Writer/Director Jon Spira Talks ‘The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee’
by CHAD KENNERK
Image courtesy of Sky Arts
Christopher Lee may have become famous for his iconic performance as a young, suave, debonair Dracula, but his work went far beyond the Hammer Horror roles he is most often associated with. With a commanding voice, penetrating eyes and his imposing height (six feet, five inches), he often found himself cast as the villain, but like Vincent Price and his other horror contemporaries, the villains Lee played were often the most interesting and layered performance in the film.
Following a long and expansive career that began with uncredited roles in the 1940s, he worked later in life with the biggest names in the industry, appearing in major franchises like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. He made five films with director Tim Burton and worked with Martin Scorsese on Hugo. Beyond his work on the screen, Lee led a fascinating life. Before his acting career he served in the Royal Air Force and the details of his military career are still shrouded in a degree of secrecy. From a young age, he wanted to be an opera singer and in his later years he released heavy metals albums, becoming the oldest person to have a top 20 hit on the Billboard music charts. His life’s adventures list like fanciful yarns, but he often found himself encountering the unexpected, such as being witness to the last ever death by guillotine. He was a cousin to 007 creator Ian Fleming and he later appeared as Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. Decades before playing the wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lee spent an evening in a pub with author J. R. R. Tolkien. He performed with the classic cast of Saturday Night Live and was a neighbour to Boris Karloff.
Jon Spira, the writer/director behind the new documentary, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, has made some of the very best and most interesting films about British filmmaking and cinema. His feature work includes the excellent documentaries Elstree 1976, about the actors behind the masks in the original Star Wars, and Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Falls of the Great British Stuntman. His docu-series Reel Britannia explored the history of British cinema. Mixing traditional documentary filmmaking with animation and puppetry, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee brings Lee back from the dead (thanks to an elaborate marionette, voiced by Peter Serafinowicz) to tell his own story. Archival materials further illustrate the tale, along with new, exclusive interviews with filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, John Landis and Joe Dante, as well as Lee’s niece Dame Harriet Walter, Hammer actress Caroline Munro, and film historian (and former Film Review contributor) Jonathan Rigby, who worked closely with Lee in writing Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History. In the course of making the film, Spira visited the British Film Institute archives — which holds Lee's personal collection of scrapbooks — and interviewed Lee’s closest friends and family. The result is an amusing, eclectic documentary revealing a complex, comprehensive portrait of a cinematic icon.
In conversation with writer/director Jon Spira
Film Review (FR): Documentaries seem like one of the most difficult art forms, because there's so many moving parts and things that are beyond your control, to a certain extent. Tell me about the journey of documenting Christopher Lee.
Jon Spira (JS): It's a really interesting question. I don't often look back and think of it in that kind of way. I suppose the thing that I do differently — and when I say ‘I’ I'm always referring to me and my producer, Hank Starrs. We work very, very closely together. We're very much a 50/50 kind of partnership. The thing about the way we work is that we're very open to the process. It's kind of just like jumping off a cliff sometimes. We don't go in with a set idea of knowing exactly what we want the film to be or exactly what we're looking for. When we decide to make a film it’s because we're both passionate about the subject and because we've seen something in the subject which hooks us — which is not necessarily the kind of biographical part of it. None of my documentaries are straightforward biographies in that kind of sense.
For me, the starting point for this film was seeing Christopher Lee's episode of This Is Your Life, quite randomly. It was a really fascinating watch, because he seemed to not be enjoying it at all and really having a horrible time. At first it was kind of amusing, and then I just felt awful for him, because he really looked like he was having a bad time. Every time they had a mystery voice – ‘who's going to come through the door?’ – he just looked panicked. I watched it a few times in a row because it was so fascinating to see. I realised I had his autobiography, which I'd read maybe a year earlier at that point as well. I realised that this is a guy who has controlled his narrative for a really long time. He came out of that era of cinema where the studios were forcing narratives on you as well. It was really important to that kind of original set of film stars, that they almost kept who they really were very far back. There were some biographical truths to what they did, but generally, they were trying to build their own protection, their own shell of who this film star was. With Lee, it was to a really extreme degree. When I started reading interviews with him, it was very apparent that he had a lot of insecurities. That was the hook for the film, for me.
