An Anniversary

This week I have decided to mark an anniversary that means a great deal to me, and practically nothing to anyone else: 25 years ago this week, when I was 15 (I will save you the maths: I am now exactly 30 years old), a film came out in which I held the title role. It was a little, eccentric film - an adaptation, in French, of Henry James's short story 'The Pupil' - and it emerged to somewhat polite reviews, performed middlingly at the French box office for a few weeks, then disappeared from screens entirely. As far as I'm aware it never had an international release of any sort, meaning that its viewership is still mostly confined to a small bubble of people who caught it on screens in 1996 or on one of its spells on television in the two or three years that followed. (There are also, it seems, a small number of paedos or paedo-adjacent people who still watch it and share it online)

For a while though - well, throughout the whole of 1996, as we shot the movie in February and March, and it came out in September - the film was my whole life. Making it, seeing it, and going on tour to promote it around France, is still one of the most formative experiences of my life - and yet, it's something I seldom get to speak about with anyone, which gives it a very peculiar place in my memory, somewhere between pride and shame, like a wedding ring gathering dust on a shelf. 

The reasons that it comes up so infrequently are as follows: I am no longer in touch with anybody who made the film, people who at the time meant the world to me, who were briefly my family; I now dwell in the living hell that is the United Kingdom; the experience of performing as a child, of working as a child, is so particular as to be practically indescribable to anyone who hasn't done it; the experience for me was somewhere between formative and scarring, because it was so momentous that it made other things pale in comparison; and I feel sort of embarrassed about it, an embarrassment mixed in with my pride and joy, something a little sorrowful about this heated period in my life when I was a paid artist, when I went on TV and did Q&As and got recognised in the street. For a long time - still, to an extent - I resisted mentioning it too much, as I thought people would consider me a failure for not having continued with acting; would see that moment as the highpoint in my life, which I would never match again. All of these considerations give the film a good deal of heft in my thoughts, and at times I feel it bubbling up, and long to go over my recollections with people who were there. 

I briefly had a shrink last year, and mentioned to her that towards the end of filming, when I knew I would be going home, and back to school; when I realised that it would soon all be over - I cried and cried and cried. Everybody else - the make-up artists, my fellow actors, the sound people and the prop guy - was used to moving on, and some of them would bump into each other sooner or later, on their next job. I knew I was going back to school, and that my life would be going back to grey. My therapist observed two things: one, she wanted me to recognise that I had gone through a moment of grief; and two, I needed to accept that I had been working at a young age, and allow that it might have some impact on my working life. This was revolutionary to me because I had thought about it as the most purely beautiful moment, a time of roiling creativity, a time when I was a teenager but had the privilege of being surrounded by talented, eccentric, wild, beautiful people and we made something together. But I was also paid, and I worked long hours; I had to negotiate relationships with colleagues, look after myself, stay focused, and navigate my way around sometimes strenuous conditions on set - this was something that I didn't even think about. 

When I was fourteen I was making a film in the suburbs of Paris - shooting a supporting role for a week during my summer holidays, playing (of all things) the child version of a role played as an adult by John Malkovich - when I got word of a film project that was then in the early casting stages, with some fairly big name actors already attached. My brother accompanied me to the audition, which was really more of a meeting with the director, and I'm fairly certain that they told me I had the film's main role there and then. Looking back, it makes sense: the part was that of a sickly, dying, aristocratic boy-genius - and I, at the time, must have been one of the most inadvertently Jamesian teenagers in the world. I was small, pale, clever enough, firmly middle-class (aspiring upper), arch, well-read, spoke French and English, and was faggy in a delicate, intangible way. Job done! In fact, I looked very much like the picture on the cover of the Henry James book from which the director had been working - a portrait of Hubert von Herkomer's son Lorenz, from 1890. All you would have to do was point a camera at me and get me to gaze soulfully into the middle distance. 

