Filming the Unfilmable

1 A FILM IN THE CAREER OF CASPER WREDE

According to Casper Wrede’s documents, issued by his Helsinki parish before he enrolled as a student at the University of Helsinki, he was born on 8 February 1929 in Lappee, Eastern Karelia (near the town of Lappeenranta), to a wealthy aristocratic Swedish family.[44] Soon the family moved to the neighbouring city of Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia).[45] As a result of the Winter War of 1939-40, Viipuri came under the Soviet jurisdiction. Shortly before that, the Wredes fled the city, first to their relatives in Norway, and then, on the eve of the German occupation of Norway, to Sweden. In autumn 1940, the Wredes returned to Finland and settled in Helsinki. Casper was accepted into the third year at Tölö Svenska Samskola, a Swedish gymnasium in Helsinki. It has been suggested that in 1944, at the age of fifteen, he served, apparently as a volunteer, in an anti-aircraft defence unit in Helsinki, but there are no documents to verify this.[46] In 1946, he graduated from Tölö Svenska Samskola with the highest mark (laudatur). His favourite subject was history,[47] but his school education certificate reveals that he was also good at languages, arts and sport. In autumn 1946, Casper Wrede enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, but did not sit exams for any courses. On 22 April 1947, he enrolled as a Faculty of Arts student at the University of Gothenburg for the Spring semester of 1947 (matriculation number 1746/4988) but did not pay his fees and did not re-enrol in the autumn.[48] Afterwards he worked as a free lance journalist in Norway, where he met his mentor Amund Hønningstad (1908-72) – a translator of Fromm and Nietzsche into Norwegian and the editor of the Samfunnsliv (Society Life) journal. Hønningstad

saw our civilisation as being at the end of a 2,000-year cycle spiritually; <…> that the power of Christianity was now declining. That its hold as the spiritual regulator was weakening. That we were living in a time which would become increasingly degenerate as we lost all sense of that wise voice within which told us how to live. <…> He believed that as one spiritual impulse declined, another was being born: degeneration was always followed by regeneration. A Martian visiting Britain in February would see a grey, barren land. If you told him that within three months <…> everything would be transformed he would ask, ‘But where is all this going to come from?’ The answer would be that it is already happening, under the earth. <…> in February, the activity under the ground is phenomenal, preparing for spring. Then when it comes to fruition it does so suddenly and dramatically. <…> Amund taught that this was where we now stood. We could not see what was to come but we could be sure that it would come. Our job was to hold on to all that remained powerful and positive from the declining civilisation, to keep the ground fertile for the new impulse when it came. <…> What Casper wanted to know was what he should do, what anyone could do, to further this end . Amund’s reply was astonishing. The power to change things lies <…> rarely in so-called leaders in the political world. Politicians follow what is actually taking place, they maintain power by gauging what the Zeitgeist demands. The people who have always led have been the artists. They have been the visionaries, and, through their art, have directly influenced the hearts and minds of civilisations. In our time one art form was more important than any other: the theatre. With the decline of religion, theatre was the only place where people came together in a community and experienced the mysteries. <…> The two men, who knew nothing of the theatrical world, did their research. England was the centre of world drama. Casper must go and study theatre in England.[49]

While in Norway, Wrede made contact with theatre circles, started publishing on theatrical topics and was even asked to direct a play for the Oslo Student Theatre. As he did not have any professional training or experience, he declined the offer. Nevertheless, his interest in theatre was awoken. The fact that his aunt, Gerda Wrede, was an actress and a director at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, also helped. In 1950, Wrede entered the Old Vic School in London, having been told that this was ‘the best thing in the world of its kind. If you want to learn about the theatre, go there’.[50] Among his tutors were the French actor and drama theorist Michel Saint-Denis (1897-1971) who revolutionised English theatre in the 1930s; the influential theatre manager and teacher George Devine (1910-66); and the school’s director Glen Byam Shaw (1904-86), one of Britain’s greatest Shakespeare experts.