Christopher Lee is this character in cinema who is very powerful, erudite, athletic, handsome. He exudes power, class and aristocracy. The second I saw him as a kind of fragile human being, that's when I knew I wanted to make a film about him. That's when I was really interested. And really, that's what the journey of the film was – identifying those fragilities, those insecurities. Where they came from, how they manifested and really trying to build an empathy with him for the audience. The journey was to try and find as many people who knew him as possible, and set up interviews with them, and keep those interviews as open ended as possible, because you want to learn. A lot of people who make documentaries go into interviews with a set of questions and they know what they want to get out of their subjects. They know the answers they want. And I never do that. The journey was just enjoying learning about him and always building on this idea that we initially had about him as an insecure, very human kind of person. Then we have the creative journey as well, in terms of all the stuff with the puppet and the animation. That was almost a separate journey.
(FR): How did you settle on the storytelling devices that you used, from the narration to the puppetry and all the different animation styles?
(JS): The original concept was that he had, not just a fascinating career, but a really fascinating life – he died in his 90s. As we were making it, the film was naturally putting itself into chapters, and these chapters were all set in different eras and in different parts of the world. It felt like it was going to have a colourful feeling, a kind of patchwork feeling. I thought it would be really interesting to play with animation and to make each section feel different from one another. It's still a straightforward film in terms of a chronology of talking heads, but I really felt instead of just using photos and archive material, it would be really interesting to put the call out and find a bunch of different animators who use all different styles, look at that work, and just say, ‘Okay, well, they would be good for this sequence. This person would be good for that sequence, and let's see what they can bring to it.’
To my mind, it really worked. We got this kind of combination of people from those who've literally just graduated from film school, from art school, doing cutting edge stuff. We used some AI, which has been a little bit controversial – but they were artists using AI. I think that's very different from me just typing into a thing. They're using it as a tool within their animation and if you've got an artistic point of view controlling that stuff, using it as a tool, it yields some really amazing results. Right up to Dave McKean, who's a very famous illustrator and filmmaker. He did a whole section for us as well where Christopher Lee’s in hospital and having surgery. That was the choice. To get as many different perspectives and make all of these sections feel completely different.
Then when it came to the puppets, I always wanted him telling his own story. I always wanted that because he cares about his story so much. He controls the narrative of his life so much and he's such a strong character that I ended up writing a script. I had so much material. He's written several volumes of his autobiography over the years. I was working with the British Film Institute and they gave me just piles of interviews with him. So I felt like I knew where he was coming from and what he wanted his story to be. His story was always stated very clearly, he very rarely contradicted himself. I thought what would be interesting was to have him narrate his own story and then intercut that with talking heads, with people who really knew him – friends and family and people who worked with him. All of our interviewees had a strong personal relationship with him and they very gently contradict him. You have him presenting his story as he would like it to be told, and we give him the decency of expressing it in the way I feel he would have expressed it, but we play that against clips of people who, in a very loving way, give you their take on what the actual truth of the matter is, and maybe why he felt certain ways and where he was coming from.
Originally, I was inspired by a TV advert we had over here about 20 years ago, where this very famous comedian called Bob Monkhouse, four years after he died, suddenly turned up on a TV advert warning against prostate cancer, which is what he had died of. It was quite early CGI. They had him in a graveyard, cracking jokes over his own grave and getting to the subject of prostate cancer – men should go and get checked. It's on YouTube and it still looks really good. It's a really well made advert. Seeing that was a real inspiration. I kind of thought, ‘Well, I'd like to do that. Maybe we can use CGI, and we can get older footage of him and have him tell his story in graveyards or things like that.’ We do tests and we try different things, we bring different people in. Eventually it was obvious that wasn't really going to work the way we wanted it to. At the point I had to make a decision, it just seemed a little controversial. The tests weren't great, because you can manipulate people's mouths all you want, but there's something behind the eyes, and there's something in the way people express themselves with their eyebrows. I just felt it wasn't 100% convincing. It wasn't right.
We thought, ‘Well, what other options are there?’ Hank was the one who came up with puppetry. We looked for a while at this amazing guy who does paper puppetry live, but then eventually, we just thought of marionettes and we found this amazing guy, Andy Gent, who does all of Wes Anderson's and Tim Burton's puppets. We met him, and he's such an amazing, lovely guy. We clicked so well with him and he built this stunning puppet. It cost a lot of money and it took a lot of building. It's a lot less simple than it looks, but it's beautiful. It takes two people to operate it. It’s interesting, because the reviews are coming out now. In this country, we have a thing which we call Marmite, which traditionally, everyone either loves or hates. You always talk about things having a Marmite response, and the puppet is definitely having a Marmite response.
(FR): Really?
(JS): They love it or they hate it, which is fine. I mean, you don't want people in the middle.
(FR): That's true. Well, I'm on the love it side. I really think it's special. You mentioned the script – in order to create the cadence of Christopher Lee, you have to have a very well researched script, and it felt spot on. How did you go about that development process?
