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‘Macbeth is a violent play and I’ve never believed in cop-outs’

Roman Polanski

Towards the end of August 1970, an announcement was made to the press that a new film version was to be made of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The news provoked general excitement among lovers of Shakespeare’s great work about the Scottish lord who becomes king through deceit, treachery and ‘murder most foul’. But their excitement quickly gave way to apprehension on several counts once it was revealed who was behind the project.

It emerged that the film’s backers would be the London arm of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy organisation who were making a first foray into film production. The movie would be co-scripted by Kenneth Tynan and Roman Polanski, and the man at the helm for one of literature’s grisliest classics would be Polanski himself.

This was the same Hefner who had given to the world the Bunny Girl and an abundance of naked Playmates in his Playboy magazine; and this was the same Tynan who had most recently scandalised less liberal sections of the nation by writing Oh, Calcutta! – a brazenly full-frontal nude stage sex-romp which many saw as a step too far even for the permissive 1960s. This, too, was the same Roman Polanski, no less, the Pole who had built a reputation for exploring the darker side of human nature in movies like Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and Rosemary’s Baby, in which the said Rosemary chillingly gave birth to a child of Satan.

For many, still fresh in the memory was Polanski’s own personal tragedy of the Manson massacre just one year earlier. On Friday 5 August 1969, his beautiful young wife, actress Sharon Tate, had been brutally slain at their California mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. The crime was all the more horrific for the fact that Sharon was 8 months pregnant at the time. She had been murdered, along with 4 friends, in a savage ritualistic killing by the crazed members of the Charles Manson ‘family’. Several of the bodies had been viciously mutilated and the word ‘Pig’ was smeared in blood across the front door.

One year later, the start of Manson’s trial coincided with the announcement of the Macbeth movie project and inevitably threw the spotlight on Polanski. He was well aware of what the general reaction would in all probability be to his choosing to make a blood-soaked drama as his first film after the terrible Manson murders. But he figured he was on a hiding to nothing, whatever he did. If he’d chosen to make a comedy, people would equally have asked how he could possibly go for laughs after such horrific events had touched him so deeply.

Hefner, Tynan, Polanski… The track records of this unusual movie triumvirate prompted one newspaper to dub the project ‘Oh, Dunsinane!’ and to predict that this new big-screen Macbeth would be awash with gore and nudity. ‘Yes, there will be nudity,’ Polanski conceded when pressed on the subject, ‘but not much. Anyone who expects otherwise will be disappointed.’

If that assurance temporarily appeased serious Shakespeare aficionados, Hugh Hefner set the alarm bells ringing again when he promised that fans would experience ‘an entirely new interpretation of the line “Lay on, Macduff!”’ Despite the fears and misgiving voiced in some educated circles, there wasn’t a single actor or actress in Britain who wasn’t hoping to catch Polanski’s eye as he cast his net for the key roles in the Scottish play – and Martin Shaw was no exception, particularly when the word got around that Polanski was planning to place emphasis on youth and was seeking largely unknowns.

Martin knew one thing for certain: Polanski’s pedigree as a film-maker would ensure that his Macbeth would be markedly different from any other Shakespearean plays which had previously made the transition from the stage to the cinema. Polanski was by now an A-list director and if the chance to work for him presented itself, he would grab it with both hands.

In 10 years Polanski had come a long way. In the early 1960s he had frequently been dismissed by Hollywood as the stereotypical short – he stood 5 ft 5 in tall – tyrannical European director. But by now he was considered by some to have a stroke of genius when it came to making movies, especially macabre movies.

Polanski had graduated from film school in Lodz, Poland in 1959 and first started to gain limited but important recognition through a series of short films. Then in 1962 he made his first feature film Knife In The Water which, significantly, was the first post-war Polish movie not based on a war theme.

In the quirky art film, Polanski conjured up some truly scary moments involving a couple who find themselves out at sea on a sailing boat and in danger from a teenage hitchhiker they have picked up. The movie earned the diminutive director some worthy credibility and he went on to make a horror film parody The Fearless Vampire Killers. It was during the filming of this movie that he fell in love with its star, Sharon Tate, and they subsequently married.

