Builder of Bridges

The Railway Man — The moving true story of a British POW on the Death Railway who forgave his torturer is now a film. Our critic on the impact it is having in Japan

Jeff Dawson Sunday Times Culture22 December 2013

In the late Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man, his harrowing memoir of his time as a Japanese POW, the revelatory detail comes not amid the catalogue of inhumanity, but on his return to civvy street. As he resumes his desk job at the Edinburgh General Post Office, Lomax is handed the very same file he had been working on in 1939, before enlistment. “Time had stopped in this fusty government office,” he recounts, “while for me it had accelerated beyond reason.” And, thanks to a snafu over his demob date, Lt Lomax of the Royal Signals had reported for work a day late, bringing an official reprimand and docked wages — a “stain on my character”, he grumbled, that irked him till his dying day.

For Far East POW veterans, there was no Pomp and Circumstance. Shipped back after the V-J Day bunting had been binned, they arrived in a Britain neither conversant with the horrors of internment nor willing to let ignominious defeats such as the fall of Singapore (of which Lomax had been part) skew the triumphal narrative. In the days before post-traumatic stress disorder was a recognised medical condition, they were expected to suffer in silence; to step out of living hells and back into sedate old lives; to bottle it up and “get on with it”.

Lomax’s war had been particularly savage. One of 80,000 Allied troops captured in February 1942, he was transported up the Malayan peninsula to slave on the infamous Burma “Death Railway”. At Kanchanaburi, Thailand, he was caught in possession of a forbidden homemade radio, which he had built to pick up morale-boosting news on All India Radio. It was construed by his paranoid captors to be an instrument for rousing local insurgents, and Lomax was hauled off by the Kempeitai secret police. Over several days, he was tortured and beaten nearly to death.

While his bones eventually mended, his mind never did. As the decades wore on, friends saw only an avuncular man, an orderly Robert Donat lookalike with a passion for steam trains — writ large in the irony of his book’s title. But, privately, Lomax was living a nightmare, his sleep plagued with terrors, his waking hours indulging a revenge fantasy. It was directed not against the thugs who had brutalised him, but at the spindly young interpreter, his interrogator — “For his smug, virtuous complicity,” Lomax seethed. “He was centre stage in my memories; my private obsession... He stood in for all the worst horrors.”

Lomax was unable to speak of his torment, and his mental state cost him one marriage and was proving problematic for Patti, his second wife, whom he met in 1980. With her husband at rock bottom, she seized the initiative. Using information gleaned from his service colleagues, she learnt that Eric’s bête noire was named Nagase Takashi, and that he was still alive, but frail, and living in Kurashiki. She contacted Nagase and did the unthinkable: arranged a meeting between her husband and the man responsible for his 50 years of suffering. What resulted became the source of an unexpected bestseller; not a confrontation, but a cathartic and moving act of forgiveness on the part of Eric.

Next month sees the release of a new film version of Lomax’s story. An Anglo-Australian co-production, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, it stars Nicole Kidman as Patti and Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine respectively as the older and younger Eric. The story flashes between the bright, steaming jungles of Southeast Asia and the Lomaxes’ home on the grey, storm-lashed coast at Berwick- upon-Tweed, where Patti still lives.

As a full-time nurse to Eric in his final years (he died in October 2012, aged 93, after a long degenerative illness), Patti — a sprightly, engaging 76 — admits she was not up to speed with her film stars. Her introductory clip of Firth emerging from the lake in Pride and Prejudice merely rekindled a memory of when her son “fell in the garden pond”. Yet over the 12 years it took to put the movie together, both the film-makers and actors spent a lot of time with the Lomaxes, making this an officially endorsed version of events.

“I thought we’d bought the rights to a book, but we found we’d become involved in the life of a man — we were on a bit of journey with him, really,” says the screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce. “There are not just Erics who came back from Burma, but Erics who came back from Iraq. Every conflict has its Erics. One of the oldest pieces of writing about war is The Odyssey. When it comes down to it, you don’t go straight home from a war, it takes you 10 years and you have to fight loads of monsters.”

This is not the first version of the story to go before the cameras. Nagase was portrayed in the 2001 prison camp film To End All Wars. Indeed, the meeting between Lomax and Nagase at Kanchanaburi was filmed by the BBC, and became the subject of the 1995 documentary Enemy, My Friend?

It was followed soon after by a television drama, Prisoners in Time, starring John Hurt and scripted by the lauded Chilean dramatist Ariel Dorfman, whose Death and the Maiden also deals with a victim confronting a torturer. Patti was not a fan of the TV film. “Oh, that was rubbish.” She hopes the new version will not only paint a more complete picture of Eric’s plight, but provide counterbalance to other misleading dramas about Japanese POWs, most notably David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, an acclaimed movie but entirely fictitious and despised by former internees, not least for its portrayed collaboration between officers and gaolers.

Lean, though, does get a nod in The Railway Man, when Patti and Eric, middle-aged divorcees, meet Brief Encounter-style in a first-class compartment on the Crewe-Glasgow express, with Patti shown making the moves, rather than the other way round. “I said, ‘You’re making me look like a tart,’” she laughs.

Fans of the book may be surprised at her central role. She’s hardly in the book, not making an entrance until the last 50 pages. “It felt to us that Patti was a much, much bigger part of the story,” says the producer/co-writer Andy Paterson, who had worked with Boyce on the biopic Hilary and Jackie. Also, he points out, there was a fundamental dramatic problem “dealing with a story in which the principal character would not talk”.

There are the other inevitable changes, the time compressions and character amalgamations that come with book-to-screen adaptations. The most significant departure from reality is in the showdown between Lomax and Nagase — set up in the movie as an ambush of the unsuspecting Japanese (played by Hiroyuki Sanada), whereas the TV-brokered reunion came about after a long period of counselling of Eric by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and two years of correspondence in which the Lomaxes had built up a fuller picture of Nagase and his postwar life.

The torturer had, it turned out, been equally haunted by his actions, swearing to dedicate the rest of his life to the railway’s 100,000 victims. After working with the War Graves Commission, he had opened a Buddhist temple at Kanchanaburi and set up a charity for the railway’s forgotten victims, the local Asian labourers.

He was still not penitent enough for Patti, who had read his 1990 book, Crosses and Tigers, in which he remarked that he felt a moment of spiritual exoneration for his part in the torture of a young British officer — unnamed but quite clearly, by description, Lomax. “I just thought this was absolutely shocking, this horrible little Japanese man saying he felt forgiven,” she says. The only person who could do that was Eric.

Nagase’s speedy reply to her opening letter was a watershed moment for the Lomaxes. “He wrote back very quickly. I couldn’t pick the letter up — I saw it on the doormat, it just looked so dirty to me,” she remembers. But the poetry of it shook them. “I think having received such a letter from you is my destiny... the dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.” As Eric put it: “Anger drained away; in its place came a welling of compassion.”