(JS): It was through immersing myself in all the interviews with him – video and written interviews. When you do that, after even a week, you can hear his voice in your head. You can hear how he phrases things, and you even start to understand what his opinions on things are going to be. For a while he had real estate in my head. For quite a while I would hear his voice. There would be times where I'd be having conversation with my wife, and I would want to answer as Christopher Lee. Actually, to have used his real speech patterns would have been a nightmare, because he was incredibly verbose and he would never stay on subject with anything.
When you see interviews with him, he goes off subject in the first sentence and then he would go off subject from the next sentence and the next, branching away from things. When you see them actually written out, they're quite complicated, this kind of branching thing that he would do, where he would – in the middle of a sentence – qualify it with another sentence, and then come back to the first sentence. I had to find a way of writing around that, but I did. I felt like I found his voice and I got that fairly quickly. I started my career as a screenwriter. I've been a documentarian for my ‘real’ career, but I could tap into the ability to nail down a character and get it on the page.
(FR): How did you hone his extraordinary life down to two hours?
(JS): It's a very natural process that just happens over the length of making a film. Your first draft of the script is huge, and with each draft, you see the stuff that kind of falls away. Sometimes it’s through consulting with other people and sometimes you just fall out of love with certain bits of it. Then you film and you get into the edit and your first cut is four hours long. You just refine and refine and refine and refine. It's hard to even see it happening sometimes, but it feels organic. I've been doing this for quite a long time, but to me it's very instinctual. I think when you first start making films, people always use the phrase ‘killing your babies’, which means that you have to throw away your favourite sequences, but once you've done that for a while, you realise that it's okay, because when you're making a film, the things that you think are going to be the best things are when you get these really great anecdotes from people in interviews. But you can't put a whole anecdote into the film. You can maybe get away with one or two, but if they're talking for three minutes solid, it’s just not good cinema. What you realise is actually what you're looking for are tiny moments, and the moments that speak volumes.
I don't want to give any spoilers, but there's an archival clip at the very end of the film, which is what everyone comments on. As soon as I found that clip, I was just like, ‘Well, now I understand the whole film.’ The whole time is getting there and I know that clip is kind of money, and I know that that clip is the thing that everyone is going to be fascinated by. I know that I can play probably two to four minutes of that clip, because it’s such an electric thing to see on screen. It was very easy to get there. I always knew where I was heading. I knew that clip was going to be at the end, so I didn't have to worry. It's an organic, instinctive kind of honing down process. I worked with a great editor on this called Alex Barrett, who is so amenable and friendly and funny and got the project so well. When you work with people who care as much about the film as you do, it makes all the difference. You can trust them. You can trust the process. To some degree, you become one big, organic being. That's a terrible sounding thing, I won't pursue this, but you know what I'm saying.
(FR): What were some of the anecdotes and stories that you left on the cutting room floor?
(JS): We had to cut an entire interview, which made me very sad. The biggest stuff that we cut out was to do with his music. Music was a huge thing to him, and honestly, he would have rather been an opera singer than a film star, and it bugged him his entire life. He had one opportunity when he was younger to train, but he would have had to pay for his own accommodation. At that time, he couldn't afford to do it. A few years later, when he had some money, he decided he was going to be an opera singer. Basically a doctor told him it was too late – his voice would never be where it needed to be, even though he's a great singer. Although we do reference it in the film, music was a much bigger thing to him than we probably make out in the film. When it came to him quite late in life, in his 70s through to his 90s, music was a really big thing to him, and he really was trying to try to pursue that career.
We tell the story about the heavy metal side of things, but he actually had released some singles before that, which were more middle of the road kind of stuff, which had done with this guy called Gary Curtis. Sadly, because everything they performed were these amazing American standards, we couldn’t afford to get them. It got to a point where it's like — there's no point in talking about this if we can't show him performing these things. So we lost Gary from the whole film, which I feel bad about, because he and Gary were very close friends. Then when it comes to the heavy metal stuff, it's a much bigger story than we tell. We tell the kind of nucleus of it, but the truth is that before he had his own heavy metal career, he guested on a bunch of other heavy metal projects with quite big bands. That was the bulk of what we lost.
In terms of anecdotes, John Landis was full of anecdotes. With him, everything he gives you is gold, so some stuff just fell by the wayside. One of the things we had to cut for time was the Gremlins 2: The New Batch section, which was a real shame, because Joe Dante is one of our interviewees and talks really well about their time to get on Gremlins 2 — which was kind of the gateway film for Christopher’s career beginning again. He had this late renaissance in his career, where he suddenly was working with huge film directors and Gremlins 2 was really the first film which elevated him to that point, and we had to lose that section, which was a real shame.
