Your Shot: Jason Bell on Getting Keira Knightley to Fake an Orgasm for Vanity Fair

The Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue is an annual tradition dating back to 1995 that sees the magazine immerse itself in the magic of the movies in the run-up to awards season. This year, with the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Rosamund Pike and Eddie Redmayne clogging up the list of nominees, the prestigious American magazine decided to focus its Hollywood portfolio on the actors who are, all of a sudden, turning the A-List into the Brit-List. Photographer Jason Bell was brought on board to snap the stars, but felt the ‘British Invasion’ warranted a mini-movie of its own. Last week the magazine released a trio of cheeky films that sees some of the UK’s shiniest stars prepare for a war on LA. LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Jason and MassiveMusic’s Tim Preston to find out more. 

LBB> It strikes me that one of the most challenging things about getting this film project made would be juggling all of those busy A-List schedules. How did you manage to get all of the stars on board?

JB> No one was going to come back after the photo shoot to do the film on a separate day. To do hair and makeup and shooting again would be half a day of their time and they don’t have that. You have more of a chance with the talent if you say, ‘you’ve done your make up, you’ve done your shoot, we’ve got ten or 15 minutes at the end of the day, can I film you?’ I’d have to pitch the whole thing every time and that’s always a bit of stress in case they’d say no. In the main, though, because it’s Vanity Fair, there was trust there and they knew that title wasn’t going to make them look foolish. A pivotal moment was when I got Keira Knightley to fake an orgasm and then Judi Dench to say ‘I’ll have what she’s having’. It’s a pretty easy sell to everyone else once you’ve got that. Kenneth Brannagh burst out laughing when I told him about it.

It got easier. And some of it was my own hesitation, being nervous to ask. As we got into it I got more confident about that. It was a bit of a wing and a prayer, begging a favour. It wasn’t quite the same as sending their agent the script and scheduling it in, it was more ‘grabbed’ than that. That made it a little harder.

LBB> Because of the spontaneity and the uncertainty around who you’d get, was the story written and planned out beforehand or was it a case of seeing what you had and creating that narrative in the edit?

JB> It was very much planned ahead. I commissioned the script and we played with it as we went. I was very clear going into it that I absolutely did not want it to be a behind-the-scenes film of the portfolio shoot. I feel like everyone does that. I wanted it to be a short film and for that reason I quite quickly decided it needed a narrative. My agent, Guy Harrington at Soho management, came up with the idea of doing it like a Pathé newsreel. I approached an old friend, Harry Oulton, who had worked at the BBC as a script editor and is a writer. Then Vanity Fair said they wanted it in three small chunks as people are very hesitant to sit down on the web and watch something for a whole ten minutes. I thought the episodic approach worked very well with the Pathé newsreel idea.

Then we had the structure of the three episodes and the lines and the film references were written to fit that. Some people had a few choices. For instance with Keira I said, “we’re in a diner and it looks like that scruffy diner in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and there are a few things we could do…” I was slightly hesitant to ask because in my mind I knew it would be amazing if she agreed to do the orgasm scene but she might have turned around and said “you’re kidding”.  I suggested we do the bit with the pie and the cream on the side and she looked at me blankly. Then I suggested another bit, and she said ‘I don’t really remember that bit’. So then I said, ‘well, there’s the orgasm…’ She just looked at me and she said, “Well I think we’ve got to do that, haven’t we?”

Similarly, with Kenneth Brannagh I wondered if he’d say, “come on, I’m not going to mock a Shakespeare line”. But he really laughed at the line. 

The other thing that I thought was important for me was that the film was a bit tongue-in-cheek. There’s a bit of an arrogance about the idea of the Brits invading Hollywood, and being British I’m a bit embarrassed about it. We’re not really taking over Hollywood, we’re just doing rather well, British actors have had some good roles. There’s also that British sensibility that it’s a bit unseemly to talk about how well you’re doing. You puncture that a little bit by saying “we’re going to take the piss out of ourselves”.  I think it was important that the film do that as an adjunct to the portfolio itself to show that we know we’re not really marching in and taking over. We’re known for our sense of humour and the Americans do think of the Brits as comic, there’s a lineage of great British comedy.

