[OPENING TITLE]
TOM HIDDLESTON: I’m sorry to get emotional about it. It’s just. It’s so deep.
…
HIDDLESTON: Hello, I’m Tom Hiddleston and I’m here with BAFTA, and we’re going to play back some clips from films that mean something to me and have inspired me.
So the first clip is from Tenzing, a film directed by Jennifer Peedom about the life of Tenzing Norgay, who was one of the first men to summit Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in the British expedition of 1953.
This clip is a happy memory for me.
[CLIP PLAYS OF TENZING]
HIDDLESTON: This really happened. It really happened to Hillary, and it really to me. So, Jennifer Peedom, our great director, the premise and the promise of her film was that we were going to do this for real. And we were going to shoot on real mountains, real ice, real snow, real wind, real conditions, real ice axe, real crampons, real crevasses.
Right towards the end of our shooting schedule, we were on a crevasse field. I was dangling 50 feet down, and one of my favourite things happened, which you see in that clip where the camera is rigged on a techno crane which is pushing along the surface of the snow over the lip of the crevasse.
So you see down it, and you see me in it for the first time. And something happened where, because of the nature of the drop of my body, the rope on the lip of the crevasse had dislodged a sheet of ice which came out, which came off in real time.
And I saw this enormous, what felt like the size of a bedsheet, a sort of a plate of ice coming towards me. I thought, ‘okay, that’s coming. I can’t move because I have no purchase on the mountain. I’m just suspended here.’ And I could see it getting bigger and bigger and it crashed over my head and then fragmented and shattered into a million pieces.
And I mean, I wasn’t sure if we were rolling yet because I hadn’t heard action and I just shouted up, into the blue sky. I said, ‘did you get it?’
And I had a radio in my, in my pocket and Jen Peedom and came over and said, ‘we got it. It looked amazing.’
….
HIDDLESTON: Speaking of being truthful in imaginary circumstances, my next clip is from Heat, directed by Michael Mann.
[CLIP OF HEAT PLAYS]
HIDDLESTON: I love this film. Heat has had such an impact on me as an actor. I believe it’s Al Pacino and Robert De Niro at the peak of their powers. Truly magnificent screen performers who have inspired millions. And they’ve inspired me.
The magic of this scene. In terms of the craft of acting, Pacino is not really a police detective, and De Niro is not really a thief. They are actors in an imagined scenario, having a cup of coffee and the requirement of the actor is to enliven the imaginary circumstance with stakes.
Drama lives or dies on the strength of the stakes and the capacity of the actor to play and inhabit the stakes. What is there to win and what is there to lose? It’s what elevates a scenario from the ordinary to being the definition of drama.
It’s why drama is not comedy, because you’re playing the stakes with sincerity. I can reduce it to two phrases, and I say this at work, and I say this to myself all the time so that nothing feels quotidian, nothing feels banal, nothing feels everyday or ordinary.
Two sentences which will always set you free. ‘This has never happened before’, and ‘it matters.’ And those two things release you from. ‘Oh, it’s in the script’ or ‘Oh, it’s what they told me to do.’ Or ‘oh, it’s the note I was given.’ That’s not how people live life. People live life forwards. They live life in the moment. This particular scene is about a kind of emotional reality, and it’s always been a lighthouse or a North Star for me about committing to a particular presence or a commitment to an emotional truth.
….
And those two sentences lead me elegantly into the next clip, which is from one of my own films. This is from Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh.
I haven’t seen this in a very long time.
[CLIP OF THOR PLAYS]
I remember like it was yesterday, but it wasn’t yesterday. It’s amazing to watch that scene that fills me with such extraordinary warmth. Now, it’s right at the beginning of a journey that’s completely changed my life.
The origin story of his status as an antagonist is so full of poignancy and vulnerability, and emotional turbulence, and I think recognisable human feeling. And I felt so grateful for the scene.
I thought, what an extraordinary origin, what an extraordinary beginning for this character who now has to exist in the architecture of the framework of the story as a villain, you know, he has to be at the end of the film, Thor must win and Loki must lose.
That’s how these stories work, but that the audience would be invited into why he becomes a villain and feel for him. It was one of the first dialogue scenes that we had in the film and very early in the schedule. You know, Kenneth Branagh wisely knows at the start, start the schedule with something meaty. Start the schedule with something really that you feel that you’ve got. You’ve planted a flag in the sand for what the film is.
I remember there was a moment where Ken had said to me, ‘when you say, ‘tell me’, say it really quietly. And then if he doesn’t hear you and he doesn’t tell you, demand that he tell you. And don’t take no for an answer until he tells you.’
And so that extraordinary, explosion, when I say ‘tell me’, there had been this silence on the other side of the camera, is Tony didn’t say anything. And I remember Ken’s instruction was, make him tell you. And I just screamed, ‘tell me.’
