Poirot and Me (41 page)

at the heart of the final film in the series that

I started in the summer and autumn of 2009,

arguably Dame Agatha’s best-known Poirot

story, Murder on the Orient Express. Filming

began in January 2010. The notion of

retribution is at the heart of what – to my

mind – was one of her most disturbing

stories, though that had never truly surfaced

in the 1974 film. No one could ever gainsay

that movie. It was simply wonderful film-

making, though Dame Agatha herself had

never been utterly certain about it. Most

important of all, however, was the fact that

there were very significant elements of her

original story which were simply never

covered in the film. In particular, it had

never addressed Poirot’s deeply held

conviction that murder can never be

justified, and should always be punished.

When I first heard that we were going to

do a new version of the story, I read and re-

read the book, to remind myself how just

serious it was, and how directly it addressed

the core of Poirot’s faith and beliefs. After I

had finished, I was more determined than

ever that we should be true to the tone of

the novel in our new version and bring that

conviction into the script, and therefore into

my performance. There are no jokes in

Murder on the Orient Express. It is an essay

in brutal murder, and I wanted to reveal that

fact. It is not about a Poirot who is famous

for his pernickety behaviour, or his funny

hair-and moustache-net; it is a story about

evil, and whether it can ever be justified.

In the original novel Dame Agatha never

wrote about Poirot wearing a hairnet or a

moustache-net, as he did in the original film,

never gave him little sly asides, never once

made him funny. Instead, she portrayed him

as a man confronted by a murder most foul,

but who then, in solving it, presents himself

with a dilemma that racks his conscience. I

remembered clearly her daughter Rosalind’s

words to me before I started our very first

film: ‘We must never, ever, laugh at him,’

and she then went on, ‘You’re not going to

wear those horrible hairnet or moustache-

net things, are you? My mother never wrote

about them.’

There was nothing whatever to laugh

about in Dame Agatha’s magnificent story,

for it confronts Poirot, a committed Catholic,

with a desperate dilemma, by solving a

premeditated murder based in revenge,

which some might be tempted to justify on

the grounds that it dispensed with the life of

a man who took pleasure in destroying other

people for his own selfish satisfaction.

That dilemma is what I wanted to bring

out, and I was delighted when the director,

Philip Martin, and the screenwriter, Stewart

Harcourt, who had just written The Clocks,

arrived at my flat in London and told me that

they wanted to do exactly that – to reveal

Poirot’s anger at the murder and his agony

at what his conscience would allow him to do

once he had uncovered the truth.

That is why Stewart’s screenplay started

by demonstrating to the audience Poirot’s

dark mood, with a scene in which a young

British officer shoots himself in front of him,

spattering his face with spots of blood, and

then a brutal scene of a woman being stoned

to death. This was not a comfortable country

house murder-mystery, where Miss Scarlet

may have committed the crime with the

candlestick in the billiard room. This was a

story about murder most foul, set at a time

when killing led to the hangman’s noose.

Written by Dame Agatha while on an

archaeological dig with Max Mallowan in

what is now Iraq in 1933, Murder on the

Orient Express was published the following

year. It was dedicated to her second

husband, who is said to have suggested the

solution. The book was retitled Murder in the

Calais Coach for the United States, because

it appeared just two years after Graham

Greene’s first major success, his novel

Stamboul Train, which had been renamed

Orient Express in the United States. The

publishers were afraid there might be

confusion between the two.

Dame Agatha had travelled on the Orient

Express several times on her way back from

archaeological sites before she wrote the

novel, and when she came back in 1933,

with the story all but completed, she used

the opportunity to check some of the details

on the train, to be sure they matched her

novel. The train was part of her inspiration.

In 1929, just a year after she had first

travelled on it, the Orient Express was

caught in a snowdrift following a blizzard in

Turkey and was unable to move for six days.

Two years later, in December 1931, she

herself was trapped on the train for twenty-

four hours, following flooding and a landslide

that washed part of the track away.

The other part of Dame Agatha’s

inspiration was, of course, the Lindbergh

kidnapping in the United States in 1932. The

American aviator Charles Lindbergh, who

had made the first solo crossing of the

Atlantic in 1927, had his infant son

kidnapped and killed just five years later, in

1932. A maid was suspected of involvement

in the crime, and after being harshly

interrogated by the police, committed

suicide. Some of the elements of that crime

lie at the very heart of Murder on the Orient

Express.

The book was certainly well received after

its publication. In the Daily Mail, the novelist

Compton Mackenzie called it ‘a capital

example of its class’, while Dorothy L.

Sayers, no mean hand at crime fiction

herself, described it as ‘a murder mystery

conceived and carried out on the finest

classical

lines’

in

the Sunday Times.