Next, he moved over to London to make Repulsion, a disturbing tale of madness and alienation that turned out to be a classy, truly horrific psychological drama. Polanski skilfully contrived to build up a tense atmosphere of evil while drawing out a remarkable performance from his young star, French actress Catherine Deneuve, playing a young, sexually repressed beauty who sinks into insanity as loneliness and her fertile imagination take hold.

Polanski’s reputation was growing fast, and the following year he rapidly followed up 1965’s Repulsion with Cul-de-sac, a study in kinky insanity. The success at the box office of these two movies earned him an invitation to move to Hollywood to make his first picture for the major American studio Paramount. This was to be Rosemary’s Baby, a superior film version of Ira Levin’s diabolical chiller novel for which Polanski himself wrote the screenplay. It starred Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, both giving outstanding performances as a happily married young couple who take a flat in a run-down New York apartment block. They become involved in witchcraft and Satanism, and after being prescribed some strange pre-natal nourishment by a sinister obstetrician,

Rosemary proceeds to give birth to Satan’s child. Polanski’s film managed to be frightening without using explicit gore or violence, relying instead on the blurring of reality and nightmare. His direction showed a precise sense of visual composition: ‘An evil-smelling tannis-root charm, disturbing next-door neighbours, a nightmare rape by the Devil, even innocent puffs of cigar smoke rising up from behind occupied armchairs bring menace and terror,’ was one assessment. For Polanski, it all made for a cinematic triumph and it changed Hollywood’s perception of him forever.

His career might have taken a different turn but for the terrible death of his wife. In his grief, his friends urged him to throw himself into work to try and put the ghastly tragedy behind him. All, that is, except fellow film-maker Stanley Kubrick, who counselled him differently, strongly advising him to go away and do some sports and eventually he’d feel like ‘getting out of the room’.

Polanski took his advice and eventually decided his therapy would be to take a long skiing holiday with friends in Switzerland. He skied almost every day for 4 months, and it was on the ski slopes of Gstaad that he had the idea that he should turn his attentions to Macbeth. Ever since he was a young man in Krakow, he had always dreamed of making a film of a Shakespearean play. Now he had gained great clout as a director, he felt he could seize the moment to achieve his long-held ambition.

Not everyone thought it was a great proposal. Polanski later recalled that when he phoned his agent to tell him about his plans, he sighed: ‘What are you doing to me?’ And Hollywood was also less than impressed. ‘Roman, you know Shakespeare is box office poison,’ one high-ranking studio boss rebuked him.

Undaunted, Polanski pressed on. He flew to London, enlisted the help of Ken Tynan in collaborating on a screenplay and secured a loan as pre-production seed money from his friend Victor Lownes, London boss of the Playboy organisation, who eventually also came up with the money to make the movie.

Naturally there was much press speculation as to who would play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, particularly as Polanski and Tynan wanted to forsake tradition and portray them not as middle-aged but as a good-looking young couple. ‘Usually Macbeth is played as an unpleasant bearded chap,’ Polanski pointed out, ‘and Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch, and both are middle-aged.’

Tynan was also anxious to dispel the cloak of doom that usually hangs over the couple. ‘They don’t know they’re involved in a tragedy – they think they’re on the verge of a triumph predicted by the witches,’ Tynan explained. It was his view that in attempting to fulfil the witches’ prophecy, they uncovered a dark side to their nature they never knew existed.

The name of Martin Shaw was never seriously considered for the lead role, but he was nevertheless overjoyed to secure the substantial part of Banquo, even if he was at first somewhat mystified to be chosen to play a high-ranking Scot almost twice his age as well as being father to a teenage son, Fleance. But if Polanski, who had cast Martin after seeing him on stage at the Royal Court theatre, believed he could pull it off, then that was good enough for him. Keith Chegwin was cast as Banquo’s boy. ‘Cheggers’, as he popularly came to be known on TV many years later, was then just into his teens and hoping to build on a career as a successful child actor.

