Bean there, done that

What is Simon McBurney doing working on a new 'Mr Bean' film?

Mar 14 2007

If you know Simon McBurney, it’s probably as co-founder and artistic director of Complicite, the experimental theatre company that started life as Théâtre de Complicité in 1983 and whose devised, often intensely physical work has seen it establish a substantial reputation as one of the most exciting companies on the international circuit. Or you might know him from his parallel career carving out a niche for eye-catching cameos in features like ‘Bright Young Things’, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and, most recently, ‘The Last King of Scotland’ (he was noxious British attaché, Nigel Stone). In either case, the news that he’s been hard at work brainstorming ideas with Rowan Atkinson for the new ‘Mr Bean’ movie might come as something of a surprise.

McBurney explains: ‘Richard Curtis, who I’ve known for quite a long time, rang me up one day and said, “I know you could do with a few extra pennies. Would you consult on the new ‘Mr Bean’? I think it would be fantastic if Rowan had some different input from all of us who have given him the same input year after year.”’

In fact, McBurney is far from a stranger to comedy. He remembers performing on-stage at the opening night of the Comedy Store in 1979, aged 18, and says, ‘I was almost set for a career in comedy but then I ran away to Paris.’ Nor was it far from the origins of Complicite. ‘When we started we just fucked around a lot; a lot of the early material was completely anarchic and largely designed to make people laugh. At one point, through some strange mistake, we won the Perrier Award…’

McBurney remembers being bowled over by Atkinson’s stage act around this time. ‘I saw him perform live in the early ’80s and I was fascinated. It seemed to me that his talent was quite outside the talent of other people, it was in a different category. He was able to stand on the stage with nothing; he did nothing but glance at a piece of paper once in a while and it was just mesmerising and hysterically funny. It’s like a piece of Beckett. He had the ability to communicate, very simply, without words.’

The opportunity to work with Atkinson, then (along with those pennies, of course), was McBurney’s main impetus. He’d had professional contact with Curtis before – he’s been in ‘The Vicar of Dibley’ several times – but admits that the ‘Mr Bean’ material to date ‘wasn’t entirely to my taste’. Nevertheless, McBurney was intrigued by its global success.

‘The really extraordinary thing about “Mr Bean” is that, whatever its reputation among the chattering classes, it has this massive following worldwide. I remember being on tour in South America and entering in to some tiny little town and going past a bar and seeing the bar packed and everyone roaring with laughter. They all seemed to be watching TV so I went in to see what they were watching – “Mr Bean”.

A similar experience happened to Hamish McColl [another of the film’s writers] in Yemen. He was in a village up in the mountains and they entered into the square and they had “Mr Bean” projected onto a wall. I rather hate the word universal but there is an appeal over and above the constraints of culture, class and age. There’s a large number of sceptics in this country but that doesn’t really matter. It’ll be most interesting to see what his largest audience make of it.’

On joining the project, McBurney found himself uninspired by the initial concept. ‘Richard Curtis had produced a scenario in which Bean falls into a romantic comedy. I said to Rowan that I didn’t think this was the direction. I felt that the most important thing is to allow people to watch him. The interesting thing about Mr Bean is that he doesn’t really speak. If you’re in a romantic comedy set in a hospital in London, you’re going to have masses of people speaking in every direction. I came up with the idea that if you don’t want the central character to speak, you put him somewhere where he can’t speak the language. I simply suggested we put him in France and that perhaps he should speak three words of French.’ The inspiration for this came from McBurney’s own family. ‘This is my great uncle Bob, who was a pompous and stupid man. “I’ve been around the whole of Europe on just one word of French,” he’d say. “And what word is that? Gracias.” That very simple premise would allow us to watch Bean in very different situations.

‘Also, Rowan loves Jacques Tati so there are specific, very affectionate, touches to do with Tati; of course, it’s called “Mr Bean’s Holiday” so we’re acknowledging “Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot”. The difference is that Tati spends his entire time by the sea, while Mr Bean spends his entire time trying to get there.’

Tati aside, did McBurney find Atkinson steeped in classic silent comedy? ‘No, strangely enough, he isn’t. I had to sit down with him and say, “Look at this” and, “Look at that”. We watched some Buster Keaton, Chaplin. What is it that makes them tick? It’s almost always a very simple premise with the bare minimum of psychological baggage. We are complicated human creatures but we very often ascribe much more complexity to ourselves than we deserve; a lot of our desires can be essentialised to a very simple thing.’

The other element McBurney took from vintage silents was the preoccupation with filmmaking as subject matter. ‘There is always a scene in those silent movies where a camera appears and someone is filming. I thought: When you go on holiday, what do you take? You take a camera, and, what with it being the twenty-first century, you take a video camera. So we have another film going on at the same time: you have Mr Bean’s film and the film itself.’

The location enabled McBurney to revisit some of his own youthful experiences in France. ‘One of the things from my adolescence was the fact that I hitchhiked all the time. I was determined that we have a hitchhiking scene and we had masses of material; the scene went on for 25 minutes. It was the most beautiful piece of strange existentialism, though, of course, it ended up being about four minutes long.’

Although a year in duration, McBurney’s involvement came at a relatively preliminary stage; the final screenplay was written by Hamish McColl (co-writer of ‘The Play What I Wrote’) along with Curtis and ‘Mr Bean’ veteran Robin Driscoll. Time Out hasn’t yet had a chance to see the film; nor, for that matter, has McBurney, though he knows its final shape.

‘At a certain point, I did my job and the ship sailed on without me,’ he says. ‘A lot of my ideas that were too extreme disappeared along the way. I still believe that there’s another film to be made – let’s call it an extraction from Mr Bean, another character who is much stranger. Part of me would have liked to have made something like “Closely Observed Trains” with Rowan, but the fact is you’re tied in to a commercial American studio. It was never going to be on the cards to make a black-and-white arthouse movie...’

‘Mr Bean’s Holiday’ is out on March 30, with Comic Relief previews on March 18.

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