In March 1993, the men met at the bridge on the “River Khwae” (such is the tourist value of Lean’s film, the Thai government renamed the Mae Klong river in its honour), accompanied by their wives. Lomax towered over his birdlike opposite number. “He began a formal bow, his face working and agitated,” he recalled. “He looked up at me, he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over, ‘I am very, very sorry.’” And thus did Lomax give him his absolution.

Nagase died in 2011. Patti says the relationship with his family never continued. “I believe they’re not interested.” Recently, when Teplitzky screened his film at the Tokyo film festival, he was warned it might ruffle a few feathers. It didn’t. “In fact, I spoke to a hundred people after the screening,” he says, “and every single one of them said, ‘Thank you for bringing this story to Japan, because none of us know or have ever heard about the Death Railway.’ That’s the more defining thing: these chapters of history have never been taught in Japanese schools.” The film is now going out on twice as many screens in Japan as was intended. Despite his involvement throughout, Eric died just months before the film was completed. While it was being shot in Berwick, however, he defied doctor’s orders to visit the set, the crew carrying his wheelchair out to the location. “That really was Eric’s premiere,” Patti says. He would not have wanted to have seen the completed film anyway, she adds. “He felt it would renew bad memories.”

On that day in 1993, walking around the Kanchanaburi war cemetery alongside the Nagases, Patti had asked Eric whether they were being disloyal to all those young men beneath the soil. His response is repeated in both the last line of his book and in the inscription that now adorns his headstone. “It was burned in my mind. He said, ‘Patti, some time the hating has to stop.’”

James Hunt, Niki Lauda and Rush

‘Now I understand how people saw me’

Rush, a movie about his death-defying F1 duel with James Hunt in 1976, has been a revelation for Niki Lauda, says Jeff Dawson

Jeff Dawson Published: SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE, 8 September 2013

There’s a story George Best used to tell after his fall from grace — of a waiter delivering champagne to his hotel room and finding him lying on a bed awash with casino winnings, Miss World curled round him. “Mr Best,” the waiter asks, “where did it all go wrong?”

James Hunt was no stranger to the fruits of success, either. World Drivers’ Champion of 1976, he had, within three years, walked away from Formula One. Wind forward a decade and he had hit the skids — divorced, broke, beset by drink problems, he had taken to riding around London barefoot on a battered woman’s pushbike.

“I met him in the King’s Road for lunch,” recalls his great rival, Niki Lauda. “I had to pay, because he had no money. His bicycle had no air in its tyres. I said, ‘Listen, get your act together. If you go on like this, you’re not gonna survive.’” Although Hunt did hang a U-turn, cleaning himself up, he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1993, aged 45.

The year 1976, season of his sole triumph, is remembered equally for Lauda’s astonishing comeback. The Austrian, reigning champ, had been runaway points leader until his horrific crash at the Nürburgring, in Germany. Pulled from a fireball with third-degree burns, he was given the last rites. Yet, 42 days later, in great pain, he was behind the wheel, attempting to claw back the lead Hunt had accrued in his absence, and came within a whisker of doing so. Lauda today has no truck with those who claim Hunt was a victor by default. “It’s a bit unfair, because he did win it. He had some great drives that season.” But the drama, on the track and off, has marked theirs as one of sport’s great duels.

Rush, directed by Ron Howard from a script by Peter Morgan, is all about that showdown. As with the subject of the pair’s Oscar-nominated collaboration, Frost/Nixon, it’s a clash of opposite personality types: Teutonic automaton versus priapic playboy. “Peter writes these unlikely psychological combatants well, and the ‘fire and ice’ idea is something he’s drawn to,” Howard explains. “I also thought this could be visceral, a big-screen movie experience.”

Starring Chris Hemsworth as Hunt and the German actor Daniel Brühl as Lauda, Rush has oddball heroes such as Lord Hesketh (Christian McKay), Hunt’s first patron; villains in the shape of the Ferrari outfit; and the scandal sideshow of Hunt’s wife, Suzy (Olivia Wilde), running off with Richard Burton. “If you had to write a script about the season, you would have written that one,” Lauda says, endorsing it as enthusiastically as he used to do his own budget airline.

“I was approached a couple of times about making a movie about my life and this kind of bullshit,” shrugs Lauda, who, in a remarkable career coda, came out of retirement to win a third world title in 1984. “But Peter said he wanted to do a movie [just] about the 1976 season, and asked me if I would help him.”

The unsurprising consequence of Lauda’s advisory role is that the film feels more his than Hunt’s, which is in no small part down to Brühl, who nails Lauda’s deadpan humour. Brühl recalls: “The first conversation we had on the phone, Niki said, ‘Please just bring hand luggage to Vienna in case we don’t like each other.’” And if the film-makers weren’t thoroughly versed in the technicalities — an early version of Morgan’s script had drivers starting their cars with keys — it could be fine-tuned. “Ron Howard impressed me a lot,” Lauda says, “because he’s like a kid. He knew nothing about Formula One at all and got himself together quickly.”

In Rush, Howard diligently hits the historical marks — Hunt’s ascent to McLaren, Lauda becoming Ferrari’s Made Man. While Lauda hones his “good arse” for driving — “When you drive, you feel what the car is doing, and this was my talent, to link arse and brain” — Hunt’s cheek-work is reserved for the ladies, a wild goose chase through furtive quickies and mile-high grapples.

Meanwhile, Ferrari never misses an opportunity to have Hunt disqualified or denied points. (In real life, they were scathing of Lauda for his ultimate capitulation.) “Enzo Ferrari,” muses Lauda of the capo dei capi. “He was a very warm, Italian, charismatic monster.”

Where Rush takes liberties — an incident where the pugilistic Hunt slugs a tabloid hack is pure invention — you can forgive them for being in the spirit of reality. The biggest licence taken, though, is making Hunt and Lauda sworn enemies: they were in fact great pals, going back to their Formula Three days, when they shared a London flat and Hunt began notching up his reputed 5,000 female conquests. “The only thing [in the film] that upset me was that I was the non-lady man,” Lauda gripes. “I would say I was about 30% of James... let’s say 20%.”

Howard admits that Rush is a departure. “I tend to do stories about groups and families that pull together. Here are two guys who bow to no one.” Interestingly, Rush was due to be directed by Paul Greengrass. Not to suggest his version would have been grittier, but it is noticeable that Howard’s has soft-pedalled Hunt’s fondness for drugs. “We didn’t quite know when in his life that started to be prevalent,” he says in the driver’s defence. “We tried to be a little selective so as not to tilt the scales.”

