Many people write about Lester James Peries, and that with the knowledge of most movies he had made. I for one have seen only a few, but my most memorable Sri Lankan movie was indeed one of his masterpieces. Many years ago I was asked by Minister Dinesh Gunawardana to write an article for Lester’s birthday with my ‘unique’ touch and although I painstakingly searched for some lost information, met and interviewed a British Assistant Director who was also lost in time, found pictures and wrote an article on how Lester went through this special project, it was never used by his foundation. Hence, I visited back that time and re- edited to commemorate this great archon of local cinema that we lost some time ago.
I was very small when my late father showed me ‘The God King’ on television sometime in the eighties. He was proud of its grandeur, perhaps due to his English style upbringing and education, proud of its majestic portrayal of Kashyapa and Dhatusena, and mostly of its British- Sri Lankan collaboration.
The God King is a 1974 Sri Lankan historical film directed by Lester James Peries, financed by pioneer British film producer Dimitri Grunwald. As it was a British- Sri Lankan collaboration, Dimithri Grunwald had brought in the three main actors, the script, the assistant director, the production manager, makeup artist and financial backing on a large scale.
It is based on the tragic story of King Kashyapa that we all know of and became an epic film with shooting done at the actual historical locations of the Sigiriya rock, the nearby plains and Mannar, utilising a large crew and extras with British actors Leigh Lawson in the leading role, Geoffrey Russell as King Dhatusena and Oliver Tobias, as General Migara.
Cultural collaboration
Art Director, Make up, Production Manager, Assistant Director, and the other main roles went to the British while four other main parts were done by Ravindra Randeniya as Moggallana, Joe Abeywickrama as the Hindu Swami, Iranganie Serasinghe as Varuni, Menik Kurukulasooriya as Sumithra and Vijaya Kumarathunga as Lalith. All the technical parts such as, camera, music, costume and directing were handled by Sri Lankans, led by Lester.
After a long search, some time ago I found the Assistant Director Richard Boyle who was then a novice in the industry gladly taking the privilege to work with our cinema legend, and he recalled many details of this difficult and less known project while I had found some other details about his involvement and the movie itself to commemorate our own Lester.
Lester himself had said that the production was plagued with problems from the beginning to the end. This was perhaps due to its mammoth task of the cultural collaborations of two very different races, their different working methods, portrayal of historical accuracy and inaccuracies, and of course putting together a large group of extras and many animals at various locations.
But who else could better handle it than the veteran Sri Lankan director Lester. I believe, the British producers relied on that fact and that itself entirely when choosing the director. If not, it was the obvious choice for them to go with a British director with more experience in making big budget tragedies. It seemed, the most difficult task for Lester was to make the bizarre notion of King Kashyapa that was on the script come to life in a more believable manner. As his Assistant Director Richard Boyle puts it, most possibly the diverse influences of Senerath Paranavithana, Swami Gauribala and Manik Sandrasagara on Anthony Greville-Bell, the script writer’s understanding of Sigiriya had caused all these problems.
According to those diverse accounts, he seemed to have understood that Sigiriya was an exotic pleasure palace and King Kashyapa as a crazy playboy. Senerath Paranavithana being an academic and an archaeologist seems an unlikely influence for such bizarre notions, but as per my view on the subject and as per Boyle’s recollection, a certain Indian swami Gauribala has explored with the idea of the palace on the rocks as an eccentric place and a pleasure ground and had made the writer believe in his ideas.
I could not find more details about this Hindu Swami who has convinced the movie writer of such notions about Sri Lanka’s history but it was obvious that the 70s was a hippie generation where influences of eastern culture had a profound effect on the young generations of the western culture.
In real life, it may have been a pleasure palace to some extent, as all kings around the world indulged in luxury surrounded by women of their courts, music, dancing and best food that anyone could lay their hands on.
But the way the script was written by the British writer sounded almost completely far away from the history we know of, but was not entirely the fault of the writer.
Perhaps the Indian Swami’s interpretation of Sigiriya, as Boyle also stated, gave him a slight misunderstanding because of pleasure focused Indian history, than the more earthly bound Sri Lankan tragic tale of King Kashyapa.
Boyle added that as Lester himself had later recalled, Swami Gauribala’s theories of Kashyapa as a puppet in the hands of a Swami (played by Joe Abeywickrama) and Sigiriya as a centre of a strange cult was too strange even for him to grasp and he had a difficult task of making sense of this script.
