When Ralph Fiennes made his directorial debut in 2011 with a film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, there was no telling if this was just a one-off. Certainly, he wouldn’t be the first well-known actor to dabble in directing. Since then, however, Fiennes has continued to direct, first with the Charles Dickens drama, The Invisible Woman (which reunited him with Kristen Scott Thomas from The English Patient), and now with The White Crow.
Based on the book, Rudolf Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh, The White Crow tells the true story of a famous ballet dancer who became one of the first prominent Russians to defect from the Soviet Union. The movie won the award for Best Artistic Contribution at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, where Fiennes also appeared at a press conference and post-screening Q&A for it.
At the press conference, sitting beside producer and fellow Academy Award nominee Gabrielle Tana (Philomena), Fiennes explained that he “was very insistent we should find a dancer who could act” for The White Crow.
“When I read the screenplay,” he said, “it was very clearly a strong dramatic role. There was dancing and ballet in the film, but it was a gift as an acting role. It was a great opportunity for someone. But I was very hesitant and nervous to cast an actor, who would have to learn ballet, which would be harder to pull off. Because, as you know, these dancers start when they’re very, very young, so the expression and gesture is in them in a very deep way. And I would have to then, if I chose an actor, I would have to have body doubles.”
This insistence on finding a real ballet dancer who could act sets The White Crow apart from movies like Darren Aronofsky’s Oscar-winning Black Swan, where controversy erupted over how much credit Natalie Portman’s dance double—American Ballet Theatre soloist, Sarah Lane—received for her work onscreen.
For the role of Nureyev in The White Crow, Fiennes ultimately went with Oleg Ivenko, a Ukrainian dancer with no acting credits. One of the qualities that made Ivenko stand out in the casting search was his potential star power.
“It sounds a bit simple,” Fiennes said, “but it is true that the camera loves him. So that, once you put a camera on Oleg, you want to watch. And that’s the quality of a movie star, I think, that you just want to watch what goes through their face.”
Fiennes Reluctantly Co-Starred and Drew Inspiration from Literature and Art
In The White Crow, Fiennes takes a step back from playing the lead and only appears in a supporting role as Nureyev’s ballet instructor, Alexander Pushkin. “The initial idea,” Tana explained, was that Fiennes “was just going to direct” and not be in front of the camera at all this time around. “And then, for, I guess, the commercial value of the film,” she continued, “he came around to understanding that it would make a big difference if he actually was in it as well. And it was really, really hard. And it was something that I think pained everybody to ask him to do. But his performance is so extraordinary in it. And also there was something poetic about watching him be the teacher of this young dancer who was becoming an actor.”
Acting in The White Crow did allow Fiennes to speak Russian, which is an ability he showed off onstage at the post-screening Q&A as well. He spoke fondly of Saint Petersburg, calling it “the city that has the most emotional resonance” for him, and he cited Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian author of Crime and Punishment, as a source of inspiration.
“One of my favorite authors is Dostoevsky,” he said, “because he takes quite extreme, often monstrous human beings and invites us to see the humanity in them. Of course, it runs alongside a strong Christian ethic, which I don’t claim to hold, but I do feel there’s an essential profound humanity in the way Dostoevsky examines the pain and the beauty of what it is to be human. So, any story that touches on this is always interesting to me.”
Onstage, Fiennes sometimes struck a pose reminiscent of The Thinker, the Auguste Rodin sculpture, which you can see outside the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno, Tokyo. While shooting The White Crow, he was given special permission to film in a couple of world-class museums, too. Rembrandt’s oil painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, served as the focal point for a scene at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
“We also shot in the Louvre Museum in Paris when it was closed,” Fiennes added. “And that scene when [Nureyev] looks at the Géricault was also the real place, real location, real paintings. But no one was there. It was closed, and around the corner from the Géricault was the Mona Lisa. And my assistant was there, and she said, ‘Ralph, Ralph, come round the corner. You can see the Mona Lisa.’ So, we crept around into this empty room, and I had the Mona Lisa all to myself.”
Just as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus grew “from man to dragon,” Ralph Fiennes has grown from actor (in films like Red Dragon) to director (of films like The White Crow). In his third directorial effort, Fiennes lifts the Iron Curtain on the preeminent ballet dancer of his time, Rudolph Nureyev, and shows how his free-spirited nature led to the pivotal moment of him seeking political asylum outside Russia.