Banquo is a key figure in Shakespeare’s plot. He is with Macbeth when they encounter three witches who prophetically hail Macbeth as ‘King’, but Banquo as ‘father of kings to come’. This places the virtuous Banquo firmly in the path of Macbeth’s ruthless ambition sparked by the witches’ prophesy. On the eve of Macbeth’s coronation celebration, Banquo is subsequently murdered upon his friend’s command to prevent his sons ever becoming king in the future.

The role placed great responsibility on Martin to deliver. ‘I hope it doesn’t sound like an ego trip, but I was only 25 at the time and I was playing a burly Scottish general of 40-ish.’ he would later reflect. ‘To make that work in a Polanski movie of Shakespeare was, I felt, quite an achievement.’

At the end of October 1970, the blue VIP room at the top of the Playboy Club in London’s Park Lane, Mayfair was the venue aptly chosen for Polanski to announce the cast of his Macbeth to the press. A host of Bunny girls busily ensured that the glasses of the show-business journalists were topped up until Polanski arrived – one hour late.

Jon Finch, a virile-looking young actor whose path would very significantly cross with Shaw’s in a few years’ time, was unveiled as Polanski’s Macbeth. Finch had been hired just a few days previously after Polanski met him on a plane. But what intrigued Martin and the rest of the signed-up actors was that there was no trace of a Lady Macbeth at the launch. Filming in Wales was due to begin on 1 November and she had yet to be cast.

In fact, Polanski had been hoping to sign the American actress Tuesday Weld, but she was balking at appearing in the nude in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. After she finally turned the role down, the part was offered to another promising young actress but her boyfriend was having none of it. Shooting was already in progress by the time the role was eventually given to Francesca Annis, a 25-year-old beauty who was starting to make a name for herself as an accomplished actress.

Polanski hired her after seeing her in The Heretic and, importantly, she understood and readily accepted why she needed to be filmed nude. ‘Roman doesn’t exploit nudity for its own sake,’ she insisted. ‘He doesn’t go in for pornography. What he says is that in Lady Macbeth’s time people simply didn’t wear nightdresses so when she got up to sleepwalk she’d have been naked.’ It was, Polanski concurred, just part of his drive for an authentic look to the film ‘… so that people can believe all this actually happened.’

Macbeth was Martin’s first film, and the next 16 weeks spent filming under the guidance of perfectionist Polanski proved to be both a sharp learning curve and an eye-opener. This was by far the most fascinating, and certainly the most demanding role of his career as a professional actor to date. It stretched him in all sorts of ways, not least on the back of a horse!

‘That’s when I learned to ride properly,’ he said. ‘I thought I could ride already, having taught myself. But the ex-Indian army officer who was my riding instructor for Macbeth just took one look at me and said: “Right, no stirrups – just the bridle. A rising trot.” Needless to say I couldn’t do it; my legs weren’t strong enough. I worked with him for 8 weeks and by the end of that time I could ride. It was just as well – when we were shooting we were sometimes in the saddle for 10 hours a day.

‘Jon Finch and I became so besotted with the horses that on days when we weren’t wanted for filming, we signed on as riding extras.’ Polanski was grateful for their willingness to help out. He didn’t have a budget that would allow him to hire the large number of extras he felt he needed and in some instances had to resort to plastic dummies to pass muster in the background.

During his time out of the saddle Martin also volunteered to help exercise the horses. ‘There were 300 of them,’ he said, ‘and only 25 handlers. They were fresh and a bit nervy.’ Keith Chegwin shared Martin’s affection for the horses, even if he did not always see eye to eye with Polanski, especially when Polanski insisted he get back on a horse after he had hurt himself. Of Polanski, Chegwin has said: ‘It was weird, I didn’t know who he was. Some days he wouldn’t turn up and we had horse-riding competitions with the horses that were hanging around.’

Down the years, all manner of superstitions, myths and supposed jinxes have surrounded the staging of Macbeth and, once the production had set up in Portmeirion in Wales and filming was under way, Polanski had every good reason to curse the bad luck that traditionally appears to accompany what some superstitious folk will describe only as ‘the Scottish play’. There were bad omens even from the very first day, on which a cameraman was nearly killed when a sudden fierce gust of wind blew him into a crevice.

