‘The King’s Speech’ was no easy sell

Colin Firth has spent the last three months bopping between continents, chatting and chewing through a whole mess of chicken dinners and vacuuming up awards for his work as the royal searching for a voice in “The King’s Speech.” If this sounds like fun, consider how Firth greets his “King’s Speech” costar, Geoffrey Rush, a man who has just scrubbed off his makeup after performing a matinee show of “Diary of a Madman” in Sydney and flown 15 hours to Los Angeles to attend the Golden Globes.

“To think, I was in a chair this morning, putting on illegal amounts of makeup,” Rush tells Firth, pulling up a patio seat at the Four Seasons at Beverly Hills. He’s wearing a black fedora, owing to the shaved hairstyle he’s sporting for the stage role.

“You’re no stranger to illegal amounts of makeup,” Firth replies with a smile. He pauses, considers Rush and adds: “It’s paradoxical to say, since the show is ‘Diary of a Madman,’ but it’s a very safe place to be, doing a day job, while all this is going on.”

When we speak, Firth has, in the span of five days, collected awards from the New York and Los Angeles film critics groups and the Broadcast Film Critics Assn. That night, he’ll win a Golden Globe, and he’ll go on to win the Screen Actors Guild Award as well. He’s not complaining. But after all these acceptance speeches and having made the promotional rounds last year for “A Single Man,” Firth, 50, is relieved to report that he’ll be sitting out the next award season, having only a supporting role in the upcoming adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” He’s next set to start production sometime this summer on the Coen brothers’ scripted remake of the crime caper “Gambit,” likely for 2012 release.

But then, Firth and Rush didn’t sign on nearly two years ago for “The King’s Speech” in anticipation of clearing room on their mantels. In fact, when Rush, who’s also an executive producer on the film, read David Seidler’s play treatment of the friendship between the speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome a crippling stammer, his first thought was: Does anybody really want to know about a forgotten royal and an unknown entity?

“It just didn’t feel like a thing that people would want to go see,” Rush, 59, says, chuckling, with Firth quickly adding that on top of that, the king involved was famous for having no charisma.

But as it turns out, a lot of people want to know about them. The film has cleared $84 million after just recently going into wide release and earned 12 Oscar nomina¿¿¿tions, including acting nods for Firth and Rush.

“One of the things that’s been leveled at us a bit is that somehow the movie’s formulaic,” Firth says. “Disability. Monarchs. Old-fashioned period piece. People think we bought the ready-made awards kit from IKEA.”

“The King’s Speech” was assembled not in Scandinavia but, initially at least, in Toronto, where Firth, Rush, screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper met in a Radisson hotel basement for a three-week rehearsal in October 2009. Diaries kept by King George’s speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Rush), had surfaced just weeks before, and the team pored through them as they honed the trajectory of the men’s relationship.

What they continued to find was that the rap against George wasn’t entirely fair. The stammer made him shirk from public speaking, but it was as if the rest of his personality gathered itself around the problem and created a perfectly fine intellect that was then largely condemned to the shadows.

So lines were added at every opportunity to showcase his wit. When, following the film’s climactic speech, Logue tells the king that he “still stammered on the ‘w,’” King George’s reply came straight from Logue’s diary: “Well, I had to throw a few in so they knew it was me.”

Another line came from what Rush calls “mucking around.” On their first therapy meeting, Logue asks, “Got any jokes?” Firth as George stutteringly replies: “Timing is not my strong suit.”

“It instantly got rid of the idea that stuttering should be held as this worthy disability of the week,” Rush says.

Adds Firth: “If he can mock himself, the audience can engage with him. Because the man had undergone a lot of damage. And that could be alienating or, worse, sentimental.”

Along with banishing sentiment (or, at the very least, earning it), the “Speech” team sought to counter the gilt-edged poshness typically found in movies about the royals. Whenever you see Logue, Hooper made sure he’s surrounded by family and teapots and toys, the wonderful clutter of a functional life. By contrast, Hooper isolated George in empty, comfortless environments, usually putting the character at the edge of the frame to emphasize the sense of bleakness.

“The first scene I shot was George sitting in Logue’s office,” Firth recalls. “[Hooper’s] using this wide-lens, 18-millimeter camera, which we called the Edvard Munch lens. It’s a wonderful lens if you want to portray the cry of a desperate spirit in an indifferent universe. It’s not very good for your jaw line, however.”

“And I’m sitting against a crumbly wall,” Firth continues, “no distractions, just my face, the stammer, about to plunge into a 10-minute scene ...”

Rush interjects: “A scene we weren’t sure would hold an audience’s attention. Two people, sitting two meters from each other, talking for 10 minutes.”

Not that they weren’t determined to make it work. And why not? Conversation for these two comes easy. With Hooper, Rush says he and Firth formed a “three-way bromance,” sometimes at the exclusion of others. Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Elizabeth, George’s wife, perpetually rolled her eyes at their antics. At one point, probably not long after the two actors spent hours rewriting the tongue-twister scene, Hooper forbade them from engaging in any more anecdotal exchanges.

When they finished that first day, Hooper told Firth and Rush they had just shot 10% of the film. Because Rush had committed to a musical in Melbourne, Hooper scheduled all his scenes first during an intense, four-week block. But even after the actors went home, Hooper kept them involved throughout the editing process, sending them various cuts of the movie.

“He said, ‘Give me ideas,’ and there were a few,” Rush says. “In one of the early cuts — and it sounds terribly vain — I said, ‘Tom, I know you love this 18-millimeter lens. But you are covering a lot of wide stuff, and I feel there are terrific moments of performance from Colin, Helena and myself, and you need to give us little quick glimpses of close-up to tell what is happening in this part of the journey.”

“And he listened,” Firth says. “He just loved gathering those opinions. And it wasn’t because he didn’t have any of his own. Tom’s a man bursting with opinions. He just wanted to cross-examine himself. He had faith in us. And, from that point of view, it was quite an exhilarating collaboration.”

“Even if that damned lens of his made me look like my grandfather,” Rush adds, laughing.

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