Martin Shaw - The Biography. Stafford Hildred
and the next 16 weeks spent filming under the guidance of perfectionist Polanski proved to be both a sharp learning curve and an eye-opener. This was by far the most fascinating, and certainly the most demanding role of his career as a professional actor to date. It stretched him in all sorts of ways, not least on the back of a horse!
‘That’s when I learned to ride properly,’ he said. ‘I thought I could ride already, having taught myself. But the ex-Indian army officer who was my riding instructor for Macbeth just took one look at me and said: “Right, no stirrups – just the bridle. A rising trot.” Needless to say I couldn’t do it; my legs weren’t strong enough. I worked with him for 8 weeks and by the end of that time I could ride. It was just as well – when we were shooting we were sometimes in the saddle for 10 hours a day.
‘Jon Finch and I became so besotted with the horses that on days when we weren’t wanted for filming, we signed on as riding extras.’ Polanski was grateful for their willingness to help out. He didn’t have a budget that would allow him to hire the large number of extras he felt he needed and in some instances had to resort to plastic dummies to pass muster in the background.
During his time out of the saddle Martin also volunteered to help exercise the horses. ‘There were 300 of them,’ he said, ‘and only 25 handlers. They were fresh and a bit nervy.’ Keith Chegwin shared Martin’s affection for the horses, even if he did not always see eye to eye with Polanski, especially when Polanski insisted he get back on a horse after he had hurt himself. Of Polanski, Chegwin has said: ‘It was weird, I didn’t know who he was. Some days he wouldn’t turn up and we had horse-riding competitions with the horses that were hanging around.’
Down the years, all manner of superstitions, myths and supposed jinxes have surrounded the staging of Macbeth and, once the production had set up in Portmeirion in Wales and filming was under way, Polanski had every good reason to curse the bad luck that traditionally appears to accompany what some superstitious folk will describe only as ‘the Scottish play’. There were bad omens even from the very first day, on which a cameraman was nearly killed when a sudden fierce gust of wind blew him into a crevice.
Polanski had deliberately chosen to film in Wales for its natural beauty and, at this late time of year, to take advantage of dark, brooding autumnal skies. But November 1970 proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant month for the director.
In Roman, his remarkable book about his life, Polanski recounted the problems he faced while filming Macbeth in Wales: ‘Portmeirion was almost flooded that fall. It was another case of “Never seen anything like it in twenty years!”
‘At first we welcomed the leaden skies and sinister, bizarre-shaped clouds but it wasn’t long before we were enveloped in an icy, almost incessant downpour, unable to shoot except during brief intermissions.’
The rain caused chaos, seeping into everything, causing make-up to run, unsticking beards, panicking horses. And when the rain stopped, fog reduced visibility to a few yards. Polanski summed up his despair by writing, ‘The weather played havoc with our shooting schedules, which had to be drastically revised. There were times when I felt I was making an underwater epic.’
For a young thesp like Martin, it was an extraordinary introduction to film-making on the big scale and, anxious to learn as much as he could, he eagerly watched closely as Polanski went about his work and sorted out or circumvented his many problems, not least with the special effects team. Polanski said they were so disaster-prone he nicknamed them ‘special defects’. A fog machine exploded, and catapults designed to propel fireballs into Dunsinane Castle either flopped lamely well short or soared dangerously over the castle on to the beach.
There were, however, light-hearted moments, too during filming, notably when Polanski sent Hugh Hefner a short out-take on his birthday – a filmed sequence of three naked, aged witches collectively singing: ‘Happy birthday, dear Hef.’
But Martin must have been as alarmed as anyone in the cast when word got around early in the New Year of 1971 that Polanski was in danger of being dismissed. Partly due to the atrocious weather, the film was well behind schedule and over-budget, and the money men were becoming distinctly edgy.
Another director, Peter Collinson, was put on stand-by for this eventuality while Polanski consoled himself with some advice he had once been given by the Austrian-American director Otto Preminger: ‘You don’t get fired for going over budget – only for being a lousy director.’
Collinson’s presence at Shepperton studios, where Macbeth’s interior scenes were being shot, was deliberately low-key. Among the backers the fear was that the cast and crew had such a reverential view of Polanski and what he was setting out to achieve that they might refuse to work for another director.
Macbeth was ultimately rescued by Hugh Hefner, who flew to London to intervene. Hefner agreed to put up the $500,000 Polanski needed to complete the film and in return Polanski offered to give up a third of his fee. As he threw himself into editing his movie, Polanski envisaged the film being given a London launch with a Royal Command Performance in December of 1971. He felt Macbeth deserved a British premiêre and he banked on English critics being far more receptive to his film version of a classic Shakespeare play than those in America.
But to his chagrin, the world première was switched to Hefner’s Playboy theatre in New York and scheduled for January 1972. Polanski was not best pleased as January tended to be anything but a vintage month at the cinema in America. Past experience showed that Americans tended to stay in after all the Christmas festivities. To make things worse, Polanski found himself embroiled in a battle with the American censors. Quite apart from considering the film too long, Macbeth’s American distributors did not want the film released with an X certificate.
This stance forced Polanski into an argument with the ratings board. When he showed them the film, he got the distinct impression they were viewing it not as a film made by a movie director. ‘They were looking at it through the filter of my particular predicament,’ he said. Moreover, prior to the screening, word had somehow erroneously reached members of the board that Polanski had used many gallons of pigs’ blood for the required gore. In fact, the director had cleverly devised a mixture of instant coffee, food colouring, milk and glycerine which more than adequately did the job.
During filming, the cast did not ever get the impression that Polanski was going too far in his powerhouse pursuit of perfectionism and realism. But Francesca Annis has said: ‘When we were filming the murder of Macduff’s children, he came in and told the set designers: “No, that’s not enough blood. It’s not really like that,” and started throwing it around the set – that made us think.’ When a member of the crew then questioned whether too much blood had been splashed on the walls of the set, Polanski reportedly said: ‘You didn’t see my house in California last summer.’
Eventually Polanski agreed to three cuts in his film. These were scenes that he later conceded had been too explicit. That was enough to secure an R certificate in America, and Martin and everyone else connected with the movie were also relieved when Macbeth was given an AA certificate by the British film censor without any problems. It meant that anyone over 14 could see the film unaccompanied, thus ensuring a much wider audience.
Polanski’s finished film did not look remotely like the X-rated adventure Hugh Hefner had promised. There were no sex scenes, and only brief nudity with an absence of eroticism. What audiences did get was slaughter on a stark scale, with close-ups of contorted corpses and dismembered body parts, and not just 3 but 60 witches, who were chosen, not unsurprisingly, for their hideous appearance and lack of teeth. If one of Shakespeare’s aims was for his play to shock audiences with Macbeth’s dastardly deeds, then the Bard himself would not have been disappointed with Polanski’s modus operandi.
Predictably, in America the critics had few kind words for the director’s efforts. The movie had an excellent first week at the New York box office but could not maintain the pace and ended up in the red, prompting Hefner to consider future movie ventures very seriously. In England, however, where the film was accorded a charity premiere attended by Princess Anne and a host of Bunny Girls, the critics were more sympathic to what Polanski