LBB> When you first decided to do a film alongside the photo-shoot, whose idea was that?

JB> The genesis of the whole project was me saying to them that they should do a portfolio of British actors because they were doing so well. Then I said ‘this invasion of Hollywood is getting so out-of-hand that we could make the whole Hollywood portfolio Brits.’ I kind of said it as a joke, thinking that as an American magazine they wouldn’t want to skew that heavily. But they loved it, that was the editor, Graydon Carter’s, decision. It was a fantastic and exciting surprise for me. 

I’d done some films for them before and I said, “you should definitely do a short film to go with it”. I knew they’d get access to amazing talent because which actor wouldn’t want to be in Vanity Fair? And if you’ve got access to 40 of the world’s greatest actors, why wouldn’t you want to do something with them?

When I went back to them with the script, that was when they said, “we’re a bit worried about this, we love it but you’re asking a lot of some very big people”. I kind of laughed and said, “I think we should aim high, and if everyone says no then we’ll give up”. Privately, because I’d shot a lot of these people before and I’m friends with some of them, I thought I’d be able to get something and we’d scale it back if we needed to. Again, the nice surprise was the level of acceptance and the way people just said ‘yes, sure’. And then it gathers momentum. Once Keira faked her orgasm, Judi Dench – and she’s so lovely anyway – thought it was hilarious. She said to me, ‘can I say “I’ll have what she’s having”. She was asking me before I’d even had a chance to ask her!

LBB> We’ve interviewed a few photographers who are also directors before, but none who have had to switch from photographer to director in such a short time space. Was it a big change in head space for you?

JB> I get asked this a lot and I get it, I think people are a bit confused by photographers and filmmaking. The way I see it is my photographic work is quite narrative, I’ve been told that my photos look like stills from a film that hasn’t been made yet. Often when I’m putting together images I create stories around them in my head. For me, creatively, it doesn’t feel like that big a leap. 

The other thing is that if you’ve done the work beforehand and you have a good script and it’s quite clear in your head, it becomes a guiding principle.

The other thing is that photographers are directors anyway. I meet high profile people – not just actors and actresses – and I tell them what to do. I talk to them, establish a rapport and tell them to stand there or do this. To direct them for motion – I’m not saying I’m a fully formed feature film director, I wouldn’t want to be arrogant and it’s something I’m interested in doing more of, but some of the skill set is already there. There can be 50 people on set for some of my shoots, so having to be the captain of the ship is something I’ve become increasingly confident with. 

And then there’s collaborating with the talent.  The other thing that I really, really enjoyed about this, which is new to me, was asking actors to act. It’s different from asking actors to be photographed. It was lovely to watch good actors do good work. I don’t do that normally. I can say ‘oh my, isn’t Emily Blunt beautiful’, but I don’t get to watch her act. Giving James Corden a line and watching him do it better than I had imagined or than I had directed it to be was amazing.

LBB> You mentioned it to look like a Pathé newsreel. Did you spend a long time in the grade and the edit to get look right?

JB> Oh God yeah. That bit is fun because it’s the completion of the project. While I spend time touching up my photographs, that’s quite quick, whereas this was two week’s solid work. Doing the grade, talking about the colour, it comes down to really small decisions. To make it look slick you have to put in all that work but at the same time, the decisions were quite easy because, as I said, once you know the story you want to tell, you know what you want to do to the footage of Benedict Cumberbatch. Creatively, I wasn’t tearing my hair out.

It’s like photography in that what I often think I’m being commissioned to do is have a point of view. The clearer your point of view, the easier the whole process is.

LBB> You worked with Massive Music on the soundtrack. When you’re doing stills photography, sometimes you might be taking images of musicians or maybe you want to evoke a musical feeling but you don’t work with music in the same way as you do in filmmaking...