Meanwhile, the New York Times commented,

‘The great Belgian detective’s guesses are

more than shrewd; they are positively

miraculous,’

and Time magazine added,

‘Clues abound. Alibis are frequent and

unassailable. But nothing confounds the

great Hercule . . .’

It is another closed-room mystery, though

this time one set on a stationary train

trapped in a snowdrift, rather than a country

house. We chose to recreate the train itself

in a studio at Pinewood, to give the cast the

same feeling of claustrophobia that the

characters would have felt on the train itself,

and I think that worked tremendously well.

We also benefitted from an extraordinarily

good script, and the director, Philip Martin,

made the whole piece far darker and

moodier than perhaps the audience had

been expecting.

In particular, Philip decided to use a lot of

close-ups of my face to underline the nature

of the dilemma Poirot was facing, and how

perturbed he was by it. Philip shot me in a

way that I had never been shot before as

Poirot, with so much emphasis on my face,

and repeatedly told me not to rush and to go

inside the character in search of how Poirot

was truly feeling. As a result, it became one

of the most exciting experiences with a

director that I have ever had. It was

challenging every single day, and it was very

brave of him to do it, because from it

emerged the face of a Poirot trapped in a

personal agony, and that was what Philip

wanted to shoot. I do not believe I smile

once in the entire film; to do so would have

been inappropriate to the story, to me, and I

was desperate, as I always was, to serve

Dame Agatha’s vision in her original novel.

Once again, ITV had provided a simply

wonderful cast, including Toby Jones as the

victim of the crime, Dame Eileen Atkins,

David

Morrissey,

Sam

West,

Hugh

Bonneville, the American actress Barbara

Hershey and the recently twice-Oscar-

nominated (for The Help and Zero Dark

Thirty) Jessica Chastain. They all gave

tremendous performances.

The miracle was that we got it done in just

twenty-three shooting days, and, to this day,

I am not sure quite how we did it, because

there is such a lot of dialogue. Poirot’s

summing-up speech in the dining car is one

of the longest and most difficult that I have

ever had to learn and deliver, not least

because he rages at those who would seek

to overturn the ‘rule of law’ by taking

matters into their own hands. It was so

testing that Sheila came down with me to

help me get through it, and even sat in an

adjoining railway carriage during the

denouement, to help me get the lines right

and make sure I did not lose my way.

For me, Poirot is fighting both his Catholic

faith and his moral reasoning as he confronts

what should be done at the end of the story.

His faith tells him firmly that man should not

kill, but he also knows that the Bible

instructs that man should love his neighbour

and forgive their sins. He wants to please

God and stay true to his belief that part of

his role in life is to defeat evil wherever it

may be, but that faith contradicts what his

moral reasoning suggests: that sometimes

people deserve to be forgiven.

The contradiction finds him trapped in

confusion and anger, a most unusual place

for him to find himself, and helps to account

for the torment that he seems to find himself

in throughout the story. I am convinced that

when he returns to his compartment after

the denouement, to consider exactly what he

should do, he spends his time alone there

not only praying for God’s guidance, but also

painfully aware that he may not be able to

follow it.

In the end, Poirot reaches his decision, but

it does not sit easily with him, and I made

sure that the last time we see him in the

film, he is walking away with his back to the

camera, but with his rosary clearly to be

seen in his hand. He is carrying the pain of

going against his Catholic faith, but at the

same time is conscious that sometimes there

is no alternative other than to do so.

Now, I realise that the darkness of this

choice means that some people who had

only seen the 1974 film, and had never read

Dame Agatha’s original novel, might not be

quite as enthusiastic about our version.

Indeed, I suspect it may never be quite as

popular as the earlier film, but the director,

the writer and I were trying as hard as we

could to stay true to the tone and depth of

Dame Agatha’s original, and I think it shows

exactly what I always mean when I say that

my role as an actor is to serve my writer.

I did not know it at the time, but it was to

be more than two years before Poirot and I

would be together again. In fact, I again

feared, as we finished shooting, that I might

never finish the entire canon of Dame

Agatha’s Poirot stories for television. Yet, by

a strange turn of events, the next time I

climbed back into his waistcoat, spats and

gloves, I was to play his death in her final

story of his life, Curtain.

Chapter 18

‘IT IS NEVER FINISHED

WITH A MURDER.

JAMAIS!’

The shoot for Murder on the Orient

Express ended in February 2010, but it

was not broadcast in Britain until Christmas

Day the following year, rather confirming my

suspicion that I might never actually

complete the last five stories Dame Agatha

had written for Poirot. There was no doubt in

my mind that the very best ones had been

done already, and although there were four

gentle and engaging stories left, there was

only one jewel in the crown of what

remained: Curtain, Poirot’s final case, which

had never been filmed.