The Father screenwriter Christopher Hampton on the difficulty of film funding, working with Florian Zeller and delivering that final punch

Despite its impressive pedigree, the difficult subject at the heart of the six-time Oscar nominated film meant finding funding was far from easy.

When there are big-name, Oscar-winning stars such as Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman attached to a movie, you’d expect investors and studios would be keen to jump on.

Not so for The Father, a stirring family drama that’s nominated for six Academy Awards including acting nods for Hopkins and Colman.

The directorial debut of French playwright Florian Zeller is the story of an elderly man whose memory is failing him and whose grasp on his surroundings becomes a losing battle as his daughter tries to arrange for his care.

It’s a sensitive and vivid film that plays with the perspective of its title character, an intimate experience of dementia that is then transferred to the audience. The film was adapted by Zeller and acclaimed English writer Christopher Hampton from La Pere, Zeller’s original stage production which premiered in 2012.

La Pere, which Hampton translated into English, has been staged in more than 45 countries, including in Australia where John Bell played the lead role in a Sydney Theatre Company production. But even the proven success of the source material plus the involvement of Hopkins and Colman wasn’t enough for many of the moneymen.

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in The Father. Picture: Sean Gleason

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“It’s quite a modest film and made for quite a small budget, which was quite hard to get a hold of, even with those stars because the subject matter makes people nervous,” Hampton told news.com.au over zoom from his home in the UK.

“I remember when we did the play first in a 100-seat theatre, and we knew we had something extraordinary, but it was very hard [to get the money to put it on]. People would literally say, ‘I don’t think an audience is going to want to come and pay money to see this’.

“To get [the stage production] to London was a real struggle.”

Hampton recalled that the first English-language stage production of The Father debuted in a small theatre in Bath and then eventually made it to London through a fringe theatre because the idea that something which dealt with “this grim subject” would be a West End hit was unfathomable to most.

“And it was literally the same when we were trying to raise money [for the film],” he explained. “Luckily, the French are more understanding about these things than the Anglo-Saxon world. So, there was a good deal of money coming from the other side of the Channel, but to get our end was quite hard.

“It is a rather arid situation at the moment as far as financing films is concerned.”

British playwright Christopher Hampton in Sydney in 2012.

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Hampton, 75, has had a storied career in the theatre and film worlds, beginning with the first play of his which was staged in the West End while he was still at university.

Between writing original plays, adapting classics by the likes of Moliere and dabbing his hand at opera, he’s penned dozens of screenplays for film and television including his Oscar winning script for Dangerous Liaisons, turning Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary French novel into a Hollywood production.

He was again nominated for adapting Ian McEwan’s Atonement in 2008 and now for The Father.

Two of his previous films have starred Hopkins (A Doll’s House in 1973 and The Good Father in 1985) so the two men have had a decades-long relationship. That helped when it came to Hampton facilitating a meeting between Hopkins and Zeller – the latter was dead set on having Hopkins play the role, one of the reasons he decided to make the film in English and not French.

“Because I’ve done two films with Anthony, the friendship went back a long way,” Hampton said. “So, when [Hopkins and Zeller] had their first meeting, I was able to be a sort of solvent in the middle of it.

“But Anthony took a great liking to Florian right away.”

The Father has been nominated for six Oscars.

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When Colman won the AACTA International Award in March for her role as Anne, the daughter to Hopkins’ father, she said her video acceptance speech that The Father was “one of the most enjoyable filming experiences I’ve had in a very long time.

“[Zeller] was the most amazing director, it’s impossible to believe it’s his first feature film.”

Hampton too had nothing but praise for Zeller’s instincts as a director. “If you’d gone in on the third day of shooting, you wouldn’t have been able to tell that [he hadn’t made a film before]. He took to it immediately.

“He’s clearly a very, very good film director and is now very enthusiastic about the idea of making more films.”

Hampton said he suspected Zeller had asked him to collaborate on the screenplay as something of a “comfort blanket” for the younger French man.

Hampton first met Zeller in 2014 when he’d gone to see La Pere in Paris after hearing the play was “something really out of the ordinary”. The pair met that very night after the performance and Hampton told Zeller he wanted to translate the play into English and launch it across the Channel.

Since then, Hampton has translated five more of Zeller’s plays. It’s the years-long “friendship” which saw them come together on this – and Hampton’s experience having directed three films himself meant Zeller had a sounding board he could trust.

For The Father’s screenplay, the two of them had a “philosophical discussion” about what kind of film Zeller wanted it to be and then Zeller went off and wrote the first draft in French.

Hampton translated that first draft to English and changed some of it before it went back to Zeller who worked off that and wrote another draft in French. Another English draft followed and then they met for “a week at the most” and by the end of it, they had a shooting script.

“The conventional wisdom when you adapt a play to the screen is to open it out and bring in all sorts of new scenes and so on,” Hampton said. “We decided pretty quickly not to do that because the reasoning was that what was going on in front of you was largely what was going in Anthony’s head.

“Therefore, we had to find ways to make the claustrophobia a virtue rather than have it feel stagey, which is what we were trying to avoid.”

Despite its setting inside one apartment across five rooms and a hallway, The Father does not feel stagey or staid. Rather, Zeller’s direction and his and Hampton’s script creates an evolving and dynamic space which mirrors the shifts in Anthony’s understanding of his world.

The Father is Christopher Hampton’s third Oscar nomination.

The film’s Oscar nomination for its production design is a testament to the care taken in transporting it from stage to screen.

It’s rare for a contemporary drama to be nominated in a category that’s dominated by historical, sci-fi and fantasy productions. In the past 20 years, The Father and Parasite are the only nominated films that didn’t belong to one of those genres.

In addition to production design and the two acting nominations, The Father is also up for Best Picture, Best Editing and, of course, Best Adapted Screenplay.

That screenplay nomination recognises, among other things, the film’s balance of tragedy with dark humour, something to leaven up what could’ve been a relentlessly grim affair. Hampton said equilibrium is what he strives for with most of his work.

“I always like things to be leavened with humour. I’ve found it to be quite a good process to start light and attract the audience in, and then tighten the screws as it goes along. Before you deliver the sucker punch at the end.”

The Father’s final scene is definitely an emotional punch.

With COVID interrupting the usual rigmarole of promoting a film, especially during awards season, Hampton has only managed to present it at one film festival, in Cairo. Afterwards, during the Q&A, he said it was clear people in the audience had been “very, very affected by it”.

“It’s a very powerful piece of work.”

The Father is in cinemas now

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