“My one political film”: Ken Russell on The Devils

At the time that I made The Devils, I was a devout Catholic, and secure in my faith. I knew I wasn’t making a pornographic film. Far from it. In fact, the movie had the blessing of the Jesuits. Even to this day it is still taught at Loyola University in Chicago as a good Catholic movie. For myself, although I am not a political creature, I always viewed The Devils as my one political film. To me, it was about brainwashing, about the state taking over. It is based entirely upon John Whiting’s play The Devils, and upon the writings of Aldous Huxley. Huxley was by no means a sensationalist – he was a historian of some note.

According to Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, in 17th-century France there was a crisis caused by the desire of Cardinal Richelieu, the king and their cohorts to pull down the walls of the city of Loudun. This would render Loudun defenceless, so it wouldn’t be a threat to the crown or the church. The same had already happened to other cities, with the result that they subsequently had to concede to every indignity and injustice imposed upon them. The people of the town felt that as long as the walls of Loudun were standing, then they could defend themselves.

When I first read this story I was knocked out by it – it was just so shocking — and I wanted others to be knocked out by it too. I just felt I had to make it. I had done three films for United Artists, Billion Dollar Brain [1967], Women in Love [1969] and The Music Lovers [1971], and they just automatically said: “Well, what do you want to do next?” I said: “The Devils”, and they said: “Fine.” Then somebody at UA actually read the script. The next thing, they refused to touch it. So Warner Bros picked it up.

I didn’t have the censors in mind when I shot the film, but I did have a great deal of respect for John Trevelyan. He was the chief censor of the BBFC at that time, and it was he who had been responsible for getting Women in Love through the censors, complete with the nude male wrestling scene. I know he had to fight hard to convince the other members of the kangaroo court that this wrestling scene was Lawrence – it wasn’t just me making it up. It was an integral part of the story, and without it there was no meaning.

I don’t recall ever showing Trevelyan a script of The Devils. As I remember, his first contact with the movie came when I actually showed him the cut that I wanted to call my own. Before that I really hadn’t discussed the picture with him at all. In the main, Trevelyan’s objections to my original cut were that the scenes of torture, such as the skewering of Grandier’s tongue with needles, or the breaking of his knees, simply went on too long. To him, these scenes needed only a few frames to tell the audience what was happening. After that, the sounds and their imaginations would fill in the rest. With the exception of one sequence, the Rape of Christ, which was removed in its entirety, all Trevelyan did was to tone down or reduce the scenes as I had cut them.

When the film was released in Britain, there were people who felt it was “disgusting”. My response was that I knew this was a disgusting event in the first place. I just filmed it. I stylised it, obviously, because I don’t believe in filming ancient cities as a load of mossy old rocks. To the people living in Loudun at that time, it was not ancient, it was a modern city. I know that the stylisation did throw some people, although many of the really weird things that they objected to, like the green lipstick, were completely factually accurate. In fact, we had to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie, one of those terrible, rolling, old-fashioned Treasure Island titles which said: “The events you are about to see actually happened…”

One thing I remember very clearly was hitting [the Evening Standard’s long-time critic] Alexander Walker with his own review of The Devils because there were two instances to which he referred which were simply not in the film. One was that we see Oliver Reed’s penis being crushed. Well, that may be wishful thinking, but it simply is not in the film. We were on a TV show [the BBC’s Tonight] together, and I confronted him about this inaccuracy, and he simply wouldn’t answer. In the end I got so exasperated that I just rolled up the paper and went bamm [hitting Walker on the head with it]… and then just walked off. We still smile at each other, occasionally, across crowded rooms.

When the film went to Venice, some high-ranking church official threatened to stop it being shown because he thought it was blasphemous. As a result, the people of Venice burnt him in effigy from a lamp post! Ha! And then there was the [conservative Christian campaign group] Natiowide Festival of Light picketing the film in Britain even though they had never seen it. I remember talking to these people outside a cinema and asking them why they hadn’t seen it. They were the usual morons, a slightly strange-looking lot, and of course it transpired that they were all just acting on instructions from above.

The basis for all the torture scenes comes from Huxley and from research that we did ourselves into exactly what those implements were. With all my films, I try to go to the source and learn as much as I can. The censors would have known that this material was factually accurate.

The ‘boot’ [a leg-crushing device] in particular is well-known to anyone who has studied history; it’s not an esoteric form of torture. I’ve always found that it’s much more shocking and indeed more effectual to go for the truth, rather than fiction.

As far as the BBFC was concerned, the nudity in The Devils was never a problem. The problems were with the Americans. Ted Ashley was head of Warner Bros at the time, and I remember his henchman coming over to see it. They sat through the film, which had already been cut and passed by the BBFC, and then just walked out stunned, saying: “You’d better come and see us in our suite at The Dorchester in an hour.”

So I went to their suite and they just let me have it. They looked like gangsters, and they said things like: “That is the filthiest load of shit I’ve ever seen!” So they took the film and they got my editor to cut out all the shots which they wanted removed. And that basically consisted of all the shots in which there was graphic nudity.

All of which adversely affected the story, to the point that in America the film is disjointed and incomprehensible.

The censors had no problem with this scene, but I remember the filming of this sequence as being quite harrowing. But then so much of the movie was. In fact, for a number of the scenes, I had loudspeakers on set playing, almost deafeningly, Prokofiev’s Third Symphony, which was based on his opera The Fiery Angel. about the possession of nuns by devils. I found that music so over the top, so demonic, so frightening, so huge and overpowering, that it had a liberating effect, and the actor feels nothing. They can do anything. They lose themselves in the music.

In this sequence, Grandier is tortured by having needles stuck into his tongue. Trevelyan felt that this scene was too graphic because we did actually show a needle going into a tongue. As usual, he simply demanded that the scene be made shorter. I can’t say how this scene was done, that would be giving away tricks of the trade. I hate films when you get to see a documentary telling you how it was all done. Suffice to say that Oliver Reed looks like he’s in pain, but he’s acting. It’s a movie. The only time I remember him being in actual discomfort was when we burned him at the stake, and he did get a bit hot. I also remember that the censors did cut a few shots of his face blistering from that scene, but again it was all to do with just toning it down, lessening the effect.

Ken Russell was talking to Mark Kermode.