On Tuesday, the movie version of George Orwell’s 1984, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, is being shown in nearly 200 US cinemas to protest President Trump.
The screenings follow the book’s having become a sudden bestseller since the election of President Trump, while many liberals compare Orwell’s authoritarian and oppressive vision to the United States in 2017.
Heat Street contributor Jonathan Gems worked as a co-scriptwriter on 1984 back in 1984. He recalls the making of the film:
The movie version of 1984, screening throughout the US tomorrow night, isn’t fun. In fact it’s like sitting in hell. But watching a horrible movie like 1984, you come out feeling purifyingly punished and reawakened as to how lucky you are—contrary to what some who will see it tomorrow might think—not to be living under Big Brother in a totalitarian state enforced by thought-crime and double-speak.
My involvement in 1984 began with a malfunctioning copy machine. I’d just finished a play and was making copies when a man came in and asked to jump the queue. He was in a hurry. He had an important meeting in an hour and needed seven copies of his new screenplay to take to the meeting. I was happy to oblige and gave him access to the copying machine. Ten minutes later the machine conked out.
Without having a clue what I was doing, I opened it up, fiddled around inside it, and it started working again. The man was grateful and asked me what I did (I was an ‘alternative’ playwright.) He told me he was Michael Radford, a film director trying to make George Orwell’s 1984.
When his copies were done, he asked me to read it and call him with my thoughts. I was flattered. When I got home, I read it. I knew nothing about screenplays—I’d never seen one before—but I knew the book. We’d read it at school. So far as I could tell, the script was good. I did have one quibble, though—the dialogue.
The dialogue stuck out as ‘book dialogue,’ and not how people talk. The dramatic writer needs to write how we think they talk. It’s not what people actually say, it’s what we think we hear that sounds true.
I called Radford. Unfortunately, he was less than pleased. He said his screenplay had been read by six other people and none of them had any problem with the dialogue. He hung up the phone and I never expected to hear from him again. So, I was surprised when, a week later, he called and told me he was in a nearby pub. Would I like to join him for a drink?
“I thought about what you said,” he told me in the pub darkly, “and, on reflection, I think you might be right.’ He offered me three weeks’ work at £700 ($870) a week. That was how my ride on the wind-horse that was 1984 began.
Three weeks later, satisfied with my work on the script, he asked me to stay on as his assistant. I worked every day through pre-production, production, and post-production. My gratitude to Michael Radford is immense.
Thanks to him I received a real education in filmmaking and learned how every department worked. Interiors were shot at Twickenham Studios just outside London, exteriors at Alexandra Palace, Battersea Power Station, the East End, and an alien-looking, post-industrial wasteland known as the Beckton Gas Works.
Beckton Gas Works was where Stanley Kubrick shot most of Full Metal Jacket and, while we were there, we kept running into sets built for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil starring Robert de Niro and Jonathan Pryce, which had just finished shooting. Coincidentally the story of Brazil had been inspired by 1984.
This happens a lot. In 1995, I wrote a film called Mars Attacks! and, half-way through pre-production, we learned that another film with the same idea – called Independence Day – had just been given the green light.
Burton and Hurt:
They say comedies are tougher to make than dramas or tragedies. I think this is right. Certainly 1984, though not a lot of fun to watch, was a lot of fun to make. The crew was great—a bunch of eccentric, emotional characters that divided into two groups: The Newbies and the Old Salts.
I was a Newbie, of course, and—to a much lesser extent—so too were producer Simon Perry, director Radford, the cameraman Roger Deakins, and Allan Cameron, the designer. The Old Salts were those who’d toiled in the British Film Industry, which had given up the ghost about ten years earlier.
Every department contained a few Old Salts, and they all had stories to tell. I was always hearing eye-popping gossip about Rex Harrison, Larry Olivier, Diana Dors, Tony Richardson and Peter O’Toole and praise for the virtues and generous actions of Noel Coward, Dickie Attenborough, Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing.
On our movie Burton was a total delight—a star off-screen and on. His physical presence was extraordinary and he was lovely with the crew—entertaining them with funny quotes from classical literature and snatches of poetry from the likes of W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.