Everything in the lead-up to filming is a bit of a blur in my head. The actor who was to play my tutor, in the joint lead role, whom I will call The Actor, was back then the hottest ticket in French cinema, having recently starred in the French film of the decade - and he had decided that, since the film relied on our characters developing a terribly intimate bond, we should ourselves meet up and spend time together before shooting. He drove out to meet me in the Parisian suburb where my family lived, and got lost on the way, so I went out to meet him and direct him to the flat: when I arrived he was wearing sunglasses and signing autographs, like a badly written celebrity in a film. Back home, my mum offered him tea which he politely declined, saying mineral water would be fine; we only had tap water, and my mother was so flustered that she dropped and smashed a number of cups. The two of us then went off to spend an afternoon in Paris, where we bonded over our love of Stevie Wonder - I think we sang a few lines of "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)" together - and the fact that a stranger who he tried to cadge a cigarette from in the Jardin des Plantes, and who refused him one, was a cunt. Another day I went into town to meet him, and we cycled around Paris, me balanced on the frame of his bike while he pedalled, and sat at cafes talking about this and that. We immediately gelled: he was funny, kind, generous, glamorous - and I was funny and a born luvvie. For the best part of a year I considered him perhaps my closest friend, this man of thirty, and I know that he too had great tenderness towards me; he would confide in me, and acted very artlessly around me. 

In a strange way, I enacted with every other actor the dynamics that the film laid out: the actor playing my mother was extremely maternal and providing on set; my older sisters (in their 20s) were irreverent and teasingly protective; my father was somewhat daunting and kindly; and The Actor, playing the tutor with whom my character strikes up a strange, doomed bond, had a similarly charged relationship with me. Mostly we would just fuck about together - he spent a lot of time goofing around to make me laugh, and I likewise. Once, he paid for me to travel in first class with him on the TGV, and to piss off a fellow passenger who was looking thunderous at having to travel in first class with two people laughing together, he pretended to have a loud conversation on his mobile, which, if memory serves, went: "Hi sexy, hi... OK, great that you can come... there'll be about 15 other people... fantastic, fantastic... ooh, and don't forget to bring butter. Lots of butter. I've got some, but we're going to need a lot, a lot of butter. OK, great, it's going to be fucking hot, looking forward to it."

Filming was a juicy opportunity for me to be around hammy adults - my people! - who made up songs and behaved dramatically. These were people who smoked and drank, who drove very fast and turned the music up incredibly loud, who had affairs and told me about them. My fellow actors were unguarded and demonstrative, in a way I had never known before. They lavished compliments and hugs and gifts on me. After dinner, when they had all got drunk, the actors would sometimes get me to stand up and sing: often they requested Good Thing by Rebecka Tornqvist, which was on rotation on the budget MTV in my hotel bedroom when I got back after a day on set. In general, actors just made me laugh in a way I hadn't really laughed before, by being flamboyant and playful. An actor playing my sister told me about auditioning for a role in Baise-Moi, where one of the directors (possibly Virginie Despentes) had suddenly thrown a gun at her to see how she reacted: she was terrified, and screamed, and obviously didn't get the role. "What did she want you to do?" I asked. "Stick it up her arse I guess," came the reply. 

So many memories from those few weeks still swirl around my head - like the fact that the director of the film, when it came to flying to Warsaw to film some scenes in Poland, had two passports, one bearing a completely different name; or trying and failing to recover from corpsing for about 20 takes when The Actor, who was supposed to feed me the line, "Comment vont Paula et Louise?", instead said to me, "Comment vont Pola et Roïd?"; or freezing to death in Kracow in early March, waiting to film my scenes in my Victorian costume of shorts, shirt, jacket and neckerchief; or how the actor who played my father, during a dinner scene, kept spitting his pasta out onto his plate after the take had finished, not realising that the props guy would scrape the remaining pasta back into the serving tureen for the next take, thereby feeding us all his chewed up penne; or how, (spoiler alert!) during my death scene, The Actor held me in his arms, desperate with grief, tears running down his face, and because of the discomfort of being held limp in his arms, I could feel a tiny fart trying to escape my body, which I could not clench my bum-cheeks to suppress as I was supposed to be lifeless, and when it eventually crawled out of me, with a minuscule but unmistakeable parp of sheer relief, The Actor pretty much dropped me on the floor and the whole crew lost its mind, while I sat there shouting, "It's not my fault! Guys! Come on!"

