"Perkins is an incredible starting point for discovering American literature of that period," says Colin Firth, the British actor at the heart of the biopic Genius, which is set in 1920s New York.
He’s referring to his character, Maxwell Perkins, who was an editor at US publisher Scribner and the man responsible for shaping the work of such literary giants as F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, as well as lesser-known “gems” such as Hamilton Basso, J P Marquand and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
The film – adapted by Gladiator writer John Logan from A Scott Berg's 1978 biography, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius – deals primarily with Perkins's relationship with southern author Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law). Logan first read the book 30 years ago when he was "a starving playwright" fresh out of college.
“I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he says. “I found something provocative, and beautiful, and very personal in it.”
About 15 years later, after co-writing his first movie, the American Football drama Any Given Sunday, Logan bought the rights, determined to get funding for what he describes as "the least sexy Hollywood pitch, ever".
It is true that literary films are tough sells – so Logan wisely teamed up with acclaimed British theatre director Michael Grandage, who immediately related to Perkins. “He got to somehow hone this raw, creative artist and present it to the public,” he says.
It is this aspect that forms that basis for Genius, as man-of-few-words Perkins takes on the effusive Wolfe, initially editing the writer's thousand-page autobiographical manuscript O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life into the considerably more compact Look Homeward, Angel.
Joking that this is not the first time he has played the "repressed man in a suit" – not least in Tom Ford's A Single Man – Firth was keen to explore his character's taciturn nature.
“People talked about Maxwell Perkins being barely audible at times and that’s how I started it,” he says.
When it came to casting Wolfe, Grandage wanted someone "fearless". A frequent collaborator with Law in the theatre, he approached the actor on the last night of their 2013 production of Shakespeare's Henry V with the offer.
“I planned it for a long time,” Grandage recalls. “I just thought: ‘I’m not going to give it to him while he’s performing anything, because I don’t want him to start thinking of other things.’”
Law was immediately taken with the idea of embodying the garrulous Wolfe.
“The thing that struck me the most ... was his desire to shake things up, his desire to try to find a new voice, to leave the past as the past and push himself in a new direction,” he says. “He clearly had incredible writing skills but it was almost as if that wasn’t enough. He wanted to let them flow from truth and his heart and fighting to find honesty at all costs, which I found incredibly admirable.”
Genius is not only the story of Perkins and Wolfe – it also examines the destruction that creativity can wreak on home life (Laura Linney plays Perkins's playwright wife, Louise, and Nicole Kidman is Wolfe's lover Aline Bernstein).
“A whole film could be made out of Aline’s life,” says Grandage. “She was the first woman designer on Broadway of any great significance. She had many interesting lovers, as well as being married – but she was, above all else, a phenomenally single-minded, strong woman.”
With Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald and The Wire's Dominic West as Hemingway, Genius also adeptly captures the New York literary scene of the time, but never more so than bringing to the fore the troubled Wolfe, a man whose novels are less known to the public now.
“The real Max Perkins,” says Logan, “said something very interesting about Thomas Wolfe, which is: ‘You have within you a thousand demons and one archangel.’ And I think that’s completely true – but that archangel was truly gifted.”
Genius is in cinemas now