Polanski had deliberately chosen to film in Wales for its natural beauty and, at this late time of year, to take advantage of dark, brooding autumnal skies. But November 1970 proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant month for the director.

In Roman, his remarkable book about his life, Polanski recounted the problems he faced while filming Macbeth in Wales: ‘Portmeirion was almost flooded that fall. It was another case of “Never seen anything like it in twenty years!”

‘At first we welcomed the leaden skies and sinister, bizarre-shaped clouds but it wasn’t long before we were enveloped in an icy, almost incessant downpour, unable to shoot except during brief intermissions.’

The rain caused chaos, seeping into everything, causing make-up to run, unsticking beards, panicking horses. And when the rain stopped, fog reduced visibility to a few yards. Polanski summed up his despair by writing, ‘The weather played havoc with our shooting schedules, which had to be drastically revised. There were times when I felt I was making an underwater epic.’

For a young thesp like Martin, it was an extraordinary introduction to film-making on the big scale and, anxious to learn as much as he could, he eagerly watched closely as Polanski went about his work and sorted out or circumvented his many problems, not least with the special effects team. Polanski said they were so disaster-prone he nicknamed them ‘special defects’. A fog machine exploded, and catapults designed to propel fireballs into Dunsinane Castle either flopped lamely well short or soared dangerously over the castle on to the beach.

There were, however, light-hearted moments, too during filming, notably when Polanski sent Hugh Hefner a short out-take on his birthday – a filmed sequence of three naked, aged witches collectively singing: ‘Happy birthday, dear Hef.’

But Martin must have been as alarmed as anyone in the cast when word got around early in the New Year of 1971 that Polanski was in danger of being dismissed. Partly due to the atrocious weather, the film was well behind schedule and over-budget, and the money men were becoming distinctly edgy.

Another director, Peter Collinson, was put on stand-by for this eventuality while Polanski consoled himself with some advice he had once been given by the Austrian-American director Otto Preminger: ‘You don’t get fired for going over budget – only for being a lousy director.’

Collinson’s presence at Shepperton studios, where Macbeth’s interior scenes were being shot, was deliberately low-key. Among the backers the fear was that the cast and crew had such a reverential view of Polanski and what he was setting out to achieve that they might refuse to work for another director.

Macbeth was ultimately rescued by Hugh Hefner, who flew to London to intervene. Hefner agreed to put up the $500,000 Polanski needed to complete the film and in return Polanski offered to give up a third of his fee. As he threw himself into editing his movie, Polanski envisaged the film being given a London launch with a Royal Command Performance in December of 1971. He felt Macbeth deserved a British premiêre and he banked on English critics being far more receptive to his film version of a classic Shakespeare play than those in America.

But to his chagrin, the world première was switched to Hefner’s Playboy theatre in New York and scheduled for January 1972. Polanski was not best pleased as January tended to be anything but a vintage month at the cinema in America. Past experience showed that Americans tended to stay in after all the Christmas festivities. To make things worse, Polanski found himself embroiled in a battle with the American censors. Quite apart from considering the film too long, Macbeth’s American distributors did not want the film released with an X certificate.

This stance forced Polanski into an argument with the ratings board. When he showed them the film, he got the distinct impression they were viewing it not as a film made by a movie director. ‘They were looking at it through the filter of my particular predicament,’ he said. Moreover, prior to the screening, word had somehow erroneously reached members of the board that Polanski had used many gallons of pigs’ blood for the required gore. In fact, the director had cleverly devised a mixture of instant coffee, food colouring, milk and glycerine which more than adequately did the job.

During filming, the cast did not ever get the impression that Polanski was going too far in his powerhouse pursuit of perfectionism and realism. But Francesca Annis has said: ‘When we were filming the murder of Macduff’s children, he came in and told the set designers: “No, that’s not enough blood. It’s not really like that,” and started throwing it around the set – that made us think.’ When a member of the crew then questioned whether too much blood had been splashed on the walls of the set, Polanski reportedly said: ‘You didn’t see my house in California last summer.’

