“You can show a range of emotion that you don’t usually get in the cinema”: Derek Jarman on Edward II

Edward II is the latest in a long line of personal ‘heroes’ who Derek Jarman has wrenched from history. Others include Sebastiane, the masochistic martyr of gay projections; Elizabeth I of Jubilee, the Virgin Queen whose qualities find their ultimate expression in Tilda Swinton’s Madonna roles in The Garden, Caravaggio and The Last of England; Prospero of The Tempest, the ultimate Shakespearean conception of the artist (as film-maker); the Pasolini-like Jesus of The Garden; and Caravaggio, the original rough-trade lumpen artist. But behind Jarman’s recent film of Christopher Marlowe’s play is also a recognition of the playwright himself as an active, passionate man who was not only gay, but died in a fight inside a Deptford tavern. Marlowe must be linked here, then, with Jarman’s passion for the work and lives of Caravaggio and Pasolini – both gay men who died violently.

If Jubilee, made in the white heat of the punk movement, was Jarman’s first attempt to shape the present by means of the past, then Edward II tries to do the same in a less schematic way. It creates a world where Edward’s obsessive and tragic love for the ambitious Gaveston is exploited as a modern gay love affair set in contemporary England, while at the same time it retains a medieval simplicity to the sets. Typically, Jarman’s depiction of the contemporary is determined by the emotional and dramatic demands of the play, so 60s gangster fashions jostle with 30s Vogue and the balaclava hoods of the 70s terrorist. Edward’s rebellious noblemen are transformed into the pillars of the modern British establishment – bishops, generals, businessmen.

Edward’s wife, Isabella (Tilda Swinton), colludes sexually and politically with Mortimer (Nigel Terry, Jarman’s Caravaggio), who, envious of Gaveston’s prestige and believing that Edward is neglecting his responsibilities as monarch, violently opposes him in a civil war. Jarman’s recurring themes of the intimacy of death and love, of the role of institutional violence in society (particularly by the military, of which Jarman’s father was a member), and an overwrought sexuality are all reworked in Edward II. Images of water, especially in Edward’s cell, recall the dream sea sequences in The Garden and the idyllic swimming sequences in The Angelic Conversation. The violence is characteristically brutal and ambiguous. Isabella’s murder of Edward’s brother Kent by biting out his throat is horrific and intensely erotic, as is Edward’s murder of Gaveston’s assassin.

Jarman’s ambivalence towards military figures reminds us of his remark that “if we must have troops, let’s have them in bed”. It is a persistent image in his films, from Jubilee (where a policeman is bedded before being killed) to Edward II, where Nigel Terry sheds the ambiguities of Caravaggio for rampant heterosexuality.

When Jarman says of Marlowe’s play that it “touches on areas that still aggravate people”, you can almost hear the relish in his voice.

“The throne and who is fit to sit on the throne is what it’s all about. I made this very clear with an image of the throne that keeps recurring. Different people get on to it in different ways. Gaveston here became a sort of chattering, evil incubus in the night, reminiscent of the Fuseli picture. The smoking was something the two actors brought into it. I think it was supposed to be a joint to be passed between them: ‘We’re stoned on the throne and fuck you’ was what was going on in their minds. Gaveston is working class and not French as he is in Marlowe. I couldn’t get a French actor and I didn’t want a fake French accent. When I was casting Gaveston one of the things I liked about him was his class; there is an element where he might become a vicious, Kray-like gangster in the beating up of the archbishop. And that has to be there, because it’s in the character, it’s in the way it’s written. It also makes the whole thing more poignant – what you have is a situation where two people have obviously fallen in love and one can’t understand just what the attraction is. Gaveston is sexuality and class merged. I wanted to have the North/South divide – so Edward has a northern accent, too. He pronounces ‘castle’ in the northern way, and whenever he did that my heart leapt because it was also against traditional verse-speaking.”

“I have no problems with heterosexual love scenes. I usually do gay scenes, but I have this unusual scene between Edward and Isabella which is a love scene that goes wrong. Now this must have happened to everyone at some point in their life – when they go to bed with the wrong person. Or what has been passionate, in the cold of the early morning, isn’t any more. I don’t know many scenes in the cinema quite like that – showing two characters in bed when it’s not working out and with no dialogue. I think Colin MacCabe thinks of it as my misogyny in a way. I’m not certain it is. We discussed this with Tilda. I think it’s realist, in the sense that bed scenes are nearly always super-real. Edward is preoccupied, I don’t think he’s impotent. It just isn’t working out. And he’s furious about the whole thing. I was trying to keep up this psycho-sexual tension all the way through. All these people trapped in a merry-go-round of conflicting emotion. This is what really excited me about the whole thing. You can show a range of emotion in Edward II that you don’t usually get in the cinema.”