Even as a child, with the little historical knowledge I had, I also wondered what an Indian-Hindu type Swami was doing ruling the life of a well-known Buddhist King. Buddhism had already arrived in Sri Lanka hundreds of years ago and Kashyapa’s father King Dhatusena has cemented himself in history as a devoted Buddhist king who created the magnificent ‘Avukana Buddha statue’.
Some reviews of the movie had criticised the controversial element of Hindu intervention in a Sri Lankan Court in the form of a Swami instead of the old notion of Kashyapa being a lover of beauty and aesthetics as per Boyle’s notes.
Many other aspects of the production were also cause for concern. A huge palace set at Anuradhapura was said to have been way behind the scheduled finishing date.
The production was overstretched and under prepared, and working conditions were too hard for the British team. Well-known Shakespearean actor Ben Kingsley fell ill and left, therefore, Leigh Lawson was brought in to replace him as Kashyapa.
Exhausted by delays
Although he processed all the charms and boyish looks of a playful, handsome young prince, the lack of depth in his voice seemed to have caused some concerns, or perhaps some were trying to compare him too much with Ben Kingsley, and the producers were becoming more and more exhausted by the delays and working conditions.
During one battle scene, which involved 33 elephants, one of them panicked and ran off to the jungle still wearing its costume and it took them two days to get the elephant back.
The producer who could handle any problem, Dimithri had to go back to London to oversee another production and the Sri Lankan producer abandoned the set and left for India. This was the final nail on the coffin and the production came to a halt. Richard Boyle was very young and straight from London when he was promoted to the first Assistant Director’s role during this chaos.
Eager to learn about the industry, and eager to please Lester and the British producers, he seemed to have jumped at the chance without a remote understanding of the madness that was brewing behind the scenes.
From thereon, he has had hands on experience to know Lester during an eight month period where he was with him almost every day. According to him, Lester remained a calm, cool and almost a motionless figure amid problems, and nothing seemed to have made him change his attitude.
New arrivals
However, many months later the production resumed duties, after most of the British cast left with bitter thoughts, and their replacements arrived and took their places. Oliver Tobias, Leigh Lawson and Geoffrey Russell were among the new arrivals and fortunately some of them are said to have had a more easygoing and different attitude to the difficult working conditions in Sri Lanka.
Boyle recalls a young journalist called William Hall from the ‘London Evening News’ writing about Lester as the ‘quiet man putting Ceylon right on the map’ after observing the making of The God King.
Later on, The God King had opened to mixed reviews and it was not a box office success. According to Boyle, The God King was reviewed by a number of film journals in England during the spring and early summer of l975, with Lester’s as well as Cinematographer William Blake’s efforts being praised. In July 1976 The God King was finally released in Colombo at the Liberty cinema.
But Lester was satisfied that it was finally finished into a fine cinematic art. Richard Boyle states that Lester’s response to it was legendary, “If we had allowed the film to collapse, it would have been a setback to the whole Asian cinema. Instead, the film proved that collaborative co-productions were possible, and that Sri Lankans could deliver the goods.”
Dimitri de Grunwald, was a famed British producer born in Russia and he had produced 13 movies in his lifetime. Some of them were nominated for prestigious awards like the BAFTA and some starred Hollywood heavy weights like Sean Connery, Bridget Bardot, Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers, Bette Davis, David Carradine and Roger Moore.
Therefore, for someone like Dimitri to risk so much on a film to be directed and photographed by Asians, he must sure have had faith and knowledge on Lester James Peries as a capable director.
As the journalist William Hall puts it, Lester James Peries was a small person but he was the King Bee in the hive and Ceylon’s top director. The God King was a bizarrely large production for a small country like Sri Lanka at that time. ‘New York Herald Tribune’(July 27, 1973) reported that it had cost $6 million to make, and if that was true, it was one of the biggest dual productions in the world at that time.
Therefore, it was inevitable for things to go wrong, but to have successfully completed the job of retelling the tale of a Sri Lankan legend in a way both the eastern and western world could understand was a mammoth task, that could only be done by a legend in the film industry.
Thanks to him, The God King made an ever-lasting image in my child mind at that time as eccentric as it truly was, and as grand and rare as it truly is today.