Iris tells the story of the great English novelist Iris Murdoch — of her love of life, her relationship with John Bayley, and their struggle to cope with Alzheimer's. The film has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, for Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslet, and has garnered some outstanding reviews.Here, together with exclusive extracts from the script, is an excerpt from writer and director Richard Eyre's introduction to the screenplay.
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The genesis of the film, at least as far as I was concerned, was in March of 1999. I was sitting with Judi Dench in a diner at the corner of 8th Avenue and 43rd Street in New York when I first heard about Iris, which is not, of course, when I first heard of Iris. That would have been round about 1963, when I read a novel by Iris Murdoch (there were to be twenty-six) for the first time. Coincidentally it was her first novel, Under the Net, and what struck me then is what strikes me now about her writing: it buzzed with a wayward energy and a prodigality of ideas. Above all, it was like nothing else I’d read.
Judi had just won an Oscar for her performance in Shakespeare in Love and we were rehearsing for a Broadway show: Amy’s View by Dave Hare. We discussed her future and she revealed that she’d been asked to be in a film to be based on John Bayley’s two books about his wife, Iris Murdoch, their life together and her death from Alzheimer’s disease. ‘Are they looking for a director?’ I said, ever opportunistic. ‘I’ve no idea, Rich, no idea.’
I discovered that the producer of the putative film was John Calley, who has the manners and manner of an English gentleman, which he combines with the distinctly ungentlemanly chore of running a major Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures. He was indeed looking for a director and a writer, but at that stage neither bore my name.
Of his books John Bayley has said:
‘Iris would have approved.’ I believe she would.
Several months passed during which I lobbied through all available channels and, to my surprise, in November of 1999 John Calley asked me to write and direct Iris. ‘Why did you ask me?’ I said. ‘You know about these things,’ he replied. The ‘things’ to which he referred were not so much film-making (even though he knew and liked several films I’d made for TV), or even directing actors in difficult roles (well, I have directed Hamlet twice), but a ‘thing’ of which I would rather have been entirely ignorant: Alzheimer’s disease.
Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997 and John Bayley looked after her until he was unable to cope; she died three weeks after she was moved to a specialised nursing home. My mother also had Alzheimer’s disease and she died in 1992, but unlike Iris Murdoch, whose decline was over a period of two years, my mother’s was over twenty.
It was partly out of curiosity about his experience of Alzheimer’s that I read John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir when it was first published. Expecting a bleak chronicle of the decline of a great mind, I was unprepared for the enchantment of a moving and humorous narrative that dealt as much with their lives before the illness as after. The second volume, Iris and the Friends, charted her further decline and her death, and in addition gave an account of his childhood and adolescence.
John Bayley has been criticised for writing about his wife’s illness. Leaving aside the fact that, like all good writers, he has successfully risen above journalistic voyeurism by transmuting experience into art, no one who has lived with an Alzheimer’s sufferer could condemn his project. Only they could know the weariness of dressing and undressing, bathing and feeding the Alzheimer’s victim, or the despair and exasperation engendered by broken nights, incomprehensible sounds, unpredictable moods and inexpressible needs. And all the while watching, watching the loved one simply fade away. Of his books John Bayley has said: ‘Iris would have approved.’ I believe she would.
In mapping out the screenplay we were clear what we wanted: to tell a story of a relationship in which love was challenged and yet endured, a love story which explored the paradox of how it is possible to remain separate in a marriage and yet for the sum of that marriage to be greater than its parts. And we were clear enough what we wanted to avoid: a bio-film that itemised their lives with dogged veracity, or an illness-of-the-week film that claimed the sanctity of victimhood for its protagonist.*
INT. CHARLBURY ROAD. BEDROOM. NIGHT
At the sink YOUNG JOHN scrubs away ineffectually at a disgusting pan and hangs it up. YOUNG IRIS brings it down again and hands it to him.YOUNG IRISWhen you know everything about me, then I'll be dead. He was a professor of Ancient History.
YOUNG JOHNThey have a malign influence on you I think. They all have, all your ‘friends’.
YOUNG IRISHe’s a teacher, a master of thought.
YOUNG JOHNYou talk, do you, you master thought together?
YOUNG IRISWe make love, yes, but that’s not the important thing.
YOUNG JOHN hangs the still-dirty pan up again. It drips.
YOUNG IRIS views him with great tenderness and some regret.YOUNG JOHNI feel as if I’m standing in a l-long l-line of suitors waiting for a kind word.
YOUNG IRISI’ll always give you a kind word. You must accept me as I am.
YOUNG JOHNAnd I am to be kept in my box or not kept at all.
YOUNG IRISJust keep tight hold of me and it will be all right.*
I wanted the film to be enjoyed by people who had never read a word of Iris Murdoch, heard her name spoken or seen a photograph of her, not because I didn’t want people to celebrate the achievements of her life or to mourn her death, but simply in the hope that people could appreciate this film without bringing special baggage on board. So we agreed that in telling the story we had to give the audience all necessary information about her work and her fame by sleight of hand or by disguised exposition.
We adopted John Bayley’s scheme of interweaving the stories of young and old love: the two tenses, present and past, would converge along the narrative spine, underscored by the decay of language and the loss of memory. We decided that water would play as large a part in the film as it had in John Bayley’s narrative: in swimming sequences, as a medium to express the unconscious, and as a device that linked past and present; the film would begin and end underwater. Above all we knew this: it had to be unsentimental, it had to be funny, and it had to be moving. ‘The job,’ said a writer friend, ‘is to make the audience cry.’
