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HBO:
Can you tell us about your character?
Jim Broadbent:
I play Lord Longford who was born in 1906 and died in 2001 at age 95. He went though a lot of changes in his life: an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, who started off a Protestant and then became a Catholic, and started off high Tory and became a socialist.
He initiated a famous report in the seventies in Britain into pornography and its harmful effects. And he was involved with prison reform, visiting three times a week for fifty years. While visiting the prison, he struck up a relationship with Myra Hindley, one of the Moore's murderers, a very celebrated case of serial child killing in England in the sixties. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were the two murderers, with Ian Brady perceived to be the initiator. Myra Hindley was besotted by him and thought to be, by some, misguided and duped by Brady, but not quite as profoundly evil as he was.
Lord Longford decided that she should be entitled to parole after a certain amount of time like any other prisoner in a similar case. But there was such an outcry against her in the country that that was never going to happen. Still, he continued to fight for her parole and release, which is the arc of our story. It's actually a film about his passions, commitments and integrity -- and perceived foolishness. He was ridiculed partly for his pornography campaign and also for his campaign to free this wicked murderess who was loathed by the nation.
HBO:
What were your initial reactions upon reading the script to this controversial story and character?
Jim Broadbent:
I was asked by the writer Peter Morgan if I'd be interested in playing him before he wrote the script. Obviously I knew who he was, but I didn't know a great deal about him. We talked about him and I was intrigued. And when Peter wrote the script I got increasingly interested and fascinated by this eccentric man and his contradictions. He was an old-fashioned politician, which is rare these days. He was absolutely not going to be swayed by public opinion. He was remarkable, but his manner was such that he was derided and mocked. This passionate, frustrating, angry and funny man was very well discovered in Peter's script.
HBO:
What is the emotional journey your character takes in the film?
Jim Broadbent:
The main journey is the relationship he starts with Myra Hindley as part of his prison visiting, and getting committed to her cause. I don't really want to say too much about the story of what happens because a lot of people won't know it. But that relationship falls apart and he is quite devastated because he had committed an awful lot of energy in both a private and public way to supporting her.
HBO:
What are the challenges associated with playing a real person?
Jim Broadbent:
They're generally much more complicated than the two dimensional characters created in a normal fiction piece. On the whole, the surprises that are provoked by real life are more interesting, I find it very stimulating trying to get partly into the heads of real people; there's an awful lot of information that you have to put together and assimilate into one whole.
HBO:
What kind of research did you do?
Jim Broadbent:
I read biographies and read some of Longford's own writing, watched television programs, listened to radio interviews. Still, in the end, what we're doing is a fiction based on real people and any similarity with real people is fortuitous. [Laughs] But it's not a documentary, it's a fictional piece, based on some known facts, but most of it is invented around the known facts.
HBO:
What was it that made this story such a scandal?
Jim Broadbent:
These stories have happened before and since but this one took hold of the public's imagination in a way that others haven't. I think it's the fact that the murder of children is always desperately sad. And that an attractive young blonde woman was involved in the murders.
HBO:
How do you think Longford should be remembered?
Jim Broadbent:
His very good biography by Peter Stamford is called The Outcast's Outcast, and I think he liked that. Somebody said to him: 'Will it upset you that you're remembered for being a supporter of Myra Hindley more than anything else?' And he said, 'Well, a friend of the friend, a listener, that'll do for me.' I think he was, above all, a humanitarian.
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