Why Tim Roth thinks we all should have the right to die

Mexican director Michel Franco doesn’t do easy subjects. That appealed to the star of Chronic, as he tells Nick Roddick
Nick Roddick15 September 2015

They make an unlikely pair. Tim Roth, a very English actor with an amiable manner but always (on screen) a hint of menace — plus, in the days following his new film with Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight, a luxuriant beard. And Michel Franco, a Mexican director, whose head is usually surrounded by an enormous “jewfro”, and whose films deal with shocking subjects presented in almost documentary style.

“He does very little rehearsal,” says Roth of Franco and Chronic, the film they recently made together, which premiered in Cannes and now screens at the LFF. “There would be a little bit of mechanical blocking, then he’d find his frame and me and the guys would have our conversation. On set, I was very focused because the work was over: it was the preparation that was the difficult bit.”

Franco doesn’t do easy stories. His first feature, Daniel and Ana, which premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2009, tells the story of a brother and sister from a well-off background who are forced to have sex together on camera by their blackmailing kidnappers. After Lucia, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2012, is about a girl who is bullied at school and whose father takes shocking revenge. Chronic ups the ante even further, dealing with such topics as sexual abuse, guilt, death and euthanasia in the story of a home-care nurse (Roth) who works with terminally-ill patients.

The pair first met when Roth chaired the jury which gave Franco his prize for After Lucia. To say the actor was impressed by the film is something of an understatement. “I kicked furniture around after I’d seen that film,” he says. “Seriously, I was like toys-out-of-the-pram. I was so upset I was crying. I called my wife and she said, ‘I cannot understand you Tim, calm down’. I was really fucked up: the film devastated me.” He met Franco after the screening, and that was when they first developed the idea of working together.

“We went for a beer afterwards at the hotel and I said, ‘What are you doing next?’ And he said he wanted to make a film about when his grandmother died and they weren’t allowed in. I asked him about that and said, ‘Can I be in it?’ He said, ‘It’s about a nurse’. And I said, ‘Well, make it a male nurse’. And he did. We started working on Chronic pretty much a couple of weeks later…”

It wasn’t a continuous process — Roth is much in demand (he appeared in four films and two TV series in 2014 alone) — but it did involve the actor in some real medical procedures.

“I had to train, yeah,” he says. “I kind of did it across a year. And one thing I learned was, the fact that you research it doesn’t necessarily make it easier. But there are people out there who really know how to deal with this stuff. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. I met some nurses and went to meet some patients — incredible people who are now gone.

“When we were working on the script, I went off and did a couple of movies and then spent some time with people who specialised in counselling the family — not the patient, more ‘this person is going to die: how are you going to deal with it?’”

One of the things that gives Chronic its power — and doubtless led to it winning Best Screenplay in Cannes — is the fact that it doesn’t tell the expected story. The focus is on those who are dying and on David (Roth’s character), the less-than-perfect professional who works with and develops a relationship with them. For David, this contact proves difficult, sometimes unbearably so: he has “a buried core of horror inside him”, says Roth.

There is more than a hint in the script that David helped his own terminally ill son to die, and has been both estranged from his family and personally traumatised as a result.

“He did a good thing and now we’re looking at how he’s dealing with the repercussions,” says the actor. The research Roth did also made him think very hard about the film’s most difficult subject: assisted dying, which he feels is no one’s business but the person making the decision to die. “This is my shit: I don’t want some politician telling me what I’m supposed to do — or some church… Who wrote that book? I am not having it. It’s not even open for discussion. If I am dying in a horribly painful way, what’s the problem? How does the government get me to stop doing it? We all know that society has to have rules or we wouldn’t be able to function, but my right to die just quietly in my own way: should that be an issue? I think that the government and the church should really stay the fuck out of our business.”

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