Inevitably, on screen and off, it all comes down to the final race in Japan, the clincher that played out as farce. A near-monsoon had rendered the Fuji circuit undriveable, until the authorities ordered a delayed start due to the demands of TV. “At four in the afternoon, the same flooding, the same rain, the race director said, ‘We’re gonna start now.’ And I said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Lauda bristles. Three points clear, he needed to finish within reasonable proximity of Hunt. But, mindful of his own mortality, troubled by grafted eyelids that barely blinked, he pulled into the pits and out of the contest.

Lauda rates the devil-may-care “Hunt the Shunt” as one of the greats. “James was one of the quickest guys when he got his act together. One of these guys you always remember. A lot of people die, you don’t remember.” Hemsworth, an Australian and a keen boardsman, recognised in Hunt something else. “He looked like a Californian surfer and considered himself a hippie, you know.” A self-styled nonconformist, Hunt had a dislike for shoes and washing, and was indecently underdressed, whatever the function.

With Rush, there is an elephant in the room — the superlative 2010 documentary Senna. A similar story featuring Yin-Yang drivers, the late Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, it was compiled from genuine footage. Howard cites it as an inspiration, raising the bar regarding what was required to simulate racing a car at 200mph.

Certainly, Lauda feels Rush’s re-creation is authentic, as is the restaging of his crash. Typically, he had always dismissed it as a mere occupational prang, his memory of it blacked out. Only once, years later, did he have a flashback of his near-death experience, he says, while puffing on some superstrong marijuana: “I saw myself falling backwards into a big hole.”

The film has given him a fresh perspective on events. “When I saw the movie, I realised how other people looked at me. Some had a shock when they saw me after the accident. In the old days, I was always upset when people didn’t look in my eyes. When they were talking to me, all they wanted to do was see if my other ear was still there. Now I understand.”

Lauda saw the film for the first time in the company of other Formula One drivers. “Lewis Hamilton was sitting next to me. He asked me, ‘Was it really like this?’ I said, ‘Yes.’” Hunt’s two sons have also seen the film, Howard says, and are pleased their father has been presented at his peak.

Rush begins with Lauda reflecting that, of the 25 drivers who started every season back then, two would be killed. “Who else does a job like that?” Is it too safe now, I ask him. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “The element of danger has gone completely.”

Rush opens nationwide on Friday

Mia Farrow

A Life Less Ordinary

Given all the talk about Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, thought I'd dig out this...

The Times Magazine, June 2006, by Jeff Dawson

Whatever way you cut it, Mia Farrow has certainly lived a life. Though she wouldn’t relish the comparison, the impression is of a pop-culture Zelig — a version of Woody Allen’s figure that pops up at key moments in history. She’s been pals with Salvador Dali, Roman Polanski, John Lennon; wife/partner to Frank Sinatra, Andre Previn and, infamously, Allen himself. Last year, when Farrow breezed into London, the star witness in the Polanski/Vanity Fair libel trial, there she was, right back in the storm’s eye of the Manson slayings. Recently, as some revisionist version of The Beatles/Maharishi bust-up surfaced, Farrow took centre stage again, getting transcendental with the Fab Four in Rishikesh. 

In modern times Farrow has become better known as a sort of reclusive Earth Mother, retreating from that sordid Woody Allen business (more of which later) to adopt a gaggle of waifs (she has had 14 kids in total); hitching her celebrity “concern” to assorted UNICEF missions. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t question the nobility of any of Farrow’s humanitarian ventures — all power to her — but it isn’t half as interesting as the old days. I wonder whether it bothers her, this constant referral to the past. But no, she says, “because I was there[ital]. What are we going to talk about? The future?”

Farrow is more lively than you would imagine. Quite enchanting. She tells a story about a cottage she once acquired in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, which went mouldy inside because she never left the heating on and had some kind of trouble getting her utility bills forwarded from the local post office. “Everything turned green,” she groans. Polanski got the best handle on it. “There are 127 varieties of nut … and Mia’s 116 of them.” She chuckles. “He would know.”  

In a chi-chi hotel suite looming over Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Farrow sinks into the sumptuous sofa and beams beatifically. She’s certainly got the hair for her current incarnation, her long ash-blonde mane in hippy contrast to the elfin do of yore. In a couture cardie’n’trousers ensemble, she is spindly thin, her eyes bright, her skin so translucent I swear you can see a vein pumping in her temple. She could knock ten tears off her actual 61, reminding me of an anecdote about Sinatra, who spotted the 19-year-old starlet on a 20th Century Fox soundstage and sent a goon over to check she was of legal age. Ah yes, Old Blue Eyes. She married him in 1966, her 21, him 50. “Didn’t work out as a marriage (it lasted 18 months) but did work out as a friendship,” she assures. “We were good friends throughout out lives. He was a great guy.”

Farrow has opted out of film work for a decade, bringing up her kids at her Connecticut home. Having supplemented her own three children by Andre Previn in the early‘70s with a trio of adoptees (including an orphaned Korean girl named Soon-Yi), she has since become every placement agency’s favourite client. Some of her brood have been special needs kids, such as the blind Vietnamese girl, Tam, who died, sadly, in 2000, aged 19. Now, the later, younger additions are flying the coop. Come September, only Quincy Maureen, an African-American teenager, will remain. “So I can think about time and how I’m going to spend it,” says Farrow. Thus, after some periodic TV work and a lauded return to the New York stage, comes her first film since 1995. 

The movie, The Omen, is a big bump-in-the-night remake of the 1976 horror classic. In it, Farrow plays nanny to devilish young Damien. Her inclusion seems a deliberate nod to Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Polanski), the first of the Satan’s Spawn flicks (see also The Exorcist), and the film which made Farrow a star in 1968. She was just 23 then and won raves as the gamine wife of John Cassavetes, impregnated by Beelzebub. “Rosemary’s Baby was the best thing that ever happened to me professionally,” she enthuses, running through a mental checklist to meritocratically praise everyone in it. “It was success, fame and fortune and it was the ’60s, so everybody was into the spiritual journey, you know, Sergeant Pepper …”

The Beatles are never far away. After her marriage to Sinatra went belly-up (he had served divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby, miffed that she had chosen it over his own flop, The Detective), she and sister Prudence (the Dear Prudence of Lennon’s song) joined the boys on their magical mystery tour to India. In what has become a standard version of events at their meditation retreat, relations with the Maharishi soured when the yogi got a bit fresh with Farrow (“Maharishi, what have you done?/You made a fool of everyone” wrote Lennon in a lyric, the name changed later to Sexy Sadie). 

The story was recently contradicted by self-styled guru Deepak Chopra, who claimed it was rather the Maharishi who had evicted The Beatles for dropping acid in his ashram. But this gets Farrow agitated. “Deepak Chopra should talk about what he knows,” she snaps. “I[ital] was there. There were no drugs at the ashram, those guys were not kicked out. Ringo left because of the flies (she laughs), I left for my own reasons and the other guys left eventually because they just got bored. George stuck it pretty close to the end along with Prudence.”

