The movie that would have been made in French if it wasn’t for Anthony Hopkins: “Everything starts with a dream”
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(Credits: Far Out / TIFF)
Actors aren’t obligated to speak multiple languages, although many have learned tongues other than their own for the sake of a role. Others pick up bits and pieces during their life, but Anthony Hopkins has always been a one-language kind of guy.
He may have been born and raised in Port Talbot, but Hopkins doesn’t speak Welsh, something he admitted rubbed Richard Burton the wrong way. The star once recalled that the Pontrhydyfen native said he wasn’t a “true Welshman” because he hadn’t mastered his native dialect, even if national pride doesn’t tend to be measured on a mastery of the local brogue.
Not everybody can be Christopher Lee and end up fluent in several languages and proficiently conversational in a couple more, but it wasn’t something Hopkins had to worry about when he agreed to play the role that earned him his second Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ and made history in the process.
Writer and director Florian Zeller had worked almost exclusively in his native France as a playwright and author before he decided to take the plunge and try his hand at cinema. His feature debut would be an adaptation of his own play, Le Père, which premiered in Paris in 2012 and originated with Robert Hirsch and Isabelle Gélinas in the two main roles.
Understandably, a lot of people were under the impression that a French filmmaker adapting a French play that had first been performed in France meant a French production, but Zeller had other ideas. Well, not so much an idea, but a dream. When ruminating on how to bring Le Père to the screen, there was only one face swirling around in his subconscious.
“The reason why I did it in English is because, when I started dreaming about the film – because everything starts with a dream – the one and only face that came to my mind for that part was Anthony Hopkins,” he told Yahoo. If the actor he’d been fantasising about turned him down, then Zeller would have either mounted The Father as a French film or not even made it at all.
Fortunately, neither of those eventualities was on the table when Hopkins agreed, with Zeller so committed to his one and only contender that he renamed the central character from Andre to Anthony. Once everybody had finished wiping away their tears, The Father quickly became an awards season frontrunner and ended up competing in all of the major categories.
Hopkins made history as the oldest-ever winner of a competitive acting Oscar, and Zeller walked away with the gong for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. He was the only reason the auteur envisioned The Father as not only his first film as a director but his English-language debut, and sticking to those highly specific guns worked out very well for the pair of them.
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