"I want good movies, not vehicles": Daniel Radcliffe on The Woman in Black... and shaking off the ghosts of the past

Faces in windows, figures in the garden, death, loss and a vast, dark, eerie country house: The Woman in Black is an atmospheric English period chiller very much in the tradition of The Turn of the Screw, though it eschews the supple ambiguities that are part of the reason why Henry James’ novella is so enduring and so often imitated. Based on Susan Hill’s novel, scripted by Jane Goldman and directed by James Watkins—whose 2008 debut Eden Lake was an effective, well-cast little hillbilly horror—The Woman in Black concerns a very young yet very troubled London lawyer named Arthur Kipps. He travels to a village tormented by the titular phantom lady whose now-vacant mansion is surrounded by marshlands and whose estate Arthur is charged with settling.

The film’s a little too drawn out in places, a little too bogged down in its own mythology, a little too dependent on boo moments to generate tension. But it has wonderfully eerie locations, a gasp of an ending, a superbly measured supporting performance from Ciarán Hinds, and the imminently watchable wounded eyes of its protagonist—eyes you will likely recognize. “I don’t want to be in anything that people are going to go see just because Daniel Radcliffe’s in it,” Daniel Radcliffe told me when we met in Toronto to discuss The Woman in Black, his first film since the close of the Harry Potter franchise that made him extremely famous. It should perform well this weekend, better than most British genre films, but, despite his wishes, I suspect that Radcliffe’s name on the poster may have an awful lot to do with its draw.

Radcliffe’s career has indeed been dominated by no less than eight Potter films, but it’s worth remembering that in making those eight films Radcliffe got to work with four very different directors, including Mike Newell and Alfonso Cuarón. He’s also starred in Equus and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for the stage, and has published poetry under a pseudonym. So, while only 22, the diversity of Radcliffe’s experience betrays his age and star image. He struck me as smart, conscientious and genuinely enthusiastic about the work. He’s articulate about craft and critical of his performances. He talks a lot, but he doesn’t talk shit. He said he liked my pants. I quite liked his jumper.


JB: There are sequences in Woman in Black where, if you don’t count the ghosts, you’re pretty much flying solo for quite long stretches. In such situations do you feel like you need to employ different tools as an actor, to pay a different sort of attention to facial expression or gesture or camera placement?

Daniel Radcliffe: Those are situations where you just stick by your director. Because you can slip into this trap where you feel like you’re just making the same face over and over. No matter how different the thought process is you’ve got to look continually fucking terrified, and there are only so many variations of facial expression that do that. So you have to keep checking in and trust the director to tell you if he’s not getting what he needs. I was also helped enormously by a brilliant set that really allows you to lose yourself walking around in it. You have to think of the house as being the other character you’re interacting with.


JB: You’re playing a widower, a single father, a guy who’s in danger of losing his job—and this is before we even get to your first encounter with the vengeful ghost. I don’t know how one prepares to embody a character loaded with such heavy psychic burdens.

DR: It’s tricky. You’ve got to balance his general sense of feeling completely devastated while letting him be reasonably reactive. I knew I could never fully imagine what it’s like to have lost someone as Arthur has, so I met with a bereavement councillor and I read a couple of books, C.S. Lewis’ Grief Observed and one called You’ll Get Over It, which was fantastic. Another thing that helped with Arthur was talking to friends who’ve suffered from depression. Something that struck me as especially useful was that they all said how physically tired you get. So I started from a place of exhaustion. I imagined that Arthur felt exhausted every day of the last five years, and I wondered how that would have affected his outlook, his mental state, and his relationship with his son. One of the things that drew me to this project was that it’s really about what happens to us if we fail to move on from a loss. Arthur is unable to even look at his child without remembering the death of his wife.


JB: You yourself are a writer. I wonder at this point what you’re looking for in scripts. Is it good writing, per se? Is it more about certain stories or themes? The right kind of character?

