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00:17Hello and welcome to the first night in a new film club series. This year the mix will be as
00:22eclectic as before, though instead of regular double bills there'll be some seasons running
00:27in parallel, such as new Chinese cinema and the Hollywood blacklist, as well as retrospectives
00:32of Rossellini and Preston Sturgis. But tonight we open with something very special. Eureka may be
00:40the most affirmative word in any language. It was Archimedes' cry of triumph when he leapt from the
00:45bathwater after discovering specific gravity. It was Edgar Allan Poe's title for his last great work,
00:51A Meditation on the Cosmos, and it's the name of millionaire Jack McCann's Caribbean mansion
00:56in Nicholas Roeg's film Eureka, an almighty fable of one man's rise and fall, and probably the most
01:03ambitious movie by a British director this decade. Eureka, I've found it. Luckily there's no equivalent
01:10word for I've lost it. Otherwise it would surely have been yelled by Roeg soon after completing
01:14this 11 million dollar film about a retired gold prospector living and dying on his lost dreams.
01:21The costliest film yet by the director of Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth,
01:25Eureka was barely out of the can back in 1982 when Hollywood tried to put it firmly back in.
01:32MGM took one look at this rogue product and deemed it so uncommercial that American release plans were
01:38cancelled. In Britain it was aborted as a video release and there was a time even the National
01:43Film Theatre couldn't get a copy for a special screening. I know because I tried. I picked Eureka
01:48for a Critics' Choice season and spent weeks telephoning round between MGM, producer Jeremy
01:54Thomas and a harassed Nicholas Roeg to find a print. Whatever did MGM find so frightening?
02:01It's true, Eureka is not the sound of music. It's a towering cinematic invention based on true life
02:07foundations. The model for Jack McCann, played by Gene Hackman, was millionaire ex-gold prospector
02:13Sir Harry Oakes, who was brutally murdered in Nassau in 1943. Who did it? No one knows to this day,
02:21nor why, though his French playboy son-in-law Alfred de Marigny was tried and acquitted.
02:27Rogue and screenwriter Paul Myersberg have taken small hints from this cause célèbre and turned
02:32them into a giant fiction, a fiction that echoes, like the icy mountains of the film's prologue set
02:37in the Yukon, with whistling mysteries and questions. McCann may also die a cruel death,
02:44but did he die spiritually years before, when his great adventure in the goldfields was fulfilled and
02:50ended? Burnt out by that early ecstasy, he now lives on in the spirit of his daughter, Tracy,
02:56played by Teresa Russell. Her near telepathic closeness is suggested in Rogian scenes of rhyming
03:02cross-cut action and Freudian imagery, notably a gold chain that's like a father-daughter umbilical
03:08cord. The film is about a man's soul that's up for grabs. The murder, hints rogue, is part suicide,
03:16McCann's willed self-destruction, and it's part cannibalism, as he's closed in on by two groups of predators.
03:23One group is materialistic, Miami-based gangsters, and the other is spiritual, the parasitic son-in-law,
03:29or Claude. Preeningly played by Rutger Hauer, Claude leeches McCann's soul through McCann's own
03:36daughter. Perhaps the film's most astounding turn comes in a long, bizarre trial scene in which Tracy
03:42and Claude peel away at each other's souls, as if the eerily lit courtroom were a theatre presided over
03:49by Judge Strindberg. But then expecting a straight story from Nicholas Rogue is like expecting a straight
03:54roller coaster. Eureka swerves and soars through time and space, and it rumbles thunderously with
04:00allusion and quotation, not least from Citizen Kane in its portrait of a modern Midas, complete with
04:06Xanadu-like mansion, doom-laden marriage, and a hand closing over a talismanic keepsake.
04:13Eureka is that rare thing, a true modern tragedy, a tale that begins with passion and ends in an
04:20almost biblical passion. And it boasts a hero played with powerhouse grandeur and unforced
04:26pathos by Gene Hackman. That's what I feel about the film. Now we're going to hear three of the
04:32film's creators talk about it. Producer Jeremy Thomas, writer Paul Myersberg, and even its normally
04:38camera-shy director, Nicholas Rogue.
04:44Well, I'd previously made a film with Nick, Bad Timing, which was the first time we'd worked together.
04:51And we enjoyed the experience very much. And Nick had loved this subject, and had got this book,
05:01King's Ex, or Who Kills Harry Oakes. It had two different titles written by Marshall Howes. Paul
05:06Myersberg had worked with Nick before on Manifel to Earth, and he was the writer of the movie.
05:11He expected me, Nick, expected me not to know the story. Now, on the whole, you wouldn't know the
05:16story, but it so happened that someone years ago had come to me with the same book. So I'd read
05:22it,
05:23and it seemed to me that it was a magnificent idea for a film about family relationships,
05:32if you like, that were connected with the social circumstances of the time.
05:41All the characters, I had a sense that they were all, it's a terrible word, symbols, but as in some
05:53great play, let's say, the daughter, the father, the wife, the, you know, the husband, the young husband,
06:04rather, rather extraordinary, more extraordinary, larger than life. McCann was a man who was
06:11a man who was, um, single-mindedly wanted to be more than his own person, but, um, to thank no
06:22one for.
06:28Rosebud.
06:33We made an explicit reference to, uh, to Wells's film, um, with the big house, which he called Eureka,
06:44which was a corollary, if you like, to Xanadu and Kane. But there was no connection in our minds
06:51between, uh, Jack McCann, our semi-invented character, and Citizen Kane and William Randolph Hearst.