“Ken Butler, the associate director, shot this scene between Gaveston and Edward and about three others. Ian Wilson did the lighting. The idea was that it was very late at night. We lit people coming in and out of shadow. Every now and again we blacked out the background so we were just on faces – then the dialogue really comes up. My couple of ‘fucks’ that everyone complains about are necessary in that sense. But I’ve left the dialogue intact as much as possible.

The suits came from a young designer who offered us the suits for Gaveston. You might not notice them but they are rather unusually and beautifully cut. I put Edward in a duffle coat for most of the film. How does one depict a drop-out and make him look monastic and medieval as well? The duffle coat was the answer. I didn’t make him put the hood/cowl up. David Warner’s 60s Hamlet wore a duffle coat, or at least looked like the 60s student CND radical.”

“Ian said we should light this by spotlight because of Annie Lennox – and suggested we put a spotlight on Edward and Gaveston too. It works because it restores the theatricality of the whole thing. The spotlight is on them simply because that is where the spotlight is. In old-fashioned theatre terms, it’s a good solution. The actors insisted on Marks and Spencer’s pyjamas. There was a sense of humour in the whole thing. The film needed a lightness of touch in places and this has been misinterpreted as my quirky campness. But I don’t think it’s true; these light-hearted decisions endear you to a character or should do, and it’s what we need.”

“Tilda was often in the most theatrically and powerfully composed shots, and here she really is chairman of the board, of Pepsi Cola! She’s also Joan Crawford! It was obvious she had to be at the other end of the table, so we cut round to her. Although, of course, you don’t know until then whether she is there or not. It’s a painterly style, but the whole thing is incredibly simple film-making. I’m a naive film-maker in that sense. Early on Tom Priestly said to me that the best films are just cut – so every time the camera goes on a move, beware! And he said, “if you’ve got no money, Derek, then just do a simple long-shot, close-ups, mid-shots”. I’ve always done that because we’ve never had the money to set up complicated shots. With low-budget film-making you got what you could get. I always think of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. I would be very interested if I could just press a button and see what the film would look like in black and white. It would probably look nearer to that Dreyer look. I am pleased we have colour, I wouldn’t make a black and white film because I think that would be arcane.”

“Very Jarmanesque! It could be that marvellous picture of the cellist with the big dress on by Augustus John. I think that’s where this came from, although her dress is green and she has red hair! And there is a deliberate homage to Some Like It Hot, when Edward and Gaveston enter and dance – which was the actors’ idea. This group had done the music on other films and have worked with Simon Turner [Music]. It’s along the lines of the sailors’ dance in The Tempest. I didn’t want it to be heavy; I needed to show that at some point this relationship is actually fun, they’re having a good time.”

“Ken Butler directed this one too. I was not well that day and it’s done really well. I might have done it differently, but I can’t think I would have done it better. l might have reframed slightly on Tilda’s face, which falls out of the frame a bit on the next shot, a close-up. Or I might have put a Paganini [a wooden box] under her so that the two of them are absolutely framed up into the frame. At first, when Tilda rushes into the scene, it was funny, but we subverted that with sound. Simon Turner’s music is very good with this scene. It’s rather clever because Mortimer does have these disingenuous lines – ‘Who’s this, the queen?’ – but somehow you get away with it because she has a veil on. There is an element of a real horror film (Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia perhaps?) – after all, we were making this in Hammer’s old Bray studios. The lighting is eerie with the slats. We decided on lighting on the day. We thought this scene was probably outside, with a lattice. It’s the moment when their relationship becomes passionate.”

“Essentially it’s just one set for the whole film. How the set changes is determined by how it is lit and it was up to Ian Wilson to invent the light to make some scenes outside, some inside, to give certain atmospheres. The set became a metaphor for the trapped country, the prison of our lives, ‘the closet of our heart’, in Edward’s words. There is no sunlight, it’s deep in the earth really.”

“I wanted to turn everyone into a mannequin as if they’d been drained of life. Tilda wanted the dead flowers in her hands, Christopher was not keen. It looked like she had received a bouquet for some performance and I like that. And he’s clapping, as at the end of The Garden, as if he’s applauding some mad performance. The little boy is always there. He’s a witness and a survivor. Whenever we had a spare moment I did another little scene with him to add because we had so little time. In the actual play, Edward Ill must be seventeen or so. When he’s dancing on the top of their cage later, it reduces him to some sort of puppet. By using Tchaikovsky I wanted to reinforce the idea of them as wind-up dolls. I was thinking of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, when he mounts the throne, that great moment when child Ivan’s feet dangle from the throne and don’t reach the ground. I couldn’t get a quotation in like that, it would have been too much. There is an element of young Edward being me, but everyone identifies with the child and he is the same child in all my films.”