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HBO:
Tell us about Elizabeth I and what made her
so special.
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Director Tom Hooper on the set of Elizabeth I. |
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Tom Hooper:
What's so fascinating about Elizabeth's life
is you can't divorce the private from the
public in that every private decision has
massive political and public implications.
And so she's always the woman without a
private life. And it is what distinguishes her
so hugely from modern leaders and
politicians.
If a modern head of state in the UK or
America has a child, that isn't necessarily
going to alter the course of political history
in that country. But for Elizabeth, whether
she has a child or not, whether she got
pregnant or not, who her lover was, who she
married, these are all decisions that had
incredibly important political implications.
And one of the reasons I wanted to start the
film on the image of Elizabeth submitting to
a gynecological examination and the
information from that examination going
straight into her accounts is to show how
important her state of reproductive health
was to the political scene.
Because the challenge facing Elizabeth was
that without an heir there was a risk of
instability because people didn't know who
was going to succeed her. And there were
various competing factions who were jostling
for the position to lay claim to that right.
And so one feels she was caught between
the desire to make the country more stable
through marriage and having a legitimate
heir. But at the same time her drive to stay
in control as the queen. So whether she
could have a child, whether she was a virgin
or not, who she married--these were all
pressing political concerns.
So the two films look at her two great loves
and contrast the wisdom and political
sagacity of one with the youthful and
impetuous folly of the other, and in so doing
you realize that these personal decisions
were major national political decisions.
I think also we wanted to show the Queen
more with her very intimate circle so that we
weren't constantly involved in presenting the
Queen as this austere monarch. We wanted
to get in the room with her and the people
she knew best over the years so that we
could see her at her most informal. Her most
relaxed. And only have a few moments
when we stood back from her as a viewer
and see her in all her iconic glory. And I'd
say the majority of the film, we give the
audience access to this intimate informality.
That was my ambition--that when we got to
the point of seeing the iconic Queen, we very
much felt the woman beneath.
The other interesting thing is that as the
most powerful person in England, she was
free to take a young lover in the way that
typically middle age men take young female
lovers. And it's incredibly unusual to reverse
the roles that way in this period. But the
Queen had the freedom to do it because of
her power.
HBO:
Talk a little about the sets and costumes
and how you developed the look for them.
Tom Hooper:
Well, I was very excited to be working with
Mike O'Neill because I had done two period
pieces with him before and enjoyed his flair
and imagination for costumes. I think we felt
very strongly that we wanted to mark the
different levels of formality and informality
that the Queen must have had as she went
about her day.
And we had this wonderful set designed by
Eve Stewart which afforded us different
types of space. So you had the most
intimate space of her bedroom, her privy
chamber. Then you had the more public
space of the presence chamber.
And so we did a lot of thinking about what
the Queen would have looked like when she
was in her intimate private space and in her
privy space. And one of the difficulties with
this is that most of the paintings available of
Elizabeth are all in her most formal, most
iconic, which are designed to help create the
myth of the Virgin Queen and help make her
look amazing, even alien one could argue.
There's very little information about what
she might have worn on a morning when
she wasn't necessarily meeting dignitaries or
courtiers or anyone outside of her circle.
Mike did a lot of research to see what those
more casual, informal outfits would look
like.
Quite a lot of the film is set amongst her
most intimate circle, and so we had this idea
that we'd see the big heavy iconic costumes
only for particular occasions, like when she
meets the Duke of Anjou and she obviously
wants to dress up more refined and make a
powerful impression. Another example of
this is the Tilbury speech when she's
wearing armor and making the statement
that she's a warrior queen. And then at end
of the first film when they're celebrating the
defeat of the Spanish Armada where she's
wearing that incredible white dress with a
huge white ruff, and the Golden Speech at
the end of episode two, following on the
death of Essex, and a new intimacy with the
Queen.
We were always interested in the Queen
standing out in any scene that she was in so
she always had the most expensive fabrics,
the fabrics that caught the light best, the
brightest colors. And the people around here
always wore more muted colors, and this all
just came out of our research, that she
didn't like to have the ladies-in waiting
upstaging her. And it was part of her
awareness of herself as an icon, the
management of herself as an icon that she
always wanted to stand out visually.
HBO:
What was it like recreating Whitehall
Palace?