07:00The connection really was to Orson Welles, because our story was one which tells of a man who,
07:08having got what he wanted, then finds that there's no further to go, and his life slips and slides
07:15to a kind of chaotic despair. And that was not the story of Hearst, obviously, or of Kane. It was
07:22the
07:22story of Wells, who struck gold, if you like, with Citizen Kane, and then paid for the next 50 years
07:30of his life, um, with despair. So the story that interested us, really, was how it would be, how did
07:38it come about, that when you get what you want, it's not that you don't want it, it's what it
07:42does to you,
07:44and that then your life is really over. So in a sense, Jack McCann died twice. Once at the moment
07:53that he found the gold and achieved his aim, and twice the second time when he was murdered.
08:01I've wanted to have it, the sense that it takes a lot to kill that, a lot of killing to
08:08snuff out that
08:09life force. And it always seems that bullfights, you know, the bull seems to live on against these
08:17little people that are struggling to kill this magnificent beast, and still roars against being
08:26destroyed by people he could destroy, and would not die. Life is very precious, and it's very powerful
08:33from a baby, you know. There was a line in it originally, you know, and um, there was another scene
08:41when Jack and Tracy are driving in the car, and he says to her, I remember your birth. I remember
08:52you all
08:52covered in blood like a terrible murder, and I thought it was a wonderful, but a sort of prescient
08:58thought, but her birth was powerful, a marvelous thing. The relationship with the father and daughter
09:05was particularly interesting to me, because I wanted it to be more than merely, um, oh, a loving
09:13relationship as it is quite a natural, um, thing that, yes, I love my daddy, and I love my daughter,
09:21and, you know, she's the very apple of my eye. I wanted her to be the very clone of McCann,
09:26that truly part of him. And it struck me that if we could find a way that they knew exactly
09:35what each other, how, how they were thinking, or how their mind worked, you know, it's the lover's
09:41oldest question, isn't it? Do you love me, darling? What are you thinking? And you can never tell
09:46anybody, so how to get inside that, and we'd worked as the dinner party scene was essentially to exclude
09:56everybody else but Jack and the daughter. And our view was that for her, who were a woman who were,
10:08who had money, as it were, who had position and so forth, what she wanted, the gold of her life,
10:15if you like, uh, was a man, not property or the magic of gold itself or whatever.
10:24And he couldn't stand this. He couldn't stand this man. So, in a way, it becomes a story of sexual
10:30jealousy.
10:31I thought it was wonderful of Rutger that big enough to accept the fact that, um,
10:36Claude ends, ends being a weak person. In the trial, he's told who he is, comes to face to face
10:43with
10:43himself. When you look at me, what do you see? She said, I see a man that can't pass a
10:48mirror without
10:49looking at him. I think it was Verlaine that said, uh, goodbye, said the dying man, as he looked in
10:55the
10:55mirror. I shan't be seeing you anymore. So what was actually a trial about who killed Jack McCann turned into
11:05a trial of the people themselves, that their lives were equally on trial because of this, uh, horrendous
11:14event. And then it turns out that everybody connected with a trial has something to hide. So really,
11:21it was the story of the things that were hidden. Maybe I'm a jinx. Yes, maybe. What does it mean?
11:32Oh, jinx. It's a regular cry from a producer or filmmakers when the film is not popular,
11:38but we didn't really get a proper shot anywhere. It started off with MGM, um,
11:45who started developing the film. And then MGM was bought by United Artists. And then it was merged
11:51with United Artists. And then Eureka finally, whilst we were in midway through production,
11:56became a United Artists picture. And we had many studio bosses and heads of production.
12:01It was sort of opened with shame because I think there was a, um, um, a lack of understanding
12:07of the film, an embarrassment of the film, maybe, um, the strength of the film. The film's very,
12:12very strong and, um, has a lot of subtext to the film. And maybe that offended some people.
12:19But on the surface, I couldn't understand it because the film has got an incredible adventure
12:24story. Uh, very exciting and incredible cast. My own feeling is that the film was disliked by the
12:30company who made it, um, probably because it said something that was not acceptable,
12:42or that they did not believe it was an acceptable commentary on, let's say, American life.
12:47And that is that since the American dream is one in which endeavor finally pays off,
12:55here was a story about the way in which endeavor seemed to be a curse and that victory turned into
13:04disaster. Curiously, over the past years have come to think that, uh, it was the beginning of an,
13:12uh, a different era, and that we're looking back historically, it was the beginning of a different
13:19era socially, certainly in England and in America, with the coming of, of, uh, a very conservative time.
13:29I mean, the, I mean, it was the year it came out in England that was the election year, the
13:34first
13:34election year of, of, um, Margaret Thatcher, which I think was wonderful for England in some ways and
13:41terrible in others, and Ronald Reagan in America, entering a hugely conservative, and by conservative,
13:49I mean materialistic time. And I think the idea, some even maybe subconsciously, that, um,
14:00a man who had made such a success wasn't happy. I think, I'm sure, it sounds mad, but I'm sure
14:08subconsciously, politically, it was not at the right time. It was very disappointing, and I think the
14:13film, um, even released today would still have a very, you know, a very good audience. So really,
14:18the showing of the, of the movie on television is, uh, is quite exciting, because then, you know,
14:23you've got a, probably a big audience that we can sort of engage in a reaction to the film better.
14:27There have been so many opinions, and so many people have wanted to, you know, from the studio to
14:32creating everyone. I think, uh, it's marvelous that the BBC have, uh, said, well, we won't have an
14:39opinion about it, you know, we will show it as it was. So, you know, let the poor little
14:47cripple walk if it can. If it can't, then let it not. And that's the only way to behave with,
14:55uh, with, uh, things that give people a chance, and you can, like, let them be their own person,
15:02and let the film be its own, have its own say.
15:09So there you have it. Before the film begins, though, I must give you fair warning. Eureka contains
15:15some strong language and scenes of intense violence. It's nothing if not uncompromising,
15:20even by Nicholas Roeg's standards.