Of Love and Death, and the Flowering of a Film Called ‘Iris’

This sleepy eastern seaside resort is a favored destination for senior citizens, who like its tranquillity, its handsome Victorian architecture and the flavor of gentler times it evokes.

The older brigade is out in force on this early May day, although a chill easterly wind is cutting in from Scandinavia. The pale sun peeks through the clouds just often enough to make it worth braving the elements.

An elderly couple, huddling together to keep warm as they wait at a bus stop, are typical. She wears a head scarf, a worn winter coat and, in an eccentric touch, ankle socks over her hose. Tufts of wiry white hair spring wildly from beneath his flat cap; he is a vision in beige, from his faded raincoat to his pants and shoes.

They fit so perfectly with the environment that it’s a shock to see film cameras turned on them. In reality, they are two of England’s most celebrated actors. She is Dame Judi Dench, the stage veteran who in recent years has become an Oscar-night favorite for her work in “Mrs. Brown,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chocolat.” He is Jim Broadbent, a hugely experienced, versatile performer who effortlessly shifts among theater, TV and film; he made a notable appearance in “Moulin Rouge” as the club owner with a show-stopping turn singing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”

Although dressed to look like Mr. and Mrs. Average, Dench and Broadbent are playing a renowned couple: the late Dame Iris Murdoch, a philosopher of note and one of the most cerebral and influential British novelists of the post-World War II era, and her husband, John Bayley, an Oxford University academic. The film (which opens Friday in limited release) is “Iris,” based on Bayley’s touching, best-selling books “Iris” and “Iris and Her Friends,” detailing their last years together, when Murdoch’s brilliant intellect was ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease.

The books captured the imagination of the British reading public with their tender, matter-of-fact and even humorous treatment of the way Murdoch’s affliction affected the couple. “Iris” may have a low budget (around $5 million), but its pedigree is distinguished.

Its director is Richard Eyre, making his first feature film since stepping down as artistic director of London’s National Theatre in 1997. Eyre has written the script, along with playwright Charles Wood. The film’s two producers are the American film and theatrical producer Scott Rudin and Englishman Robert Fox, primarily a theater producer who launched Dench’s 1998 Broadway triumph as the star of “Amy’s View.” The rest of the cast also demonstrates strength in depth; Kate Winslet plays the younger Murdoch in flashback scenes, while Hugh Bonneville (“Notting Hill”) is the young Bayley.

When a character in a film script falls ill, it presents pitfalls, as Eyre acknowledged. “It’s so not intended to be a film about illness. It’s a film about a relationship, and the illness is just something that happens to the relationship.

“The idea was to make a film about love, enduring love and the mutability of love, and at the same time, someone losing their mind.”

“Iris” has a personal resonance for Eyre and Broadbent, both of whom lost their mothers to Alzheimer’s. “Sadly, I didn’t need to do any research for this story,” said Broadbent. “My mother’s death was part of the reason I was drawn to the script. It was clearly very accurately written, a very honest description of the disease....

“Oddly, it’s not all bleak and it’s not all dreadful. There’s a lot of humor and love generated by the disease, in a strange way.”

Eyre’s mother died nine years ago, but, he said, “I didn’t take on [the film] thinking in some way it would be on behalf of my mother. I just thought, well, that’s a subject I know a lot about. And it’s been less distressing than I thought.... I wouldn’t say it hasn’t brought back memories, but it’s possible to objectify them becoming part of the work.”

What Eyre found difficult was the logistics of shooting the film in seven weeks, including five specific weeks when Dench was available between stints of shooting “The Shipping News” in Newfoundland. “Of course, it does concentrate the mind wonderfully.”

Yet “Iris” was originally planned as a big-budget studio picture. Sony bought the rights to Bayley’s books, and studio chairman John Calley quickly approached Dench to play Murdoch. “She’s perfect casting, it goes without saying,” observed producer Fox. “She expressed interest from that moment and remained committed to it through its ups and downs.”

Eventually, Sony put “Iris” into turnaround, which Fox believes was actually a blessing: “It’s not really a studio film. It’s a film that needs to be made for a price, and if a studio was involved you’d never be able to make it for that price. Now people are doing it because they want to, not because it’s a payday.”