John Calley decided that Sony couldn’t make the film. However, he granted me the right to reclaim the ‘property’ — our screenplay and the book rights — if I could find another sponsor. To cut short a tale with more flashbacks, parallel action and back stories than most film scripts, the film was eventually produced by Scott Rudin and Robert Fox with five executive producers: Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack of Mirage Films, Guy East of Intermedia, David Thompson of BBC Films and Harvey Weinstein, the film’s US distributor. To all of them I’m inordinately grateful.
Several months followed the decision of Sony to withdraw from the project during which, as the producers engaged in a flurry of negotiations, the writers continued to absorb a cascade of notes, principally (and significantly) from Scott and Anthony, but each producing entity — plus their advisors, consultants, script editors and assistants — made contributions. I noted every recommendation, distilled the notes and divvied up the work to be done with Charles.
By the end of the year the shooting schedule had shrunk from forty-five days to thirty-nine and the budget had shrunk to $6m, a huge sum by any reasonable standards, but making films doesn’t adhere to any reasonable standards. To save money we had to start cutting scenes or re-conceiving them on a less lavish scale. We relocated a scene that we had set in the black hills and fields of lava of Lanzarote, which offered sun, sea, and a massive contrast to English light, to the most English of seaside locations: Southwold beach. Iris and John never went there in reality, but the scenes worked at least as well, if not better, in their new location, and we created fictional facts. Shortly before the film was released in the UK, the travel section of The Times recommended Southwold as a desirable place to visit: ‘Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley were regular visitors to this Suffolk resort, renowned for its pebbly beach and pastel-coloured beach huts.’
By the time the film was shot we were on DRAFT 14 of the screenplay. We had read most of Iris Murdoch’s work, spoken to John Bayley and friends of Iris, and absorbed a number of anecdotes about both of them. (One will suffice: a friend told me he had been at a lunch party at which Iris and John were expected. They arrived over an hour late in their Morris Traveller, with JOHN and IRIS stickers papered over the top of the windscreen. ‘I’m s-s-so s-s-sorry we’re late, we h-h-had to stop for a f-f-fuck in a lay-by,’ said John allegedly.) We had both met Iris — Charles in her heyday, I in the summer of 1997 when I was a visiting lecturer at John Bayley’s college in Oxford. She said to me: ‘And what do you do?’ I told her. ‘And what do you do?’ she asked. (We wrote a version of this scene and even filmed it, but it didn’t survive beyond the first cut of the film.)*
EXT. GUN HILL. BEACH. SOUTHWOLD. DAY
IRIS runs down a path to a pebble beach with gathering momentum like a child’s toy released, clutching JOHN’S notebook and pen in her hand. She pelts out from behind the beach huts on to the blustery beach. JOHN carries a small holdall containing not much more than their toothbrushes and night clothes. IRIS drops the pen. JOHN lets go of her to pick it up and IRIS makes off for the sea.
JANET, EMMA and PHILLIDA come out of a hut and wave to them.
IRIS is making the noise of the sea on the shingle, as if trying to say ‘sea’, still clutching the notebook. JOHN puts down the holdall, takes off his cap, wipes his face, puts it on again.
JOHNI thought we’d walk, calm her down. She won’t let go of my notebook, it’s a good sign. She has an idea ... for a novel ...
PHILLIDA looks doubtful at JOHN’S wilful optimism.
IRIS sits on the shingle and watches the sea come up to her feet. She tears a page of the notebook out and puts it down beside her, chooses a pebble and puts it carefully on the page ...*
In spite of the research and our desire to be faithful to John’s account of the events of his life with Iris, by the time I came to shoot the film, the ‘truth’ had become relative. What Iris and John said to each other in the film had sometimes been taken from John Bayley’s books, but just as often the dialogue — perhaps as much as half of it — had been invented. Events had been compressed or transposed, characters had been conflated and, as in any description of an intimate relationship, behaviour had been guessed at. The actors — Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville — although drawing on available documentary evidence of film, photographs and memoirs, interpreted the characters in the screenplay rather than attempting to be facsimiles of the originals. Their performances, which still seem miraculous to me in spite of my proximity to them, have an autonomous life, a truth of their own.
I don’t feel we have traduced Iris Murdoch’s life and character and nor did John Bayley when he read the script and saw the film. ‘I shed more tears over the film than I did in life, in a way, just because it represented what it was like,’ he said. ‘Obviously, one’s conscious that the film is a work of art, and a work of art can move one more than things do in life.’ So while being true to the facts of Iris’s life and to her spirit, the film is not a biography nor is it fiction; it occupies a poetic territory somewhere between the two, which is why if I had to find an alternative title for the film it would be this: Enduring Love.*
EXT. BEACH. SOUTHWOLD. DAY
... a line of notebook pages, each with one pebble on it. IRIS sits alongside the pages, looking out to sea.
JANETIris, would you sign your new book for me, please? Like postcards, get them done at once or you don’t.
(opening the book)
Please?
IRIS not sure what to do. She closes the book and looks at it without understanding. She might be about to throw it into the sea but JOHN takes it quickly. IRIS picks all the pebbles up from the pages and they flutter away in the wind.*
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for finding this extract from Iris: A Screenplay on the Bloomsbury Magazine website.