‘Allelujah’ Director Richard Eyre on Grappling With Old Age on Screen: ‘I Wanted to Avoid Any Patronizing Sentimentality’
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor “Allelujah,” Richard Eyre’s latest film, unfolds in a Yorkshire geriatric hospital, following a group of patients as they make peace with or rage against the indignities of old age.
It’s a story that resonates with Eyre, a legendary stage and screen director. “I’m about to be 80,” he says. “So old age isn’t my consuming passion, but it’s a subject that has been forced on me and that has become difficult to ignore.
I’m acutely aware of having outlived both my parents and many of my friends.” Perhaps unwittingly, “Allelujah,” which premieres this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, also serves as a showcase for a generation of English actors such as Judi Dench, David Bradley, and Derek Jacobi, who have all entered their ninth decades. “I’m not sure I was fully conscious of it it, but what a privilege to have this professional continuity,” Eyre says. “These are people that I started working with 30 or 40 years ago.” The film adapts Alan Bennett’s play of the same name, but Eyre says that many radical changes were taken to bring the story from stage to screen.
He kept the setting and many of the characters, but reordered the narrative and excised musical numbers that were sung and danced by the geriatric patients. “I wanted it to be much more real and the play was more of a surreal fantasy,” he says.
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