Acting, with Sophie Fiennes and Cheek by Jowl

Who can explain the alchemical transformation that is rehearsal? Actors begin with words on a page and emerge with a fully formed theater production. In her documentary, Acting, director Sophie Fiennes captures the magic of actors connecting with their text and characters during a workshop with the world-renowned Cheek by Jowl theater company.

Eight actors haunt the halls of Twyford Abbey, a crumbling derelict mansion on the outskirts of London, as they explore scenes and monologues from Macbeth. Cheek by Jowl founders and co-artistic directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod lead the cast through their unique rehearsal process, uncovering surprising truths not just about Macbeth but about the craft of acting itself.

Since 1981, Cheek by Jowl has staged critically acclaimed productions in over 50 countries and multiple languages, with a special emphasis on Shakespeare. Donnellan has directed and Ormerod has designed over 45 productions with Cheek by Jowl.

In this episode, Fiennes, Donnellan, and Ormerod share about their collaborative journey, the keys to unlocking a scene, and why “life isn’t realistic.”

Sophie Fiennes is a film director whose feature documentaries for theatrical exhibition include her collaborations with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012); her portrait of German artist Anselm Keifer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010); and her film Grace Jones; Bloodlight and Bami (2017), an observational odyssey into the world of the iconic singer and performer. This project came about when Fiennes met Jones following Fiennes’ first feature documentary Hoover Street Revival (2001) about a Pentecostal church community in Los Angeles, and the sermons of its preacher, Bishop Noel Jones, brother of Grace Jones.

More recently, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (2022) is Sophie Fiennes’ translation from stage to screen of her brother Ralph Fiennes’s performance and staging of the modern epic poem. This was commissioned by BBC and released theatrically by Kino Lorber, in the US in 2023.

Her films have been selected at festivals internationally including Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Sundance. Fiennes’ films are distributed theatrically, and screened online and broadcast and have also screened in museums including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, and the Hammer Museum. Tate in the UK acquired the installation current/SEE for their permanent collection, which comprises a 13 min extract from her film The Late Michael Clark.

Declan Donnellan was born in England of Irish parents in 1953. He grew up in London and read English and Law at Queens’ College, Cambridge, before being called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1978.

Declan Donnellan is joint Artistic Director of Cheek by Jowl with his partner, the designer Nick Ormerod. They formed Cheek by Jowl in 1981, for which they have created over 45 productions, performing in over 400 cities, across six continents.

Cheek by Jowl’s first production, The Country Wife, was presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981. In 1989, he was made Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre in London. Since then, he has received awards in London, Moscow, Paris, and New York, including four Olivier Awards, the Order of Charlemagne of Andorra, the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the Stanislavski International Prize in Moscow, and the Golden Lion of Venice.

Donnellan has directed for the Avignon Festival (Le Cid); The Maly Drama Theatre of Saint Petersburg (The Winter’s Tale), The Noel Coward Theatre (Shakespeare in Love), the Piccolo Teatro Milano (The Revenger’s Tragedy) as well as the opera Falstaff for the Salzburg Festival and the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet for the Bolshoi in Moscow. Recent collaborations include work with the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (Spain) and the National Theatre of Craiova (Romania). His first feature film, Bel Ami, co-directed with Nick Ormerod, and starring Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci, and Robert Pattinson, was released in 2012.

After qualifying as a barrister, Nick Ormerod trained in Theatre Design at Wimbledon School of Art. His first job in theatre was a year as an assistant at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. From there he went on to work with Declan Donnellan on various productions for the Royal Court and Arts Educational Schools before forming Cheek by Jowl in 1981.

Since then, he and Declan Donnellan have taken work to over 400 cities and received awards across the world.

Ormerod’s work is characterised by its simplicity and directness, an approach that has shaped the visual signature of the company’s work and led to winning the Corral de Comedias Award with Donnellan in 2008 and an Olivier Award nomination for Designer of the Year (1988) for A Family Affair, The Tempest, and Philoctetes.

In 2017, he was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to theatre design.

His credits also include Fuenteovejuna, Peer Gynt, Sweeney Todd, The Mandate, and both parts of Angels in America for the National Theatre; The School for Scandal, King Lear, and Great Expectations (which he also co-adapted) for the Royal Shakespeare Company; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny for the English National Opera; Martin Guerre for the Prince Edward Theatre; Hayfever for the Savoy Theatre; Antigone for The Old Vic; Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet for the Bolshoi, Falstaff for the Salzburg Festival; and The Revenger’s Tragedy for the Piccolo Teatro Milano. In 2012, Ormerod co-directed the feature film Bel Ami with Declan Donnellan.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Before every production of Shakespeare, there’s a rehearsal process. Actors go into rehearsals sometimes knowing nothing about a particular play. They may not know each other or the director.