And then what happened as a result of that in the take was there was a, a kind of, a palpable emotional reality that was taking place, as I say, in the moment, I couldn’t have cultivated it. And the results are in the film forever.
I’ve played Loki for 16 years, and I’m still playing Loki. And that scene, I think, is the cornerstone of the entire characterisation. The fact that inside this, master mischief-maker, this agent of chaos, who has great defences of charm and wit, but also huge reserves of emotional feeling.
This is the reason I get to play all the keys on the piano is because there’s this incredibly recognisable, empathetic, compassionate reading of the character that exists in this film, and it’s almost like it anchors everything else I’ve ever done.
…..
HIDDLESTON: My next clip is my interpretation of a visual masterpiece. It is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
[CLIP OF 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY PLAYS]
HIDDLESTON: When this film opened and the sun rises over the planets and you hear the opening strains of Richard Strauss and The Blue Danube and this incredibly sophisticated construction of a Viennese waltz. And the planets were dancing.
I was in awe. I was in awe of the confidence. I was in awe of the construction, just the authority and the clarity of it.
Not a wasted second, not a wasted frame, that it seemed to be within ten minutes I go, oh, this is a film about life. This is a film about the meaning of life and the meaning, if there is any, in the experience of being alive, the miracle of it, the fact that there’s only life on this planet, and that the reason we’re interested in space is because we’re not sure there is life anywhere else. And what on earth does it mean down here?
But none of that didactic or autocratic or pompous or puffed up, just poetry in motion, and it sustains for the rest of the film our relationship with technology, our relationship with exploration, our relationship with each other, it is visually breathtaking in a way that I think has never been bettered.
And you see, I could read at the age of 21, I could, having seen Star Wars and Star Trek and other films, said, oh, I see, this is The Godfather to or to any, you know, exploration of space in motion pictures.
All points lead to 2001. All roads lead to Kubrick.
….
HIDDLESTON: Speaking of sound and image. There is one film that I am always playing back and will always return to. If I paint an image for you in your mind, who doesn’t know the image of a British woman in a British hat floating down from a very British cloud on an umbrella?
Her name is, and can only be, Mary Poppins.
[CLIP OF MARY POPPINS PLAYS]
HIDDLESTON: I love this film so much. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know this film by heart. As a child, you access the film from a child’s perspective of, you have to tidy up the nursery and all you want to do is jump in and out of chalk pavement pictures and dance with the penguins and Dick Van Dyke.
Watching it now and as I’ve watched it, as I’ve got older, I realised it’s not a film about children at all. It’s a film about being a parent. Mary Poppins is a story about – I’m sorry, I admit, I get so moved by it. It’s a story about a man learning how to be a father and a woman learning how to be a mother. It’s so. It’s such a, so moving.
And you realise, sorry to get emotional, but Mary Poppins comes into the life of this family to remind Mr. Banks and Mrs. Banks that their children are precious.
And they are brilliant, capable, wonderful people, but they’re missing it. They’re missing their children’s childhood. And it’s so deft. It’s so it’s very, very carefully, beautifully, intricately constructed. There’s all this feeling in it, but it’s not sentimental at all. And so much wisdom.
Of course, I haven’t talked about the most extraordinary sequences, you know, the popping in and out of pavement pictures, laughing on the ceiling, the chimney sweep dance on the rooftops of London.
I also love it as a film about London as a Londoner. I was born in London, I was raised in London, and the whole film is a love song to London.
When Mary Poppins, Bert, Jane and Michael are on top of the stack of smoke that somehow Mary has magicked into a staircase and they’re looking out at London at night and the river and St. Paul’s, and it’s all twinkling in the gloaming. It’s so beautiful. And it’s such a eulogy for London.
….
HIDDLESTON: These have been films which mean so much to me for so many different reasons. Moments in my life that I have felt are unforgettable, films that have inspired me to do the work that I do and in the way that I do it.
It’s been my pleasure to play them back.
…
[CAMERA PANS TO DIFFERENT MEMORABILIA AROUND THE ROOM]
HIDDLESTON: Hamlet. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.
…
This is Warhorse, Captain Nichols, Michael Morpurgo, Steven Spielberg, an unforgettable experience in my life as well.
…
Thanks, Chuck. Nobody puts Chuck in the corner. Very close to my heart, because that’s also about the meaning of life.
…
And this is a house plant available too at your local garden store.
…
This, for those of you who don’t know, is the Tesseract. Be careful what you do with it.
…
This is a map of Mount Everest with a charming miniature ice axe, which is beautiful here, but wouldn’t do much good on the mountain.
…
Last but not least, the letters of T.E. Lawrence, which is, the book in Jonathon Pine’s apartment in Zermatt, where he is The Night Manager. It’s also what I was given by John le Carré as a wrap gift.
….
My life in miniature.
…
PRODUCER: That’s a wrap thank you very much, Tom Hiddleston!
[CLAPPING]
