Capturing Mary – Monday 12 November at 9pm on ±«Óãtv Two
Introduction
In Capturing Mary, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff enters new territory by creating a terrifying and compulsive story of lost youth.
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This new film for ±«Óãtv Two stars some of Britain's most talented actors, including Maggie Smith, David Walliams (Little Britain), Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre) and newcomer Danny Lee Wynter, who is the eponymous caretaker in the ±«Óãtv One film Joe's Palace.
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A Culture Show special about the work of Stephen Poliakoff precedes this film. The centrepiece of the programme is a specially commissioned new drama, A Real Summer, shot on location and written by Poliakoff for Ruth Wilson. A Real Summer introduces the character of Mary before she enters the dangerous house featured in Capturing Mary.
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Capturing Mary opens as Maggie Smith who plays the older Mary, knocks unannounced on the door of a grand old house in central London. Coaxed across the threshold by its teenage concierge, Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), she enters and hesitantly relives her past.
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When Mary retraces her footsteps through the corridors of the splendid mansion, where as a brilliant young writer and critic (played in her earlier incarnation by Ruth Wilson) she attended glamorous Fifties soirees, she recounts to the sympathetic Joe the story of her youth.
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Looking back on her heyday, the once highly successful Mary recollects the salons at the elegant house when she used to rub shoulders with the cultural elite. She reveals to Joe that she is haunted by the memory of a deeply sinister man called Greville (David Walliams), whom she met at one of these gatherings.
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A social climber who rose without trace, Greville had tentacles that seemed to reach into the highest echelons of society. Mary remembers him as an ostensibly supremely charming, but in fact subtly evil, man.
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He feigned friendship with Mary but, when she spurned him, he ruthlessly brought about her destruction. Capturing Mary is a dark and frightening account of the past and how it can capture and destroy a person's life.
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Jane Tranter, the Controller of ±«Óãtv Fiction, comments: "It takes a unique auteur to deliver two films and a drama that straddle two ±«Óãtv channels. Stephen Poliakoff is such a talent and with the depth and breadth of the amazingly gifted cast assembled across Joe's Palace, Capturing Mary and A Real Summer."
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Deborah Jones, the producer of Capturing Mary, says: "With this drama, Stephen once again demonstrates a wonderful sense of structure and rhythm and an unrivalled mastery of detail.
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"At the same time," she continues, "Stephen is not afraid to go into uncomfortable areas, which is refreshing and bold. He also possesses a remarkable ability to conjure up character; each character in this film is rich and interesting in its own right. But above all, his characters all have very recognisable human attributes. In his work, he is able to strike a universal chord."
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Poliakoff starts by emphasising his delight at having gathered together such a first-rate cast. "It's enormously exciting to have a cast like this," enthuses the writer-director, who shot Joe's Palace and Capturing Mary back to back, filming the interiors at Langley Park, outside Slough. The exteriors were shot in Mayfair, London.
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"Maggie Smith is one of our greatest actresses. I think she's rarely been better than she is in this film, as Mary, she's very real and very brave. David Walliams and Ruth Wilson are a really interesting combination.
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"I think they work so well together. We did a lot of rehearsing beforehand, which is rare in television these days, and during that period David and Ruth worked exceptionally hard to create their characters. It really paid off, because they absolutely inhabit that world."
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The multi-award-winning writer-director goes on to explain that Capturing Mary started with the idea of a grand house at its zenith. "I wanted to make a film about a great house at its peak, before it went into decline. Throughout the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, there were a lot of these grand houses where the elite mingled and ran the country.
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"I set this film in 1958, which was the last official debutantes' season where they were presented in court. It was still an incredibly class-bound world, but that was beginning to be scraped away by the first signs of angry young men and kitchen-sink dramas."
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Poliakoff, who has won acclaim for his previous works for the ±«Óãtv, including Gideon's Daughter, Friends And Crocodiles, The Lost Prince, Perfect Strangers, Shooting The Past and Caught On A Train, says that into this heady world of power and influence he plunged the character of Mary, at that time a dazzling young writer.