Eventually Polanski agreed to three cuts in his film. These were scenes that he later conceded had been too explicit. That was enough to secure an R certificate in America, and Martin and everyone else connected with the movie were also relieved when Macbeth was given an AA certificate by the British film censor without any problems. It meant that anyone over 14 could see the film unaccompanied, thus ensuring a much wider audience.

Polanski’s finished film did not look remotely like the X-rated adventure Hugh Hefner had promised. There were no sex scenes, and only brief nudity with an absence of eroticism. What audiences did get was slaughter on a stark scale, with close-ups of contorted corpses and dismembered body parts, and not just 3 but 60 witches, who were chosen, not unsurprisingly, for their hideous appearance and lack of teeth. If one of Shakespeare’s aims was for his play to shock audiences with Macbeth’s dastardly deeds, then the Bard himself would not have been disappointed with Polanski’s modus operandi.

Predictably, in America the critics had few kind words for the director’s efforts. The movie had an excellent first week at the New York box office but could not maintain the pace and ended up in the red, prompting Hefner to consider future movie ventures very seriously. In England, however, where the film was accorded a charity premiere attended by Princess Anne and a host of Bunny Girls, the critics were more sympathic to what Polanski was trying to achieve and far less obsessed with the Manson murders. Felix Barker’s enthusiastic review in the London Evening News was even topped off with the headline ‘Macbrilliant!’

Certainly, Macbeth was one of the most talked-about films of the year even if it didn’t set the box office alight and, for Martin Shaw, the role of Banquo was a great career move. He had third billing in a major international movie helmed by a top director at a time when Britain barely had a film industry worthy of the name.

‘I’m particularly proud of Macbeth, because it was my first film,’ said Martin. ‘It brought a lot out of me and was very demanding.’ In years to come, he was only too happy to talk about the movie during frequent interviews about his role as Doyle in the TV series The Professionals. ‘Macbeth had a profound effect on my career,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I can’t think of any other filmmaker I would rather work with than its director Roman Polanski – it was one of the high spots of my career.’

The whole Polanski experience whetted his appetite for working in movies, but a combination of circumstances, bad luck and bad timing meant that he did not build on Macbeth in the way he might perhaps have hoped. It should have been a springboard to higher things but instead Martin spent the next 12 months waiting for the phone to ring. He didn’t even have an interview, and nothing came his way. For him, it was a confusing and difficult period at a time when he had so many expectations.

‘The Polanski thing led to interesting enquiries,’ he said, ‘and there were two or three extraordinarily “unlucky” occurrences right afterwards. It wouldn’t be right to say what they were because other actors were involved. But I was there and I was cast in major films and then, just at the last minute, something happened or somebody changed their minds, or the producer fell out with the director or the money got lost.

‘And so I carried on with TV and theatre, and then the British film industry had one collapse after another. Then The Professionals came up, and during the time that I was doing The Professionals, the British film industry went through one of its periodic revivals. Then, when I finished The Professionals, the film industry was flunking again. So it has not been an area where I’ve had a great deal of success. I’ve had some, but not enough for me. I would certainly like to have film success but I would like to do it in British films.

‘The difficulty with the British film industry is that it is under-funded and nobody helps. The Government doesn’t realise what a cultural resource they have in this country; we’re the world’s worst at cultural recognition. We have got the best technicians in the world and the Americans love to come here and make films because of the quality of our technicians. Steven Spielberg tried desperately to keep EMI open in Elstree because he liked to come here and work.’

Two interesting, and very different, film opportunities which did, however, come his way in the mid-1970s were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Operation Daybreak.

The latter was directed by Lewis Gilbert, a veteran of several notable war movies including Reach For The Sky and Carve Her Name With Pride, as well as the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Gilbert returned to his war film roots to make Operation Daybreak, based on a true story of a secret mission to assassinate maniacal German commander, Reinhard Heydrich, whom the Nazis had positioned in the Czechoslovakian capital of Prague. Allied intelligence feared that if Hitler should be toppled, Heydrich would continue the expansion of the Third Reich.