But with hard work, a transformation occurs in time for opening night.

The whole process can be more than a bit mysterious. As members of the audience, we rarely get a glimpse of just what goes on during that metamorphosis. The documentary Acting takes us inside this process. It focuses on rehearsals for Macbeth by the British theater company Cheek by Jowl.

Founded in 1981 by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, Cheek by Jowl has received seemingly every theater award on the planet, and their specialty is Shakespeare.

The film’s director, Sophie Fiennes, has made documentaries about dance, visual art, and film history, including a trio of films with the philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Here are Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod, and Sophie Fiennes in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

—————

BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, welcome. And thank you so much for this fly-on-the-wall experience of an acting workshop.

DECLAN DONNELLAN: Well, we loved doing it, and Sophie made it so easy for us.

SOPHIE FIENNES: And I’d waited almost 20 years to get the chance to do this.

BOGAEV: Really?

FIENNES: Yeah. I got a fellowship to look at the relationship between fiction and drama or nonfiction, and I’d known the productions of Cheek by Jowl. Declan and Nick very kindly let me sit in on the rehearsals of their production of Othello, and of course, the process was so riveting. I said, “Can we make a rehearsal film?” And it was too difficult in the lead-up to a production to have the full experimentation, exploring.

So, 18 years later in the pandemic, they contacted me and said, “We’ve been doing these workshops and they’re really interesting, and we’ve got an idea. Would you like to make a film?” So, the roots of it went back a long time ago.

BOGAEV: Long time. And that is, kind of sadly, the silver lining of the pandemic, that you could sit down and do something like this.

Declan and Nick, and I guess I’ll start with you, Declan, why did you want to reveal your process?

DONNELLAN: Oh, because I’m an incorrigible narcissist.

BOGAEV: Clearly. [Laughter]

DONNELLAN: What kind of a question is that? [Laughter]

I love to share what I do. That’s what I do. I like to share things with people, so that’s what I do. I mean, the only point of life for me is having good contact with other people, and so, to do it with Sophie’s film, it’s really, really good.

BOGAEV: Well, I want to talk about the location first, because it plays such a big part, obviously, in the workshop and the documentary. Twyford Abbey, it just looks so haunted. It’s perfect.

So, Sophie, you’ve explored location in your documentaries before. I’m thinking of your film about the artist Anselm Kiefer and his studio in that amazing derelict silk factory in France. So, how did filming at the Abbey come about? Was that your idea, or Declan and Nick’s, or what?

FIENNES: Well, actually, it came from a conversation, and the first time that Nick shared this idea of doing it in a location. Because when this proposition came to do the workshop, I said, “Well, where would we do it?” And Nick said, “Well, we’re thinking of a location.” I’d heard about Twyford Abbey. I hadn’t been. And it was really based on this conversation and what Nick was imagining that then in some ways, suddenly, there it was, almost magically, the place that suited our needs perfectly.

BOGAEV: It does. And Nick, tell me about that, because I was thinking there are a couple of layers when you watch this documentary. It gives the impression, of course, that the actors are in Macbeth’s castle. It looks like a haunted castle or something. But on another level, I felt as if I’m seeing what the audience might imagine if they were watching a performance of Macbeth in a theater, you know? These are the images that might come to mind.

NICK ORMEROD: Well, in that case, Twyford Abbey turned out to be miraculously wonderful for it, because there were so many different spaces within the building, many staircases, and they could all find their own space and treat it completely differently.

I think if we had been condemned to a rehearsal room that would’ve been awful. But that’s the normal state of rehearsals, a rehearsal room.

BOGAEV: You mean like visual death for the for documentary?

ORMEROD: Well, yes, yes.

BOGAEV: This must be really close to your heart. As an artistic director, you’re in charge of the look and the feel and the visuals of the production, so how does the location add to this examination of acting?

And I noticed a few times in the workshop, it seems like your role is to situate the actors in a physical space, and you tell them things like, “Touch the walls and use the set because you’re better when you use it.”