Lennon eventually became a New York neighbour of Farrow’s, moving in to the famous Dakota building next door, the towers of which you can just see out of the window today, across Central Park. It was in it, coincidentally, that Rosemary’s Baby had been filmed, Lennon’s eventual murder outside the gates given as evidence of a curse attached to the movie. Usually such things are a concoction of the publicists (the new Omen, for good measure, opens on 06/06/06), but when it comes to Rosemary’s Baby, you’d be hard pushed to top the run of ill fortune. The year after release, Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was butchered by the Manson Family.

It was at Elaine’s restaurant, a Manhattan celeb eaterie, where Farrow had met a grief-stricken Polanski on his way to the funeral. In a 2002 article in Vanity Fair, it was claimed that Polanski had actually spent the evening trying to cop off with a “Swedish beauty”, a charge vehemently denied and the reason for last year’s libel trial (which Polanski won thanks to Farrow’s testimony). “It felt good to do that, it was the right thing,” she sighs. “Somebody was fibbing. Someone was getting a long nose, if you know what I mean.”

Tragedy follows Farrow. Though she was born into Hollywood royalty — daughter of writer/director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan (Jane from the Tarzan films) — the silver spoon was tarnished. At age nine, she contracted polio and spent time in an iron lung (one of her adoptees, Thaddeus, is a polio-afflicted paraplegic she plucked from the streets of Calcutta). At 13, she lost her brother Mike in a plane crash. At 17, her father — something of a womaniser — died of a heart attack. She was at her mother’s in New York when it happened, ignoring his phone calls, her father expiring with the receiver in his hand. Farrow says the early suffering made her want to become a nun — “a nun, then a doctor, a paediatrician working in Africa,”  prefiguring her later passions. Does she ever watch her mother’s old movies — Jane romping around in the tree house, a sassy proto-feminist to Johnny Weissmuller’s dumb ape man? “Yeah they’re great. I show them to my kids,” she gushes. “My mom is amazing. Gorgeous. Wow, what legs.”

Her parents had taken out some insurance on Mia’s passage into The Biz, enlisting George Cukor and gossip columnist Louella Parsons as godparents (a Catholic, she was born Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow). When she began theatre work, they employed family friend Vivien Leigh to hit up the talent-spotters. By 18 Mia had sprung from the stage to Peyton Place, the original glossy TV soap opera, and from there the would-be carmelite sashayed to Sinatra. “I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a little boy,” snipped ex-wife Ava Gardner, who — in another confusing twist — had had a fling with Farrow’s father.

By 1970, Farrow was married to composer Andre Previn, living in leafy Surrey for nine years, acting with the RSC and doing occasional films like The Great Gatsby. But Previn’s constant touring led to another divorce. Farrow returned to New York and was introduced to the quirky, neurotic Woody Allen. Allen, in need of another muse after Diane Keaton, cast Farrow in 1982’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and they worked/played together pretty much exclusively, making 13 films in ten years — including big critical hits Hannah And Her Sisters and Crimes And Misdemeanours. They were the toast of gentrified New York — she in her apartment one side of Central Park, he in his garret opposite. They had one kid together, Satchel, and adopted two more. The clans meshed, according to her, into a big tantamount family.

What happens next is has been pored over endlessly but bears repetition. In 1992, when Farrow was rummaging around in Allen’s gaff, she discovered “nude” (read pornographic) polaroids of Soon-Yi, then aged 19-21 (there was never any birth record). Allen, at the time 56, confessed to an affair (the pair since married). To say that the bottom fell out of Farrow’s world is an understatement. Not only was her long-term lover sleeping with her daughter, but was also, as she alleged, committing “virtual incest” “There was just nothing in the books to tell me quite where to place all this,” she ponders. “I mean hard for the children, too. This is the father in their life. So we have a son whose father is married to his sister, or, if you like, a sister who’s married to the father.” 

The ensuing, and vicious custody battle over their three kids exonerated Allen (who, for the record, is now Farrow’s son-in-law) from a further charge of abuse against daughter Dylan, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. He lost all access to the children and, pointedly, all three have changed their names, refusing to have anything to do with him. Sinatra offered to break his legs.

She claims there is no “lingering vindictiveness” but can never reconcile. “It’s just not acceptable behaviour,” she says. Would she ever open a door to Soon-Yi one day? She chooses her words carefully. “I’ve had to close ranks in the family,” she expounds. “You can’t have a chair with a missing person forever and there are children who don’t know she exists in my family.” But they’ll hear things eventually, surely? “Yeah, and I’ll still say the family is complete. She can’t be my daughter any more. I just can’t go on thinking of her as a daughter.”

Only recently, Allen said he had considered casting Farrow again in one of his later movies. “Well it’s astounding really,” she replies. “What can I say? Well how nice, or how strange? Or how little he understood?” That said, she is surprisingly generous. “I’m very grateful to have made the films and grateful for some very good times as well.” Aside from Rosemary’s Baby, she adds, Purple Rose Of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose, in which she starred for him, make up her three favourite films (and clips from which she recently denied use of in an official Woody Allen documentary).”

But, onwards and upwards. Farrow has a couple of other film in the works. “I keep forgetting how much fun acting is, you know?” Meanwhile, on June 10, she will be heading with UNICEF to the hell-hole of Darfur, accompanied by 18-year-old son Ronan Seamus (formerly Satchel), an ex- child prodigy now studying Law at Yale. The horrors of the Sudan, she says, are making it a “Rwanda in slow motion” and she will do all she can to bring attention to it. I trot out the traditional cynicism. Haven’t the poor Africans suffered enough celebrity visitations? But. she is wise to such views. The press are simply denied accreditation there, she explains. By a quirk she is allowed in (she went two years ago) and if she can grab one headline, then it’s worth it. 

Outside, pootling on Madison Avenue, is the limo waiting to take her on the long drive back to New England. It will be in marked contrast to what lies ahead.“Do be careful,” I say. “I will, I really will, don’t worry” she promises. She gives a big warm smile. “And thank you.”

ends

Breaking Bad Jumps the Shark

I love Breaking Bad. Coming to it relatively late, I have consumed the whole thing on Netflix in recent months, sometimes watching several episodes a night and driving my wife potty. I think it is a work of TV genius, though, by association, one should pay tribute to the also-brilliant Weeds whose fundamental premise is near identical and would, one have thought, been of significant influence.

That said, permit me to fly in the face of overwhelming acclaim and say that Breaking Bad has jumped its shark. For me, the new "second half" of Season 5 (why was it never just Season 6?) has royally disappointed. The essence of the show, surely, was Walter White's double life? The moment he was outed it was game over. To limp the series on through shootouts and excessive carnage, and to suddenly elevate to major status Todd and his clan, feels dramatically unsatisfying.

