Guardian Review

Class act . . . Richard Griffiths as Hector and Dominic Cooper as Dakin in the film of The History Boys The History Boys is the second film that Alan Bennett and I have made together. The first, in 1994, was The Madness of King George . Both started as plays at the National Theatre, though The Madness of King George had its title helpfully changed on the journey from stage to screen, as it was feared that for an audience unversed in the history of the English monarchy, the title of the play - The Madness of George III - might imply it was the sequel to The Madness of George I and The Madness of George II. Despite the shortcomings of its title, there always seemed to be a film in The Madness of George III . It took us longer to believe that The History Boys , the strengths of which included neither a driving narrative nor any whiff of the picturesque, belonged on screen. As there seemed to be no point in trying to parachute into the material cinematic attributes it had no interest in possessing, the point of a History Boys film would be that it would allow us to intensify what was exciting about the play. Maybe it could bring us closer to the protagonists, get under their skins. Maybe it could capture their speed of thought and the glitter of their intellects. But whatever else it turned out to be, it would be about eight boys and four teachers. So when we finally started to think about making it, we knew it would also be about the 12 actors who had created them. Alan Bennett is a stylist as recognisable, in his way, as Oscar Wilde. People don't actually talk the way they do in his plays: the "history boys" are often far wittier and more articulate than even the cleverest Oxbridge entrant, and it was a measure of the work we did together over several weeks of rehearsal and many months of performance that the eight actors who played them were able to root Alan's inimitable speech patterns in concrete reality and toss them off without apparent effort. "Lecher though one is, or aspires to be," says Dakin, aged 18, referring to the hapless attempted gropings of his English teacher, "it occurs to me that the lot of woman cannot be easy, who must suffer such inexpert male fumblings virtually on a daily basis." Dominic Cooper delivers this with the aplomb of a latter-day Jack Worthing, but you never doubt that it's part of the daily banter of a Sheffield teenager, falling as naturally from his lips as the cheerful obscenities that pepper all the boys' dialogue on screen, as it would in life. The casting question surfaced as soon as we began talking with potential financiers, some of whom wanted to make what might be called a contribution to the casting process. As we already had a cast that we thought unimprovable, and whose ownership of their roles after a year on stage was absolute, this got us nowhere. The world we had created together was the world we wanted to film. There was undoubtedly another, and maybe a better, film that could have been made based on the play, but none of us had any interest in it. So we decided to cut loose and make by ourselves all the decisions that would under normal circumstances involve consultation with our paymasters. We'd go looking for someone to pay for the movie only when we were ready to start shooting it. Delivering the screenplay seemed less of a problem to me than it did to Alan. I'd been full of ideas about turning George III into a screenplay, most of them designed to demonstrate that I was a bona fide film director, my imagination no longer confined by the proscenium arch. If there was half a chance to move the camera, or to cut to a different location, I took it. The best scenes were nevertheless lifted more or less verbatim from the play. This time, I started out by offering Alan very little beyond a conviction that we shouldn't try too hard to open out something that worked precisely because it was enclosed. Closed worlds can be as eloquent on film as they are on stage. Schools, prisons, hospitals, courtrooms: they all operate according to easily graspable rules and stand as microcosms of the wider world. The Front Page , The Philadelphia Story and A Streetcar Named Desire waste no effort on straying from the centre. Their energy springs from the dynamic exploration of small worlds that are fully inhabited by large spirits. I now reckoned if we could devote seven minutes of film to the teaching of a poem by Thomas Hardy, we'd be doing OK. Watching Sam Barnett and Richard Griffiths slowly recognise "a sense of not sharing, of being out of it . . . a holding back, not being in the swim", I know why we made the movie. Freed from the necessity of including 900 people nightly into their conversation, these two marvellous actors played only for each other and allowed the camera the most intimate imaginable access to a profoundly felt loneliness. My key partner was the director of photography, Andrew Dunn, who had shot The Madness of King George . To meet the budget, we needed to shoot The History Boys in six weeks - a lightning-quick schedule for a film, but one that I thought we could make because the actors could not have been more in command of their material. King George involved the animation of a world familiar from the paintings of Zoffany and Reynolds; it was about people whose lives