ORMEROD: Well, all human beings are situated in a space. And if you look around, you’ll find they touch the space. They sit in chairs. You know, they lean against walls. That’s perfectly normal. I mean, that’s how human beings behave. But if you put them on a stage, there’s a terrible tendency to stand on the stage and not be connected to any space.

FIENNES: On the cutting room floor, there’s a point where Declan says, “I know this sounds like a crazy note, but just remember that the floor is underneath you.”

It’s so true. Talking about the film I made about Anselm Kiefer and La Ribaute, this strange space, he was actually inspired by a Le Corbusier monastery. When he built this monastery in Lyon, he put stones on the floor on the base level where the monks would pray so they would be having an unstable space to stand on, so they would have to be in the space because it wasn’t even stable underneath them. So, I do think that this relationship to space cuts across all different creative practices and certainly cinema.

BOGAEV: Absolutely. I’m thinking of meditation stones—the idea of Zen meditation walking. The stones in the path that they lay out are uneven so that you have to pay attention. You have to be in the moment.

I think one of the things that this documentary you’ve made, and the workshop, really helps me understand as a non-actor is how space plays such a huge role in performance, both literally and metaphorically.

Declan, this must be all obvious to you guys, but for all of us non-theater people, why don’t you explain the exercise that you have the actors do at the beginning of the rehearsal where they explore the space and they just walk around, and then they do a bit of monologue, and then they pick up their chairs and they move them to a different place. I have a clip we can play.

[CLIP from the 2024 documentary titled Acting¸ directed by Sophie Fiennes.]

[Chair dragging noise]

LADY MACBETH: Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes…

DECLAN DONNELLAN: That’s great, thank you. Great, excellent, wonderful. Let’s move our chairs again. John.

[Chair dragging noise]

BOGAEV: Declan, what’s that all about?

DONNELLAN: Well, I think the problem is in everyday life that it’s not in the theater. I think theater is in an extraordinary position to remind us of the madness of everyday life. When we think we can somehow dissociate from the space, theater reminds us that we can’t. And it’s difficult for a consumerist society for all sorts of reasons. I go into this at great length, but actually, there’s a kind of conspiracy of ordinary life that we can somehow dissociate from the space.

So, the idea that I’m putting people back in the space is kind of not true. I’m trying to sort of undo the mad delusion that we can somehow be separate from it. You know that you are in a body, you do breathe, you are on the floor, and touching a wall will remind you of something. But I’m only reminding people. An enormous amount of effort is put into helping us to deny that we’re in space because it doesn’t make money. And that’s one of the reasons for it.

But I’m not brilliantly putting people in the space. I’m stopping them pretending that they’re not in the space.

BOGAEV: Wow, you’re stripping away civilization and its discontents.

DONNELLAN: Yes.

BOGAEV: Okay, well let’s talk about speech then. Shakespeare is obviously so much about the poetry, and the speaking of this arcane language as if it’s the actor’s native tongue. So, how do you get Shakespeare into the mouths of your actors? You say early on in this workshop that they should forget about meaning at the beginning.

DONNELLAN: Yes, enough already with the meaning, enough already with the understanding. The important thing is the sound of the words in your mouth.

The wonderful thing about verse plays is it blows out of the water that we can be realistic. The problem is life is not realistic. You forget that life isn’t realistic until the next time you’re in intensive care, until the next time you’re in the emergency ward in a hospital. Nobody walks around a funeral saying, “Gosh, this is so real. This feels so…” Nobody says that. Everybody says how unreal it feels. That’s because somehow, something alive has broken through, even if it’s a funeral, even if you’re in intensive care, but for the rest of life, we can hibernate and put ourselves into the depressed sleep that we are. So, I think theater’s very important because it’s very subversive—because in its very nature, it asks us to see the sort of madness of everyday life.

The thing about verse, though, to come back to that, is that it’s important to remember that what’s going on in my head now and what’s coming out of my mouth is a total disconnect. There are things in my mind that I’d like to share with you, but to go through my mouth, go through speech, it has to go through a form of Google Translate.

BOGAEV: Our brain is Google.

DONNELLAN: Yeah. As soon as we verbalize, it’s Google Translate, and we need to wake up to that, and that’s why I love verse. I love verse in Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, whatever language. I often don’t speak the languages, but it doesn’t matter. It means that you can no longer fool yourself that this is like it is, because it reminds us that sincerity is toxic because it can’t happen, because sincerity, the idea that the words are absolutely going to correspond to what’s in my head, ain’t on the menu. That’s just not going to happen. Verse actually reminds us of that.

