How many of your kids can you expect to become stars? If your surname is Fiennes — or, to be at once more prolix and more precise, Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes — the answer would seem to be an improbably high percentage. Of the six children born within the space of a decade to the bohemian photographer Mark Fiennes and his novelist wife, Jini, no less than five have found fame in the film industry while the sixth, Jacob, is renowned as a conservationist.
Between them (and their explorer cousin Ranulph) they have turned the name Fiennes into a moniker to conjure with. Ralph is the megastar of the family, recently nominated for an Oscar for his role in Conclave, and the favourite for a Bafta at tonight’s ceremony. Hot on his heels comes the youngest brother, Joseph, last seen in James Graham’s hit play about football, Dear England. Magnus, the middle son, is an award-winning producer and composer of movie scores while Martha and Sophie, the two sisters, are acclaimed directors, although in different genres.
This month, I caught up with Martha, the elder of the two, as the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, west London, screens two of her works. Now aged 61, she made her feature film debut in 1999 with Onegin, an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel; the film earned a Bafta nomination and won a London Critics Circle award. Her follow-up, Chromophobia, was premiered at the 2005 Cannes Festival. But while she continues to work on her next feature — a movie about the spy Mata Hari is in development — she has been exploring more experimental fields.
In 2011 Fiennes made Nativity, a slow-motion digital version of a Renaissance tableau that, drawing film and fine art together, was exhibited at the National Gallery and the V&A. Viewers will get another chance to see it at the Coronet alongside the British premiere of its successor, Yugen. Fiennes has created what she describes as “a moving image artwork: a hybrid that inhabits a space somewhere between a painting, a photograph, a film and a computer game”.
Yugen takes its title from an ancient Japanese aesthetic. It alludes “to the principle of a subtle yet profound awareness of the beauty and mystery of a partially perceived universe”, apparently. Salma Hayek, suitably beautiful and mysterious, is the star of the piece.
I stare as mushrooms sprout like some fabulous fungal wedding hat from Hayek’s head and watch her as she wanders amid fantastical architectural spaces or crawls like a creature across a chequerboard. Figures cavort through mountainous wastelands. A stone tower catches fire and goes up in bright flames. It’s nothing if not entrancing. But what makes this film radical, Fiennes explains, is that the AI “brain” in the black box in front of us is making its own decisions. Drawing on a data bank of images, it creates “a self-generated, never-repeating, non-linear narrative with infinite possibilities”.
The music for Yugen was composed by Martha’s younger brother, Magnus, who has worked with Shakira, Pulp and Tom Jones. For Yugen he has created a library of 85 different compositions from which the machine can choose, overlapping and combining them in such a multitude of ways that the music will never be heard — just as the images will never be seen — in the same way twice. “I just gave him some clips and said, ‘Go, Mags.’ He’s brilliant,” Fiennes declares.
Forget all those celebrity figures who publicly revel in their family feuds. The Fiennes family don’t brawl, they boost. Ralph took the main role in Onegin — although that was before he had found Hollywood stardom with Schindler’s List, and the idea that he and the sister (then still a director of music videos and commercials) could get a feature film off the ground felt implausible. But they did and by the time Martha was directing Chromophobia, in which Ralph also featured, it was presumably he who helped to attract the starry cast.
Brought up in the country, at first in a cottage in Wiltshire and then, after her parents decamped (“to escape the rat race”) to Cork in Ireland, they were a close family. “Close in age,” Fiennes says. “My mother really popped them out at a rate of almost one a year, but we also kept close company. Of course, we squabbled … a lot … Magnus never did any washing up and he always got away with it. But we were all very different. There was no sense of rivalry.”
Their mother, a “powerful, passionate woman” who had eight books published under her maiden name, Jennifer Lash, put her writing career on hold to home-school her six children. “She had a thing about the creative process,” Fiennes says. “There were crayons and paintings and books and music playing constantly. She felt that a conventional education could be very limiting. I remember a young poet telling her he’d got a place at Oxford. ‘I’m just very sorry you are going,’ she said. She thought Oxford would ruin his creativity.
“What my mother was very, very brilliant at was children,” Fiennes adds. “She believed that when they popped into this world, they already had a shape and you ushered them along, but that basic shape, the character, was there from the get-go. But she was also a disciplinarian. She could get hysterical and be quite scary. It could be tough. But the idea that work is not just about inspiration, but about hard effort: that came from her. ‘You’ve got to just put your guts into it,’ she would say: so often that we started to imitate her, giggling and rolling our eyes.”
As a child, Martha loved sewing and knitting and crochet. Ralph, she remembers, “was the most brilliant natural draughtsman. He had huge sheets of paper and he would start drawing a Napoleonic battle charge or something, and it would be fantastic, but then he would suddenly just go, ‘No,’ and leave it.” Sophie also was great at drawing. And Joe “was such an impish character; so sweet. He was really into his fashion early on. Remember those big blotches of bleach on your jeans?” Fiennes laughs. “It’s unfair to remind people. We all wear terrible clothes at some point.” And besides, nothing could put the female admirers off. “I realised my brothers were good-looking rather early on — I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s why you’re friends with me … you want to get off with Ralph.’ Though actually I think my father was even more handsome.”
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Where did film come into it? “Well, of course, our father was a photographer,” Fiennes says. He would put Martha and Sophie to work in his darkroom for pocket money. They didn’t have a TV. A favourite family story is of the time when Sophie asked their neighbours if they had been watching their “bourgeois television”. “But if any one of us ever went to the cinema we would come back and tell the others about it in every minutest detail,” Fiennes recalls. “Film had this magic for all of us. It wasn’t mundane.”
And the Fiennes parents were there to encourage their children. “I remember Ralph, who was at art school, suddenly deciding he wanted to act — it was between that and, can you believe it, going into the Royal Marines — and our mother got right behind him even though my father’s father, who was a captain of industry, kept asking her: ‘How can you possibly let Ralph do something so stupid?’ By the time Joe followed him into acting, Ralph was doing very well. I remember Joe worrying that Ralph would think he was copying.” But although their mother had died of breast cancer (in 1993, aged 55; her husband died a decade later) before Ralph soared to success, the rest of the family followed her example and got right behind their youngest brother’s career.
“We weren’t competitive. I never wanted to act, though I am the good mimic in the family,” she says. And when the Fiennes family play charades it is apparently Magnus, the musician, who excels. “He’s a big old closet performer,” Fiennes says, laughing. “But it’s the work that matters. It was respect for the work that was always instilled in us. We never criticise each other. Luckily, we don’t need to. My brothers are brilliant. Ralph is exquisite, his performance is fantastic in Conclave. He’s absolutely on the top of his game. We all feel really proud of him and proud of each other.”
The talent is clearly passed on to the next generation. Two of Martha’s three children, Hero and Mercy Fiennes-Tiffin, have already found note as actors (she is separated from their father, the cinematographer George Tiffin and has recently married an antiquarian book dealer, Simon Finch). The Fiennes, it would seem, are not just a family. This is a dynasty in development.
Martha Fiennes: Yugen & Nativity is at the Coronet Theatre, London, Feb 13-19, thecoronettheatre.com