DR: Good writing is important because good talent is attracted to it. Smart people gravitate toward each other. Compelling stories are important because I don’t want to be in anything that people are going to go see just because Daniel Radcliffe’s in it. I want good movies, not vehicles. My choices are also be based a lot on directors. I want to work with people who are going to push me.


JB: To offer a variation on something you’d mentioned, one of the themes of The Woman in Black is that the past never really lets you go...

[Radcliffe laughs knowingly]

JB: Do you think The Woman in Black will help to shake off the ghost of that first, enormously popular phase of your career?

DR: I never thought there could be any one movie where people would go, “Oh, well he’s not Harry Potter anymore; he’s totally changed!” I always knew it would be a longer process of working on consistently good films, so people can say, “Okay, he’s got good taste, he’s a good actor and he’s making good movies, regardless of what he did in the past.” I don’t think it’s going to happen with this film. I think it’s a good start.

Manic repression: Sentimental Exorcisms

There are forms of oppression so subtle, draconian, and fully incorporated into our shared way of living as to press their hoary bulk upon us only in guises of kindness, invitation, and concern. The stifling embrace of altruism. Trevor Spate offers a curious case study. He’s a market analyst having some sex problems at home, which is to say he’s having a tough time working up the energy to perform the sex act with his wife Gillian. Gillian wants a baby, which, requiring sex, only increases the pressure. Trevor takes to visiting a peeler bar to get him in the mood, but his gallant efforts to defend the dignity of an ungrateful waitress—who not coincidentally resembles Gillian, at least from a certain distance—yield nothing but troubles. He’s forced to take a leave of absence, coerced into going into analysis as part of his legal defense, urged to visit his sister and brother-in-law and their wriggling new child in Tofino, of all places. Next thing you know he’s trapped with a self-described reformed rapist with a ponytail who co-opts Neil Young to justify his own neuroses and plies Trevor with experimental drugs that ostensibly produce only “positive emotions” and the most tender-loving desires. Trevor has fallen victim to the “tyranny of sympathy.”

Trevor’s one of several such protagonists inhabiting Sentimental Exorcisms (Coach House Books, $18.95), Toronto author David Derry’s eloquently titled debut, a collection of blackly comic stories in which the Victorian era lives on in the collective unconscious of the white Canadian middleclass male. Stories in which no man is allowed to tend the garden of their own repressed impulses in peace. Stories of men with thorny mom and dad issues, neighbour issues, spouse issues, workplace issues, poo issues. In some cases organized transgression becomes a form of self-medication, but unforgiving society seems unable to appreciate such valiant efforts to take matters into one’s own hands. In Derry’s taut, arrestingly witty opening tale “one of the University of Toronto’s top English undergrads,” employing perfectly sound solipsistic logic, arrives at the conclusion that the only way to fully realize his inherent and sturdy normalcy is to extinguish his compulsion to peep through peeping. “Attainment is annihilation,” he explains. He buys a ladder and a painting suit. He limits his technically criminal therapy to two nights a week. If only he could just manage to see a woman sodomized then surely he would revert to the pristinely well-adjusted individual he and his looming parents know him to be. (In a sly bit of detail, Derry has his protagonist alternately studying The Portrait of Dorian Gray and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ both being works not only involving sexual repression, but more importantly, looking.)

David Derry, photo by Shannon Bramer

The risk with this sort of material is that the author inevitably condescends to his characters, smugly stacking their often-tormented psyches with so much fodder for gags cheap or otherwise. Derry largely avoids this through writing in the first-person and stressing identification through sheer desperation and what would appear to be a large number of characteristics shared by both the author and his creations. Only a short piece that takes the amusing form of a letter addressed to real-life author Austin Clarke—written by a lawyer convinced that two of Clarke’s stories were based on true events in which the lawyer himself played an instrumental role—seems to stumble through an awkward balance of exposition and the narrator’s somewhat tiring, pedantic tone. Yet the most sympathetic protagonist in Sentimental Exorcisms turns out to inhabit Derry’s only tale written in the third-person. The eponymous hero of ‘The Eventual Eponymization of Tim Pine’ is a Polish-Canadian stamp collector whose washroom experiences epitomize that horror of the log that won’t drown so often described by Slavoj Zizek. I mean it as no small compliment when I say that Derry really knows how to write shit. In the story of Tim Pine Derry transforms an innocent bowel movement into a form of disaster fiction. Here’s a sample:

