The Rocky Road to ‘Brideshead’

It’s hard to believe that 20 years have passed since Anglophiles were in the throes of “Brideshead Revisited” fever. Every Monday night, viewers were glued to PBS’ “Great Performances” to catch the latest installment in the 11-hour miniseries based on Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel about the waning days of the British aristocracy between the two world wars.

Jeremy Irons starred as Charles Ryder, an officer in the British Army during World War II, who recalls his friendship with the flamboyant, self-destructive Sebastian (Anthony Andrews), whom he met when they were both students at Oxford, and his relationship with Sebastian’s very wealthy Catholic family who reside at the opulent castle Brideshead.

Critics raved about the drama and it won 17 international awards, including an Emmy for Laurence Olivier, who played Sebastian’s father, Lord Marchmain. “Brideshead” transformed Irons into a major international player.

The complete, uncut and digitally remastered “Brideshead” makes its DVD debut today in a lovely three-disc set (Acorn, $80), complete with a companion guide, production notes, location photos, facts and photos about Castle Howard, biographies of the cast, crew and even Aloysius, the teddy bear owned by Sebastian.

Despite the success of “Brides- head,” the production was beset with one harrowing crisis after another, director Charles Sturridge recalls.

Production began in England in late spring of 1979 and within six weeks was shuttered by a technicians strike. The strike lasted four months. “It not only brought production to a halt, it threw every contract, arrangement, location that had been booked out the window,” says Sturridge, who most recently directed “Shackleton.”

It also became clear during the strike that the original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, wouldn’t be able to continue because he had another engagement.

“At that point, they had shot it like one enormous feature film,” Sturridge says. “They had shot a disparate groups of scenes. They started, in fact, with Sebastian’s final scenes in Morocco. They hadn’t done any Oxford or Castle Howard scenes, but they had done some of the London parties.”

Sturridge was brought in and production started again in September 1979. It continued for 42 of the next 52 weeks. Why the second interruption?

“When we re-contracted everybody, Jeremy had expressed a desire that he wanted to do [the film adaptation of] ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ which he hadn’t been cast in at that point. He said, ‘If I am cast, I want to get out to do it.’ This bargain was accepted, frankly, in hope that he wouldn’t get the part. But he did get the part, so we had a second hiatus, slightly more organized this time in that we could see it coming. So in the summer of 1980, we again stopped production and used the time to work on post-production to cut what we had done.”

Originally, the miniseries had been commissioned and written as a conventional, six-hour TV adaptation that didn’t have Charles Ryder’s voice-over.

“If you take the personal observation out of it, if you take out the fact it is Charles Ryder’s version of the events of the story and start to tell the story from a neutral point of view, the story becomes very different and starts to fall apart,” Sturridge says. “This had begun to become obvious when Michael was shooting and during the strike it became quite clear that the six-hour abridged version didn’t have the potency of the story.”

So the original script was tossed out and the decision was made to expand the miniseries by five hours.

“A trick I have always tried to repeat is to take advantage of accidents,” Sturridge says.

Sturridge, who was only 28 and had very little directing experience before “Brideshead,” had only nine days of preparation from the day he got the job to when production was to resume. To make matters more complicated, the final episode had to be shot first because of Olivier’s schedule. And there was no script.

“Olivier was very concerned that he wouldn’t know his lines and he kept saying, ‘I must have the script. I must have the script.’ So producer Derek Granger and I, in a disused chapel in Yorkshire, hammered out what became that episode and then hammered out the basic structure of all the other episodes.”

Sturridge says one of the most extraordinary things about his “Brideshead” experience was “to make a film about the complexity of a group for relationships over a period of time over such a long period. As a cast and crew we spent nearly two years together, which is unusual for a film. It is more like being in a theater company.”

And he’s remained close with a lot of the cast members. In fact, he’s been married 17 years to “Brideshead” star Phoebe Nicholls, with whom he has three children. “We are quite close,” Sturridge says, laughing. “Derek [Granger] is godfather to my children.”

He also worked with Irons a few years back in the TV miniseries “Longitude” and recently talked to Andrews about teaming up for a project. “It is an experience that is part of us all,” Sturridge says.