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"She is the voice of youth. In that era, there were a lot of such talented women writers and critics, Katherine Whitehorn, Penelope Gilliatt, Dilys Powell and Pauline Kael. I was fascinated by the idea of someone so obviously talented. Mary is a buzzy, shiny person."
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However, her promise is cruelly stifled. When she appears to cross the cruel, yet well-connected, social butterfly Greville, he makes it his business to cut her career off in its prime.
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Pulling influential strings with national newspaper editors, he makes sure she never works properly again. Poliakoff muses that: "I was intrigued by the thought of, 'what if you met someone at the beginning of your career and he succeeded in destroying you?' Greville stops Mary flowering."
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Only a few years later, Poliakoff suggests, the social climate would have changed irrevocably and Greville would never have been allowed to get away with stopping Mary's prospects in their tracks. She is a woman sadly out of time.
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According to the writer-director, "just seven years later, everything changed. In 1965, Michael Caine starred in The Ipcress File and society became far less class-bound.
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"It's not always great to be first, sometimes it pays not to be in the vanguard. Mary came to the fore a little too early. There is real poignancy in her thinking, 'if only I had been born a bit later'. But, unfortunately, in 1958 Greville still wielded tremendous power."
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Greville's destruction of Mary is brutal and leaves her in a very dark place, but Poliakoff makes no apology. "Capturing Mary is one of the darkest films I've ever made, but it had to be because there were some very, very dark people around at that time.
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"Mary has to disintegrate because in her head she's still haunted. She says to Joe, 'I'm crying for my youth, what an idiotic thing to do'. But it's perfectly understandable, her despair is to do with what she wanted to become but never did. As age consumes us, there are moments like that for all of us."
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Poliakoff, who links Capturing Mary and Joe's Palace in the twin shapes of the caretaker Joe and the house he tends, goes on to give an example of an evil, Greville-like figure from his own past.
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"As a young playwright, I had a very disturbing encounter with a very famous producer. I was 22 and had a play on in the West End and had won the Most Promising Playwright Award.
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"I was quite innocent about showbiz, but when I met this man, I just felt this extraordinary sense of evil coming from him. People with such power could haunt you all your life. If I'd got involved with that producer, I could have been destroyed and been left weeping on a park-bench.
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"I was right to be wary. My agent told me later that he was vicious and had already destroyed two people's careers. At that time, the West End was a very dark and dangerous place, presided over by just one or two very powerful people. If they didn't like you, they could keep you down ruthlessly."
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Greville is an equally malevolent character. "He is a total snob, who ingratiated himself with those in control," Poliakoff carries on. "Greville is friendly with a lot of newspaper proprietors. As soon as people know a lot, they get invited to all the right functions. In every age, we have had characters like that, people who are near power and are used by power."
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Poliakoff explains why Greville ultimately takes against Mary so viciously. He believes that Greville fears, and therefore has to crush, the rebellious spirit of Mary.
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"Greville smells the changing world in Mary. It's the debutantes last season and rock 'n' roll is about to arrive. Mary has a column called The Voice Of Youth because young people are starting to express their opinions. But Greville is fearful of change and disparages it.
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"Greville feels that if he can get Mary on-side, then the future will be secure for him. However, she resists his advances, and so he thinks, 'I have to destroy her'. He's spurned by her, as she won't play his game because she's too independent-minded.
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"He has to lay waste to her career because she rejects him and all he stands for. What is most shocking is that his cruelty stems not from a failed love affair but from two or three very intense meetings that have an extraordinary impact on her."
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Deborah Jones sums up: "Stephen has enormous clarity of vision and knows exactly what he wants to achieve with every scene, not a moment on screen is wasted. Every detail is so important. The more familiar you become with his work, the more you realise that every tiny detail is vital. It's very unusual to find a piece that is so finely wrought and beautifully achieved."
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