Calley had already asked Richard Eyre to write and direct “Iris.” When the studio dropped it, Miramax, Intermedia and Britain’s BBC picked up financing for the film. Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) also became involved. “It could have been hard, with seven producers involved,” Eyre reflected. “That’s about six more than desirable. There was a nail-biting few months, seeing if the film would get off the ground. But in the writing of the screenplay, I got a lot of expert advice, especially from Scott and Anthony....

“The other side of a low budget is you get to make the film you want. All the people involved are bright, so there’s no crass intervention. No one for a moment has suggested the film should be anything else but what it is.”

“I never met Iris Murdoch,” Judi Dench said flatly. “I only wish I had.” She has finished the scene with Broadbent, having climbed aboard a bus and bid farewell to an old friend of the couple (played by English stage actress Penelope Wilton) whom she clearly does not recognize. Dench too has retired to the relative warmth of her trailer, and is pondering the notion that her casting seems perfect.

“I don’t know about that,” she said finally. “This is certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. So many people knew Iris Murdoch. I was a great fan of her novels a long time ago. It’s a wonderful love story, and I’ve watched masses of tapes of interviews with her. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have known her, so you get a kind of distillation of her, I hope. It comforts me to know she’s Anglo-Irish, like me. You can’t hope to be her. All I can do is to give the essence.”

Part of Dench’s challenge stems from the novelist’s lack of mannerisms: “She was an extraordinary philosopher and writer, wonderful with words, but she didn’t speak in a dramatic way. She didn’t throw her head back and deliver. Hers was a contained way of speaking, no stresses on words and no gestures. She needed to use just the right words, which was what made it terrible when the Alzheimer’s started.”

Dench had expected it would be harrowing to play Murdoch in decline. “In fact, I’ve managed to be--objective isn’t quite the word--but when you have a feeling about something, you can use it as an actor. Grief produces incredible adrenaline, and in a way this is running the adrenaline out. It’s a use for a whole lot of emotions.”

She was alluding to two separate issues here--Murdoch, and her own bereavement since the death earlier this year of her longtime husband, actor Michael Williams. Dench threw herself into work, accepting roles in three films: “Iris,” “The Shipping News” and a new British production of “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise,” she said.

Broadbent said he had not sought to meet Bayley, although he had listened to him on tape and managed to approximate Bayley’s trademark stutter. “After a while it might not have been helpful to meet him,” he mused. “The performance will be more like me than him, anyway. It’s my body. And I’m taller.”

Fox added that Bayley had read the script and made suggestions, which had been adopted. “John and I have met, talked and corresponded,” Eyre confirmed. “He’s been encouraging and supportive, nothing but enthusiastic.”

Murdoch’s biographer and friend, the academic Peter Conradi, has visited the set. “He was moved by seeing Judi and Jim,” Eyre said. “He said he thought they were the essence of Iris and John.”

All the elements in “Iris” look promising, but it remains a low-budget film being shot in less than ideal conditions. For the next scene, the crew decamped across a narrow stretch of water (a single rowboat served as their ferry) to an isolated house with a wooden balcony, set facing the sea. Dench, Broadbent and Wilton would complete a funny conversational scene inside.

Because it was a night scene and the crew arrived in midafternoon, the windows were darkened with a huge expanse of black canvas, which proved troublesome. The wind was becoming fiercer by the minute, and the canvas kept coming loose. Finally an assistant director ordered everyone on set without a task to stand in a row and hold down the canvas while the actors spoke their lines inside.

“This tells you all you need to know about the British film industry,” one observer snorted derisively. And in truth, there was an element of farce in the proceedings. In the wrong hands, everyone on set agreed, the story of Murdoch’s last years could make a perfectly awful film. But the script by Eyre and Wood has a poetic, haunting, literary quality and does the subject justice.

“It’s about love and Iris’ philosophy of it,” mused Dench. “So how do you get that on film? Certainly, Jim and Hugh Bonneville look uncannily alike. And if the same [resemblance] can work between Kate and me, you never know, we might have something.”

Modestly, Dench leaves herself out of the equation. But observers on set who have seen the dailies are astonished by the quality she brings to the role. “I don’t think anyone will have seen Judi in anything quite like this,” said Fox. “They won’t have seen the scope, the range she’s able to show in this film, which is staggering. Even when she’s not saying anything, it’s extraordinary what she manages to convey without words. It’s truly remarkable.”