BOGAEV: All right. While we’re talking about speaking verse, why don’t we listen to how you talk to actors about pace and time?

[CLIP from the 2024 documentary titled Acting¸ directed by Sophie Fiennes.]

DECLAN DONNELLAN: It’s like, you know, when somebody’s dying, somebody you love’s dying. You’re wondering when it’s going to be, when it comes to be. And then it happens. But you’re never ready. When it happens, you’re not quite ready. And that’s a sort of theme that runs through these plays, that there’s never enough time.

It’s connected to things like the fear of missing out. People talk FOMO, you know. People talk about a lot at the moment, but it’s a lot of it’s to do with time and how out of control of time we are. But the verse helps us get there, because it puts us into that horrible rush.

BOGAEV: So, how does understanding this theme of time—particularly in Macbeth, but in Shakespeare plays in general—and never having enough time in these tragedies, how does it shape the actor’s performance?

DONNELLAN: Oh, it’s very important because you can’t be ready because there’s never enough time.

We either have too much time—there’s a wonderful example in Shakespeare with Juliet’s speech, you know, “Gallop apace,” when she has too much time. When you’re waiting, you have too much time. It fries your brain when you have too much time, and you want events to take you over because you don’t know who you are when you’ve got too much time.

But mostly the plays are about people who realize they haven’t got enough time. Even if they prepare and prepare and prepare, they still haven’t got enough time. That’s so true of our experience of life. Nobody’s ever had enough time. Because when the moment for action comes, you’re always somehow late, and that’s fine. You can’t be prepared. It’s a fantasy.

BOGAEV: Sophie, I’m curious, while you were watching this workshop—because you’re not an actor, right? You, of course, come from a family of actors, but you’re a documentarian—were you constantly thinking the way I was? “This is so interesting. This is so existentially challenging and philosophical. What are these actors going to do with this?”

FIENNES: Well, the irony is, of course, that with a camera as an observational filmmaker in that film, I’m a bit like the actor, I’ve never got the time to think about what just happened because I have to be ready and seeing the next thing. So, I’ve got to be so present with the camera because otherwise, I will miss the things that are happening, and then I won’t be able to make the scene. I won’t be able to work the edit to really reflect what’s happened. So, I’m like an actor in the room.

But the process of observing was so interesting to me. Inside, as Declan has been saying, we are virtual. We’re always in another space in our heads, and it’s actually a challenge to be really where we are. You can see it in the actors: when the actor is in space, when they’re in outer space, let’s say, or inner space. and they’re not in the actual space. You, as an observational filmmaker, all these things become incredibly clear when you get to analyze it.

BOGAEV: Where they suddenly click in to being there?

FIENNES: Yes, because we are all looking at each other and we can’t hide what we are. We’re animal instinct, you know? The animal is to see the other. So, if the actor has a plan, you see the plan. You see them trying to figure out what to do and be faithful to their plan.

BOGAEV: Something they had thought of before, something they had prepared?

FIENNES: Yes. So, this thing about character that now to make things seem safe to young actors, they’re told to invent and decide what their character is. I’m the filmmaker, I see that that person’s deciding to stick to the idea of their character. You see it. Of course, it was fascinating for me to actually then shape it down from whatever it was, 60 hours into the two hours and 24 minutes, because it’s all about reducing time.

BOGAEV: I’ve got to say, at one point, Declan, I laughed aloud because you said, “You know what we’re doing here is, it’s not rocket science. You’re working with the external. You’re responding to things and…” But then sometimes you say things to these actors, and it seems like you are asking just the impossible.

Here, let’s listen to this note you give one of your Macbeths.

[CLIP from the 2024 documentary titled Acting¸ directed by Sophie Fiennes.]

DECLAN DONNELLAN: The weird thing says you’re saying it as if you want to communicate it with us, but I’d like to think that you’re saying it to us because you don’t want to communicate it to us. That sounds really weird, doesn’t it? Does that just sound loony or…

ORLANDO JAMES: It doesn’t sound loony, but it throws me a bit.

DECLAN DONNELLAN: Because it’s not just a direct act of communication.

ORLANDO JAMES: Yeah.

DECLAN DONELLAN: Because the stakes are so high, you want to say it without them hearing it. So, if they said, “Did you say that?” You can say, “No. Did I say that?”

FIENNES: Yes, this is the thing. Because one of the things that Nick said when we got to Twyford Abbey was the actors will be an audience to each other. So, in the space is also the audience, and that mechanism, that dynamic of being seen by an audience that’s in the space—as an audience is in a theater—is a big part of what unlocked questions of the soliloquy, which I found really fascinating.

BOGAEV: Yes, because in a soliloquy, it’s always a question. Who are you talking to? Are you talking to the audience? Are you talking to yourself, the two sides of yourself, or the five sides of yourself? Are you talking to the dagger, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

But in this clip, Declan, I kind of get what you’re saying: that Macbeth doesn’t want to tell them, but also, you don’t want to tell them, but you’ve got to tell them. Tell me more about how an actor’s supposed to do this.

DONNELLAN: Well, there’s no way because that’s what the actual scene is. I mean, one of the most stupid words in psychology is “conflicted.” People say, “Oh, you know, he’s a very conflicted person.” Well, welcome to the human race. That’s what we are. You know, you’ve got this and you’ve got that, and how do you sort it out? Every moment of every day. “Do I swerve left or do I swerve right?” That’s what it is to be human.

BOGAEV: So, what do you see your actors do with this information? What did you see in that performance? What changed?

DONNELLAN: Well, the important thing to realize is that I don’t want them to do anything. I don’t want them to be present. I don’t want them to try harder. I don’t want any of those things. I want them to stop disconnecting, and that’s a very tall order. That’s really, really, really difficult because we disconnect all the time. Nearly everything that I do in the books I’ve written and so on, it’s all about getting people to stop doing things which remove them from life.

BOGAEV: Okay. Here’s a Shakespeare question. Text analysis. How do you understand Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s motivation to kill Duncan?

And before you answer, let’s play a clip here as well. In this clip, you’re talking to an actor playing Lady Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 5, and she’s alone in the castle reading the letter from her husband in which he tells her about his encounter with the Weird Sisters and their prophecy. This is where the idea of murdering King Duncan first gets hinted at, and you say this.

[CLIP from the 2024 documentary titled Acting¸ directed by Sophie Fiennes.]

DECLAN DONNELLAN: This is the big thing, you see, really. It comes back to “why do we do what we do?” And I think what’s useful is that when we get stuck on something, like when we get hooked into something like this—it’s any form of addiction, it can be the [makes sound] or whatever, you know, the banker’s card and you’re in overdraft—but we don’t do it because we want to do it, we do it because we dread not doing it, because if we don’t do it, we will cease to exist.

It’s much more serious than life and death that this thing happens, and suddenly, you’re on the ball going down the hill, and if we don’t do it, it’s not that we’re going to go up in a ball of smoke. It’s a bit like canceling. You know, you’re not canceling somebody now, you’re not canceling the future, you’re actually canceling their past as well. So, it’s not like you’re not going to live anymore, it’s like you’re never going to have happened. Does that make any sense?

DONNELLAN: Yes. Does it make sense? I hope it does.

But I’d like to open that I shouldn’t pathologize it. It’s not to do with just addiction; it’s to do with life itself. I don’t think we know why we do things. I think we do things for reasons, and sometimes we do have motives for things. But on the whole, motives are things that we supply afterwards.

In a previous incarnation, Nick and I both were barristers, and one thing that I know about police and courts and law is that the law, and on the whole, the police, and certainly the judge, is not interested in motivation. The only reason that people in all detective series say, “We have to establish motive.” is that the motive is very important if you want to sway a jury.

But actually, the fascinating thing about Macbeth is that the more you look at it, they never wanted to do it in the first place.

BOGAEV: The whole play is about not wanting to do it, really.

DONNELLAN: The whole play is about doing something you don’t want to do.

BOGAEV: You’re trying to prod and shape a performance and air different ideas, right? This is a workshop. Air different ideas and insights into the marriage, say, of the Macbeths? But you’re not forcing down a text analysis down anyone’s throat.

DONNELLAN: No, no, I couldn’t analyze a text. I don’t think Shakespeare could analyze the text. It isn’t quite like that.

All we can say is that there are great gravitational forces acting on us all, all the time. That’s all that we can say. We end up doing things, and then afterwards when people ask us why we do them, we come up with reasons. We don’t really know why we do what we do. Not really.

We do in a granular way, in terms of decency rather than morality, in terms of absolute granularity, that you’re doing something in this moment because you think it’s the more decent thing to do. This may be, yes.

