Making 'History' with Nicholas Hytner

It very much sprang up out of this theater,” director Nicholas Hytner notes of his new film, The History Boys. “It’s not the usual way. It has a theatrical genesis, it really does, and that’s something that we’re very proud of.” Hytner says “this theater” modestly—Britishly, if you will—as if the place he was describing was something besides London’s National Theatre, founded by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1963, as if the script wasn’t penned by Beyond the Fringe vet and legendary British playwright Alan Bennett, and as if the play hadn’t already picked up a few dozen awards (including six Tonys upon its New York arrival).

Hytner’s tone, however, isn’t inaccurate. The History Boys—which unpacks the complex relationships between eight students and four teachers preparing for the Oxford/Cambridge entrance examinations—is unflinchingly quiet. And, while you can almost hear somebody pitching studio execs on the coming-of-age-beneath-the-tutledge-of-charismatic-mentors-while-characters-grapple-with-homosexuality-and-whatnot narrative (“like a British Dead Poets Society!”), the film itself moves with a grace that belies the network of intricate intrigues driving it.

“The great popular entertainment of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s was incredibly literate,” says Hytner, 50, who took his post at the National Theatre in 2003, nine years after his and Bennett’s first stage/film collaboration, The Madness of King George. “Now we live in a storytelling culture that’s much more image-based. I’m not knocking that; that’s just a fact. And the work that comes out of it is often totally extraordinary, but I think [The History Boys] is a bit of a throwback.”

“It was a compound adjective; you like compound adjectives,” says Frances de la Tour’s history teacher early in the movie, punchlining the use of the word “cunt-struck” in conversation. “Their talk is, in the best sense, mannered,” Hytner assesses, “in the way talk-y films used to be. It cuts against the grain of current film trends, and I think the film isn’t of interest to people who don’t want to see a talk-y film. What you’re trying to do on film is make that dialogue, which is very highly wrought, sound or feel as spontaneous as possible.”

ROMANTICISM
VS. PRACTICALITY
Since George’s success, Hytner has split his time between the screen and stage, directing a 1996 adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible featuring Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis, and stirring up trouble in the London-theater world. “I’m a member of all sorts of interesting minorities,” quipped Hytner—who is both gay and Jewish—as he started work at the National, responding to charges that the theater had anointed just another white, middle-aged, middle-class male as its director. “Indeed I am,” he says of the accusations, “but I’m a lot more things, too.”

The History Boys, which sold out its 2004 opening run before touring internationally, is very much the product of Hytner’s vision: drama that touches on contemporary culture while remaining emotionally enduring. With Bennett’s first work following his 1997 treatment for cancer, the writer delivered, Hytner says, “what he always does: something that’s full of material, going off in all different directions, with the question, ‘What is it about that I’ve just written?’” There is no one answer.

Bennett’s layered dialogue delves into sexuality, of both the teachers and the taught—but also class, the meaning of intelligence, education and the very nature of history itself. “The conflict of ideas at the heart of the film,” Hytner explains, “is between the idea of education as mind-expanding and soul-deepening—the romantic classical ideal—and a utilitarian idea of education, which is purely practical. The reason the film is set in the ’80s is because the ’80s was the final battleground, and the battle was lost by Hector,” the beleaguered teacher played by Richard Griffiths. “The debate is more current now than it was 10 years ago, because now the consequences of the defeat of Hector’s romantic ideal of education are being felt very keenly.”

Concepts aside, The History Boys is about its 12 characters—actors all drawn from Hytner’s original cast at the National—and what happens to them. With a stunning performance by Dominic Cooper, and Griffith’s heartbreakingly sympathetic Hector, the film unfolds patiently—in other words, with actual drama.

STAGE TO SCREEN
“There is no absolute dramatic truth,” Hytner asserts. “film acting is inherently no more truthful than theater acting, and film acting is ultimately, for the actor, a much less empowering experience than theater acting. A film actor’s performance is ultimately going to be so screwed with in post-production that what gets delivered to you, the viewer, is kind of a technological construct.

“Theater acting, of course, is not screwed with, and—if it’s at its best—it can be unamplified and unaccompanied and theatrically naked. That is acting which has a greater potential for unadorned truth than film acting can ever have.”

And, whether Hytner is right—whether German theorist Walter Benjamin is right; that industrially produced art has less of an aura than directly experienced art—it is a fascinating premise upon which to direct films. It comes across in nearly every frame of The History Boys, including several delightful music-set montages that function in knowing homage to the great high-school comedies of the ’80s.

It is perhaps a backwards way to make films, but—if one has the time to pull off “200-odd” performances before cameras roll—it seems sound. “The Marx brothers used to take routines out on the road, to see how they worked,” Hytner recalls, “and the danger is that what you’re freezing is something theatrically contrived, but you have to guard against that. “I’ve watched the film with large audiences. Parts of it do work like the play works, and I like that. I’ve not watched it the way it’s gonna be halfway through its fourth week, on a weekday matinee with 12 people in the house.” He pauses, perhaps mentally comparing the theater where he works with the proverbial empty matinee. “Though,” he continues, “it seems okay on DVD.”