Buddy movie

Director Roger Michell, left, and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. (Alliance Atlantis)

Roger Michell, director, and Hanif Kureishi, screenwriter, are friends as well as collaborators – I think. In describing their creative process, Michell says: “There’s lots of shouting, lots of screaming and cursing and banging of feet.” A smile. “We’re very good friends.”

Says Kureishi: “Roger will say to me: ‘This is really lazy, this is so crap, how could you write this rubbish?’ I listen to him, take his ideas very seriously and then reject them.” A smirk. “Directness is a kind of method.”

In separate hotel rooms during the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, the two men are discussing the birth of Venus. The film is a ribald, only slightly sentimental comedy about sex and death, starring screen legend Peter O’Toole, who recently earned a Golden Globe nomination for the role and appears Oscar-bound, too. “It’s about somebody who is saying goodbye to the world,” says Kureishi.

At 52, Kureishi is not quite up against his own mortality, but he has definitely outgrown the “bad boy of British letters” reputation that came with the release of the gay love story My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishi was a 31-year-old former playwright when his script earned him an Oscar nomination. Now, in expensive runners and a jaunty scarf around his neck, he projects a hip, slightly precious mixture of youthful insouciance and cultural authority, much like his writing. Kureishi jumps among novels, non-fiction and screenwriting at an enviable rate. Before Venus, he and Michell collaborated on the 1993 BBC adaptation of Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia, and a decade later on the under-seen The Mother, about a widowed granny (Anne Reid) who starts a sweaty sexual affair with a man 30 years younger (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig).

It is clear that Michell and Kureishi love taking the piss out of one another, as they say back home in the U.K. Asked to describe the moment of Venus’s inception, Kureishi says: “Roger was out of work again, and he said to me: ‘Have you got anything?’ I said: ‘Yeah, I’ve got a great idea, why don’t we do a film about a guy having a prostate operation?’ The idea was that he remembers his sexual life, so it becomes like a Fellini film, a parade of sexual conquests.” Kureishi laughs: “But Roger couldn’t see people queuing around the block to see a movie about a guy having a prostate operation.”

Maurice (Peter O'Toole) meets Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) and begins a relationship with her in Venus. (Alliance Atlantis)

After a few months of Kureishi writing, with Michell weighing in on structure, the straight-ahead, feel-good script that emerged does include a prostate operation but little Fellini strangeness (though watch for a nod to the famous beach scene in 8 1/2). The unlucky scalpel recipient is Maurice (O’Toole), a former actor who still lands the occasional role as a TV corpse (“Typecasting,” says Vanessa Redgrave, as Maurice’s oft-betrayed, un-bitter ex-wife). His routine consists of pill-popping, snail-paced walks and pub visits with fussy old friend Ian (Leslie Phillips). The slow wind-down to nothing is interrupted by the arrival of Ian’s grand-niece, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). Despite her snake tattoo and a penchant for apples, Jessie makes an unlikely seductress: she’s a couch surfer who sucks chip salt off her fingers, wears velour track pants and has a Yorkshire accent so thick that when she says, “I might try modelling,” Maurice replies, “Yodelling?” But the Lolita breaks Maurice out of his resignation; indeed, at one point, he gives himself a slap in the face: “Come on, old man!” To stop things from veering toward Cocoon-cutesy, Maurice displays some carnal impulses, even if they’re not exactly reciprocated. With Venus and The Mother, Michell and Kureishi have engineered two films in a row that rescue the elderly from Hollywood’s depressing certainty that the twilight years are entirely neutered.

“Not only are people of that age on screen completely asexual, they are always stable, they’ve reached stasis,” says Michell, who is 60. “What Venus expresses is an obvious truth that you don’t stop changing, you don’t stop desiring even when you’re about to die, and maybe you start desiring particularly when you’re about to die.”

While Michell is best-known for directing the saccharine Julia Roberts rom-com Notting Hill, he has treaded in darker, and more literary, waters, too, with the urban revenge drama Changing Lanes, co-authored by novelist Michael Tolkin, and the adaptation of Ian McEwan‘s stalker drama Enduring Love. A one-time Cambridge University English literature student, Michell was set to direct the film version of the bestseller Captain Correlli’s Mandolin a decade ago when felled by a heart attack and dreams of adapting Huck Finn one day.

“You might as well try to work with the best possible literary brain, even though he might not be the best possible film brain,” Michell says. “I can help with that part. Hanif needs quite a lot of kicking around. He doesn’t write in a way that considers how a film is put together, but that’s why he’s good, too.”

Though it would be years before they worked together, Kureishi met Michell in 1979 when they were working in theatre in London. Kureishi was an usher and Michell a director.

“He was this British-Pakistani guy, first generation from the suburbs, and writing from the corner of the room. It was fertile ground,” Michell says.

Maurice (Peter O'Toole) and his best friend Ian (Leslie Phillips) enjoy a visit to the pub in the film Venus. (Alliance Atlantis)

“I guess what I look for is that which isn’t spoken about, or that which is censored or that which is peculiar. That’s where the action is in society: in what can’t be said, in the characters that are hidden,” Kureishi says, noting that the film My Beautiful Laundrette, showed loving, explicit gay sex long before Brokeback Mountain. “And with a skinhead and a Muslim!”

In Venus, Kureishi turns his eye to another invisible demographic: “the slag,” as he calls Jessie. She falls into a Pygmalion relationship with Maurice, who takes her to the National Gallery and quotes Shakespeare at her gum-chewing face. But Jessie is not simply wet clay; she has her own distinct humanity, as Maurice comes to see.

“Political correctness doesn’t look after white working-class girls. Girls who are called ‘slags’ or ‘mingers’ or ‘trash’ are generally despised,” says Kureishi. “My family moved to Britain from India, I was generally abused and spat on by society as a kid. I’m interested in people who occupy that position.”

His work – sexy, coarse, filled with beautiful dialogue – is inherently filmic, and Kureishi’s books and stories have been adapted by directors including Stephen Frears (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and Patrice Chereu (Intimacy, based on Kureishi’s thinly veiled autobiographical novel about leaving his wife and children for a younger woman).

“I’m used to people f---ing around with my work, and I have to say, mostly it’s been improved,” says Kureishi. “But the screenplay is just a series of instructions, really. It’s go ahead, turn left, turn right, stop at the light. Everyone else involved has to make the journey. The journey is the real thing. I’m providing a story that Roger and the actors will then fill out the colour in. It’s up to them. It’s just a map. It’s not the place.”

It helps, of course, to have a virtuoso like Peter O’Toole get you there. “There are not many actors who are 74 years old who are fit enough to carry a movie, and have the balls to do it,” says Kureishi. “I didn’t write it for him, I just hoped that some old bloke would show up and be brave enough to say: ‘I’m old and I’m not trying to hide it. This is what an old man who’s dying looks like.’ “

Equally without vanity is 83-year-old Phillips as Ian, Maurice’s best friend, stoically shouldering his unacknowledged feelings for Maurice and the longing that quietly hums between old, and new, friends. “I didn’t want to make the unrequited love theme too explicit, and Roger agreed with me. It’s simple: Ian loves him and he’s always loved him,” says Kureishi. Perhaps, then, Venus is not so much a film about sex as it is about friendship, born of Michell and Kureishi’s friendship. 

Then again, says Kureishi, contemplating Ian and Maurice: “And you know, all friendships have the libido in them.” 

Venus opens in Toronto Jan. 19.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.