Helen Mirren discusses The Debt and the Untitled Phil Spector Biopic

“I’ve had a few pinnacles of my career,” says Dame Helen Mirren, modestly. From starring with Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday to winning an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for playing Her Majestic Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, the resplendent actress has arguably had more than just a “few” pinnacles. You might add playing DCI - and, later, Superintendent - Jane Tenninson in the Prime Suspect series to that list. A role she played over fifteen years, from 1991 to 2006, it was during this time that she first encountered John Madden, who directed her in the fourth Prime Suspect film, 1995’s The Lost Child (one of three she made that year).

So it’s no surprise that Dame Helen jumped at the chance to reunite with Madden on their new film The Debt. Both a pulsating thriller and a thought-provoking political piece, it sees the actress play Rachel, a former Mossad agent, who – over forty years earlier – was sent with two colleagues to East Berlin to track down a Nazi doctor in hiding, kidnap him and bring him to Israel for trial. Cutting between both time periods (with Jessica Chastain playing the younger Rachel), as the story unfolds, it sees Rachel forced to deal with a secret she’s kept regarding their mission. Below, Dame Helen talks about sharing a role with Chastain, what she considers to be the dark side of her job and working with Al Pacino – another “pinnacle” – on her next film, David Mamet’s Phil Spector biopic.

Q: Did you get a chance to get together with Jessica Chastain and discuss your shared character?

A: We didn’t get together nearly as much as we would’ve liked, but we spent an afternoon together. Jessica, I know, did a lot of work looking at a tape of me. I couldn’t watch any tape of Jessica, because there was none at that point - she had not done anything on film, so it was a bit of a one-way street there. But we were very lucky to have a dedicated and serious young actress like Jessica, who did her homework. But then she and I got together and just had a little chat about tiny, subtle things that we could both do and which would bring the character together.

Q: And what were they?

A: Oh, just things about how we would do our hair, particular gestures, really small things. Then of course John edited them out of the movie anyway! So best laid plans!

Q: How did it feel when you saw her performance interweaving with yours?

A: I thought ‘I buy this. I do buy it.’. Physically, I was never nearly as beautiful as Jessica is when I was her age. But having said that there is something about her face that kind of works, that kind of could be the same person. But I think with that sort of thing, it’s not really the physiognomy, it’s really more what’s inside of you. I think, when I met Jessica, it was a bit like meeting a clone of myself when I was younger, in the sense of her attitude to the work, her passion, her engagement, her commitment, her earnestness. It was kind of like seeing myself at her age and I found that very moving.

Q: Are you good at resisting giving advice to younger actresses?

A: I would only give advice if people asked for it. Sometimes young actors come up to me and ask me for advice. Often it’s career advice - should I do this or should I do that? Or ‘I’m doing this, but I really want to be doing that.’ And I’ll certainly give advice, but I would never give advice unless I was asked for it.

Q: Were you drawn to The Debt straight away?

A: Yes I was. Absolutely. The story, the script, the position of the role within the script, it’s a great role. It’s not a big role; it’s not the leading role as there is no leading role in the film really. But it’s a great role – pro-active, especially for a woman, number one, and then even more so for a woman of my age. That kind of pro-active role is pretty rare. I thought the story was great, believable and interesting. And then above all of that was John Madden - to work with John again, I was really looking forward to that.

Q: Did you feel uncomfortable at all in the role?

A: No, I didn’t feel uncomfortable with it, not at all. But when I first agreed to it, and was thinking about the role, before I’d shot anything, I was just thinking of it as a really good story, which it is, and a thriller. Like ‘It’s a great pro-active role and I get to do a fight at the end and it’ll be fantastic.’. What I didn’t think of was the seriousness of it. Then the penny dropped when I saw the original Israeli film. It’s a remake of an excellent Israeli film made by these two young Israeli filmmakers. The woman playing the role that I play was a very great Israeli actress and she approached it with incredible emotional commitment. Her commitment to it was deeply emotional. At first I thought ‘Why is it so tragic?’, then I realised, ‘Of course – because these people were living with the burden of the memory of the Holocaust that’s so much a part of their living lives. It’s their parents, it’s their uncles, and it’s their family that they’ve lost.’. The psychological weight of that is really profound. So that gave me a whole other colour to my performance and I really learnt it from her.

Q: I guess you can’t really meet any real-life Mossad agents. They probably don’t make themselves available…

A: No, I guess they don’t! I think that the guys who originally wrote the story did know people. Obviously all Israelis are in the army and they would’ve been. I think that they did a lot of research. One of the things that I love about the film is that it has this feeling of veracity about it. When I watched it, I was going ‘I don’t remember reading about this story in the newspaper! This obviously happened.’. You just feel that it was real, somehow. That’s one of the elements in the film that I personally really like. There are so many thriller stories, they’re great, they’re exciting, they’re up for the ride, but you know this could never happen. You know it’s ridiculous. You don’t feel that with this one, I don’t think. I think you feel it really could’ve happened.

Q: Was there any resonance for you in terms of your own heritage and the fact your family were displaced from Russia?

