Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci are sitting in two separate screens on my computer. Firth is almost camouflaged, with grey-flecked hair, wearing a grey jumper in front of a grey wall. Except, you know, he’s Colin Firth and kind of hard to miss. Tucci, meanwhile, is perched straight-backed on a chair with stripy gold wallpaper behind him that wouldn’t be out of place at Versailles.
On my screen, they’re as far apart as can be but in their new film Supernova they are as close as a couple can get, lovingly bickering in their campervan while facing the most enormous of challenges: early-onset dementia.
Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth play Tusker and Sam, a couple who struggle with the consequences of Tusker’s dementia diagnosis.
“One of the defining things about a relationship with dementia, whether it’s yourself or the person you’re caring for, is there’s obviously nothing easy about it,” says Firth, who ends up being the chattier of the two. “And there are ways you try to learn to navigate the relationship and keep that relationship as meaningful as possible.
“But there’s a line in the film, which is such a simple one but it’s resonated with me since, which is when I say to my sister, ‘I just don’t think I’m very good at this.’ And that’s how one feels most of the time, really.”
In Supernova, they play Sam and Tusker, who have been together for 20 years but are now grappling with Tusker’s diagnosis of posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease. They are on a road trip through Britain’s Lake District, with their farting dog Ruby, to see family and friends. They are at odds over what their future will look like. Do they move house? Does Sam (Firth) get help to care for Tusker (Tucci)? How do they go on when nothing will ever be the same again?
“One of the things that’s fairly specific to this disease is the whole question of choice,” says Firth. “Having that taken away from you is what is brutal. And that’s what’s largely at issue in our story.
“When you’re working with two actors that literally love each other and have a pre-existing history, it’s a real coup.”
Harry Macqueen, director
“Tusker wants to make a choice while he still can make a choice. And the fact that the future may involve no longer having agency over his fate, I think makes it singularly critical because he knows that his cognitive powers and his decision making powers are fading. It’s about having a power over your own fate and your own future.”
A person’s power over their right to die is what partly inspired the film’s writer and director, 36-year-old Brit Harry Macqueen. A former actor, he began to think about dementia in 2015 after a colleague died six months after she was fired for being incompetent at work, and then a close friend had to put her 60-year-old father in care. He then watched a documentary about a 64-year-old British man who went to Switzerland to end his life legally at the controversial Dignitas clinic. All three suffered from early-onset dementia.
“There’s so much to [early-onset dementia] that you don’t really think about,” says Macqueen, who appears later in another Zoom call. “Of course, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s challenging, but it’s also funny, and it’s fun, and it’s life affirming. And it also affects a lot more people than we know about.”
In Australia, younger-onset dementia is categorised as any form of dementia diagnosed in someone under the age of 65. About 28,000 people are estimated to have it, according to Dementia Australia, while in Britain, the number is about 42,000.
Firth and Tucci have been friends for more than 20 years.
While dementia is not a new subject on screen - the recent Anthony Hopkins vehicle The Father turns it into a thriller, while Julianne Moore won an Oscar in 2015 for Still Alice, in which she played a woman with Alzheimer’s - Supernova brings a real intimacy to the subject. There are no stock shots of wandering lost through traffic, of smashed glassware, no tear-streaked fall-to-the-floor moments. In fact, there are very few tears at all.
“I was always confident that the power of the film would come in how quiet and subtle it was,” says Macqueen. “And if you’re making a story that is just about two people, it’s about the little raw nuances of that relationship.
“If you allow the audience to invest time in getting to know the characters, and the little idiosyncrasies, then the much more broad and important context of the story is just there effortlessly, and it’s not impacting all the time on your viewing of the film.
“You have to love the characters first. And it felt, to me, the way we would love the characters was to present them as naturally as possible.”
It’s the chemistry between Firth and Tucci that makes Supernova hum, and it’s something that plays off the pair’s friendship of 20-plus years. They live near each other in London and first met playing Nazi officers in the 2001 TV movie Conspiracy.
Tucci was the one who suggested it to Firth, sending him the script without telling Macqueen. “You want to do it [Supernova] with somebody who is really good, like him,” says Tucci, nodding to Firth. “And somebody who you know and respect.”
Adds Firth: “Sometimes when something is proposed to you, it’s a potential job. It’s the next job in your life. But this didn’t really feel like that at all. It felt like a potential experience. And it was completely bound up in Stanley, for me, and the possibility of that relationship.”
For Maqueen’s part, having Firth and Tucci on board allowed him to play with their on-screen personas: Firth has been an imperious love interest of one sort or another since he waded out of a lake as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, while Tucci has skittered between tragicomic and high-camp roles in everything from The Devil Wears Prada to The Hunger Games.
British director Harry Macqueen on the set of Supernova, which is set around Britain’s Lake District.
“They’re both very fragile in the film, they’re both normal guys,” says Macqueen. “Colin quite often plays characters that have a high status within a film. And with Supernova, that’s really subverting that because he’s the carer, he’s the person without the status, even though he’s the person in charge of the journey.
“And the same for Stanley. He gets the chance to play a lively, fun character, which he’s done many times before, but underneath it is heartbreak and this subtext of deception and lies. And that is not something I’ve ever seen Stanley do before.”
The challenge for Macqueen also came in breaking down Firth and Tucci’s relationship and moving beyond their friendship.
“It’s fair to say they saw a lot of their relationship in the characters and in the character’s relationship,” says Macqueen. “I mean, obviously, it’s not similar in many, many ways. But you have two people at a certain time in their life that absolutely love each other, that trust each other that would go to the ends of the earth for each other, and they are like that as people.
“And when you’re working with two actors that literally love each other and have a pre-existing history, it’s a real coup. And you have to use as much of that as you can. So we did. And at times, it was effortless, because they’re just so quick and natural with each other. But the task then becomes making sure that the film isn’t just Colin and Stanley, that it’s Sam and Tusker and that the nuances of that relationship are really locked into.”
Speaking of that “certain time of their life”, both Firth and Tucci are now 60. For women actors, historically, that’s a time where they’re considered 30 years past their use-by date. How do Firth and Tucci feel about their older age?
“How do you think I feel,” says Tucci.
Jumps in Firth: “I’d rather be 59.”
Tucci: “I don’t want to be 60.”
Firth: “It’s quite a number. I wasn’t quite ready. I was in denial until one minute before midnight of being 59. I had photographers outside my house. To take a picture of somebody being 60.”
Tucci: “That’s not very exciting.”
Firth: “I try not to think about it too much. But if that number comes to my mind for any reason, or if somebody asks how old I am, there’s a voice inside my head that screams, ‘What?’”
Tucci: “Sixty-one is going to be even worse. Just that one. Then there’s going to be no hope.”
Firth: “There’s no rehearsal for being whatever age you are. I think when I was young, I thought older people were another species. They’re somehow fated to be the age they were. And it’s a little bit of a jolt when you realise it happens to you as well.”
And what about Macqueen? How does he feel, having paired up two of cinema’s favourite actors only to turn it into a tragic love story. Haven’t we suffered enough this past year?
“I’m really sorry about that,” he says, laughing.
“What’s been really interesting about the reaction to the film over here [in Britain] has been how life affirming people have found it. And I mean that genuinely, because we’re going through a very difficult time at the moment, all of us. And there is always a slight worry when you’re making a film that is about death and love in the face of death, that it might not shine with people. But what people have really bought into with this film, is that it’s about a beautiful loving relationship between two people at a certain age.
“And it’s about compassion and looking after each other. And there’s a lot of appetite for that at the moment. So it’s taken on a kind of new resonance, which is kind of quite amazing. But yeah, I’m sorry.”
Supernova opens in cinemas from April 15.