Now this is a day I have looked forward to for some time…. I guess I have been working on the IN SEARCH OF CHOPIN script for two or three years…tweaking, amending, cutting, revising…. Sometimes weeks go by with nothing and other times it’s highly engaged and productive. Gone are the days that one could focus on one project at a time – and the EXHIBITION ON SCREEN project has been extremely time-consuming. But I have always had Chopin in my head and certainly in recent weeks, as the date of final narrative readings approached, my mind has been very focused on this. It’s one thing to have a general sense of things in a script – a note-form paragraph, something roughly done, a marker. But when you know that within days Juliet Stevenson is going to be reading the final script and David Dawson reading the letters of Chopin, there is no longer any room for inaccuracy or flaccid writing. Everything has to be precise, accurate, flowing and accessible.
On the early train to London, I make last minute changes and alterations…As I walk from Victoria Station past Buckingham Palace to the voice-over studio in Soho, I am still going over it all in my head…Every word, one has to think how will Juliet and David deliver it. The studio is a smallish basement on Berwick Street but they’re good. Except they don’t have a printer for three 83-page scripts…Possible delay is averted though by a professional printers next door. Juliet is first up. What can I say about Juliet that you don’t already know? Simply one of this country’s finest actors – as well as being smart, sensitive, gorgeous, friendly and highly professional. Choosing her to be the narrator of Mozart was a brilliant suggestion (by a colleague of mine in 2005) and being able to use her subsequently for Beethoven, Haydn and now Chopin is simply fantastic. She makes sentences come to life. Any of you that listen to her audio books will know she is a born story-teller. It only took us two hours to read the whole script…and she did it so well. Then in came David Dawson – a brilliant actor that I first saw playing Romeo in Stratford. I thought long & hard about the right voice for Chopin and decided that David was absolutely right – not only for the skill with which he can deliver lines but the ability to carry that mix of frail body but fiercely competent and endlessly sharp intellect.
By the end of the session, I felt as close to the ‘real’ Chopin as I think I’ll ever get. Now it’s all electronic signals on their way, via email, to my editor and into the film. In 20 years time, there they’ll still be…..it’s done, it’s locked, any faults are mine and mine alone. There still remain two months of finishing the film but the end is in sight….