A: No, I don’t think specifically that. Obviously, I am a child of the Second World War and that is a part of my history and it will always be. But a part of my preparation for this film, which was coincidental because I happened to be in the area, was going to Buchenwald. I made a particular effort to go there. It was related to my preparation for the film and I do feel really strongly that we should not forget. It’s great that places like Buchenwald exist and are maintained and are visited. When I was there, there were a lot of school children there – which I was very happy to see. It’s really, really important to remember.

Q: Have you researched your Russian background?

A: Yes, yes, absolutely – with the help of a research journalist in Russia, who did this amazing research and discovered members of my family. Going to my family estate was pretty extraordinary. It was mythological in my mind. I never thought we would ever really find out where it was, although my grandfather actually left very good maps. I didn’t know quite where it was. Will Stewart (that was his name) found estates that belonged to my grandfather and the estate my father was born on. Nothing is left. No house or anything. Then seeing the tombstone of my great-grandfather, who was an aristocrat in Russia, and, sometime in the Revolution or in the war, it had been uprooted from its place in the cemetery and it was just lying on the side of the road and had been lying there for the last however many years. Apparently, people use it as a bench! And there is my great-grandfather’s name on the tombstone! So that was pretty amazing.

Q: Was it quite moving to go back and see that sort of thing?

A: Yes, it was extraordinary. I mean, life goes on, and you can’t live in the past, and you have to keep moving forward. But yes it was extraordinary.

Q: Do you see the film as being about the nature of truth and the idea of living a lie?

A: Yes, very much so. I think that an awful lot of us – more than we probably know – walk through life with a heavy secret of some sort. Human beings are brilliant at denial. There must be some mechanism in our brains that allow us to go into complete and utter denial about something. I think it’s self-preservation, probably. But they can psychologically wipe something out and carry on as if it never happened. I think more of us have a heavy secret than we’d admit.

Q: Did you take any self-defence classes?

A: I’m afraid I didn’t take any self-defence classes! Jessica did. Jessica had to do the fighting stuff. I do have a fight in it – we call it the geriatric fight! Between a 60 year-old woman and an 80 year-old man and it’s really hard to get up, once you’re down.

Q: What made you decide to use an accent?

A: John decided we should all do this with a very slight Israeli accent. It’s always an interesting question when you’re playing maybe a Russian or an Israeli or a French person, but you’re doing it in an English-language film. In theory, you’re actually speaking Hebrew to each other, but you’re using English because it’s an English-language film. So should you be speaking English with an English accent? Or American? John made the decision, to point out that we were actually Israeli, to use a slight Israeli accent. Then we had a very good dialect coach.

Q: Do you get sentimental about your career? Do you keep things?

A: I’m not very good at keeping things. No, I’m not very sentimental actually. I want to get rid of it all. I find it depressing!

Q: Are there any characters you’d still like to play?

A: Well, life is full of constant surprises – and is magically and endlessly changing and, luckily, drama follows life. So it is inevitable that I will say ‘I want the next thing to be a surprise’. Before I did this film, I would never have been able to say ‘I would love to play a Mossad agent!’. It’s the unexpected, the surprise that’s always fantastic.

Q: You’re in the Phil Spector biopic, with Al Pacino. Who do you play?

A: I play his defence lawyer. It’s about the first trial and dealing with that. David Mamet, who wrote and directed it, is fascinated by lawyers and law. So it’s as much about the lawyers and how they construct the defence of Phil as anything else. It’s not really about his life. It’s about this relationship between him and his defence lawyer.

Q: How is Al as Phil Spector?

A: What do you think? He’s brilliant! Absolutely brilliant. I have to say, I’ve had a few pinnacles of my career and one of them is working with, and watching, Al work. He’s just incredible. He’s just the archetypal, total actor. He loves acting. He loves actors. He’s incredibly supportive of his fellow actors. I think he’s gone through something and he’s come out somewhere really incredible.

Q: Was this your first time with him?

A: Yes, but I’d met him before. Actually, he threw me off a set once! Which I completely understood, I have to say. My husband directed The Devil’s Advocate and he said, ‘You should come in today because Al’s doing his big last scene and it’s going to be fantastic. I just know he’s going to be brilliant because he’s an incredible improviser. So why don’t you come?’. I said, ‘I’d love to see that’ and my husband added, ‘Just be quiet and stay behind everybody’, so I crept on, behind the whole set, and there were hundreds of people between Al and me and he could see me. Then I saw him talk to Taylor and Taylor came over to me and said, ‘I’m sorry Helen, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave the set.’. I said, ‘Absolutely, I understand’ - I knew why and I would’ve done the same. It’s a weird thing as an actor. You don’t like being looked at.

Q: Do you like to test yourself when you make a film?

A: Well, you’re always testing yourself. The jobs that you sign up for are always the ones that really scare you. ‘Oh, I can’t do that – that’s much too scary!’.So you say, ‘Obviously that’s what I have to do’.

Q: Do you find you have limits?

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: When?

A: When I’m working with Russell Brand [on Arthur and The Tempest]! Because he’s limitless. He’s just so brilliant. His brain works so fast. Talk about the tortoise and the hare. I felt like this galumphing, mentally slow person. He couldn’t be kinder and more generous. It was not like he was making me feel bad, not at all, it was the opposite. He was incredibly welcoming and appreciative. But he is just so brilliant that you just feel like an idiot.

The Debt is released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 23rd.