Florian Zeller (Director), Ben Smithard (Director of Photography) filming _The Father_. Photo by Sean Gleason. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
You’re barely in your forties and your first feature film is nominated, or favored to be, for various prestigious awards, including the Golden Globes and the Oscars. _And_ your film stars one of the greatest living actors in the world.
That’s hardly the convention.
But French playwright Florian Zeller is not someone who can be called conventional. Blond, cool and profoundly talented, Zeller’s feature debut _The Father_ stars Sir Anthony Hopkins as a man afflicted with dementia, based on his own successful play which premiered on the Paris stage nearly ten years ago. Which in turn was based on something very personal for Zeller, as he explains for _Flaunt_ during a Zoom interview. “When I wrote \[the play\] a few years ago, it was probably something personal, because I had been connected to this sad issue in my own experience.” He then continues, “I was raised by my grandmother, she was like my mother, and she started to suffer from dementia when I was fifteen, so it was really part of my personal story.”
I caught up with Zeller just days before _The Father_ kicked off the 42nd edition of the Cairo International Film Festival, one of the few festivals to take place in real life during this past year. Zeller is talkative, and his words fly by quickly even in his unmistakable French accent. His thoughts are clear, he pushes his points across, accentuating them with some self assured hand gestures, which show off a collection of cool silver rings. If ever a writer could be a rockstar, well, Zeller would be it.
Yet there is also an underlying depth, almost a melancholy to his words. “I was not sure that the audience would be open to share such a journey,” he says about putting on a play which dealt with his personal understanding of dementia, “and I was so surprised, and moved, when it was on stage to discover that the response of the audience was very powerful.” What makes _The Father_ so moving for those of us watching it is the universality of its subject matter, which Zeller acknowledges. “It was always the same—everywhere, in every country—people were coming to us after every performance to share their own story, and I realized that there was something almost cathartic about it.” His next words are chillingly perfect when he says, “I think art is here for that, to make you feel you are part of something bigger than yourself.”
Anthony Hopkins, Florian Zeller filming _The Father_. Photo by Sean Gleason. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
So how does a young, French writer get Sir Anthony Hopkins to star in his first film?
“I started to dream about it, because everything starts with a dream, especially movies” Zeller admits. “And in that dream, the one and only face that came to my mind was Anthony’s. And that’s mainly the reason why I decided to make the film in English despite my English—as you can hear I’m French.” The playwright then worked with English writer Sir Christopher Hampton, who had translated his plays before. “I remembered when I was speaking with my friends about that desire to work with Anthony, people were kindly, a bit laughing at me,” Zeller continues, “because, well, I’m French. This is my first picture film, and he is Sir Anthony Hopkins!” Of course, among well known French heroes is the wondrous Joan of Arc, "The Maid of Orléans” who never gave up on her dreams—or visions. Plus it’s not that unusual to think of French filmmakers as visionaries—one need only journey back to the mid-Sixties and early Seventies to discover François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard. Éric Rohmer, and even the great Agnès Varda, to realize how groundbreaking and courageous a bunch they were.
Zeller adds that “as soon as someone comes and tells you it is not possible, it means that potentially it is—and most of the times we are the ones who close the door on what is possible and what is impossible.” His voice breaks a little. Zeller, perhaps betraying how emotionally invested he was in securing his casting choice, admits, “this time I made a decision not to close the door and to follow my instinct and my desire and just send the script to Anthony, through his agent, and I waited a bit.” Then, one fateful day he got a call from a number he didn’t recognize, which turned out to be Sir Hopkins’ agent. After flying to Los Angeles to meet the star in person for a long breakfast, the rest, as they say, is history.
Zeller wasn’t the only one who got a dream fulfilled in _The Father_, as it turns out. Hopkins also got one wish—though many predict it not to be the only thing he’ll receive, with talks of a Best Actor Oscar for his haunting performance. Zeller worked with Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi, whose music appears in Clint Eastwood’s _J. Edgar_ as well as Chloé Zhao’s _Nomadland_—another favorite this award season. Zeller chose him because “Ludovico is one of my favorite musicians,” and his work in the film feels like “almost nothing, like a golden thread with violin and something really fragile… I wanted to have something very discreet and very subtle—almost silence.”
Olivia Colman, Florian Zeller (Director) filming _The Father_. Photo by Sean Gleason. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
But back to Sir Hopkins’ wish come true. In _The Father_, one particular piece of music resulted from the collaboration between the playwright turned filmmaker and his actor. “There is that moment when the character is supposed to hum that music in the kitchen, so we started to talk about music,” Zeller explains. “Anthony and I talked about what kind of music we could have in that moment, and we discovered we were both crazy about an aria taken from ’The Pearl Fisher’ by Bizet.” Hopkins confessed to Zeller, “I’ve always dreamt to make a movie with that music in it,” and thus it was that the aria was chosen. In the film, it plays three times, so Zeller adds playfully, “so I fulfilled his \[Hopkins’\] dream three times, because he had fulfilled mine.”
Granted, I realize we still haven’t talked about why Zeller dreamt of Hopkins as his lead, apart from the obvious reasons, and didn’t instead cast a French actor. “The main reason I wanted to make the film with him is because I personally think he’s the greatest living actor,” he says. Then continues, “but also because we know Anthony through his roles and he’s the master of subtext, the master of anxiety, the master of uncertainty, and I wanted to use that—I think he’s so profound, humble and strong at the same time.” Zeller’s next statement reinforces one of the reasons why _The Father_ works so well as a film. “I profoundly believe the audience is intelligent. I wanted the audience to feel like they were in a labyrinth, trying to figure it out, trying to understand as if it was more than just a story, as if it was an experience—and to experience what it means to lose your bearings.” So Hopkins played into that and became what Zeller says was like a “red herring”—a means to throw the audience off a bit and make the film’s indisputable outcome less predictable.
“That’s the reason the film starts almost like a thriller. It’s mainly thanks to him \[Hopkins\] and what he brings. Because if we are with this character at the beginning, this is his apartment, and we recognize his face. Suddenly there is a stranger there, pretending this is his apartment. What you feel is danger and uncertainty, and that’s what Anthony could bring.” And with Hopkins, we aren’t used to that from him. Zeller adds “he’s this man always in control, throughout all his roles, this very intelligent man, and I thought it would be disturbing and exciting at the same time to see him losing this control—and to be losing everything and be in a world where intelligence doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
So, to end, does Zeller think Sir Anthony Hopkins will walk away with the coveted golden statuette? Wisely he answers, “this is the year when it’s not possible to make predictions. I don’t know. But I’m very happy to feel that people are moved by his performance.”
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_The Father_ opens in the US on February 26th.
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