Albert Finney talks about directing new film, Charlie Bubbles - archive, 12 February 1969
There is quite a resemblance between Albert Finney and the Identikit picture someone had stuck on to a poster for Charlie Bubbles: “Have you seen this man?” It might well have been altered to “Have you seen this movie?” because it has had one of those crazy film industry histories that means it’s virtually unseen here after two years. It’s the first film Finney has directed (from a script by Shelagh Delaney), a huge success in America, a critical triumph here, and it’s still not going out on general release. It’s on this week at the Essoldo, Chelsea, and opens soon in Sheffield for Cinecenta.
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Finney, who is 31, is much more hero than anti-hero. He is larger than life, very open and disarming. His hands push through his hair as he talks, ironically about himself, more slowly and thoroughly about his film. “Two weeks after Charlie Bubbles opened in New York I suddenly felt grown up – in the way you think on your 16th birthday you’ll feel on your 21st … I did suddenly have this sense of maturity. Of course this year … I don’t feel it quite so much.
It’s the first time I’ve followed through a picture. Because I directed it, involvement to this stage has been greater than with any other film I’ve been in. Usually as an actor you leave after the main shooting, dub maybe, and that’s goodbye. But this is all my responsibility.
I’m not continually angered by the fact that it’s not got a circuit booking. I’d never visualised Charlie in the Odeons of this world. To me the word Odeon means a place with a thousand seats, and duster cupids with a space where the organ used to come up; ten minutes of those dreadful commercials, an interval for ice-cream, and then the main film stars. I feel that atmosphere is in no way conducive to experiencing certain films including Charlie Bubbles.
There’s always a degree of experimental work feeding the mainstream of commercial work and the exhibitors don’t seem see to recognise or accept this at all. If cinemas are emptying, you don’t just try and increase your ice-cream sales, you must ask yourself. ‘Well, why?’’ and the answer is to do with the experience the audience is not having inside the cinemas.
It may be what Charlie is saying that limits its mass appeal. One of the basic statements of the film is that money isn’t everything. Well, that’s all right for me, I can say it and I can mean it, and some people who haven’t got money can believe it. But most people who haven’t any money can say ‘Well, give me some first and then I can let you know.’
Albert Finney and Liza Minnelli in an intimate moment during the film Charlie Bubbles, 1967. Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
I also felt it was important to have a scene that says when you have sexual freedom, it doesn’t always work. I’m irritated by this tendency to say it’s always marvellous, lyrical, fantastic. The scene with Charlie’s secretary is basically an anti-love scene – saying that one should have the freedom to admit that it sometimes doesn’t work and what the hell. These statements get in the way of people’s fantasies, fantasies they have to have in order to keep going. For a capitalist to say money isn’t everything is like propaganda – keep off my grass.”
Charlie explores the effects of success on a young writer from the North. “The thing about the film is that Shelagh Delaney and I have each had a period where that sort of isolation, alienation, has happened to us, and we, both have an emotional understanding of what we’re talking about. A lot of the sequences you could say are based on some sort of autobiographical experience. Some idiot said to me ‘Oh, your poor wife, when she sees the film …’
Well, my relationship with my ex-wife and my son is extremely different from the one in the film, but undoubtedly the film relationship is an imaginative development of a certain guilt or crisis or whatever that I had about them at one stage in my life. That’s not the reality: it’s an extension of a tiny portion of my real experience. I suppose I’d say that some of the incidents are in some way autobiographical, but in a highly magnified way.”
Charlie’s alienation progresses with steady naturalism, until he steps into a balloon and sails off. “I like talking about that. In the first script, Charlie died at the end – he drives off followed by press men and crashes. I felt that was too brutal for the feeling of the film, literal death like that. So we tried to soften it, with Charlie saying ‘Go away, I’m busy’ as he quietly expires, so that even his death is ironic. But there was a finality there that I just don’t believe, for this situation. The fact that Shelagh and I were writing about our experiences showed that there must be some possibility of survival, otherwise we’d have killed ourselves. And, when Shelagh said ‘I think he should go away in a balloon’ it felt absolutely right for no known reason. I wanted to leave it open, because I think the only answer to his dilemma is time. It is a question mark, it’s possible to be optimistic about it. It says he might be back.”
Finney seems to have missed the traps waiting for actor-directors. “I felt with Charlie Bubbles that the problem of being in it and directing it were not overwhelming, because Charlie is relatively passive and the film is shot from his point of view emotionally. He doesn’t have to say so much. We cut a lot of his talk because the reason for making a film is to try and communicate with an audience emotionally, and not by statement, not by narrative signposts.
The Guardian, 12 February 1969.
It didn’t seem to me to be a difficulty, doing the two jobs, except that most of the days of shooting I had Kleenex in my collar to stop it getting full of make-up, and I felt sort of rigid. But directing this film gave me a joy, a feeling of creation stronger than I’ve ever had before.
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I’m hesitant to say yes, I always considered that I’d end up directing, and that my acting was working towards that, because it’s not true. But directing Charlie seemed something I had to do. The alternative was for me as an actor to hire another director to direct it as I wanted it to be done, which isn’t on.
Who knows, I suppose ‘I’ll go on acting. At the moment I’m very unreceptive to the idea. I want to concentrate on this new side, and satisfy that, even if in a year’s time my projects are still on the drawing board, I jealously guard my time for them. There are sort of two-and-a-half ideas – but it’s not right for me to say to you that I’m pregnant, because I don’t know yet. I just might be.”
Charlie Bubbles, via YouTube.