Martin, enjoying second billing to American actor Timothy Bottoms, played the duplicitous Czech ex-patriot Sgt. Karel Curda, one of three parachutists sent in to perform Operation Daybreak – the assassination of Heydrich at any cost. But the mission runs into trouble when Martin’s turncoat character switches from Allied spy to Nazi informer, in the process giving away details of the location of the headquarters of the Czech liberation movement.

As with Polanski, Martin learned a great deal under Gilbert’s measured direction and attention to detail as they filmed in the depths of winter in Prague for three months in 1974. Czechoslovakia was then still a frontline Soviet state and Martin and his fellow cast members were put up in the Alcron hotel, which had been the Gestapo headquarters in the World War II. They were given little chance to explore the magnificent city and, for Martin, seeking out vegetarian fare was far from easy. He discovered there was not even a word for vegetarian in the Czech language. ‘It was incredibly difficult to find anything to eat other than pickles, processed cheese and bread,’ he later recalled.

But it was a very different story when Martin returned to Prague some 25 years later to film The Scarlet Pimpernel. With thousands of Americans now living in the city, he was not observed with suspicion on his shopping expeditions to seek out vegetarian food. ‘Vegetarianska’ was by now a word in common use. Even so, he was not taking any chances and he carefully packed away some appropriate food and clothes for the three months he expected to be filming on location. When he landed in Prague, however, his luggage went missing for four days and during that time he had no change of clothes or a toothbrush – and, to make matters worse, finding acceptable food was still something of a challenge.

One night while he was in Prague filming Operation Daybreak, he picked up the book Heart of the Hunter by Laurens van der Post, the South African educator, explorer, conservationist, philosopher and humanitarian. Since the 1950s, van der Post had become well known for his advocacy of the Kalahari desert and the culture of the Bushmen in southwestern Africa and Martin was captivated by his descriptions of the magical properties of the desert where you can ‘hear the light’.

The author’s prose captured his imagination and he was dreaming of visiting just such a place when the telephone rang with a call offering a star part in Burke and Wills to be made in the Australian desert by the BBC. This was an episode for a documentary series called The Explorers which used actors to portray the lives of famous adventurers. Soon afterwards, he found himself leaving behind the Prague winter to film in Alice Springs where it was a sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. ‘Only there was no shade, but everything van der Post had said was true,’ he commented. ‘I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the desert and its purity. You can feel the life force.’

Burke and Wills followed the fanciful and awful story of the journey made in 1860 by legendary Aussie explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. The two men set out on their ill-fated expedition after the government of South Australia offered a prize to the first expedition to cross the Australian continent from south to north.

Martin was cast as Burke, an Irishman who had emigrated to Melbourne and joined the police force, and who eventually died of starvation in 1861. The film was shot in Australia’s glorious outback and directed by Lord Snowdon, erstwhile stills photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was then best known as the husband of Princess Margaret.

As Martin was just about the only Englishman in the cast alongside a bunch of Australian actors and film crew, Martin and Tony – as Lord Snowdon preferred everyone to call him – enjoyed a natural affinity and developed a close friendship throughout the duration of the shoot. Martin found him to be a warm, sensitive and intensely private man, and enjoyed working with him.

It was far from easy filming in such sweltering heat. Among cast and crew there were some tetchy moments but Snowdon managed to keep the production moving forward and happy, and ultimately to do the story justice. At first there was some resentment in Australia’s acting fraternity that Pommie Martin should star in a film based on such quintessential Aussie explorers, but as the camera rolled, the Pom won them round with his dedication to his work as the cameras rolled.

The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, filmed in and around Mallorca with a screenplay by Brian Clemens, creator of The Professionals, could hardly have been more different from Operation Daybreak. This was an adventure story told with some opulence about Sinbad the Sailor coming across a golden tablet, which turns out to be one third of a puzzle.

Martin played Rachid, Sailor Sinbad’s first officer, but with limited opportunity for him, as it was John Philip Law as Sinbad and Tom Baker (later to become TV’s Doctor Who) as Koura the wizard who caught the eye, as well as the clever tricks of co-producer and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen.