In Kidman's latest film, The Railway Man, she plays Patti Lomax, the wife of a former prisoner of war who suffered terrible torture building the Burma railway. Here, Kidman and the real-life Patti talk about the relationship they forged
"Some time the hating has to stop." So concludes the memoir The Railway Man, the late Eric Lomax's remarkable account of how he survived torture and extreme deprivation during his time as a prisoner of war in Thailand under Japanese rule. Along with his fellow prisoners, Lomax, a lifelong railway buff, was forced to participate in the construction of the Burma Railway, which cost the lives of more than 100,000 forced labourers and prisoners of war. David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was inspired by events during the railway's construction and, perhaps because that film casts such a long shadow, there have been relatively few films since that deal with this particular episode of second-world-war horror.
Now the Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky, working with a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, has adapted The Railway Man into a film starring Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole Kidman as his wife, Patti. Structurally, the story switches back and forth between what happened to Lomax during the war (where he is played by Jeremy Irvine) and years later when Lomax (played by Firth), suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, forced himself with Patti's gentle encouragement to deal with the past. The film climaxes with the older Lomax confronting the Japanese interpreter who watched over his torture.
Lomax died in 2012 after a long battle with myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disease that affects the nerves and muscles, before he had a chance to see the finished version of The Railway Man. However, his widow Patti has been enthusiastically supporting the film since it premiered at the Toronto film festival.
I talked on the phone to Patti (in her home in Berwick-on-Tweed) and Nicole Kidman (in Los Angeles ) about the oddness of seeing yourself being played by a movie star, the relevance of The Railway Man to soldiers returning from war today, and Patti and Kidman's shared passion for gardening.
Leslie Felperin: So where did you last see each other? Toronto?
Nicole Kidman: It was, actually.
Pattie Lomax: Hello, Nicole. You were going to go camping with the children.
NK: I did go camping in very high temperatures, which is not recommended.
LF: When did you meet each other?
NK: It was when Eric was still alive, but unbeknown to Patti I'd studied her because she did a long interview with Andy [Paterson, the film's producer] – hours and hours of footage where he talked to her. I watched it quite a few times, actually.
LF: Was it daunting playing a living person? You've played historical figures before, of course.
NK: No, it was an honour. I wanted to do as much as I could in a very small amount of screen time and somehow do justice to her and – you should block your ears, Patti – to her incredibly elegant and quiet determination. There's such grace to her, I found, but she's very quiet and I loved the challenge of that and how the film shows how standing by someone and loving them can be a powerful tool for healing.
LF: How did you feel watching it, Patti?
PL: I had to see it twice. Initially, I was just fascinated by seeing these people whom I'd met – and one or two of them I got to know very well – and how they handled the whole story, which is very distracting, but I knew that Nicole had managed to be a good representative of me. It was quite impressive really. One of my sons is a real cynic and he said he couldn't see how a beautiful blond lady could play his mother, and when he saw the film, he said: "She's done really well, Mum, she's really caught you." So that's high praise.
NK: That is high praise, how sweet. I loved playing you.
PL: Do you remember when we were in the garden and we were discussing the lack of bees and the roses in Italy? Well, I remember when our roses came out eventually and then again this year, there's one in particular, called Constance Spry, and it's very beautiful. It only flowers for about three weeks in the year, but I sort of think of that as being the Nicole Kidman rose. It really is a glorious thing, and the perfume is also a marvellous thing. It sort of embodied you to me.
NK: I tried to grow roses in Nashville – that's what Patti and I discussed, our flowers. We both love gardening but Nashville is a terrible place to grow roses. Mine have terrible fungus all the time.
LF: Patti, do you feel you've become a representative for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?
PL: I wouldn't be arrogant enough to say I represent them, but the story is about untreated battle stress. If it's not treated, it can blight not only the victim's life but their family's lives, and that really is a modern message, certainly for those coming back from Afghanistan. I am trying to raise people's awareness, but I think it's recognised a lot more now than it was in Eric's time.
NK: Yeah, but I don't think they're doing enough though. I think they should be doing more, particularly over here in the States for the men who are now returning from Afghanistan. And I'm sure it's the same in Britain. I'd be more than happy to be a spokesman for them because I don't think that it's dealt with anywhere near enough in the way it should be.
LF: Do you feel you have a responsibility to use your fame to help projects like this get made?
NK: I respond to things emotionally. I'm not in a position where I have to work, and I have young children [Sunday, five, and Faith, three] and I'm extremely lucky that I'm not an actor who has to do a job because I need to get paid. I can choose from a place of pure desire to put a story out in the world. And I just loved the idea of working with an Australian director on this material and that it wasn't grand or over-the-top. A lot of the characters I do are very extreme, so the thing I loved about this was the quiet dignity of Patti. That was very powerful to me. And the fact that the story was about how you come to a place where you forgive, as you see in the last scene.
LF: Patti, was it strange for you to see Colin Firth playing Eric?
PL: The only experience of Colin I had had was watching his performance in Pride and Prejudice on TV, particularly the scene where he goes in the lake, which only reminded me of the time our son fell in the garden pond, so it really didn't have quite the same effect on me that it had on every other western woman.
LF: I hate to change topic, but what are you working on next, Nicole?
NK: I'm going to play Gertrude Bell, in Queen of the Desert with Werner Herzog. It is a huge endeavour, so I'm in the midst of researching her right now. I was with Herzog this morning. I'm very glad to be heading off to the desert with him to play her. I'm completely enraptured with her right now. She's the female Lawrence of Arabia. She was English, and basically defined the borders between Iraq and Jordan that exist today, borders that she negotiated between Churchill and different Arab leaders. She went out to the desert with the Bedouin and all the different tribes that were feuding at the turn of the 19th century.
LF: How long will the shoot be?
NK: A couple of months, so I'll be taking my little girls as part of their education. So we'll take lots of sunblock and give them a chance to experience different cultures. In years to come they'll be able to say: "When I was three, I was in the desert with my mother." When I explained that they'll be riding camels and living in tents, their eyes lit up.
LF: I love Herzog's work, but he famously had a combustible relationship with Klaus Kinski in the early part of his career. You're not worried he might threaten to shoot you?
NK: [laughs] No, my personality does well with people who are deemed difficult. I don't know why it does but I just seem to get along with them. The more difficult the better.
PL: That goes for me too.
NK: There you go, another thing we have in common.
LF: How do you deal with difficult people? Do you smile patiently or fight back?
NK: I suppose I just have a desire not to judge and view things compassionately. The thing I'm not good with is mediocrity, when someone isn't really trying to reach something. I'm very much an admirer of people who are reaching for things and trying to survive. I like exploring life and its complexities. I suppose that's why Patti and I relate.
LF: You've certainly not shied away from challenging opportunities. Has it been a deliberate strategy to go from working with Lars von Trier and doing mainstream work such as Australia and then shift to something intimate and small such as Rabbit Hole and Stoker?
NK: Yeah, as an actor timing is important, especially as a mother with small children, so a lot is chance. I try never to be governed by fear; that's how I choose things. If I ever feel that this is dangerous or I'm scared of it, then that probably draws me more towards it.
LF: Can you talk a little about Grace of Monaco?
NK: I finished that this time last year. I think it's coming out in March. I still haven't seen it. It's a French director [Olivier Dahan]. I think I'm meant to see that next week.
LF: Your friend Naomi Watts appeared recently in Diana and that didn't go down very well. Are you a little chary about how playing such an iconic figure is going to be received?
NK: Always. That's what I mean about not giving into the fear, not [avoiding] playing something because you're worried about the part being iconic or worrying about how it's going to turn out. You weather the storms and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. With Grace, I find the idea of her walking away from her career at 25 years old to live in Monaco really interesting. And the film is only six months of her life, it's not a biopic. Hitchcock comes at the beginning of the film and offers her Marnie, and she wants to go back and do it.
LF: It's quite a fine balance to do so much research on a character for a film and to then to let it go, as you did for The Railway Man by studying Patti in interviews for hours.
NK: I think you do your research and then, on the day, it's there as a resource, but you just throw it away. But it's embedded then. I said to Werner today: "You know Gertrude Bell bit her nails all the time?" And he said: "No, no, we don't want that." But at least I know that. It's the same way with Grace Kelly, there was a certain way she sounded that was very British, which they said would confuse audiences today because she wasn't British, she was American. When I played Virginia Woolf, I had one recording of her voice to listen to and she sounded like the Queen. If I had spoken like that, people would have said it doesn't sound correct.
LF: Did you identify with Grace as an actor, as someone who changed her priorities?
NK: I certainly existed in that place of … there have been times in my life when I've said, I can't go and do this because I'm in this situation, I can't fully express myself right now, and that's probably years ago when I was in my 20s. Grace is in her 30s when this happens. She has got two children and she's a princess. And she comes to this fork in the road where she has to go, OK, can I go back and do it?
LF: Is there anyone left you'd really like to work with?
NK: Oh, the list is so long because it goes from actors to different directors. I'd love to go back and work with Lars [von Trier] again. I haven't worked with him for a while and I still believe in Lars and liked to work with him. I feel that Martin Scorsese hasn't done a female story and he needs to. And I've always wanted to work with Michael Haneke, which he knows. Hopefully, at some stage I'll get the chance to do something for him, even if it's just a walk-on. I'm such a huge fan of his last film, all of his films actually.
LF: you have two more projects – Paddington Bear and Before I Go to Sleep – coming up with Colin Firth. Were you buddies before this?
NK: No, we clicked on The Railway Man. I have enormous admiration for him but I also just really enjoy his company. He makes me laugh, which is a great thing. We have the same sense of humour. We just did Paddington Bear together, even though we don't have any scenes together. Well, we do have scenes together, but we didn't film them together [because Firth is doing the voice of an animated Paddington].
PL: Eric would have been tickled pink by that.
• The Railway Man opens in the UK on 10 January.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/26/nicole-kidman-the-railway-man-true-story
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