Was Jim Broadbent always the choice for Gilbert?

Yeah. Did you ever see that short we made, "A Sense of History?" We were shooting that in January of 1992, the year we made "Naked." We were on this farm, in sub-zero temperatures, and he was just doing this bit. During the take, I suddenly just went, "Ping!": Gilbert. And when we finished the film a few weeks later, I said to him, "Look, I have this idea which is crazy and you won't believe it, but, I think you should play W.S. Gilbert. And I'm gonna lend you some books." And he plainly thought I'd lost it. So we sat on it for quite a long time, partly on the question of who was going to play Sullivan. And fortunately, thank goodness, I had a really good casting director who pointed me in the direction of Allan Corduner. The truth is, nobody else could have done it, I think.

Sullivan -- despite his kidney trouble and with all his libertine dalliances and travels -- comes off as a blessed sprite.

Yeah. And was, I think.

And Corduner is such an uncanny performer that he can play that and be able to make it palpable, not just metaphoric.

I think it's a remarkable performance, I have to say.

It struck me that part of the cumulative effect of it comes from his authority as a conductor, and his rapport with the musicians.

Yeah, Corduner himself is an amazing musician. You can see it in the way he plays. He just is. And he learned conducting. So it's a real bonus that we kick off with that real conducting of his going on so early there. Corduner's been in lots of movies playing small parts, and, indeed, was on Broadway playing the chief steward in "Titanic," the musical, when I auditioned him for this film. He's a dramatic actor, but occasionally does musicals.

You did round up a lot of your regulars, like Timothy Spall as this abused master actor, Richard Temple.

He is fabulous. You know, he is musical, too. You see him playing the drums in "Life Is Sweet," if you remember. The bonus there was that he and I have got this great shared passion for all things Victorian, and Dickens in particular. In fact, he was in the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Nicholas Nickleby": He was Young Squeers, and he was good. At an early stage, I had him in mind for Gilbert's manservant. But then I had to find a Richard Temple, and the truth was that little is known of this guy except a few material facts. So it left us huge scope to invent this definitive Victorian actor, which is right up Timothy's street. We both, at different stages of our early childhood, secretly wanted to be Charles Laughton. And what Timothy Spall does is a great piece of modern Laughton-esque acting. He absolutely balances on that fine line between the grotesque and the moving.

In retrospect it seems inevitable, but was it always your plan to center the story on the period before "The Mikado," when G&S seem to have split up?

Yes; as you say, it was inevitable. No other point in their history is that interesting. As you know, I always like to tell stories when the main protagonists are up and running, and then you can go off into other directions.

These days, musicals like "Annie Get Your Gun" have to be vetted before each new production, to make sure they conform to contemporary attitudes. That doesn't enter into your treatment of "The Mikado." You do seem to think that there was an open-hearted cultural exchange in what Gilbert did.

Yes, although that's something to deal with cautiously. Because there is a certain degree of inherent racism on the go in certain sections of the film, including the attitudes expressed when the three actors are talking about the defeat of General Gordon at Khartoum. I mean, the fact is Gordon shouldn't have been there, but that's a very modern, liberated, post-colonial point of view.

Interestingly enough, there are in "The Mikado" a couple of references to "niggers," one of which is within Temple's "Mikado" song: "The lady who dyes a chemical yellow/Or stains her grey hair puce/Or pinches her figger/Is blacked like a nigger/With permanent walnut juice." "Blacked like a nigger" was reworked in the 1950s as "painted with vigor." We shot the original line, and there was quite a kerfuffle about it. Then we had to cut a verse anyway from a couple of songs, because we were too long in film time, and out it went. I think we properly dodged what would have been unnecessary hassles. But the line probably would not have been perceived as racism at the time of Gilbert and Sullivan.

And, yeah, the spirit is generally open and generous, if a touch avuncular. It's a kind of local technicality that there are non-P.C. specific elements.

Audiences may get a little nervous at the start of that marvelous scene in which Gilbert has three Japanese women teach the actresses how to walk in "Three Little Maids From School Are We." Especially if they don't know that you're being accurate about what Gilbert actually did.

It depends on what you call being accurate. Certain things I know are fact and with certain others I am taking dramatic liberties. For example, Gilbert certainly brought people from the Japanese exhibition to show his actors how to be Japanese. I have no doubt they came over several days and I personally have little doubt that what happened was entirely functional and straightforward -- they just showed the actors a few things, like how to use the fans.

So what happens in the film is plainly an invented piece, a concoction, and rightly so -- this film is not a documentary. The idea that Gilbert gets the Japanese to demonstrate something and they have no idea what they're demonstrating -- and they don't do anything because they don't know what he wants -- and then he gets other people to imitate them not doing anything -- and that becomes it -- it's fairly preposterous but it makes its own kind of sense, curiously, within the piece.

And incidentally, although we're not talking about it, that scene is absolutely a function of doing the film in an organic way. If ever there was an example of how I achieve things by the way I work -- which I couldn't possibly achieve in a million years with a million monkeys and a million typewriters, or word processors, in a room -- that is it.

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