But the idea that they, a) have characters; and b), that they work out what their motivation is; and c), they work out what the words mean, is total death. It doesn’t work like that.

BOGAEV: I have to pick up on something you just said, which is that both you and Nick were barristers in another life. Is that how you met Nick?

ORMEROD: No, we met in a rehearsal room rehearsing Macbeth, funnily enough, which was to go on a European tour.

BOGAEV: Both actors?

DONNELLAN: Yes, as students.

ORMEROD: Yes, as students. And then subsequently we deviated into the law briefly, and then both, I think, realized that this wasn’t for us.

DONNELLAN: Yes.

ORMEROD: In different ways.

BOGAEV: Does the law figure into your thinking at all as a member of the theater?

ORMEROD: The experience of doing law is interesting insofar as, you know, you understand early there’s a big difference between law and justice, and it’s interesting when people don’t know that.

FIENNES: But I do think that if you are working as a lawyer, you are encountering a lot of human madness.

ORMEROD: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

BOGAEV: Well, I want to play another clip, and this is an actor playing Lady Macbeth in the, “Screw your courage to the sticking place,” scene. And Declan, you advise her to treat Macbeth like a baby.

[CLIP from the 2024 documentary titled Acting¸ directed by Sophie Fiennes.]

LADY MACBETH: We fail.

[Laughter]

DECLAN DONNELLAN: Hold him there, don’t forget your line.

LADY MACBETH: Screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.

[Laughter]

When Duncan is asleep

(Whereto the rather shall his day’s hard journey

Soundly invite him), his two chamberlains

Will I with wine–

DECLAN DONNELLAN: Yeah so, so it’s not that so much. It’s that there’s this great whoosh, of, kind of, motherly love for him. He’s such a baby! “We’ll not fail—” you can even do some baby faces at him.

BOGAEV: So, Declan, why this exercise, maybe in extremity, going to an extreme place? And how do you as a performer dial that back from an extreme place to something more nuanced in performance?

DONNELLAN: I think you don’t really have to think about it. In my experience, it’s not really a problem. I give them the exercise of extremity to really go to one extreme or another. Then somehow these things sort themselves out, actually. I don’t know how it works, but it does work actually. It’s very, very useful.

BOGAEV: And why go to an extreme?

DONNELLAN: If we’re doing Romeo and Juliet, I’d want both of them—for an example, a very obvious exercise of extremity—for the both of them to play the scene as if they’re predators. That they prey with their love on other people. And I think that’s rather useful actually, and of course you’ll throw it away afterwards, but it’s amazing how much the exercise of extremity exposed something that you hadn’t really seen before.

BOGAEV: That’s the thing about creativity. You don’t know what’s going to come out under pressure or when you’re doing the extreme thing, right? And something brilliant might come out.

DONNELLAN: Well, yeah. And you won’t know if it’s brilliant or not, that’s the other thing.

But the problem, you know, in terms of arts funding and so on, for example, is that you’re continually asked to explain, because you have to explain what the deliverables are. I wonder, you know, what are you trying to say? What are you trying to do? What do you hope to achieve by this? And the thing is, if you can answer the question, don’t bother doing it. If you can answer that question, do something else, because it’s going to be no bloody good. It’ll be something. But it won’t be a work of art. It won’t actually move somebody.

BOGAEV: There’s no spark of curiosity in that. You already know where it’s going, you’re saying. You can’t make that connection with the audience.

DONNELLAN: If you know where it’s going, it’s dead. Full stop. No exception. That’s the very difficult thing. And that’s, you know, for producers and funders, it’s very difficult to accept that. I’m sure Sophie would agree in her own way that that’s true. You can’t know where it’s going.

FIENNES: I was thinking about the editing process because you discover so much. The bottom line for me is always that the material knows more than I know, and I just have to try to see what it can do, and it’s constantly surprising. And then when you take things out, new things become clearer. It’s full of discovery, and you can’t know it in advance.

And that’s why it is extremely difficult, particularly in documentaries, because you don’t know what will happen. You’re not in control. You have to respond. And it is very difficult for people who want the safety. They’re from an institution that has a brand that they’re trying to protect, and it’s got to be on message for their brand and their boardroom people, so they—

BOGAEV: It’s all about control.

FIENNES: Yes, it’s all about control. It’s all about knowing what we’re doing and saying why we’re doing it. So, it takes all of the discovery, which is the magic.