Many more candidates had applied for entry to this prestigious new theatre school than could be accommodated, and what chance had a Finn with no theatrical experience at all? But Glen Byam Shaw was interested in military matters, and in artillery in particular, and on Wrede’s mentioning that he had served in the artillery <…>, Byam Shaw questioned him closely for half an hour on the subject and then told him that he was accepted.[51]

At the Old Vic school, where Wrede studied directing, he met his future wife, the actress Dilys Hamlett (1928-2002),[52] as well as James Maxwell (1929-95) who played the Captain in Ivan Denisovich, and the designer Richard Negri (1927-99) who later turned the derelict Cotton Exchange building in Manchester into the Royal Exchange Theatre – one of Wrede’s companies – ‘the most distinguished and acclaimed theatre outside London, some would say superior to any in London, including the National’.[53] When after one year, four of the new students were elected to continue their studies, Wrede was one of them. At the end of every year the students were obliged to direct a play with other students engaged as actors. Wrede's first work was a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

Upon leaving the school in 1952, Wrede directed various productions at the Edinburgh Festival and for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), including Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Marlowe’s Edward II and Euripides’s Hippolytus.[54] In 1955 and 1956 respectively, Wrede directed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna for a festival in Varberg, Sweden. In June 1956, at the Victoria Palace in London, Wrede co-directed (with George Hall) a musical comedy called Jubilee Girl by Alexander Kevin (tunes) and Robin Fordyce and David Rogers (lyrics), about a country girl who arrives in London to become one of the first female secretaries.

Together with Michael Elliott (1931-84), whom he met at Oxford and who acted as assistant director on some of Wrede’s productions, he became a trainee TV director at the BBC.[55] January 1957 saw Wrede’s and Elliott’s first co-production for television theatre, at that time a fairly new cultural medium. It was Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Wrede had taken an interest in Chekhov's plays while still at the Old Vic School, analyzing Uncle Vanya and producing Three Sisters. In this TV version of Uncle Vanya, Wrede strove to stress the humorous side of the play at the expense of its tragic elements. Although the London Times found the production ‘as taut as an overstrained violin string; speeches were rattled smartly off, tea was gulped down with indecent haste, close-up followed close-up in unselective profusion’,[56] the result led to more TV assignments for both Wrede and Elliott. Shakespeare's Twelfth night, again co-produced by Wrede and Elliott, was broadcast by the BBC in March of the same year. In May 1957, Wrede and Elliott co-directed for TV The Survivors by Irwin Shaw and Peter Viertel, a drama set in the period shortly after the American Civil War. The next year saw Elliott’s and Wrede’s television adaptation of Euripides’s Women of Troy (January), followed by Laurence Olivier’s debut in TV theatre in Wrede's production of John Gabriel Borkman by Ibsen (November).

Wrede preferred to ‘work for television on a free-lance basis, thus enabling himself to have ample time to prepare for his productions. He took three months to prepare for John Gabriel Borkman’,[57] whereas a producer or director under contract may have had to do all his/her work on a play in a month or so and then be limited to only a couple of days in the studio because of the shortage of studios and camera crews.

One of Wrede’s responsibilities as a producer was directing the actors.[58] Wrede swiftly earned the reputation of ‘probably the best producer of television drama whose work has been seen in this country’.[59] He mainly worked with a classical repertoire showing little interest for the modern theatre of the absurd exemplified by Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. Wrede used to say: ‘I don’t like anti-theatre, where the subject is exhausted in advance and the dramatic power is missing. What there is left to be acted out, that is tedium and emptiness, is not enough’.[60]

In 1959, Wrede co-founded the 59 Theatre Company, characterised by a ‘fixed determination to give the public not what it is supposed to want but what it ought to want’.[61] The enterprise was bankrolled by James H. Lawrie, a vice-president of the British Bankers’ Association and a managing director of the National Film Finance Corporation.[62] For six months, the company presented Danton’s Death by Büchner, Brand by Ibsen, The Cheats of Scapin by Molière (in Thomas Otway’s seventeenth-century adaptation), The Creditors by Strindberg and The Rough and Ready Lot by Alun Owen at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and attracted national attention (the company’s versions of Danton’s Death and Brand were even televised in May and August of the same year). For a small part in Ibsen’s Brand, Wrede hired a South African actor and playwright, Ronald Harwood (b. 1934), the husband of the 59 Theatre Company’s stage manager Natasha Richie. Thus began Wrede’s collaboration with Harwood (now a renowned screenwriter, who has been awarded an Oscar for the script of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, and a CBE).[63] In April 1961, Wrede directed a television version of Harwood’s play, Private Potter (a year later turned into a film for an MGM release by very much the same creative team), about a soldier whose behaviour, on a mission to apprehend a leader of the Cypriot insurrection during the Cyprus Emergency, leads to the leader’s escape and the death of a fellow soldier. The offender, charged with disrupting the operation by screaming, claims that he screamed because he saw God. The regiment’s priest believes the claim to be genuine, while the military psychiatrist suspects that the soldier is either psychotic or has been hallucinating. Either way, the soldier has to face a court martial and a possible fifteen years in jail, as his case makes it clear that there is little room for religious faith not only in the Army but in the modern society at large.[64] For the title role, the recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) Tom Courtenay (b. 1937) was chosen.[65] This was his screen debut.[66] Both Harwood and Courtenay were to make significant contributions to the film adaptation of One Day – arguably the biggest creative effort and achievement of Wrede’s entire career, certainly as far as film and television are concerned.[67]

