IFTN met with director John Madden recently when he attended the Dublin International Film Festival screening of his new film Proof. Madden is an award-winning stage and screen director, his most well-known screen work including ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (for which he received an Oscar nomination), ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’, and ‘Mrs Brown and Her Lover’.

Given the success of Irish playwrights and stage directors on screen (Conor McPherson, Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh and ‘Studs’ writer/director Paul Mercier), it is interesting to talk to Madden about the screen adaptation of ‘Proof’, the Pulitzer- and Tony-award winning play that has the distinction of being the longest running play in New York.

Madden had been approached to direct the screen version by the film producers Hart Sharp Entertainment (Jeff Sharp and John Hart Boys Don’t Cry, You Can Count on Me) but didn’t initially see it as a movie. However, in an unusual sequence of events, involving accepting Sam Mendes’ invitation to direct the UK premiere of Proof at the Donmar theatre in London and casting Gwyneth Paltrow in her London theatre debut, Madden began to feel differently about its life on the screen.

Paltrow had also been approached about the film version, and found the work with Madden such a ‘positive experience’ that she agreed to take it on. “We didn’t know what schedules would allow and John wanted to see whether it was crackable as a screenplay, but we

were both so attached to the material and had such an amazing experience doing the play that we were determined to try and make it work as a film ,” she said.

John worked with the play’s writer, David Auburn, to transfer the text to screen. “The writing is so good, the emotional landscape so intense, the characterisation very rich and accurate, the story is in a way simple yet full of surprises, and there is a really uncanny degree of naturalism to it. It’s also an extremely subjective piece. And it jumps around in time. And it’s a mystery story. Naturalism, subjectivity, time-jumps, mystery, close-ups; all things a movie can do really well. The issue was to figure out how.”

Madden felt that the exciting challenge was structural; “to find a cinematic language that could honour the play’s surprises, and develop the mystery so that head and heart were engaged all the way to the end.”

Both saw that there were opportunities to include elements that the play had only hinted at, particularly the funeral and the party. Auburn had worked on an early draft of the screen draft over a number of years, however given that his life had been “consumed by the success of the play” when it came to adapting it to a movie, Auburn felt he needed to step out of that process for a while.  Rebecca Miller’s involvement was a “great piece of luck” – she had just successfully adapted her own short stories ‘Personal Velocity’ to the screen which Madden thought was “wonderful and strikingly insightful about women of that age; offbeat and unusual in its writing and approach”. Miller was familiar with the play; Madden had also auditioned her for a part in ‘Ethan Frome’ (1993), so they met. Miller had a “huge respect for the play, and an intriguing mind at once loose and spontaneous because she hadn’t had the experience of adapting another person’s work before, but at the same time very incisive, very emotionally logical, and she brought a particular insight to the material which was already implicit in the piece but which had to do with the feelings of a daughter with an extraordinarily distinguished and brilliant father.”

Madden is “very hands on” with the script. It’s “simply part of the job. I do pay very particular attention to the script because it is the primary means I have of  eliciting the performances I want , because in a film if you don’t get the blueprint right in the script stage I think you’re in trouble.” “The process of making a film is such madness and the ability for things to go catastrophically out of control is so enormous that you need a very clear set of instructions, which is what the script is. A disciplined approach is necessary from the director, and he/she needs to declare on the page what kind of film they will be making”.

Palthrow & Anthony Hopkins