John Hurt, the acclaimed actor, on stage in “Krapp’s Last Tape” in Brooklyn, Dec. 6, 2011.RICHARD PERRY/The New York Times
I had the extraordinary privilege of working with John Hurt many years ago. It was a film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, and it was the only project I've ever made that allowed me to shoot sequentially. Over four days of shooting at Ardmore Studios in Dublin, we moved from the beginning of this magnificent play to the very end, with John's extraordinary performance deepening from moment to moment.
I will never forget this experience. In most projects, the shooting of scenes is out of sequence – due to schedule and budgets – and my job as a director is to make sure that the actor's tone and interpretation will appear seamless as these disparate pieces of performance are edited together. My collaboration with John on this film was rare. He could perform organically and have complete control over his work. It was as though he was performing on stage.
I have never had such a front-row seat to such a masterful actor. Because of my insistence on being right beside the camera (as opposed to watching from a video monitor some distance away) I was never more than a few feet away from seeing one of my favourite plays by one of my favourite writers performed by one of the best actors in the world. I had to keep pinching myself.
John was meticulous. Like other great actors I have had the privilege of working with, he could control every muscle on his face, and was capable of conveying unbelievable nuance without saying a word. Throughout most of the play, Krapp remains silent. He's a 69-year-old man listening to a tape recording of himself made at the age of 39 commenting on his actions at an even younger age. Everything is expressed by how he reacts to the recording he hears. It's a haunting meditation on memory and desire and mortality.
When an actor dies, a part of him becomes strangely amplified and distorted. Like the former version of himself that the character of Krapp listens to on the tape recording, our relationship to the actor is shifted to something deeply mysterious and ghostly. They are no longer with us, yet the characters they incarnated on screen have a continued relationship to our most intimate sense of who we are. They live "within us and without us," as George Harrison sang in his remarkable Beatles song about "the space between us all."
John Hurt was one of those rare actors who could enjoin the space between us all and allow us to believe any role he inhabited. I've never seen him play a false moment. On top of everything, John pulled off one of the most miraculous cinematic performances of all time, evoking the deepest sense of humanity while hidden behind the most grotesque mask ever imagined. For this role in The Elephant Man he received an Oscar nomination.
It was impossible to miscast John, because his dimension as a human being was so rich and genuine. The only role that doesn't make sense is the one of a "recently departed." He's surely here within us. And without us.
Atom Egoyan's new book about his collaboration with John Hurt, Steenbeckett, will be available this spring from Black Dog Publishing.