Oddly enough, by Wrede’s own admission, he never though he would get into films:

The power structure is too overwhelming. Yet I always loved movies. As a boy in Finland during the war one of the things that sustained me were all those wonderful American movies, the musicals, gangster stories and Westerns from the late 1930s and early 1940s. One night I remember I went to see movies in three different theatres. <…> Life was so grim and dark that <…> American pictures were the only bright spot in a boy’s life.[68]

Yet Wrede’s own films could not be further from the notions of escapism and light entertainment. When asked if he would like to direct films in the US, he replied:

<‘>Yes, <…> but not in Hollywood style<’>. Besides, explained, he’d have to come and live in order to absorb the feel and the history of the country. he expressed concern about being coerced into doing something with which he did not agree. ‘If you have a very difficult digestive system as I have for my work, you have to pick and choose very carefully, otherwise you lose what little you have’, he said. ‘A film must relate to me in every way I can think and feel’. In other words, he is not a man who feels he can do everything. He waits for specialized work. [69]

Wrede read One Day in 1964, or thereabout, in the 1963 English translation by Ralph Parker,[70] and

thought it would make a wonderful movie <…> I was attracted by the theme of confinement, of survival and of man’s indomitable will to win through against all the odds <…> But more than anything else, it is the universality of the theme that attracted me. It is not a particular story. The author makes his stand and sticks to it. There is hope for the future implicit in everything the prisoners do’.[71]

Although Wrede was instinctively dissatisfied with the quality of Parker’s translation[72] (in his adaptation, he used the 1963 Finnish translation by Markku Lahtela, and later even commissioned, for USD480.00, a new English translation of the book to Gillon Aitken, whose renditions of Pushkin’s prose he admired), he did manage, on its basis, to get Harwood interested in writing a screen version, and Courtenay, in starring in it.

For Wrede, One Day must have resonated well with Hønningstad’s ideas about the intense spiritual activity below the visibility level in the barren land, of which Solzhenitsyn himself was a prime example, having sprung up suddenly, as if out of nowhere, when Khrushchev’s Thaw came to replace the Stalinist freeze.[73] In a 1971 interview, Wrede said:

I knew it was a film I must make. It was a turning point for me. I have felt that we are in a state of transition from something towards something. But I feel we are in danger of leaving something valuable behind. We have not arrived yet and there is no certainty. But I feel that the book was one of those milestones that made you aware that you were on the way.[74]

Those less attuned to Hønningstad’s teaching doubted One Day’s suitability for a film version. In a later interview, Courtenay admitted that he had had serious misgivings about the project:

I thought it was a great book, a universal book – the prison camp is an image of life, of what we all have to do both morally and physically to survive – but I didn’t see how it could work as a film. In the end I did it for Casper. He’s very much a sort of guru to me. I’ve known him since I was virtually a little baby, well, since I was at RADA anyway, and I’ve always had enormous respect for him.[75]

For his part, Casper Wrede, who had been fascinated with neighbouring Russia ever since his childhood years, recalled in his previously unpublished 1993 autobiographical essay ‘Russia on My Mind’, kept in David Wrede’s private archive, why Solzhenitsyn’s book became such a magnet for Wrede himself and for many of those who got involved in its screen adaptation:

Nothing remains in my memory of the time when I first read Solzhenitsyn but the experience is with me still. It was a kind of homecoming <…> It was not only myself I met in meeting Ivan Denisovich. For the first time I met ordinary Russians of my own generation. For the first time I was shown – without bitterness or recrimination – life backstage at the great Soviet show. And I knew with the whole of my being that what I was shown was the truth. My guide did not only possess the necessary experience; he had the genius to convey it in the simplest and most accessible form. I only regret that the political implications of the story have obscured its universal lesson: that we are what we do; that it is not what we do but how we do it that makes us what we are. This little book created the first living bond between the Russia of the future and the people in the world outside who chose to believe in forces stronger than violence and murder. I never knew when it was that it chose me to put it into pictures. The process was remarkable: before I knew it I had been joined by all those who were needed to realise the project and the assured impossibility of the task dissolved before us and was overcome at every stage.[76]