JB> What was really good about them and where they really helped was that I don’t have the language to explain what music I want. I can explain it in my terms, I can explain a feeling. I can say, “I want it to sound like a Pathé newsreel and I want it to say ‘Britain’ and then I want it to say ‘America’ and then I want it to switch between the two”. I have a layman’s approach but they were really good with their research and their suggestions. And mixing the sound was a massive contribution. If you can find music that immediately conjures up the image of the Jazz Age in America, you’re half way there. You want the audience to get that straight away and the music is a big part of that. 

LBB> And Tim, what was the brief for the music like when you came on board? 

TP> When the guys approached us to work on this project, it was in a very early stage of development, so we were lucky enough to be able to help develop the brief from the very beginning. We worked with Jason, Swoon and Soho Management very closely to define what underlying themes for the whole film were going to be, and from that we created a musical brief. 

LBB> What sort of ideas did you play with and what sort of research did you do?

TP> There were lots of ideas floating around to begin with! We tried out a variation of different genres, until we found the clear themes the films would each be taking. This varied from WW2 era jazz and classical to an almost slapstick ‘Carry On’ style. At Massive, we're lucky to have such a great team to work with globally, so this gave us the opportunity of utilising our non-British team members to really find out what ‘Britishness’ means abroad.

LBB>  How tricky was it to switch between the vintage British feel and the more American-sounding music in a way that made both styles feel like they complimented each other?

TP> The main point we were trying to achieve was cohesion between the different tracks and scenes. There are two very strong and obvious themes throughout; Hollywood and Britain. We found it was important not to approach this too seriously, or we could lose the magical element the actors bring. We honed in on specific historical points to find this cohesion, using styles like 1940s pre-war jazz to reinforce the VO and war propaganda scenes. 

LBB> Since finishing the films, have you had much response from the people who are starring in it?

JB> Only on Twitter – it’s only been a few days. I saw that James Corden had shared it on Twitter and Felicity Jones had liked it. I haven’t had time to call everyone up and ask them what they think – though I would like to know what Keira Knightley thinks as it’s gone a bit viral with her, as one would expect. 

It’s so funny to me, in an odd way, how little you’re aware of. I’ve been asked whether I was trying to make it go viral by getting Keira to do that… it never crossed my mind. I thought it was funny, that she would probably say no and then do something else. It was only once I’d edited the film and sent it over to the magazine that I then got an email back from Vanity Fair saying ‘we’re pretty sure that’s what everyone is going to be talking about’.

LBB> My favourite scene in the project is Jeremy Irons – what was shooting his section like?

JB> That was so unexpected and I was a bit embarrassed to ask him. I was thinking his appearance in Die Hard, I’m guessing, isn’t one of the peaks of his acting career although he did good work in it. It’s also kind of funny because it’s not his line in the film, he plays the baddy, it’s Bruce Willis’ line. But what I had in my favour was the tongue-in-cheekness of it all. And also if you’re in the Hollywood portfolio for Vanity Fair you’re being honoured as one of the greatest actors around so you don’t need to be insecure about laughing at yourself. 

Again, it’s another example of someone making it better. He was the one who slurped the milkshake and when I was watching the rushes I thought it was ‘hilarious’. 

LBB> Going forward, is this kind of filmic storytelling and directing something you want to get more into?

JB> I would definitely consider it. I would never give up photography and I would be very careful about a directing project. I would never want to be dilettantish and it’s something I would take very seriously. What I would say is that it’s something that I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with and I’ve no doubt that I will shoot more of these short films to go with editorial work. I think if I did another portfolio for Vanity Fair or any other magazine I’d probably want to do a film to go with it and they feel like very good things to do. 

I know every actor says ‘it’s about the script’ and it’s a bit of a cliché but I think if someone offered me  a story that I thought I could tell well, then I’d definitely do it. But this isn’t part of a master plan to give up photography and become a director. I would say that these things co-exist. But I am sure I will be doing more film work. I like it and I feel good about it. Touch wood it’s been going well so far, so why not? It’s fun.