Iris tells the story of the great English novelist Iris Murdoch — of her love of life, her relationship with John Bayley, and their struggle to cope with Alzheimer's. The film has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, for Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslet, and has garnered some outstanding reviews.

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The genesis of the film, at least as far as I was concerned, was in March of 1999. I was sitting with Judi Dench in a diner at the corner of 8th Avenue and 43rd Street in New York when I first heard about Iris, which is not, of course, when I first heard of Iris. That would have been round about 1963, when I read a novel by Iris Murdoch (there were to be twenty-six) for the first time. Coincidentally it was her first novel, Under the Net, and what struck me then is what strikes me now about her writing: it buzzed with a wayward energy and a prodigality of ideas. Above all, it was like nothing else I’d read.

Judi had just won an Oscar for her performance in Shakespeare in Love and we were rehearsing for a Broadway show: Amy’s View by Dave Hare. We discussed her future and she revealed that she’d been asked to be in a film to be based on John Bayley’s two books about his wife, Iris Murdoch, their life together and her death from Alzheimer’s disease. ‘Are they looking for a director?’ I said, ever opportunistic. ‘I’ve no idea, Rich, no idea.’

I discovered that the producer of the putative film was John Calley, who has the manners and manner of an English gentleman, which he combines with the distinctly ungentlemanly chore of running a major Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures. He was indeed looking for a director and a writer, but at that stage neither bore my name.

Of his books John Bayley has said:
‘Iris would have approved.’ I believe she would.

Several months passed during which I lobbied through all available channels and, to my surprise, in November of 1999 John Calley asked me to write and direct Iris. ‘Why did you ask me?’ I said. ‘You know about these things,’ he replied. The ‘things’ to which he referred were not so much film-making (even though he knew and liked several films I’d made for TV), or even directing actors in difficult roles (well, I have directed Hamlet twice), but a ‘thing’ of which I would rather have been entirely ignorant: Alzheimer’s disease.

Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997 and John Bayley looked after her until he was unable to cope; she died three weeks after she was moved to a specialised nursing home. My mother also had Alzheimer’s disease and she died in 1992, but unlike Iris Murdoch, whose decline was over a period of two years, my mother’s was over twenty.

It was partly out of curiosity about his experience of Alzheimer’s that I read John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir when it was first published. Expecting a bleak chronicle of the decline of a great mind, I was unprepared for the enchantment of a moving and humorous narrative that dealt as much with their lives before the illness as after. The second volume, Iris and the Friends, charted her further decline and her death, and in addition gave an account of his childhood and adolescence.

John Bayley has been criticised for writing about his wife’s illness. Leaving aside the fact that, like all good writers, he has successfully risen above journalistic voyeurism by transmuting experience into art, no one who has lived with an Alzheimer’s sufferer could condemn his project. Only they could know the weariness of dressing and undressing, bathing and feeding the Alzheimer’s victim, or the despair and exasperation engendered by broken nights, incomprehensible sounds, unpredictable moods and inexpressible needs. And all the while watching, watching the loved one simply fade away. Of his books John Bayley has said: ‘Iris would have approved.’ I believe she would.

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In mapping out the screenplay we were clear what we wanted: to tell a story of a relationship in which love was challenged and yet endured, a love story which explored the paradox of how it is possible to remain separate in a marriage and yet for the sum of that marriage to be greater than its parts. And we were clear enough what we wanted to avoid: a bio-film that itemised their lives with dogged veracity, or an illness-of-the-week film that claimed the sanctity of victimhood for its protagonist.

I wanted the film to be enjoyed by people who had never read a word of Iris Murdoch, heard her name spoken or seen a photograph of her, not because I didn’t want people to celebrate the achievements of her life or to mourn her death, but simply in the hope that people could appreciate this film without bringing special baggage on board. So we agreed that in telling the story we had to give the audience all necessary information about her work and her fame by sleight of hand or by disguised exposition.

We adopted John Bayley’s scheme of interweaving the stories of young and old love: the two tenses, present and past, would converge along the narrative spine, underscored by the decay of language and the loss of memory. We decided that water would play as large a part in the film as it had in John Bayley’s narrative: in swimming sequences, as a medium to express the unconscious, and as a device that linked past and present; the film would begin and end underwater. Above all we knew this: it had to be unsentimental, it had to be funny, and it had to be moving. ‘The job,’ said a writer friend, ‘is to make the audience cry.’

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"By the time I came to shoot the film, the ‘truth’
had become relative ... we created fictional facts."