2 COSTINGS AND FUNDING

In 1968, Wrede, whose enthusiasm about the project was ‘infectious’,[77] convinced Erik Borge, head of Norsk Film AS, to co-finance the adaptation and offer a studio and technical facilities, to the tune of USD100,000 (the other financial backer was Group W, the film division of the US Westinghouse Broadcasting Corporation, which provided USD325,000;[78] the third partner was a company called Leontes Productions Ltd, founded by Tom Courtenay to ‘engage in production of significant films he personally wants to make’.[79]) Wrede had worked as a director in Norway in the past, making a TV version of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman in 1967 and staging his Government Inspector at the National Theatre in Oslo next year (incidentally, Hønningstad contributed to both adaptations too). Some of the Norwegian actors Wrede had directed were cast in One Day. Thus, Espen Skjønberg (b. 1924) played the part of Tyurin, and Frimann Falck Clausen (1921-83), that of Senka Klevshin. They spoke accented English, which turned out to be quite appropriate, because it conveyed the international atmosphere in the labour camps, whose population was composed from people of different ethnic backgrounds. Norway was also convenient for snow scenes.

On 1 February 1969, a formal agreement was signed between Leontes Productions Ltd and Wrede, putting him in charge of the film adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as the director and producer, for a sum total of USD25,000, of which USD10,000 was paid upon signing the agreement; a further USD7,500, upon the start of the shooting; and a final USD7,500, upon the shooting’s completion. Additionally, Leontes Productions Ltd undertook to reimburse Wrede’s work-related expenses and pay him a half of the net profits of the film.

According to the rough cost estimates, sent to Wrede c/o Hønningstad at Klingenberggatte 7 in Oslo, by Peter S. Katz of Group W Films from London on 24 March 1969, the overall film budget was expected to comprise USD410,000,[80] of which the pre-production expenses amounted to USD5,000; the production staff – including the cameraman, the art director, the dubbing editor, the make-up artist, the seamstresses, the wardrobe mistress, the animal trainer and various assistants – were to be paid USD65,000 (including the Norwegian insurance and the Swedish pension); Tom Courtenay, USD15,000; and the rest of the cast, USD40,000 (double the amount to be spent on the extras, on the one hand, and on the local technical staff and equipment, on the other). The film stock would cost USD17,500. The construction of the camp and the working site would set the producers back USD50,000; the crew’s travel and living expenses, USD30,000; the soundtrack, USD2,500; and the post-production, USD8,500.

On 1 April 1969, a contract was drawn between the Leontes Production Ltd and Harwood, engaging his services as a scriptwriter for a screenplay based on Aitken’s translation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to be delivered by 1 July 1969, for USD12,500 (plus expenses if any), the first half of which was to be paid on the day when the contract was signed; and the second, in two equal instalments, on 19 September 1969 and no later than 1 November 1969 respectively.[81] The screenplay had to be approved (or otherwise) within fourteen days after its submission.

On 17 April of the same year, in his letter to Erik Borge, Peter Rawley of the London-based Creative Management Association (Wrede’s agents)[82] outlined the financial guarantees of the Norsk Film’s involvement in the project. In return for their investment, Norsk Film was to have all the income from the film’s release on the Scandinavian territories. Furthermore, up to 75% of the Norsk investment would be covered out of Westinghouse’s takings received in the first year of the film’s release in the Eastern Hemisphere. The remaining 25% of the Norsk investment would be recovered, if necessary, from the additional fees Tom Courtenay was entitled to in case Westinghouse makes 2.5 times more than their investment after the film’s world-wide release. Also, Norsk Film would receive 10% of the entire profit made out of the Eastern hemisphere release. According to Wrede’s handwritten notes on an undated piece of paper with the Norsk Film A/S letter heading, for his part, Borge requested the guaranteed recoupment, from the Eastern hemisphere receipts obtained in the first year of the film’s release, of the entire sum Norsk was going to contribute, because of the uncertainty of the Scandinavian market.[83] From the documents at our disposal, it is not clear how the issue was resolved, but a solution was undoubtedly found, because the project went ahead, with the Norsk Film A/S underwriting one fourth and a quarter of the budget (which totalled USD443,640) and a quarter of the contingency (estimated at USD20,000), and Group W shouldering the rest.[84] On 25 June 1969, Peter S. Katz (Group W’s London representative, appointed the production executive on the Solzhenitsyn adaptation) wrote to Wrede with a suggestion to register the titles One Day, One Day in the Life and/or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with the Film Production Association of Great Britain.