Richard Attenborough on Closing the Ring
Attenborough tells Jan Gilbert about his latest film and about what moves him to make cinema.

Considering his many achievements, Richard Attenborough is an extraordinarily modest man. According to the 84-year-old actor/director, his films are not innovative, and he sees himself as a ‘craftsman’, rather than as a great filmmaker or auteur, reserving that title for the man he regards as ‘the genius of British cinema’, Michael Powell. Yet during his 65-year career in the film industry, Attenborough has accomplished an enormous amount. At only 17 years old, he received a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and was still a student when he made his debut on both the West End stage and the big screen in 1942. He followed that first film, Noël Coward and David Lean’s wartime drama In Which We Serve, with over sixty others such as Brighton Rock, The Great Escape, and 10 Rillington Place, and more recently Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, and Shekhar Kapur’s historical drama Elizabeth. While his credits as a producer date back to the late ‘50s and include Bryan Forbes’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon and Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, it was not until 1969 that Attenborough helmed his first feature film, the satirical musical Oh! What a Lovely War, which won a number of awards including a Golden Globe and a clutch of BAFTAs.

Still, as a filmmaker, Attenborough is undoubtedly best known for his 1982 film Gandhi, a labour of love which took the director years of dedication and patience to bring to fruition, and which garnered eight Oscars, five BAFTAs, and the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. However, what makes Attenborough most proud is that the film ‘achieved a huge amount in terms of the impact it had on certain attitudes at the time.’ Like Gandhi, his latest work behind the camera, Closing the Ring, a love story which moves between America and Northern Ireland in 1941 and 1991, also tested the director’s incredible reserves of patience over the many years he spent trying to bring it to the screen. As Attenborough reveals, ‘It gets more and more difficult. You’re not really dealing anymore with people who are interested in the movies. They are part of conglomerates. They rarely read scripts, they have a chart with names of players on, and they have numbers which are added together, and if you have a sufficient number then you can get your money, if you don’t, then you can’t.

‘I do believe that increasingly there is a genuine audience that is not being served. There are films which you know there is an audience waiting to see, but for some reason, for instance the print and advertising costs simply are not available, they don’t get the sort of promotion they might. They don’t get on Parkinson, or Jonathan Ross, or Richard & Judy. And because they don’t get the promotion they require, the film disappears and it’s very sad. And that means that the criteria determining what sort of money you can raise for the next film you want to do is even more difficult.’

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 119.