And When Did You Last See Your Father?, 2007

Synopsis:

Based on Blake Morrison’s best selling memoir, “And When Did You Last See Your Father?”, is ultimately a father son love story. From scholarly Blake’s fraught and some times humiliating teenage years growing up with a charismatic, overbearing and adulterous father; through to the ultimate grief of watching him die, as an adult and father himself, the story takes us on a heart-rending and often humorous journey in which Blake revisits his past, comes to terms with some difficult home truths and finally learns to accept that one’s parents are not always accountable to their children.

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Full description:

Arthur Morrison and his wife Kim are both GPs based in the same medical practice in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. They have two children, Gillian and her older brother Blake – the protagonist of the story and today an established author. Blake’s story jumps between childhood and teenage memories, and the present day, which sees him at 40, married with two children, and dealing with the fact that his father is terminally ill.

The film opens with a humorous flashback to a summer bank holiday family trip in the late 1950s. Blake is 8 years old and we see him and the rest of the family dying with embarrassment as Arthur hits the hard shoulder to skip a long queue of traffic at a car racing event. He proceeds to charm his way in to the private members car park.

This is the first of many flashbacks that convey Arthur’s bluff ways and the pride he takes in his money-saving, time-saving minor duplicities. Some of these childhood episodes include Auntie Beatty and her daughter Josie.

It becomes clear that Beatty and Arthur are more than friends and that Josie could even be Arthur’s child. Adult Blake strives and fails to find the truth about Josie but it adds to the problematic relationship between father and son as well as providing an insight to the parameters of his father’s marriage – Kim knows about Beatty and never reacts.

To the present day and Arthur’s ways haven’t changed over the years, he is indignant that Blake has hired a van to move house with his family when he could have used his own mobile home for the job. It’s clear that Arthur still dominates his son, to both Blake’s resignation and his wife’s annoyance. However, Blake’s wife and children barely feature in this story.

We track Blake on his increasingly frequent trips north from his London home to visit his ailing yet ebullient father and to support his mother – the ever adoring wife.

The essence of this father/son relationship is further explained through flashbacks to Blake’s teens – a skiing trip, a fumbled affair with the au pair – where the awkward and introverted Blake is constantly crushed by his father’s flirtatious ways and need to be the centre of attention.

These memories are interspersed with tender, heart-rending and often uncomfortably graphic scenes of Arthur’s decline and submission to the cancer that is killing him.

Arthur’s battle with his failing health is paralleled by Blake’s struggle to come to terms with his relationship with his father.

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This project has been developed through the UK Film Council’s slate funding initiative. Intandem Films will handle international sales. The project is one of the first to come through the development slate franchises awarded two years ago by the U.K. Film Council.

It's produced by Stephen Woolley and Liz Karlsen's Number 9 Films, with backing from FilmFour and EM Media.

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American and Latin American rights.

Buena Vista Intl. is taking U.K. theatrical, video and pay TV rights.

Principal photography has started 5 October 2006.