Timothy West Interview - Going Postal

The fabulous adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal is out on DVD on 23rd of August. To celebrate the release we caught up with Timothy West and chatted filming in Budapest and his character Ridcully.

The heat, mainly. I’ve been lucky because I haven’t been here when it’s been really hot, but of course the costumes are very heavy and hot.

Do you enjoy getting into costume, though?

It’s not a question of enjoying it, it’s more you gradually see yourself appearing in the make-up mirror and you think ‘Oh, that’s what I am’. It’s what you have to do; if you’re going to play a part properly you have to inhabit it, you can’t just be outside and comment on it. You have to feel that you are that person. In filming, sometimes you have a lot of actual physical difference put upon you, not necessarily by your own free will, and sometimes it’s quite a surprise. The costumes and make-up on this are absolutely fantastic – everyone is a believable inhabitant of this weird place. It’s a great feeling when you don’t just feel you’re on a film set getting bored while they shoot the same scene 15 different ways; if you really believe in the set, the scenery, the way they’ve decorated it, the way everyone is clothed and how they look facially, it’s rather magical.

You’re taking on the role of Ridcully previously played by Joss Ackland. Have you seen his performance?

No, I haven’t. I don’t think one gains much from seeing other people’s interpretations, plus I didn’t know anything about Going Postal until I was offered it. I was lucky enough to meet Terry Pratchett on my first day here and he’s very informative about the characters. He kind of treats them like his own relations so it was very helpful. He told me not to make the mistake of thinking Ridcully is the usual university don because he’s not eccentric and just because he’s highly qualified in his subject, which is magic, it doesn’t mean he’s reclusive or difficult to get at. He’s a man of the world, he probably has quite a lot of money, he’s been to some rather nice houses on holiday, he probably does a bit of shooting and fishing perhaps. He has very nice meals, goes to very nice places and keeps his job at a reasonable arms’ length.

Did you tweak your performance after meeting Terry?

I was aiming in that direction but it was nice to get it confirmed.

How does this differ to other period dramas you’ve done?

It’s in a weird world that makes its own rules. It’s rather more exciting, in a way.

Were you familiar with Terry’s work?

Not at all. I knew about him but I’d never read any of the books. I read the script and read the book then, and it made me laugh a lot. It’s extraordinarily inventive and very funny and the characters are wonderful, and don’t confuse it with Harry Potter. Not to criticise Harry Potter, though. It’s based on the old Lewis Carroll and CS Lewis thing of there being a magical world behind a picture somewhere where all values are completely reversed, and that’s fun. JK Rowling has also been clever at recognising children want two things; they want some kind of control and they also want freedom from control, and if you can write a series of books that have discipline on one side and anarchy on the other you’ve got them. What better way of fusing the two than to have a public school which teaches magic?

The themes in Going Postal are very interesting…

They’ve very contemporary. I’m with Terry on his views about the post office. I still write letters, but nobody answers them of course – that would mean writing on a piece of paper, signing it, sticking it in an envelope, finding a stamp. That’s all too much for modern life, but I still do it and I don’t mind if I don’t get replies. I write a lot by hand, I type sometimes and I have an assistant who sometimes types for me. My wife and I wrote many, many letters to each other over 40 years, when either of us was on tour or filming something, and I published my lot of letters. They are your immediate reaction and the idea is to get them off as quickly as possible. They were what you were thinking at the time and you can’t alter them. That’s the central theme of Going Postal, I think. It makes you go ‘Do we really love emails and texting?’ I do a bit of texting; I have a son who loves it so I text him a lot. The thing that really gets my goat about the death of letter writing is greeting cards shops. You can now get a card for every message under the sun for anybody you like without ever having to put pen to paper. It’s appalling. ‘Sorry I couldn’t be with you on Tuesday’ – you can get a card for that without having to write it yourself. Well, you might have to write in ‘Tuesday’. Sadly all you get through the letterbox now is charity applications and credit card offers.

Presumably you’ve worked with some of the cast before…

Yes, five of them. I find that doesn’t happen on film; television a bit and theatre, of course. Usually when I do a film I meet a lot of strangers, but not this time. It’s rather lovely to meet up with everyone again.

Any egos?

Absolutely not, neither off the set nor on it. It’s an extraordinarily happy unit.

It’s interesting it’s being made by Sky rather than a film studio…

I do think this would do very well in cinemas, but cinema is such a polarised business now. You have reasonable-budget films being made about human beings and human situations, relationships and emotions, but they don’t get much in the way of distribution. Or you make your mega, mega CGI picture which costs god knows what and recoups god knows what across the world because you can play it in countries where they don’t want dialogue. They’re like two different industries.