The Constant Gardener

[DB7]

A Brazilian let loose in the British world of Le Carré

John Hiscock goes on the set of the surprising new venture from the 'City of God' director

Immaculately dressed in a pin-stripe suit, blue shirt and tie, Bill Nighy strides authoritatively across the smoking room at the National Liberal Club, talking in clipped, upper-class tones to an attentive Ralph Fiennes at his side.

The take goes faultlessly and, while crew members scurry to set up the next scene, Nighy takes the opportunity to pull up a chair in the club's River Room and assess his surroundings. Floor-to-ceiling windows open out on to a long balcony with magnificent views of the Thames, and oil paintings line the walls of the 125-year-old club's high-ceilinged rooms.

The actors and crew have moved in for a week to film scenes for The Constant Gardener, the £15 million film based on John Le Carré's novel of murder and intrigue in Africa. They will then move on to Kenya for eight weeks.

Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a mild-mannered British diplomat who surprises his colleagues by embarking on a personal odyssey to find the truth surrounding the murder of his socially conscious but adulterous wife, played by Rachel Weisz. Nighy is Sir Bernard Pellegrin, a Foreign Office mandarin with special responsibility for Africa.

After being cast as mentally fragile and battered individuals in films such as Still Crazy, I Capture the Castle and Love Actually, Nighy takes great satisfaction in portraying what he calls "a nobby toff".

"I don't come from that background at all, so it's very nice to be playing an upper-middle-class Englishman," laughs the 55-year-old actor who, after 30 years of stage, small-film and television work, is suddenly near the top of filmmakers' want-lists.

His years of hard-won experience allow him to shun the weeks of rehearsal and instead step straight into a role. He only arrived on The Constant Gardener set the day before, having come straight from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in which he plays Slartiblartfast, the man, he explains with a grin, who designed the world, winning an award for the fjords of Norway. "I came in yesterday, shook hands with the director and started acting," he recalls. "I'm still here today, so I must have the job."

It is not Bill Nighy's first role in a Le Carré thriller. In 1983, he had a bit part in The Little Drummer Girl when the theatre company of which he was a member was hired to play themselves.

Nighy talks drolly, with a self-deprecation that probably comes from years in the acting trenches, but The Constant Gardener's director, Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, is more enthusiastic about his talents.

"Bill arrived yesterday, we met for 20 minutes and he did his scenes perfectly," he says. "I am very fortunate, I have a wonderful cast."


Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle
It is Meirelles' first film in English and he took over from Mike Newell, who left when he was offered Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. Meirelles comes to The Constant Gardener from City Of God, the Portuguese language film about drug dealers in a Brazilian slum that won more than 25 awards globally and received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Director. Following its success, Meirelles received 64 offers from Hollywood, but instead opted to cut his English language teeth on the lower-budgeted British film.

An engaging, bespectacled 48-year-old with a slightly rumpled look, Meirelles is wrestling with the intricacies of the English language while struggling to understand the ways of British diplomats. "The difficult thing for me is the English," he says frankly. "I speak bad English and some things in the script sometimes I just don't get. The actors are helping me and they are very patient with me. I feel very bad because I think I am more intelligent than I can express in English." In fact, his English is much better than he says and he has imposed his own vision on screenwriter Jeffrey Caine's adaptation of Le Carré's novel. Meirelles has jettisoned many of the references to the structure of English society that, he confesses, he didn't understand, and has focused more on Kenya and the ruthlessness of the corporate world in Africa.

"Fernando has brought a vision of Africa to the project," says the producer, Simon Channing Williams, whose credits include Secrets and Lies and De-lovely, and who obtained the rights to The Constant Gardener three and a half years ago.

"Until Fernando came on board, it was mainly about an enclave of English middle-class diplomats living in a colony in Africa," he says. "It was very much done from the British point of view, but Fernando has refocused it and has cast 17 Kenyan actors."

The villain of the piece is a multinational drug company that fatally uses Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy. Tessa Quayle is killed when she is discovered compiling data against the company.

Meirelles and Caine have reshaped the structure, beginning not with the death of Tessa, as Le Carré does, but when she is pregnant and living in Africa with her husband. Her murder does not occur until a third of the way into the film and she continues to appear in flashbacks.

To balance the darkness of the story, Meirelles has included an explicit love scene between Fiennes and Weisz, which he has already filmed and in which Fiennes, he says, performed admirably.

The only problem has been filming in London. "It's been an absolute nightmare," Channing Williams says bluntly. "London is not film friendly. Ken Livingstone has said he would like to make it easier to film here and I hope he does, but, at the moment, it is harder than any other city in the world. Dear old Britain is still in the colonial age."

[Gibbie]

When is this due out DB7?

[DB7]

Maybe Sprng next year.

[Gibbie]

Thanks, DB7!