The golden moment was at the conclusion of Season 5a — Hank having his epiphany while sitting on the toilet. That was the perfect ending. They should have wrapped it there.

Naomi Watts "walks out" on Simon Mayo

I think Simon Mayo is a tremendous broadcaster. He still leaves a huge void in the Five Live afternoon schedule. That said, he let himself down over the alleged Naomi Watts walkout. I have met and interviewed Watts myself. She is a delight. A little serious until loosened up but not one to shirk a question. I haven't seen the Diana biopic but in the face of some very negative press I thought she gamely weathered Mayo's interrogation.

The problem lies with the setup — that of conducting a radio interview between a BBC studio and a remote location, i.e. a junket hotel, and disingenuously passing it off as a face-to-face (which is what they would have done otherwise, believe me). Let's be clear, as part of a global publicity tour, Watts will have given umpteen interviews that day, most probably brain-frazzled, jet-lagged and having had to field the same questions over and over. When put on the line to Mayo, I'm pretty sure she would have had no idea of the status of Mayo and Kermode's Film Review show (not that that should have mattered). Nor would she have taken their conversation to be anything other than pre-recorded for editing later, certainly not to be broadcast technical warts and all.

In these situations PR people swirl around, as do technicians, lackeys, etc. It is quite possible she mistook a signal for the interview to conclude after the allotted time has elapsed, saw a PR's head pop round the door or simply matched some gesture to her own watch. Either way, I do not believe she meant to cause offence or emulate the Bee Gees on Clive Anderson. To bill it as such was a bit cheap, I thought. If they'd simply edited it down and broadcast the extracts, as is normal practice, no one would have been any the wiser.

If there were consistency here, just about every broadcast of a "down the line" interview would feature a publicist jumping in to bark "last question" or "can we wrap it up now." Or indeed, as, Watts said, "Sorry, but I'm being given the windup" (or a variation thereof). Unfortunately for Watts, this one fit the narrative.

Remembering David Frost

Fare thee well, Sir David. The obits do not overstate your importance as a global media player. You were also one of my favourite ever interviews (reproduced below), an encounter where one felt only a degree removed from a significant event in history. A man of immense charm, I remember Frostie phoning me at home around the time of our meeting and us singing (please don't ask why) Jake The Peg together. He was less convivial as a businessman, I gather. Quite ruthless. With the Nixon sessions he also birthed Chequebook Journalism. But a towering figure nonetheless. Tremendously entertaining. A great loss.

Sir David Frost on Frost/Nixon

Published: The Sunday Times, 18 January 2009, by Jeff Dawson

There's a lot to be said for the old school. Arranging an interview with Sir David Frost requires no haggling with PRs, press lackeys or intermediaries. You simply phone up Frost's production company and are, in an instant, put through to that distinct, much mimicked voice - one that's being awfully nice to you, while its owner rustles through his no doubt crammed diary. You don't dare contemplate with whom you will soon be sharing page space - Stephen Fry remembers Frost breaking off a conversation to greet another guest: "Boutros Boutros, always a pleasure" - but there is nobody too small in Frost's universe. Charm has always been part of the offensive. A little too offensive for the late Peter Cook, who claimed his biggest regret was having rescued Frost from a swimming pool.

As well as unparalleled media savvy, this particular commodity has served Frost supremely well over his 47 years in television. Far from the savage young satirist of That Was the Week That Was, he has evolved into a genial breaker of bread with the great and good. Where Humphrys and Paxo twist the thumbscrews, Frost eases his guests into a nice warm bath, tenderly administering enough verbal loofah to exfoliate the demons. "You can put just as testing a question in a relaxed way as you can in a hectoring way," he explains. "The late [Labour leader] John Smith said to me, 'You have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.' Which I'm happy to have on my coffin."

Today, Frost is quite mellow himself - and unseasonably ochre - having returned hotfoot from Christmas in the Caribbean. He still represents about the most genial and attentive interviewee you are ever likely to encounter, bursting into the lobby in a sharp navy suit, pumping your hand, then ushering you into his cosy study, complete with fireplace and plumped sofa. The desk is piled with papers - cluttered enough to give the impression of a busy man, not messy enough to suggest he's been reading them.

Three months short of his 70th birthday, Frost these days is broadcasting's éminence grise. His main gig is his weekly show Frost over the World, on Al Jazeera, a station maligned in America, unfairly, as an Al-Qaeda mouthpiece. In its English-language version, it has been building itself as an alternatively focused rival to CNN. His show is received in 130m homes in 100 countries, he declares: "The thing is that we in the West are chauvinistic in our interests." He cites an interview with President Lula of Brazil: "Probably the most powerful man in South America, rarely, if ever, seen on British television."

Frost has done them all - premiers, prime ministers, princes, presidents, including every American leader since Kennedy. What is regarded as his Magnum Chinwag, though, is the exclusive series of interviews he conducted in 1977 with the disgraced Richard Nixon. Less than three years after the former president's resignation over Watergate, Frost got from him what those on Capitol Hill had failed to elicit - a mea culpa. "A 99.9 per cent apology," as Frost puts it. Certainly the furthest Tricky Dicky would ever go.

It was a hell of a scoop, not least because Nixon, with his agile legal mind, could run down the clock surer than the most artful contestant on Just a Minute, droning away until a question had no meaning. Funnily enough, my powwow today is not without its own Nixonian moment, as Frost kicks off proceedings with a tribute to the late Benazir Bhutto, with whom he had spoken just days before her assassination - eating into valuable allotted interview time, but done with such heart, it seems rude to interrupt. Frost, though, has been in the game long enough to give you what you want. Soon he is in full Nixon anecdotal mode.

He hunches forward, affecting Nixon's gruff, heavy-jowled demeanour, channelling the moment when the former president described how he had bade farewell to the White House staff: " 'I hope I haven't let you down.' " Their silence had been so deafening that, on recalling this moment to Frost, it had rolled into the famous confession.

" 'I hope I haven't let you down,' " growls the impersonating Frost. " 'Well... I had.' " ("I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government," Nixon had continued.) "That was a euphoric moment." With 45m viewers for the first US broadcast - it was transmitted in four 90-minute segments - and millions more worldwide, it remains the highest-rated political interview in TV history.

In 2006, Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan's play about these events, was a critical hit in the West End and on Broadway. Now, with the same stars - Frank Langella as Nixon, Michael Sheen as Frost - comes the screen version. The film has been nominated for numerous awards and looks a strong contender for the Oscars. "What [the director] Ron Howard's done, it's not spectacular," Frost says. "He didn't do anything like putting scenes in the middle of a football field, but he opened it out emotionally. He did a terrific job."