His memory was prodigious. Some afternoons, during hold-ups, he would divert us by reciting ‘Under Milk Wood,’ or glorious passages from Shakespeare in his spell-binding voice. Even the studio cats were transfixed.
As O’Brien, the cultured torturer of Winston Smith (played by John Hurt), Burton had a slew of very difficult speeches. But he came to the set word perfect and delivered his lines with dimensions of subtext without (seemingly) any effort. What’s more, whenever Radford made suggestions —which wasn’t often—Burton could put a new spin on the lines that instantly manifested those suggestions in fresh, unpredictable ways.
No-one knew 1984 would be Burton’s last film. Less than two weeks after his last day on the picture, he was dead at the age of 59. The last person to see him alive was John Hurt. Burton had invited him to his house in Switzerland for a holiday. It was very, very upsetting.
But that was in the future. Before this tragic coda, we had an exciting time. When Hurt and Burton had scenes together, the atmosphere was hilarious. The two actors were always trying to crack each other up. It was a contest to see who could make the other laugh first. The winner was invariably Burton.
But I remember one occasion when the sparkling Hurt got his revenge. During a short break to re-set a light, John announced that he knew a few words of Welsh. (Burton was a proud Welshman who spoke Welsh almost fluently). “Go on, then,” said Burton.
“Purraba onferya dadee,” said John in a filthy Welsh accent.
“What’s that?” said Burton, wrinkling his brow.
“Purraba onferya dadee.”
It sounded extremely Welsh, but Burton was baffled. “No,” he said, after a searching pause. “I have no idea what that means.”
“You must do!” insisted John. “You’re a Welshman, born and bred!”
“Say it again.”
“Purraba onferya dadee!”
Burton shook his head. “What does it mean?”
John sighed and said—making it slow and clear: “Put Abba on for your Daddy.”
Burton burst out laughing. Even Roger Deakins, one of those guys who never laughs, was reduced to helpless laughter. You had to be there.
Hurt’s achilles heel was booze and, to help portray the suffering of Winston Smith, he gave up drinking. Throughout the shoot he pushed down constant waves of craving, which read onscreen as the spiritual agonies of submission to Big Brother.
To add to his very real suffering, his co-star Burton (a famous lush) was walking around with a halo over his head modestly bragging that he’d given up the demon drink.
But had he really? Burton was magnificent in the mornings but, after lunch, he got looser and looser. His concentration would falter and, sometimes, he’d even slur his words. Was he secretly getting loaded? Some of us noticed a faint scent of something on his breath. Was it vodka? Maybe it was aftershave? If it was vodka, where was he getting it?
His trailer was searched—no booze there. Was one of the crew slipping it to him? It appeared not. Everyone was mystified. The only thing he drank was diet coke. Every morning he brought in a 12-pack, which he worked through steadily during the day.
Towards the end of filming, one of the camera crew swiped one of Burton’s diet cokes, opened it and took a swig. It was laced with vodka! But how did he get vodka into an unopened can? A close study revealed an almost imperceptible hole in the top—a tiny hole that could only have been made by a hypodermic syringe! Who knows if Hurt was also party to this elaborate scheme?
But Hurt’s performance made the movie compelling. There’s a scene near the end where Winston Smith—who’s being tortured—has a front tooth pulled out. As luck would have it, John had a false front tooth. The story was that he’d lost it in a drunken brawl with Oliver Reed, another actor with a weakness for the hard stuff.
So this fake tooth, which had been artfully installed by a Hollywood dentist employing a lattice of fine bridgework, was removed for the scene. Reality—that’s what Hurt went for in everything he did.
Our leading lady, Suzanna Hamilton (who everyone called’ Zanna’) was a Newbie. This was her first leading role in a major motion picture and she was only twenty-two. She was fragile and somewhat withdrawn, but she always came through with a well-judged performance.
Everyone liked Zanna. Creating Julia—the fearless woman Winston Smith falls in love with—was a challenge. No one wanted to talk about the scenes, half-way through the schedule, that flashed like a red neon light in the distance. The nude scenes.
