In September last year, Roger Michell finished the final mix for film Elizabeth: A Portrait In Parts on the day he died. He had left a few notes and then had gone home to collect his daughters from school. His colleagues had no idea that it was the last time they would ever see him.
Michell was one of the key figures in contemporary British cinema, a director whose credits ranged from the hit romcom Notting Hill to several films and TV dramas with writer Hanif Kureishi, among them Le Week-end, The Buddha Of Suburbia, The Mother and Venus.
Elizabeth: A Portrait In Parts, a special screening at Visions Du Réel, may seem an uncharacteristic project for Michell. It’s an entirely archive-based documentary looking at the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II. However, as its producer Kevin Loader points out, it has many of the same qualities as his feature films.
“It has got all his wonderful characteristic wit and mischief, humanity and warmth,” Loader says. “It’s very much a Roger Michell film.”
2022 marks the Queen’s Jubilee – the 70th year of her reign. As Loader points out, that wasn’t the starting point for the film. Michell had had the idea for the documentary at the start of the Covid pandemic.
“Roger rang me and said, ‘right, we obviously can’t shoot anything.’” Loader remembers the start of the lockdown. They realised, though, they could make an archive-based film. Michell wanted the Queen to be the subject.
“I have to say I was initially a little bit sceptical. I thought, OK, how are we going to make a documentary about the Queen that doesn’t feel like every other royal documentary you’ve ever seen. But he [Michell] had already got far enough in his thinking to know he wanted to do something a little bit more disruptive and unusual.”
Michell’s idea was to look behind the scenes: to show his subject in her more intimate and unguarded moments but also to explore how she was viewed by everybody from British kids to foreign dignitaries, from pop stars to captains of industry. There is footage of her coronation but also of her unlikely appearance on the children’s BBC show Crackerjack. We see her meeting foreign dignitaries but also avidly watching horse races on which she has had a bet.
“If you’re making an archive documentary, one thing you’ve really got to be sure of is that you’ve got enough archive,” the producer notes. In the case of Elizabeth, “that was one issue we were never going to have.”
After all, every period of Elizabeth’s life has been exhaustively chronicled. She has probably been photographed, filmed, drawn and painted more than any other figure of her era. She is now in her mid-90s and the oldest footage of her featured in the documentary is itself more than 90 years old.
Some of the most revealing material comes from Edward Mirzoeff’s fly on the wall 1992 TV film Elizabeth R. “That was the first real behind the scenes footage that people got…the first time that someone with cameras had been allowed in with cameras for a period of months to shoot what goes on,” says Loader.
Neither Michell nor Loader were ardent monarchists. “But we’re big fans of Elizabeth because she has done her job in such an extraordinary way over a long period of time….We may at times have felt the monarchy was dead as an idea and was disreputable, but we are now possibly going to start re-evaluating,” the producer suggests, pointing out that countries with politicians as presidents aren’t necessarily any better off than Britain with its hoary old constitutional monarchy.
The filmmakers weren’t interested in covering Elizabeth’s children (who haven’t always distinguished themselves in their private or public lives). “Obviously, her role as a mother features in some of the missteps of her children perhaps, but we are more interested in the fact she has been this magnificently poised centre of the storm for so long.”
Michell’s documentary also serves as a record of changing social attitudes. In one piece of archive footage, a commentator in the 1960s who has had the temerity to say on TV that the Queen should be more “spontaneous” in her behaviour is given a very sharp slap by a member of the public.
“Deference was more ingrained into public life than it is now. That is possibly one of the things the film charts….some of that early footage [from Elizabeth’s reign] is like looking at anthology. Some of those foreign tours to the ex-colonies in the 40s and 50s – extraordinary footage.”
The Elizabeth in Michell’s film is more glamorous than the stern and diminutive figure that the British public knows today. Paul McCartney is shown confessing that when he was a teenager, he quite fancied her. Michell includes footage of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and of Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I as points of comparison. “If you look at the footage from the 50s, when she was a young queen at all those West End premieres and film occasions when she talks to Marilyn Monroe, your eye is drawn to Her Majesty,” Loader suggests. “She is incredibly glamorous….it’s all mixed up in some way – that sense of the new look, the red carpet, film stars and royalty all mingling. We were just trying to remind people that, at one stage, the Royal Family, and particularly the Queen, was very much associated with a streak of glamour.”
The filmmakers consulted with Buckingham Palace throughout the production.
“To not have gone to the Palace would have cut us off from some of the most wonderful footage, so we always went to the Palace and said what we were doing,” Loader recalls. “They were very civilised to deal with…[but] it was clearly not a royal documentary in any way they’ve been used to dealing with in the past.”
There hadn’t been many other documentaries about the Royal Family made for cinema but the Palace communications team was reassured by Michell’s reputation and experience.
Loader isn’t expecting the Queen to see the film at the Holloway Odeon but the Palace now has a copy and he does hope she will watch it. “I would love to think Her Majesty will find the time to watch it, but I have no idea if she will find the time to do that. She has got quite a busy year.”
And, no, Loader isn’t worried that the film will only play to UK audiences. On the day he speaks to Business Doc Europe, he has just finished an interview with a Belgian journalist who seemed to know as much about Elizabeth as he did. “I think she [the Queen] is the most famous woman in the world. The ex-colonial countries have a particular relationship with her and a shared history…in many European countries, our Royal Family has been celebrities for decades. Think back to the era of Paris Match and all the pre-Hello magazines, they were always featuring our Royal Family.”
Embankment is handling world sales on the documentary. The UK theatrical release is handled by Signature but the film is also going day and date with Amazon Prime on May 27.