For the subject of a biographical film to give an interview on its behalf is an unusual thing, because a) they're usually deceased, or b) are most likely in litigation. The royal family hardly went out of their way to promote Morgan's The Queen. The writer had pitched the play to Frost as "a sort of intellectual Rocky", and Frost had been sufficiently soft-soaped by tales of theatrical impoverishment (it opened at the Donmar Warehouse) to grant his UK rights for free.

Yet not for nothing is Frost one of the smoothest operators in the business, said to be worth about £20m. This time, he followed the money. "I take the royalty," he whispers. There's also his book, Frost/Nixon, co-authored with Bob Zelnick, the Washington journalist who led Frost's research team, and the original television interviews, or rather the Watergate portion, released on DVD.

Wind back to 1977 and the tale remains fascinating. Although Nixon quit the Oval Office in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, Watergate still dominated the headlines. With Woodward and Bernstein's celebrated investigations transposed to the screen in the shape of All the President's Men, there was no letting up. Hungry both for public rehabilitation and a way to recoup his legal fees, Nixon was prepared to sell his story by way of a television exclusive.

Aside from the interviews themselves - nearly 29 hours of eventual recording - the behind-the-scenes activities proved of equal interest. Here, in the finest Frost tradition, came a collision of politics and showbiz, enhanced by the Southern California setting, as the 38-year-old Brit, holed up at the Beverly Hilton, wrung every last drop of cash from his investors, outbidding his rivals to the tune of $600,000. Negotiations were conducted through the hotshot agent Swifty Lazar (Toby Jones in the film). There followed intense rounds of talks between Frost and Colonel Jack Brennan, Nixon's chief of staff, as to the question of editorial control (which Frost retained), not to mention the infighting between Frost and his backroom boys - the journalists Zelnick and Jim Reston, and the producer John Birt (later DG of the BBC). For the two Americans, frustrated by Frost's passive-aggression, it merely confirmed suspicions - that Nixon had chosen Frost as a soft touch.

Nixon's home, the "Western White House", down the coast at San Clemente, was unusable as a location because of noise from aircraft, so the production repaired to a "set", a rented bungalow in nearby Monarch Bay. There, amid a bizarre suburban circus, the opposing entourages crowded into the kitchen while the protagonists duked it out in the living room. "The first day, I realised I had never interviewed anyone for two hours, much less for 12 such sessions," Frost recalls. (They were taped over March/April.) "But once you got him absorbed in a subject, he was very good."

Strategic breaks had been agreed so Nixon, a notorious heavy sweater, could have time with his handkerchief. Elsewhere, the primitive setup yielded its frustrating logistical moments. "Nixon was going on about making mistakes," Frost says, standing up to mime out the scenario. "Brennan walked in and held up a sign, which I thought said, 'Let us talk.' So I said, 'We've got to change the tapes.' As he came closer, I saw that it said, 'Let him talk,' because there was something Nixon really wanted to deliver."

What with The Deal and The Queen, as well as his adaptation of The Last King of Scotland (about Idi Amin), Morgan has become a prime screen essayist of modern historical figures. Sheen has played Blair for him twice and will do so again in the final instalment of the new Labour trilogy, The Special Relationship. Add to Frost Sheen's role as Kenneth Williams (Fantabulosa!), and his Brian Clough in the forthcoming The Damned United (Morgan again), and he is only a Tommy Cooper away from Mike Yarwood. His turn here, though, seems more "impressionistic" than outright impersonation. "You can't have an impression for two hours of drama - that wouldn't work," Frost agrees. "It's not David Frost, but David Frost-inspired."

A recurring gag centres on Frost's supposed annoyance with his celebrated salutation, "Hello, good evening and welcome", suggested to be a misquote. Certainly, Monty Python's merciless lampooning of Frost helped to create the caricature. He recalls the night the Pythons posted his home phone number on screen at the end of their sketch The Mouse Problem, as a hotline for people with a rodent fetish. Truth be told, Frost doesn't mind his catch phrase at all: "I did use that. I still do. So I'm not sure where that came from."

While most of the Pythons had started out in The Frost Report in the late 1960s, by the time the decade turned, they were still the punks, consigned to the late-night garage of BBC2. Frost was the supergroup, and one that broke America, all champagne, caviar, parties and beautiful women. At one point, he commuted weekly on Concorde. Which brings us back to the film and the one thing that doesn't sit right - its premise that Frost, pre-Nixon, was down on his uppers, a sort of lame variety-show host.

"I worked out that because I had done three years of talk shows in New York, in addition to presidents and prime ministers - Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir and all of that - by the time I did Nixon, I'd done about 4,000 interviews," Frost asserts. "That was Peter [Morgan] letting his imagination run riot in terms of the boxing match, the underdog and overdog." Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed? He laughs. "Exactly."

Frost had already grilled Nixon in 1968 and had met him again in 1970. He had even produced a Christmas entertainment special from the White House. "My dear mother came alone," he asides. "She said, 'You know, I had to give up choir practice.' This was in Beccles, Suffolk." Not to mention Frost the burgeoning mogul, a co-founder of London Weekend Television. (He would later launch TV-am.) Given that the film will become the received history, maybe more than the original interviews, even, is his portrayal not a little disrespectful?

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, it builds to a happy ending, and I think that's the abiding image," he considers. "Word eventually gets around about what's true and what's not true. Given the question 'Would you rather or not this play/film came out?', the answer is that I'm delighted."

He gets off far more lightly than Nixon, played by Langella as a grotesque: "He has the soul, or lack of soul, of a Nixon, but not the looks." Even then, it's an image more favourable than the pill-popping schizophrenic suggested by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's 1996 film Nixon. Frost has been sitting on another screenplay, Young Nixon, about the president's bleak Quaker upbringing, written by the late Robert Bolt - "The last thing he ever wrote. Bolt at his very best" - which he hopes will be made one day.

One thing Langella captures superbly, says Frost, is Nixon's fabled gaucheness: "He always insisted on five minutes of small talk, of which he had none." A remark, shown in the film, where Nixon asks Frost, off camera, "So, did you do any fornicating this weekend?", is accurate (although it happened in slightly different circumstances). "If there hadn't been eight people all looking stunned, I'd have thought I'd gone bonkers," Frost says. "I knew he didn't really want to know the answer, but it was touching in a way, because it was Nixon trying to reach out and getting the word wrong, being clumsy."

Nixon was a peculiar specimen, Frost recalls. There are guests who can be talkative in the green room, yet clam up on camera, but with Nixon, "it was the other round".

Even the former president, though, could have his light-hearted moments. "There was a wonderful story somebody told me. Six months after JFK's inaugural, Nixon was talking to Ted Sorensen, JFK's speechwriter. Nixon said, 'There were things in that speech I wish I'd said.' Sorensen says, 'You mean, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?" ' And Nixon said, 'No, I was thinking more of, "I hereby solemnly swear. . . ' " Which was a good gag."

