Grey Owl (1999)

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My brother David and I went to see Grey Owl/Archibald Belaney as kids when he came to Leicester to lecture - we each have a signed copy of his book. I found it the most wonderful subject, but again the reviewers didn't like it, either having no time for it at all or going on about 007 in pigtails.

Pierce Brosnan's performance was very clever, but I made one major mistake. Rather than a Hollywood actress, I insisted on casting a girl who was absolutely genuine, lived on an Indian reserve and so on. I was somewhat arrogant and pretty stupid because, despite the fact that English was her third language, I thought I could get the performance from her, she looked so wonderful. But she couldn't lose a certain amount of her French intonation and because her dialogue was learnt almost parrot fashion, Pierce found it very difficult to play against. So that relationship never quite worked and people didn't believe the story. My fault.

We did however have a ghastly misfortune that wrecked the end of the movie. The penultimate scene was to be a speech interspersed with scenes of a canoe fight. The fight had been rehearsed with doubles and we were going to shoot it on the last day on the major lake location. I got there at 5am and, by 6.30am, there were no stunt doubles. At 7.30am we tried to get in touch with them - they were working on another movie hundreds of miles away that had run over, and that production had offered them double pay to stay on.

I didn't know what the hell to do, as we had to leave that night, so we just sent out for some local people who could row canoes - but, of course, they couldn't do the scene. Towards the end of the movie, therefore instead of the pace going down and down and then up again, it just went down until the movie missed its great dramatic shape.

Lord Attenborough