DONNELLAN: Yeah, I agree completely, but I’d also say it’s actually more than magic. I’d say it’s the life.

We want to know what’s going to happen. We want everything to be delivered. We want to know. We want insurance plans. But that’s not what life’s like. That’s not the deal that we’ve been offered. The deal that we’ve been offered is that there’s nothing constant but change.

So, what I’m saying is, I suppose the little point I’d like to make is that theater’s incredibly important and incredibly subversive, and that’s why people hate it so much. That’s why it must be stifled. People don’t hate it because it’s boring.

BOGAEV: That’s why they’re so afraid of it. Yeah.

DONNELLAN: They’re so terrified of it. Exactly. And art.

FIENNES: There’s a necessary vulnerability in making something, and it’s the fear of that vulnerability.

DONNELLAN: Yes.

BOGAEV: And that’s really your subject, Sophie. Your subject is not, obviously, just a workshop. An acting workshop encompasses everything. But your subject is creativity itself. How it happens.

FIENNES: Well, yes. It’s about process because it’s a workshop. But it’s many things. It’s also the play that holds it together so that we didn’t have to explain what was happening in the scenes, because, of course, it’s edited totally out of the chronology in which it was shot. But I realized that you could see different versions of the same text within one scene and know what the stakes were, know what the predicament is, and see it shifting.

So, a lot of it is the theme of actually making a documentation of all of this, you know, 40-plus years that Declan and Nick have been making theater, is a gathered sense which is carried in their bodies. And yes, they’ve written these books. But this was to observe it in action, as it were.

What I saw and what I tried to do in the edit was to place the viewer inside their point of view and to be surprised by what they saw, because filmmaking works through point of view. It’s a big factor in the grammar of it.

So, that question of how. What will they see? What do they see? I see the actor did this. How does someone with 40 years and this acute sensitivity, and sense of, I would say, love of, what’s possible? The failures of humans as much as what are successes, you know. So, it’s like looking at these extraordinary characters of the Macbeths making these terrible decisions—

BOGAEV: And love of theater itself, what that means.

FIENNES: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

BOGAEV: And, Sophie, a really elemental question: why are you so drawn to making films about art?

FIENNES: Well, I mean, I’m curious and I want connection, and I look for that. These are points of meeting, they’re encounters with Declan and Nick and the people who I’ve made films with. They have all invited me to make these films.

I did set the idea up initially because I wanted to learn something, and I think that Declan is a fantastic teacher, and he talks about having had fantastic teachers. I left school at 16, and I never went on to any further education. I wanted to be making work. So, I went and did a foundation course, and I started working, so, I never feel that I really know anything, and I’m always feeling that I need to learn.

So, you know, when you’re looking at Cheek by Jowl working with actors, it’s a bit like pressing the elevator button. You’re not going to go to the second or third floor. You’ve gone right through the roof and you’re in this really thrilling place of seeing and of responding. That’s really exciting to bring a camera in to see that and be challenged by that. We didn’t know that it would be a film, that is the way it is. It was really, I think, initially it was, “Oh, you know, something for the educational pack, to please the Arts Council.”

But I have a sort of perverse drive in me which wants to push something into a consolidated form that can go further, that can travel further, and shape and craft that into something that can be encountered, that carries. that’s a witnessing.

DONNELLAN: It’s all about communication, encounter, the living spark, and it’s more to do with curiosity than creativity. I feel the same in my work. I don’t do my job with Nick because we want to be creative. We want to have fun, and we want to be with other people, and we want to work on things that seem to us to be more and more alive. And that’s what we do.

BOGAEV: So, Sophie, how do you top Macbeth at Twyford Abbey? What comes next?

FIENNES: Well, I’ve just completed a film called The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, which is the completion of a trilogy with Slavoj Žižek. I feel these two films are very connected. There are crossovers, not least in terms of seriousness and playfulness, as well as questions around madness and meaning. These two films are very connected for me.

BOGAEV: Well, I so enjoy talking with you and I so enjoy the film. Thank you for all of it.

DONNELLAN: Thank you very much.

ORMEROD: Thank you.

FIENNES: Thank you. Thank you very much.

DONNELLAN: Thank you very much. You’ve been very kind.

—————

KARIM-COOPER: That was Sophie Fiennes, Nick Ormerod, and Declan Donnellan, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Acting is available to stream on Amazon Prime.

This episode was produced by Matt Frascella. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster.

We had technical help from London Broadcast Studios and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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