Watch the interviews today and Frost does succeed in humanising Nixon. For a fleeting moment, you even feel sorry for him. "Not sympathy, but possibly empathy at times," Frost allows. "There were about 30 people in jail because they had done what he asked them to do." There's sadness, too: regret for the passing of a less frivolous time, armed with the knowledge that, 20 years later, the same judicial machinery that fingered Nixon would be used to check for presidential stains on an intern's dress; or the likelihood that even were George W Bush to confess on primetime that, yep, he stole the 2000 election, the ratings would hardly trouble The X Factor.

When Nixon died in April 1994, he received quite a sendoff; all the living ex-presidents attended his funeral. It accorded him a sort of real pardon, after the somewhat grubby one issued by Gerald Ford when he became president. His achievements - the opening of dialogue with China, detente with the Soviet Union, Southern desegregation, even the messy extrication from Vietnam - are to be lauded. "Basically, there was a good Nixon and a bad Nixon, and the bad Nixon won out in the end," Frost muses. "He was a sad man who so wanted to be great."

Frost never saw his interviewee again, but has stood by Nixon's conveyed assessment of those interrogations as "tough but fair" - though Nixon, in two separate memoirs, and as late as 1990, was still grumbling about a stitch-up (despite taking 20% of the profits). "I did not expect the telecast to be positive or even balanced," he wrote, "and I was not surprised when they turned out to be highly negative."

"It was rather a heart-warming reminder of the old Nixon," Frost says with a smile. As Reston says in the film, Nixon's greatest legacy is probably that "gate" has become a suffix to every significant political scandal. Or maybe it's that the nerdy kid in The Simpsons ended up with the name Milhouse.

On the way out, Frost launches into some corking anecdotes - about the playwright Neil Simon, regarding the Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun - but one in particular. "To finance the first $200,000 [for the interviews], I sold my shares in London Weekend Television - I had 5%," Frost says. "When, many years later, LWT had been bought by Granada, Ray Snoddy [a media commentator] called me. He said, 'Do you realise that if you hadn't sold your shares, you would today be getting a cheque for £37m?' I said: 'Thanks a lot, Ray.' But I'd make the same decision again."

What the script has changed

The Watergate interviews are shown as the climax of the Frost/Nixon showdown. They actually occurred on days eight and nine of the 12 days of taping. The four shows were broadcast to address topics including Watergate, foreign affairs, civil unrest and his departure from office.

In the film, there is a dramatic "smoking gun" - evidence of key discrepancies relating to Nixon's conversations with Charles Colson, his chief counsel. They added to evidence of a Watergate cover-up. This information is shown being discovered by Jim Reston in the nick of time for Frost's interrogation.

"It was in our possession for eight months," Frost counters. Nor was it that crucial.

"It was helpful, but it wasn't relevant to the building climax." And as for that drunken, late-night call he is shown receiving from Nixon? "A complete piece of fiction. But brilliant, I thought."

Frost is shown picking up the wealthy socialite Caroline Cushing in the first-class cabin on the flight to America. She then accompanies him to meet Nixon and becomes a de facto member of his team. In reality, Frost had met her some time before, and she only showed up at the farewell to Nixon at San Clemente. Yet, as Frost recalls, their host was quite smitten: "He said, 'Marry that girl . . . She's a resident of Monaco. She lives tax-free.' "

Far from being adversarial, the atmosphere between the backroom teams was quite convivial. "There was the occasion when Nixon said, 'I'm paranoid, but Paranoia for Peace is no bad thing.' The next day, both groups arrived wearing buttons reading 'Paranoics for Peace'."

The movie has Nixon showing a particular fascination with Frost's trendy Italian shoes. "I was laughing in the car on the way down about the small talk, the awkwardness of it, and what Nixon chose to talk about. I said, 'Today he'll probably want to talk about my shoes.' Then we're filming and, bugger me, he said, 'Where did you get those shoes?' He actually did ask this incredibly prosaic question." Nonetheless, the footwear did not become the great totem, as suggested.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

I couldn’t possibly comment

He may be keeping silent on whether he’ll play Christian Grey for his director wife, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance in Kick-Ass 2 will get everyone talking, says Jeff Dawson 

(from The Sunday Times 28/7/13)

For someone who won rave reviews ­playing the brittle young John Lennon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson catches you un­­awares. In he saunters, beefed-up, thick-necked, with vein-popping forearms and a haircut one buzz shy of a No 1. He’s currently playing a US Navy lieutenant, he explains, spraying lead at Godzilla in the $100m-plus, 3D, all-destructive remake of the Japanese monster stomp due to hit the multiplexes next May.

Taylor-Johnson is an actor with a penchant for maverick, indie roles, so one assumes his involvement marks a new, dark, postmodern spin on the reptilian legend. It’s not your typical brainless summer blockbuster, he insists. “But obviously it’s got special effects, right. It’s a big monster movie. It really is trying to keep the original kind of feel.” Plus, there’s gunplay and stunt work. “One of the perks of the job.” If, as Lennon claimed, Elvis died when he joined the army, you can forgive the King an ironic and spectral chuckle.

Taylor-Johnson is a friendly enough chap, softly spoken, a tad on the ­serious side. A bit spaced-out, too, he apologises, having zipped back to London on a few days’ break from filming in Vancouver. He has two young children who are entirely unsympathetic to jet lag. “With kids, you’re up,” he sighs — the first glimpse into a private life that has grabbed more headlines than his professional one of late.

Nipping home has afforded him the opportunity to get his first peek at Kick-Ass 2, a film that, in spirit, seems diametrically opposed to the piece of blockbuster work he’s currently engaged in. The original Kick-Ass (2010) trampled all over the whole post-9/11 superhero/disaster genre like a man in a rubber lizard suit. To recap, Aaron Taylor-Johnson — or just plain Aaron Johnson as he was then — starred as Dave Lizewski, a teen nerd blessed with no superpowers whatsoever, who became an accidental caped crusader. Though the film is set in the familiar milieu of an American high school, the team of Brits behind it (the director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman, adapting the comic book by Mark Millar) lent proceedings a humorous, off-kilter sensibility — a little too off-kilter for the big ­studios, who balked at financing it, thanks to its gleeful embrace of violence and profanity. “I remember Matthew, at one point, said, ‘This could be one of the most expensive home ­movies ever made.’  ”

But, $96m at the box office later, and here we are: a sequel, something that was never actually in the blueprint. “We all backed away from doing it for quite a long time, Matthew included. He felt he had a cult film that stands alone.” The problem with most franchises, he adds, is that the next instalment is rushed out while the ­previous one is still on DVD. “Whereas this one,” he points out, “had four years for it to build up enough appreciation.”