Tom Hooper:
I was very excited to recreate Whitehall as
accurately as possibly because when I began
working on the films I turned up through
research some great old maps of Whitehall,
and drawings and sketches relating to that
period. And I began to ask myself why don't
we just build exactly what we see here?
What would be the reason to invent
something, and wouldn't it unlock secrets
and truths about Elizabeth if we did get it
absolutely right?
And it was very exciting because the set
designer Eve Stewart absolutely embraced
this concept and we embarked on a very
ambitious project of a very faithful
recreation of the Palace of Whitehall on
really quite an immense scale.
And I think one of the things we unlocked
through that is this sort of realist truth of
her surroundings was what I'd call the
hierarchy of space in her palace. In studying
the layout of Whitehall, which is the main
London palace, we realized that the way
space was arranged was all about what level
of privileged access you had to the Queen.
And so we built a continuous interior set
that allowed me to show the way space was
charged with hierarchy.
As you come into the palace you go through
a public area, which pretty much anyone
can gain access to. And then you come
across a guarded entrance to the presence
chamber which is the big yellow room with
the famous hallway painting of Henry VIII
above Elizabeth's throne. And the presence
chamber was sort of like the first level of
access to the Queen; this is where she would
meet dignitaries and ambassadors, where
she would be consulted about petitions from
commoners, so it wasn't public, it was
controlled but when she was there she was
always on show. It wasn't a very intimate
circle.
Then as you passed through the doors of the
presence chamber, you come into the privy
gallery which is a long gallery with rooms off
and this is her privy or private space. This
is a space which really only her ladies in
waiting, her lovers, and her privy counselors
have access to, and we're very careful in the
film to never show anyone other than those
characters in this space.
And off the privy gallery, you have the privy
chamber which is a meeting room a bit like
the presence chamber but much smaller,
much more intimate. And this is where she
receives only her most intimate circle. And
then you have this whole suite of rooms
leading up to her bedchambers: her music
room, her study, the bathing chamber which
is where she bathed and her bedroom. And
obviously no one of her counselors would go
to any of her bedrooms. The only males who
have access to her bedroom suite were
Essex and Leicester.
And the more time I spent studying the
period, the more I realized was that the
arrangement of the space was absolutely key
to understanding the monarchy and by
defining what rooms you got access to, it
defined your status.
And so I was very interested in connecting
all this up and making a coherent
presentation of the world. And out of this
came a desire to use the steady camera
extensively in the film because it seemed to
demonstrate that this tension in space
required the camera to be able to fluidly
travel with Elizabeth through any room she
might wander. So we could connect up
these rooms because obviously if you keep
filming one room and a character walks out
and you cut and pick up in another room,
you don't understand the relationships.
And there were some wonderful shots where
the steady cam shows the way the parts
connect together.
So really what was driving me was to create
a tremendously strong sense of geography,
that every door led somewhere, to create a
sense for the audience of a virtual reality
tour through the past rather than a sort of
pantomimic version of the past where
famous actresses dressed up in costumes
and you don't for a moment think you're
back in that reality. And I felt capturing the
physical space accurately was tremendously
important.
And also I wanted to rather than visualize
the world through the prism of the threat
that faced her, I wanted to show the world
that she was fighting to protect. In other
words, a world of tremendous finery and
beauty that came out of her tremendous
wealth. And this was the lifestyle that she
was aiming to protect through dealing with
the threats that faced her. And it was a
world of tremendous beauty.
What's interesting is there's not a lot of
squalid London in the two films. And that
was a conscious decision because I think
she did everything in her power to avoid
them. She wanted to live in a world of color
and beauty and the finest things in life.
HBO:
You used computer generated imaging to
recreate several sets. Tell us about that
process.
Tom Hooper:
We made extensive use of CGI. And the shot
I'm most proud of is when we go into the
River Thames and we see London laid out
before us. That shot was literally the grassy
banks of a Lithuanian lake. There was not a
single building there, and we created the
whole of that view through computers. So
CGI was also a very exciting way of realizing
that world.
It's also incredibly exciting as a Londoner to
be able to say, well what did London really
look like, and let's create some wide shots
where we really see London in the 1580s as
it looked then. And what's so exciting for me
as a filmmaker about the use of CGI in this
film was the chance to go back into the past,
and finally properly show people what
London really looked like back then. For me,
that was tremendously exciting.
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