The aforementioned swirls suggested heavy use, but the water had been clear, and he’s noticed nothing unusual in his advance flush. This time the contents gurgled and started to rise. Back up against the door, he fumbled the lock open, eye on the bowl, and twisted out of the stall with his belt still undone, as the soiled, matted surface paused at the rim before overflowing, just a trickle.

Coach House’s lovely packaging of Sentimental Exorcisms features reproductions of paintings by Greg Denton excerpted from a series entitled Out of Date: 365 Self Portraits. Denton himself joins Austin Clarke by playing an actual role in one of Derry’s stories. In ‘Greg Denton Dons Golden Threads in Anticipation’ a 42-year-old stockbroker unexpectedly becomes one of several subjects—all of them named Greg Denton—to be painted by Denton. The irony that drives the story emerges from the protagonist feeling singled-out and redeemed by an invitation received explicitly for no other reason than his bearing an apparently very common name. Yet, come to think of it, our titular Greg Denton does prove himself a unique individual as the story reaches its conclusion by clothing himself in what reads as one flamboyantly ugly motherfucking suit.

Well, there may be a lot of Greg Dentons in the world, but there was surely only one Raymond Carver. Or was there? Controversy still lingers around the degree of authorship shared between the late Carver and his devoted editor Gordon Lish, crediting with having excised massive chunks of Carver’s most beloved stories and even changing endings, titles and names of characters. My friend Salvador insists that Lish was responsible for what he refers to as “the Carver twist.” (Salvador always places finger and thumb in close proximity and then flips his hand over whenever he says "twist.") I’m not so sure. But it does make you wonder about how many people can claim some part of the person we all know as Raymond Carver. Also, according to Wikipedia there’s also a famous darts player with the same name.

In any case, the Library of America has recently published Raymond Carver: Collected Stories ($50), which offers the whole canon between two covers. These stories remain some of the most influential and enduring in modern American letters, and the nicely packaged collection should make a superb Xmas gift for completists.

The kids are definitely not all right: observing the troubling guises of innocence at work in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

There’s something about the insertion of a child into a tale marked by frightful shadows that “gives the effect another turn of the screw.” In tales of terror, children can pose a special mystery, their consciousness a blank slate more vulnerable to invisible corruption. There’s the ambiguity of their knowingness and the veneer of their innocence to contend with, as well as the absolute power of their fear and acceptance both. And there is also a child’s relative proximity to the imagined other place from which we come and upon death return, a proximity that invites speculation as to the child’s access to that place’s knowledge and occult goings-on.

As the calendar days march their way toward October’s end and I crave some seasonal reading, I find myself snatching Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw from its place on my shelf once more. Few literary works give me the creeps so consistently, so satisfyingly, so eloquently, and given the novella’s length, it can easily be read in a single day –or preferably, a single night– and this somehow intensifies its tenor. Its truly one of those rare books I don’t want to put down once it’s started. Enormously influential and to this day hotly debated with regards to the reliability of its narrator, James’ sharp little masterpiece, originally published in 1898, possesses a singular power, driven by the psychological lucidity of its prose and striking imagery.

The story is somehow all the creepier for starting at a Christmas party, where several eager guests gather to hear one of their own talk of a woman he knew long ago, now dead some ten years, who relayed to him the chronicle of her encounter with sinister forces via a job she’d taken as the governess of two orphaned siblings. The set-up is rather strangely never returned to, and the unnamed governess takes the story’s reigns once it gets started proper, explaining the uncanny degree to which she becomes enchanted with the beatific children under her charge, and the strange figures that begin to appear once she’s settled into the children’s isolated Essex estate.