And perhaps the howls of indignation ­levelled at the vigilante character Hit-Girl, played by Chloë Grace Moretz — 11 years old when filming began — both in terms of her screen-death yield and her preternatural potty mouth, will not be repeated. This time round, her character is training up Dave to be her fully fledged sidekick — “like Batman and Robin” — socking it to the supervillain Red Mist, reinvented as the Mother F***** (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), whose evil-o-meter has ratcheted up since the first outing.

If there’s a different director (Jeff Wadlow) and the not insignificant finger of Universal Pictures to punch in the financial Pin number, be assured, says Taylor-Johnson, part two does not pull its punches. “I’ve just seen it. It’s so violent.”

Apparently so, for in the finest Kick-Ass tradition, there is fresh controversy. Jim Carrey — who plays a Captain America-ish avenger named Colonel Stars and Stripes — recently ­disassociated himself from the project, stating that he regrets his participation in it in the light of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. “My apologies to others involve [sic] with the film,” he tweeted. “I am not ashamed of it, but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”

Taylor-Johnson has nothing but good to say about Carrey. “What he brought to it is what Nicolas Cage brought to the first one: that kooky, odd humour, that darkness. He does the job brilliantly.” Whether Carrey’s remarks will hurt the film or, perversely, put more bums on seats, remains to be seen.

For Taylor-Johnson, who is only just 23, a lot has happened since the first Kick-Ass. There have been some big roles in some pretty big movies — the bouffant Count Vronsky opposite Keira Knightley’s Anna Karenina (“I play the typical blond”), a hippie marijuana cultivator in Oliver Stone’s Savages (“super-challenging”), not to mention his tour de force as the schoolboy John Winston Lennon in Nowhere Boy.

That film has a special significance for him, obviously. It’s the one on which he met his now wife, Sam Taylor-Wood, the visual artist/­photographer turned director. Their union is still causing something of a stir, she being literally twice his age and with two children, one a teenager, from a previous marriage (they have since added two nippers of their own). He, on first impression, seems something of an old soul; she, by various accounts, comes in on the youthful end of the cougar spectrum, putting their ­virtual, collision-path age, you imagine, somewhere in the early thirties.

Was there a symbiosis between life and art, I venture? Nowhere Boy, after all, was about a young man (Lennon) seeking love — besotted, moreover, with an older woman, his estranged birth mother, Julia. “Maybe, yeah, in retrospect, you can look at that and see it as that, for sure,” he muses. “It’s funny, I always think that with jobs, weirdly, you’re picking something you relate to in some respect. You embody that ­person, you live it, and you’ll start to see resemblances in both your worlds.”

Did his agent complain when he changed his name (he adopted her ­Taylor, she ditched her Wood for his Johnson)? What follows is a lengthy, meditative, soul-searching and actually rather sweet answer to what was only intended as a quip — all about his new stepdaughters and wanting to solidify the family and, anyway, why should the woman automatically be expected to adopt the man’s name? But as for film credits, industry profile and all that jazz... “I’m quite happy I can wipe all that shit away,” he laughs. “I don’t hold onto things, attachment-wise.”

Days after our interview, Mrs Taylor-Johnson makes news for herself with the announcement that she has landed the big one: anointed director of the big-screen version of EL James’s mummy-porn sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey. Inevitably, this news has led to speculation, as well as assertions from well-placed sources, that her hubby (along with every other young actor stud in Hollywood) will ­trouser up, or rather trouser down, as the story’s caddish woodsman, Christian Grey.

Officially, the film is nowhere near the casting stage. As yet, there’s not even a script. “He’s not pursuing the part and is not going to work this fall,” comes the brusque smackdown from his theatrical agency, William +Morris Endeavor, accompanied by an avowal from his publicist that “Aaron will be a supportive husband and father while Sam shoots her film”. But don’t expect his name to disappear as a rider in the media’s casting sweepstakes.

Taylor-Johnson’s path into acting was not typical. He hails from leafy High Wycombe, Bucks, with no showbiz genes in the family. He enjoyed acting as a hobby. “I was so manic at home, it was another activity I did after school to wear me out.” Dance and gymnastics became his thing. “I actually prefer movement to words,” he adds. “I struggle to find words for the way I feel.”

I’d read that he had an Ezekiel-like epiphany while watching Pulp Fiction, aged four — which, if nothing else, demonstrates a somewhat lax attitude on the part of his guardians towards the BBFC’s ratings system. “It came out when I was four,” he corrects (which only serves to make one feel old). Some mental arithmetic results in his recalculation that he was actually a more mature eight when he got round to catching it. “I remember seeing it with my sister,” he chuckles. “I was definitely very young, reciting lines from it.” But still.

Taylor-Johnson waxes lyrical about John ­Travolta, with whom he eventually got to work on Savages, a film about the two subjects dearest to Oliver Stone’s heart: drugs and war (albeit of the Tejano gang variety). I have met Stone. He’s bonkers, isn’t he? Taylor-Johnson smiles. “That’s an understatement.” He rates “people who are ambitious and bold and willing to take risks”, including Joe Wright, whose highly theatrical Anna Karenina divided critics. “If you’re not pushing boundaries, what’s the point?”

He later went to stage school and did commercials for clients such as McDonald’s and ­Persil, followed by assorted television gigs. His big break came as a teen heart-throb in Gurinder Chadha’s Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, the director’s follow-up to Bride & Prejudice and Bend It Like Beckham, though unfortunately not curled with quite the same accuracy.

He became a bit fed up with the parts he was offered in its wake. “These One Direction-type kids — Kick-Ass came out of that role because I wanted to be the complete opposite. You know, a bit rashy and spotty” (as he gets when he shaves, he says, bless him). Among other young bucks, there was the cyber-bully of Chatroom and the bit-of-rough Irishman in Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close’s Edwardian cross-dressing drama. By the time John Lennon came twisting and shouting, though, it was bye-bye boyband, hey-hey rock’n’roll.

The preparation period was frantic. “I was learning how to play guitar during my lunch breaks while doing Kick-Ass.” But he pulled it off magnificently, earning stamps of approval from both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney. The new cool status even got him picked as one of the new faces of Prada. Interestingly, though, no job has yet come close to bringing him the attention he still gets from the music video for REM’s Uberlin (more than 3m hits on YouTube), filmed by his wife, which has him performing an improvised dance down a London backstreet, something that was meant to have been hoofed by his “good friend” Michael Stipe, until he went all bashful. “He said, ‘Get Aaron to do it.’  ”

So, will he and Sam work together again? “Yeah, yeah, I mean, there’s a film called A Reliable Wife [from Robert Goolrick’s bestseller]. She’s in the process of casting that. And there are possibilities and other projects we are thinking of doing together. That would be my ideal.” Anything specific? He checks himself. “Not that I can talk about.” If Fifty Shades of Grey is among them, we shall have to wait and see.

Kick-Ass 2 opens on Aug 14