and identities were bound up in lavish displays of power and wealth. The world of The History Boys - a modest Yorkshire grammar school in the 1980s - was remote from the court of George III not just for the obvious reasons. The spirit of the boys who populate it is immediate and spontaneous, and though they often think and speak with theatrical elegance, the concrete reality of their lives is rough and ready. Andrew responded with the same invention that he had brought to the regal splendour of George III's Windsor, but where he had then conjured up a folk memory of monarchy, he now photographed a real memory of school. I've seen films set in schools that look the way films look; The History Boys looks the way schools look. It was useful that this was cheaper than the glossier alternative; it also seemed right. I hope the result is a film that, even when it follows the same script as the play, often seems to be saying something more. On stage, the central argument can seem unfairly weighted in favour of Richard Griffiths' character, Hector. The truth is that much of what Hector teaches is entirely self-indulgent. Most parents would be uneasy with his insistence on following to the letter Housman's dictum that "all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use", and his insistence on inflicting on his class the culture, high and low, of his own youth is at least as questionable as his wandering hands. In performance, however, Hector's stuff is irresistible. In the film, Stephen Campbell Moore's Irwin provides Hector with formidable opposition, seductive enough to allay the suspicion that there is a thin line between a sparkling intellect and a flashy one. There is a scene that didn't make it beyond the first draft of the screenplay, and was even cut eventually from the play - though only in the interests of brevity and with a heavy heart, because, like so much of Alan's discarded material, it was better than most writers' highlights. In it, Rudge challenged Hector to recognise a song by the Pet Shop Boys; Hector, ignorant of all popular culture after about 1950, was completely floored. "You can't expect him to know that," said Timms. "And anyway, it's crap." "So is Gracie Fields," said Rudge, "only that's his crap. This is our crap." I feel something similar about The History Boys : I have no idea yet whether it's a good film, but it's our film. The History Boys opens on October 13. The screenplay by Alan Bennett is published by Faber & Faber on October 5 at pounds 12.99. To order the audiobook at pounds 11.99 (rrp pounds 12.99) with free uk p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-History Boys.1 The History Boys is the second film that Alan Bennett and I have made together. The first, in 1994, was The Madness of King George . Both started as plays at the National Theatre, though The Madness of King George had its title helpfully changed on the journey from stage to screen, as it was feared that for an audience unversed in the history of the English monarchy, the title of the play - The Madness of George III - might imply it was the sequel to The Madness of George I and The Madness of George II. My key partner was the director of photography, Andrew Dunn, who had shot The Madness of King George . To meet the budget, we needed to shoot The History Boys in six weeks - a lightning-quick schedule for a film, but one that I thought we could make because the actors could not have been more in command of their material. King George involved the animation of a world familiar from the paintings of Zoffany and Reynolds; it was about people whose lives and identities were bound up in lavish displays of power and wealth. The world of The History Boys - a modest Yorkshire grammar school in the 1980s - was remote from the court of George III not just for the obvious reasons. The spirit of the boys who populate it is immediate and spontaneous, and though they often think and speak with theatrical elegance, the concrete reality of their lives is rough and ready. Andrew responded with the same invention that he had brought to the regal splendour of George III's Windsor, but where he had then conjured up a folk memory of monarchy, he now photographed a real memory of school. I've seen films set in schools that look the way films look; The History Boys looks the way schools look. It was useful that this was cheaper than the glossier alternative; it also seemed right. I hope the result is a film that, even when it follows the same script as the play, often seems to be saying something more. On stage, the central argument can seem unfairly weighted in favour of [Richard Griffiths]' character, Hector. The truth is that much of what Hector teaches is entirely self-indulgent. Most parents would be uneasy with his insistence on following to the letter Housman's dictum that "all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use", and his insistence on inflicting on his class the culture, high and low, of his own youth is at least as questionable as his wandering hands. In performance, however, Hector's stuff is irresistible. In the film, Stephen Campbell Moore's Irwin provides Hector with formidable opposition, seductive enough to allay the suspicion that there is a thin line between a sparkling intellect and a flashy one. - Nicholas Hytner.