His life before he became a film actor was insane; he did so much, but you can’t put it all in there. The stuff that you tend to lose is the funny, abstract stuff. He became a professional knife thrower. He was a lonely child and he became obsessed with knives, and because he couldn't really relate to women, or to girls at that point, because he was a teenager, his way of essentially chatting them up would be to stand them in front of a wooden door and throw knives at their head. It's a great anecdote. His autobiography tells a great anecdote about how he loses his virginity. All I'll say is just read the book, because it's one of the most hilarious, wonderful, unexpected kinds of stories. He met the guys who killed Rasputin. There is just so much with him.
Really what I hope is that when people watch the film, they'll then want to read his autobiography and want to find out the missing information. I think what we've done is create a kind of emotional portrait of him, and I'm very happy with it being that. That's all I intended it to be. Maybe if you do the Netflix series, you could fit all of the facts in, but to be honest, I think that kind of thing, when you're watching a film, can be quite boring; watching a film that doesn't have a point, that's not building towards something.
(FR): You miss the emotional story that you mentioned. You're able to really capture it in one take, rather than having an audience have to come back for multiple episodes to get that overall picture.
(JS): It's such a weird time to be making films, because we're fairly new into it, but we're in the information age now. If you want to know about Christopher Lee, you type it into Google and it's there. You can read these articles like, ‘100 Things You Didn't Know About Christopher Lee’, which are mainly true. There's no point in me spending two years of my life putting something together which someone could watch and go, ‘Oh, I knew that.’ It gets me into trouble sometimes, because I think people don't expect it with the subjects of my films, but all of my films are much more about emotions and much more about feelings than they are about facts. I've got no interest in just treading over old ground. I'd rather find something new and what I find, is that most people stick to facts rather than feelings. Actually, when you watch a film in the cinema, I think you're looking more for an emotional experience.
(FR): Now that the doc is done, how do you view Christopher's legacy?
(JS): The thing that really struck me, once I'd done all the research and was familiar with him, is that there's no one in cinema history like him. Firstly, he made more films than anybody else. I think he used to claim it was a world record. I don't know if it's a world record or not, but it's pushing 300 film appearances. Secondly, he started making films in the 40s and he finished in the 2000s. They spanned almost eight separate decades and he was something different in all of those decades; he was relevant in some way in all of those decades. I don't think there's anyone else who you could say that about, especially the fact that at the end of his career, he was more successful than he had been at the beginning of his career.
You've got this guy who's lived all these different lives and he came about in this era of cinema that I'm very interested in, which is British cinema of the 1940s. Then in the 1950s, all of a sudden he's in the Hammer movies, which are their own genre of lurid horror. He becomes famous and then in the 60s, he's in Europe working with Mario Bava, Jesús Franco, and all of these very outlandish, rule breaking kind of filmmakers. In the 70s he goes to Hollywood and lived there for a decade. In the 80s, he came back to London and that's the point at which his career really looks like it's restricted to cameos and not very good films. Then all of a sudden, in the 90s, he is working with Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton – huge directors and huge films. The Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars films are the biggest film franchises in the world.
His earliest roles were uncredited sword fighting roles with Errol Flynn and at the end of his career, he's having a lightsaber battle with Yoda. It's crazy. His legacy is huge, but it's also very split up. What's incredible is that he's a completely different person to everyone who loves him. As someone who's in their late 40s, I love the idea of someone who is in their teens or 20s, who just loves Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, watching this film and going, ‘Oh my God, that's what he looked like when he was young. He was Dracula and he was Scaramanga in a James Bond film, from a James Bond who I've never even watched.’ I think there's so much to discover. If you grow to love him, which I think the film helps with in a way, I think then all of a sudden you go, ‘Wow, there are all these films I can now go back and visit.’ Horror was a thing, but he does so many genres and so many different crazy films. His legacy is almost 300 films, half of which are terrible, but always interesting. His legacy is almost 300 interesting films.
JON SPIRA is a filmmaker and writer based in London. Spira makes independent feature documentary films and TV series, as well as video essays, mini-docs and video promos for companies such as the British Film Institute, Arrow Video, Eureka, the BBC and others. As a writer, Jon has been published by the Daily Telegraph, BFI, BAFTA and other various sites and publications. He has self-published three books, all fully funded by successful Kickstarter campaigns. In his spare time, Jon likes to... watch films.
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