment.
On writing farce
This is the beginning of one of my
favourite sequences in the movie because I've always had a terrible weakness
for farce. I should add for 'good' farce, because there's nothing worse than
bad farce. Bad farce is where none of the characters are believable at all. But
I do love it when relatively sane, ordinary people get into situations where
they are maximally stressed and start behaving more and more oddly. It's one of
my favourite forms of comedy, and I think some of my happiest nights have been
spent at the National Theatre in London watching Feydeau farces. When I started
to write this sequence I made a map, almost a model, of the set and I got some
little figures to start moving them around. In fact, at one point I had Michael
Palin's character Ken following these guys on his little moped and he then got
into the house in the big farce sequence, but that didn't quite work out
unfortunately. It would have been wonderful if it had, but sometimes you just
find if you go over all logical possibilities that certain apparently good
ideas just don't lead anywhere, and it's rather sad when that happens.
On Ken's attempts to kill the old lady
The idea of
Michael's character Ken trying to kill the old lady came to me as the last funny
structural idea that I had, and I reached it by pure logic. I could not think
what Michael was up to in the middle of the movie, and I remember my wife at
the time Barbara and I took a house in Malibu to get away from the English
winter. I sat there for two weeks and thought, 'What is Michael Palin's
character going to do in the middle of the movie?' and I slowly got there by
starting from the fact that he would be trying to kill the old lady. Then I
thought that every time he tried to kill her something else will happen; then I
thought "What's he going to kill instead? it's obviously a pet"; then I got to
dogs; then I thought that was much funnier and more ironic if Michael was an
animal rights activist. So the whole thing was constructed entirely logically.
One of the things I often say to people, when I'm doing little comedy classes
for students, is that very frequently the funny idea is inherent in what you've
already got. You don't necessarily have to have a new idea, you just have to
examine as closely as possible the nature of what you already have and try to
see if you might be missing it.
On Otto torturing Ken
This scene caused quite a lot of
trouble. When Kevin started to push French fries, or chips as we say in
England, up Michael's nose, the audience became very, very distressed. When
Kevin put the apple in Michael's mouth they really started to worry about
whether Michael could breathe properly, which is extraordinary because it is a
movie and the whole thing consists of a number of cuts. This is the man who was
trying to kill an old woman for half of the movie – but no, that doesn't
matter, they're more worried that Michael couldn't breathe very well. When I
saw these scenes in rushes, particularly when he had the apple in his mouth, I
have never laughed so much in my life. I thought this was quite simply the
funniest sequence I had ever seen, and it was a considerable disappointment
when we started playing it to audiences, to discover that it distressed them
and we had to keep shortening it. They were even worried about the chip up the
nose! I remember doing some publicity photos in New York after the movie opened
where I had chips put up my nose, because I said I didn't want any of the
actors doing a stunt that I was not prepared to do myself. I suppose it's
slightly disgusting, but I do love the way they play this. It's absolutely
insane and it's completely real.
Bits and Pieces
One of the things that annoys me usually when I'm
watching movies is that they put the names of the starring actors up very
frequently over other people. So I deliberately here wanted to do these little
thumbnail sketches in the right order and with the right names up.
Charlie and I made a big mistake here. When we went to
the close-up of the squashed dog, Charlie had actually got a bucket of innards
from a local butcher and had lovingly arranged them around the dog. When we
started previews the audience absolutely froze and the laughter stuck in their
throat, so we went and shot that close-up which doesn't even look like a dog if
you look at it for more than three seconds, it looks as though it's made out of
a raffia mat. Anyway, it didn't bother the audience anymore so they went on
laughing.
A little joke there that of course Cary Grant had a
real, non-stage name of Archie Leach, so I popped it in. I thought it would
amuse about 25 people, but to my amazement about 8 million people got it.
Incidentally, Jamie thought I was a rotten kisser, and
I did point out to her that I was trying to kiss in character, because I don't think
Archie is a very sexy man...whereas I, of course, am enormously sexy.
When I sat down with Charlie on the first day I said, "I want to have a scene where a man with a really bad stutter is trying to tell
someone some very important information but he just can't get it out" and he
said, "Alright, we can do that, and I've got one scene I want to do. I want to
run someone over with a steamroller." So those were the two scenes we started
with.
Final Thoughts
I haven't watched this for many years and I have to
say I got some good smiles watching it again. It's so lovely to be with people
you enjoy, and so nice to see them again. It was a very happy production, we
did it in 52 days, plus the reshoots, and Charlie was so efficient he used to
finish at half past six every night, so nobody got too tired and we all had a
really good time. I think that contributes to the good spirit that you see up
there on the screen.