‘Are you ready for your close-up?’ Paul Greengrass asks not long after I arrive in Munich to play a peasant in his new movie The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield, about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. ‘It feels so unbelievably contemporary,’ says Greengrass of the revolt, in which ordinary farmers of Kent and Essex marched on London and beheaded the King’s more corrupt noblemen. ‘The feelings, the debates, the emotions, the rage, the religiosity, the desire for change, the interplay between the powerful and the powerless – all of it speaks to us now, I think.’
I had got to know Paul in the course of collaborating on a book, and had heard much about what calls it the ‘unknowing camera’: a restless, rough-and-ready vérité style, drawing on Greengrass’s background in investigative journalism and documentary, to lend his films the immediacy of unfolding news, happening now. It can unnerve newcomers. Before shooting his 2013 hostage drama Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks asked Matt Damon, the star of the Bourne films, what to expect. ‘Okay, your first rehearsal will be a disaster, and the first time you shoot it will be like everybody’s talking over each other and no one can figure out what’s going on,’ Damon told him. ‘But then you end up getting at stuff better than you would ever imagine.’
I had to find out for myself what the fuss was about. ‘Are you sure?’ Greengrass asked me. As the day approached he asked again, ‘Are you sure?’, and this time I was unnerved. Had I known what I was letting myself in for, I would have boarded the next flight back to Gatwick. No question.
The car sent for me is held up by roadworks. By the time I rush into a warehouse at Penzing Studios, a former airfield 20 miles outside Munich, the other extras are already in costume. Many of them are German theatre actors, dressed in rough beige tunics, worn boots, capes and wrapped scarves. I’m in the make-up chair having my face dirtied up when I spot Joanna Kaye, Greengrass’s wife and a producer on the film.
Had I known what I was letting myself in for, I would have boarded the next flight home
‘Any chance of coffee?’ I ask, a request that, I am later told, causes great hilarity when it reaches the director. Not many extras get to ask the producer for a cup of coffee on a £38 million film being shot in 50 days, but graciously, she brings me a cup of tea.
‘So here’s your line,’ says Joanna, flashing an iPad in front of me.
A jolt of fear goes through me.
‘Line? What line?’
‘Didn’t Paul say? He’s given you a line.’
‘No, he didn’t – what is it?’
She grins and angles the iPad towards me. I have just enough time to see something about a pardon before she, and the iPad, are called away.
It is my first taste of the controlled chaos. A coach takes us to a field the production has turned into Rotherhithe in the summer of 1381. Tents, animal pens, cooking fires and carts spread towards the river under a cold drizzle, and the ground is churned to mud. The scene is a town-hall-style debate beneath a makeshift tent, with the peasants arguing over their demands before marching on London. Garfield’s Ploughman grows uneasy as Jamie Bell’s firebrand preacher, John Ball, whips up the crowd.
People don’t lose themselves in a Greengrass crowd; they find themselves. The effect is carefully built. Each principal actor has a small core group of extras assigned for the whole shoot: about eight around Bell, six around Garfield, and a soldiers’ group around Cosmo Jarvis. Every supporting artist gets an information pack and a briefing from historian Dan Jones, who is also in the scene. He tells us what brought us here: taxes, famine, and family lost to plague.
‘In any political situation, whether it was Bloody Sunday or any demonstration, there are always radicals and moderates in tension with each other,’ Greengrass tells us. ‘Each of you has come from a remote part of Kent or a remote part of Essex and you are there because you have a story to tell of disaffection, seismic pain, rage… Be on your front foot. Don’t wait for someone else to say something.’
Then he turns to me. ‘So, Tom – Dan will say his piece and then you’ll come in with your line about the pardons: “I want a pardon. Just make sure we all get pardons.” That’s really, really fucking important. Just centre yourself on your terror of what will follow.’
With every eye on me, terror will not be a problem. ‘When do I say it?’
He shrugs. ‘When it feels right – you’ll know.’ Then he retreats to his monitors.
Damon was right. The first takes are a mess, with everyone talking over each other. I blurt my line far too soon, just to get it over with. Greengrass reappears.
‘So, Tom, you’re getting swallowed by everyone,’ he says. ‘Spin it out a little. Get them on your side. “All who agree with me say ‘aye’.” That sort of thing.’
It seems the perfect end to the story about the humbling of a movie critic
It is at that point that I realise: the only thing more scrotum-tighteningly terrifying than saying a line in front of Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell and 90 extras, with cameras rolling, is improvising a speech in front of them.
Action. My insides are gelid. But at the right moment something comes out of my mouth, something about how they’ve seen our faces and about wanting to live. I cap it with Greengrass’s trick: ‘All who agree with me say “aye”.’
And, to my delight, the tent goes up:
‘Aye!’
So I ask again.
‘All who agree with me say “aye!”’
‘AYE!’
I could get used to this.
Jamie Bell looks at me with a laser blast of utter contempt.
‘There’ll be no pardons,’ he snarls, and off he goes into John Ball’s bloodthirsty call for retribution, which echoes off the 100-foot fir trees at the edge of the forest and comes back to us as if we were in a stadium.
I am elated. Afterwards the other actors talk to me, breaking the omertà that separates actors from extras. I’ve earned my spurs.
There’s one last hurdle. I hadn’t been mic’d like the principal actors, so Greengrass needs a clean take of me alone, pleading for pardons to a tent of silently cheering extras. ‘Great,’ he says. ‘We got that.’
Many months later, over lunch while he is editing the film, I ask whether he was having some sport with me.
‘Let me just say, on behalf of all film directors everywhere, the idea of having one of the most esteemed film critics in Britain on your film set, and being able to give him a hot potato so he knows what it actually feels like – it was irresistible,’ he says. ‘And a film critic begging for a pardon, showing absolute moral cowardice… Perfect.’
‘I walked right into it.’
‘You did. I had Callum arguing the proto-socialist position, Dan arguing the proto-capitalist position, and you arguing the surrender-monkey position.’
He’s joking of course. Then comes the bad news. The scene has been cut, made redundant by a debate earlier in the film. Joanna consoles me by pointing out that Greengrass has dropped her, his children and his brother from films over the years.
‘That scene was in for a long time,’ he says. ‘It came out very late. There was never a version of that scene without you. But you are on the DVD extras, in the deleted scenes.’
It seems the perfect end to the story about the humbling of a movie critic: I made the DVD extras, like Blade Runner’s unicorn. I can live with that.
The Uprising is in UK and Ireland cinemas Oct 9. In US theaters now.