An iron fist, a less certain heart

EVERY film set has an undercurrent of whispers, heated speculation about who is sleeping with whom. And on a scorching day last summer at the Lithuanian Film Studio in this quiet Eastern European city, everyone had an opinion about a certain Elizabeth, leading lady and reported resident virgin. Had she or hadn’t she? And if so, with whom? Was it dashing Leicester, her trusted advisor and constant companion? Or the dazzling young Essex, her latest obsession?

This was the set of “Elizabeth I,” a four-hour miniseries about the so-called Virgin Queen directed by Tom Hooper (“Red Dust”) and starring Helen Mirren, with Jeremy Irons as the earl of Leicester and Hugh Dancy as the earl of Essex. A co-production with Britain’s Channel 4, where it aired last fall, the two-part drama will be shown on HBO on Saturday and April 24. Written by Nigel Williams, “Elizabeth I” takes a personal look at the later reign of a politically powerful woman whose private and public lives were perilously intermingled.

“The relationship that Tony Blair has with Cherie Blair doesn’t have an immediate binding effect on the body politic with Britain,” said Hooper. “But in the Elizabethan court, whoever was Elizabeth’s lover rose to the most powerful political player in the court, became a multimillionaire, had the power to bestow land and status to other people.”

Elizabeth had more to lose than her virginity by giving in to her desires -- the risk of disease, the life-threatening possibility of childbirth, the loss of her power to a king-husband or an heir. Men had everything to gain from flattering her, and it was impossible to know where their affections ended and their self-interest began.

The movie opens in 1579 as a royal gynecologist inspects the unmarried, 45-year-old Elizabeth’s seemingly public parts to find out if she is still capable of bearing an heir, a national obsession. Until the end, Elizabeth defends herself against questions of succession, the Catholic threat from Spain, the endless flattery of countless men and the battles of her own mind and heart.

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A city recast

THE day’s shooting had included a scene in which Leicester rescues the queen from an assassination attempt while strolling in a pebble-and-rosebush-covered garden, which had been built from thin air and would be torn down in a few days. Across town in an abandoned Soviet-era sports stadium, the filmmakers had re-created a spectacular suite of chambers from the original Whitehall Palace, in the shadow of avocado-green bleachers that went so high you had to crane your neck to see where they ended.

Vilnius has a World Heritage site jewel of a city center and the Hugo Boss boutiques, sushi bars, newly expensive hotels, cheap beer, strip clubs and fledgling moviemaking business that are the hallmarks of a burgeoning post-communist economy. At the airport’s one-room arrival lounge, young Lithuanian men wait for their girlfriends with single long-stemmed flowers and it’s standing room only at Sunday morning Mass in the city’s dozens of churches. On the streets, long-legged young women dress like working girls and nobody turns their heads.

It seems an unlikely setting in which to make a classic English period drama -- except that production costs can run at a third of the price of those in the U.K., and there is less red tape than trying to shoot on location at Hampton Court or on the streets of London. “Here we can build Hollywood-scale sets on a television budget,” Hooper said.

“ ‘It’s great here, you can do anything’ -- I hear that a lot,” said Eve Stewart, the production designer. “And in a way, you can. But the challenge of trying to build Elizabethan London and Elizabethan palaces in a country that has absolutely no cultural reference points for London, England, anything Western -- it was just like madness in one way.”

The city’s castle had the wrong style roof for the period (it was taken off using special effects). The churches were Baroque. Even the vegetation -- “pine trees and Chekhovian cherry orchards and nothing English” -- was wrong, Stewart said. “In a way it worked in my favor, because we realized about 10 minutes after getting here that we would have to build everything.” She admired the locals’ ability to transform scrap materials into beautiful sets and their woodworking skills to carve Elizabethan-style chairs out of wood from the plentiful Lithuanian forests. But it was hard for the British crew to work with a support team of mostly untrained locals in a language they could not begin to grasp. “I mean it’s been a slog, to be really honest,” Stewart said. “I mean it’s been great, but it’s, yeah, it’s very hard. I’ve worked in a lot of Europe and America, but this is a big cultural difference. If you’re from an Eastern bloc, you feel dislocated from power and used to just constantly being told what to do, rather than being proactive and taking responsibility.”

“Sometimes I have wanted to be in England just because Elizabeth means something to the English and really doesn’t mean anything to people here,” Mirren said during a shooting break, looking quite the queen in an elaborately embroidered peach dress, an apricot-colored wig bejeweled with Elizabethan ornaments and a corset clutching her tiny waist. “Except now they all say, karaliene, karaliene -- my queen!’ and when I walk in often they all applaud, because I’m the queen. So there is some understanding of ‘queen,’ which is amazing after so many years of communism and so forth. And maybe a sort of yearning for that romantic vision of monarchy.”