This was where our shy, young leading lady would have to strip, make love to Hurt, disport herself around the bedroom, and then be attacked by heavily armed, uniformed security forces, punched in the stomach, picked up, and hauled out, screaming and wriggling.
When the dreaded day came, Radford closed the set, and nobody made any more jokes. The first to arrive was Hurt in a robe. He took it off—handed it to an assistant, and—shivering despite the heat of the lights—slipped naked under the bedsheets.
A moment later, Zanna Hamilton appeared, also in a robe. Radford approached her gently and whispered in her ear. He told me later he was assuring her that if she felt uncomfortable, she should signal him and he’d call ‘Cut.’ Zanna’s response was to suddenly yell: “For God’s sake, Mike! Stop making such a fuss!”
Everyone was startled. We’d never heard her raise her voice before. The crew got busy and, in every set-up, Zanna knocked it out of the park in one take. The only reason some of the shots needed several takes was Hurt, who was more nervous than she was!
All through the day’s filming, Zanna was as relaxed as if she’d been raised in a nudist colony. If you watch the film, you cannot fail to be impressed by how natural she is in these scenes. When it was over, the crew gave her an enormous round of applause.
Later, Mike told me he’d congratulated her on her performance and asked her how she’d pulled it off. She replied that it was nothing to do with her. It was Julia, her character, who did it. “If it had been me,” she said. “I would have locked myself in the dressing room!”
Radford was determined to be faithful to the book and fought vigorously every attempt to sprinkle sugar on it. In fact, when he saw the footage—exquisitely shot by cinematographer Deakins—he was in despair. “It’s much too good!” he moaned. “It’s too beautiful!”
All his efforts to make Allan Cameron, his production designer, build the ugliest possible sets had been sabotaged by Deakins’ magnificent photography. Radford was deeply troubled until someone told him about a bleaching process that could strip color out of the negative.
He had a tortured internal struggle over the decision, but he made it. I was in his office when, on a call to the lab, I heard him cry, in a strangled voice: “Do it! Do it! Put it in the bath!”
Later, a group of us watched the washed-out footage. Most of us thought it was depressing. But Mike and his old London Film School buddy, Bill Forsyth, were cautiously positive. (Bill Forsyth directed several notable films, including ‘Local Hero,’ with Burt Lancaster; Mike had asked him to the screening to get his input.)
“’Tis nae purrfect,” said the dour, Scottish Forsyth, “but ‘tis a damn sight worse than it was before.” “Thank you,” said Mike, much relieved.
The impossible dream of our indefatigable producer, Simon Perry, was to have 1984 released in 1984. Personally, I didn’t see why it mattered so much what year the film came out. After all Orwell wrote it in 1948, needed a futuristic date, and simply reversed the last two digits of the current year.
But I was on my own in not appreciating why Perry strained every muscle to get it out in theaters in 1984. The film was released on October 10th, 1984.
The angel behind the 1984 enterprise was Richard Branson. Today he’s Sir Richard Branson, celebrity billionaire, airline head honcho and a friend of ex-Presidents, but then he was a guy in a baggy sweater who wanted to start a small film studio.
The movie had gone over budget, and there’d been a quarrel with Radford over the soundtrack. Mike didn’t want the music by Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics and had commissioned a classical score by composer Dominic Muldowney. But a compromise was reached, wounds were healed, and, in a blaze of publicity, 1984 was released…in one movie theatre.
Why only one? Because almost all the movie houses in Britain were (and still are) directly or indirectly controlled by the Hollywood studios. Branson bowed to the inevitable and sold 1984 to MGM for cost. He got his investment back, but all the profits—and they were considerable—went to MGM. The good news was that MGM gave the film a tremendous worldwide release and millions of people saw it.
When the movie came out, some people liked it and others didn’t. The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby called the film “bleakly beautiful” though “not an easy film to watch”. Roger Ebert said it “penetrates much more deeply into the novel’s heart of darkness” than previous adaptations, and called Hurt “the perfect Winston Smith.”
All I can say is that, for me, working on 1984 was one of the happiest times of my life.