Besides all this we were making something together - at the end of the day there were rushes, of the scenes we had shot; we were performing in beautiful locations, rowing in a boat on a lake in Aix-les-Bains, or shooting by night in the eaves of a chateau surrounded by vineyards; and this sense of being a team, of creating a work of art together was powerful too. Amidst all the giddiness, I felt some pressure, principally from the director: a lot rested on my performance, and he didn't have enough authority on set to quarrel with the other actors, whose status vastly exceeded his own. So, on occasion, he took it out on me, out of frustration. He was another rather stimulating person, whose private life was, let's say, mercurial: he was libidinous and scatological, and perved on my mother when my family visited the set; he professed to know someone who had made snuff movies in the 70s and scoffed at me when I asked why he had not reported him to the police; he was the child of Holocaust survivors; he had written a truly beautiful screenplay, and was illuminating when talking about the films of Losey and Visconti. 

Everything died down for a little while after filming: I resumed school for a couple of months, and soon enough it was the summer holidays. The director had turned around an incredibly fast edit, to try to get into Cannes: we weren't selected. In the last weeks of summer we went to Montreal, for the rather less prestigious film festival there: when we arrived at our hotel reception, we could see down onto the swimming pool, where a man was very solemnly doing length after length of doggy-paddle. The director brayed, "Oh my god why is he swimming like a dog", and I laughed until I thought my ribcage would split in two. I met Laura Dern and Jacques Audiard, and a sweet old woman who I thought was Jeanne Moreau but wasn't, and we won a prize of some sort. I was hanging out with my people again, meeting up as old friends, chatting shit and filming interviews and promotional segments for the news. Once, I emerged from the metro with friends, to find that posters bearing my hilariously melancholy, searching little face were stretching all the way along the Champs-Élysées. We held our premiere, and Polanski came to see it. Another time, my aunt caught a plane to go on holiday, and the woman in the seat next to hers recommended my film to her. I went on a late night literary TV show with a Goncourt-winning novelist, a Palme d'Or-winning director and the director of Le Monde. By this point, the film I had made when I was fourteen had also come out, so I briefly had two films in cinemas at once, a bit like when Daniel Day-Lewis announced himself to the world with A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette. Exactly like that, in fact. Alongside all this, I had repeated a year at school because of the classes I had missed when filming, and because I was still so undeveloped for my age - a fun disconnect, when having to field questions from journalists about what it's like to play a wünderkind. 

Then everything pretty much died to a close. There was the odd screening or dinner; the odd hang-out or phonecall with a pal from filming - but eventually all of that came to an end, too. The Actor and I didn't have much reason to maintain contact. I suppose I just got on with things, with schoolwork and friendships, not having the time or instinct to stop and reflect on my dual life. 

I've stayed connected to film ever since - I became a cinephile in the 90s, and I now have the privilege of writing about cinema. I hope that my writing still reflects that love, that excitement. As for the film itself, I can't look at it dispassionately - I can't really look at it at all. I think my parents must have a DVD of it somewhere (they have a CD of the soundtrack, too, which features me warbling a song made up of lyrics from Romeo and Juliet), but I can't watch it; I dread people I know ever seeing it. I held it too closely to me, and when it was released I took criticism of it to heart. I know full well the film's flaws: it's knock-off Losey on the cheap, with a score that plagiarises Death In Venice; it's too long; it fully stacks the ending; The Actor's performance is a mite too stiff, mine a smidge too brittle. Still, I think that perhaps it will be something else if I see it again - that it will have changed, that it will instead be what it could have been if we had all focused harder, had more time, more money, more togetherness. Mostly, I can't watch this reminder of my life from so far back, of those days that seem to have gone completely, disappearing like Eurydice if I try to turn around and stare them down.

So this is the anniversary piece nobody asked for - the quarter-century of that movie that fuck-all people watched, which is to blame for helping to create the person I am today. I loved doing it, and for all that it's had a strange, not always positive role in my life, I would do it all over again in the blink of an eye - but better.