A competing BBC production that covered Elizabeth’s entire life was shooting on location in England, but Hooper said he was more interested in focusing on the mature Elizabeth. “I think there’s a sort of ageism in our culture particularly in relation to women,” said Hooper, 32, “where with so many of our cinematic television role models, the emphasis is on youth and beauty. With the older Elizabeth, we have the chance to put a woman’s life at that age in the center of a big piece, which I think is quite unusual. I think there are very few people in the world who could have played Elizabeth at this age.”

Throughout the afternoon, Hooper had conferred often with the actors and seemed to be not only soliciting their suggestions but working out the scene on the spot.

“I just find if you come to a scene having worked it out completely in your head and structured and blocked it and then you want the actors to fit into that plan, you risk being unreceptive to new ideas and better ideas,” Hooper said. “Helen is my closest collaborator. A lot of actors are in their own space worrying about themselves. She’s got a very good what I call ‘naff-ometer.’ If there’s anything in the scene -- something an extra’s doing or something that’s not being thought through -- she’ll quite often spot it and draw your attention to it, so everything goes through a quality filter.”

Watching Irons and Mirren pal around on set, giggling through the beginnings and ends of their takes, it was hard to believe they hadn’t worked together before. “We’re very well matched,” Mirren said of her colleague. “Similar age and certainly mutual respect. And he makes me laugh a lot.”

“I’ve tried to create an intimacy in the naturalistic way I am with her,” said Irons in his trailer, rolling a cigarette, his hair wet from a shower. “They’re a bit like an old married couple by the time we get to them in the film. They are just two people who very much get each other’s number.”

Dancy is the sexy, dangerously power-hungry young suitor of Part 2, but the 30-year-old actor said he didn’t just want to play his character like “a villain, a jerk. Essex goes sour like a stalker almost,” he said, standing in an empty field on the studio lot during an after-hours beer party, “in the sense that you can justify anything if you say you did it out of love. What I found intriguing in the historical research was the idea that people didn’t really know how to handle a queen being in charge, so they took all the devotion that they would have had for a king and they tacked onto that the idea of courtly love. In her reign, people were writing these crazed love letters, she was the shining example of all womankind, and they were all spouting this kind of rhetoric. And she was encouraging that by being genuine and generous and tender and playing with her femininity -- but could undercut that and turn around and just be utterly decisive and brutal.”

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Of costume and character

THE filmmakers were hoping to humanize this complex woman without pop-psychologizing her in the process. “It’s very difficult to put your mind back to what that world was and the attitudes that were so different from ours,” Mirren said. “In many ways, the action Saddam Hussein took against the Kurds is the sort of action that Elizabeth would take against anybody who she felt was rebelling against her. She was a bit of a monster, incredibly self-centered, arrogant, egotistical, greedy, cruel. But at the same time she was witty and intelligent -- and vulnerable.” Many actors say they don’t become their characters until they get into costume. “Sometimes I catch sight of myself and I think, ‘Wow, is that me?’ ” Mirren said, sporting dark contacts. “The wig and the crown and all the rest of it does a lot of work for you because every English person knows that image. But in a way you have to fight your way out of the costumes and the makeup -- to make the character become real and human and believable in spite of all that stuff.”

At the end of the day, Mirren slipped off to her trailer to “de-rig” and reappeared as the lovely woman she is in a rust-colored skirt and a low-cut top, wearing a straw hat crazy with pink plastic flowers to cover the state that was her wig-prepared scalp. Her eyes were restored to their habitual blue.

“She was sexual,” Mirren said, weighing in on the debate, and turned her head to take a ladylike sip from a bottle of warm Lithuanian beer. “She loved men and she loved big, strong men, so she was obviously feminine in that way -- she was absolutely not sort of dykey. She might have been a bit like those girls who have taken a vow of celibacy in America, you know, and so they have anal sex, and they think that’s not having sex. There might have been a bit of that. She certainly wasn’t frigid, let’s put it that way.”

But Mirren insisted that Elizabeth ultimately ruled with her head. “The only thing that really interested her and that she wanted to hold onto was her own position and her power and her sense of destiny as a woman,” Mirren said. “She was absolutely obsessed by that and proud of it and I don’t think would have done anything that would have jeopardized that.”

Hooper was happy to leave the mystery of Elizabeth’s virginity intact. “I like this idea that after four hours of being with Elizabeth that there is still an unknowable center to this character,” he said.

“Holding back from sex -- particularly in the Essex story -- is more interesting and dramatic. Because we never see it happen, there’s that tension of Elizabeth desperately wanting to surrender, and not being able to because of the implications for her. We rejected this idea that sex makes things more interesting for the viewer.”