“I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers on a great drifting ship,” our protagonist tells us long before anything particularly unnerving occurs. The precision of James’ words allow the governess to articulate each step in her journey vividly, gradually drawing special attention to the blood-curdling geometry of gazes that characterize the story’s slipping into the realm of the potentially supernatural.

At one point the governess spots a conspicuously hatless intruder gazing at her through the kitchen window and dashes outside to confront him. Finding he’s vanished, she gazes back through the window from his estimated vantage point, in effect taking his place, and unintentionally scares the beejesus out of her colleague. At another point, little Flora gazes out her bedroom window at night and the governess, wanting to determine what it is Flora’s gazing at, goes to another window facing the same way, whereupon she sees little Miles out in the grounds at night, looking back toward the manor, yet not at her, nor at Flora, but up toward the tower, where the governess is almost certain no one could be.

The Turn of the Screw is an extraordinarily ocular piece of writing. It's visually evocative, but more than that it's compellingly preoccupied by the act of seeing and the impression seeing things makes on our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. James takes us through the governess’ process of trying to come to terms with what she sees, yet he never gives us a comfortable notion of what’s running through the minds of the children, who the governess fears are seeing things “terrible and unguessable and that spring from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.” Because of this, James’ novella holds a revered niche in the halls of the macabre, implying that children, those little people with their bright, unfinished faces, are inherently intruders themselves, and no matter how much they seem to require our protection, they might just be the last ones we should trust.

Looking for lineage on The Orphanage

The marketing for The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is, unsurprisingly, making much of Guillermo Del Toro's role as executive producer, a fact that no doubt prompted whichever dunderheaded critic it was who declared it "This year's Pan's Labyrinth!" Irksome hyperbole aside, I still enjoyed the film when I caught it on a whim at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and I went back to see it again this afternoon at a downtown multiplex. It takes little reflection to realize that the story, crammed with innuendo, is of course full of holes, yet none of them seem to actually burrow into the morbidly romantic heart of the material, or take anything away from Belén Rueda's engagingly desperate, sympathetically neurotic performance as Laura, the mother haunted by her missing child long after everyone else has resigned themselves to his almost certain death. Laura and her son Simón share the determining attribute of having both been orphans, and the fidelity and solidarity this imposes on their bond is probably of a nature most of us who've grown up with the security of knowing our birth parents can't truly comprehend. It's this aspect of The Orphanage that I immediately found strangely moving in spite of the film being a bit overcooked by its young director Juan Carlos Bayona.

What drew Del Toro to the film however only became obvious to me after my second viewing. In the largely pedestrian documentary that accompanies Warner's wonderful Val Lewton box set, Del Toro articulates his deep admiration for Lewton, and in The Orphanage we can detect a number of traits that connect directly to Lewton's themes (and in discussing them, there will follow MAJOR SPOILERS). In particular, the film is fundamentally controlled by a very relatable tragedy grounded in reality, while its potentially supernatural elements are finally left ambiguous. As well, the film basically imparts upon the viewer the idea that suicide is a good thing, at the very least a way to resolve an insurmountable emotional wound and make amends with a troubled past. The film's ending is unfathomably gloomy, yet it does imply that the heroine reunites with her son and finds a peace that was otherwise obscure to her. 

But as much as the film benefits from its evocation of Lewton's enduringly seductive horror classics, it also works away at the same creeping psychological schisms found at the heart of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, perhaps my favourite horror story ever, one that found its finest cinematic adaptation in 1961's The Innocents. Frustrated maternal urges, isolation and obsession, the veneration if not fetishization of children: all of these factors figure into the mental landscape of The Orphanage (not to mention Guy Maddin's  Brand Upon the Brain! to which The Orphanage bears several curious resemblances). Perhaps this calls for the delineation of a subgenre: manic surrogate mother and child chillers? ...Let me work on that one.