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Tiffany Hansen: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Alison Stewart today. A new documentary explores the larger-than-life persona of celebrated actor Richard Harris through the memories of his three sons, it's titled The Ghost of Richard Harris. Harris was known for turning on the charm in films like Camelot and as Dumbledore in Harry Potter, for his daring roles in films like The Field and This Sporting Life. He was also a talented poet and singer.

You might know his song MacArthur Park, which was an unlikely hit back in the '60s, but Harris was also infamous for his hard-partying, drinking, behaviors that led to the end of his marriage to the mother of his three boys. One of those boys grew up to be actor Jared Harris, who you might know from his roles in Mad Men and Chernobyl. He is prominently featured in the film and joins me now to discuss it. Hi, Jared.

Jared: Hi, I'm also here with the director Adrian Sibley.

Tiffany: Yes, and I was just getting to him. We're also joined by the film's director Adrian Sibley. Hi, Adrian.

Adrian: Hello there. Hi.

Tiffany: The Ghost of Richard Harris premieres on BritBox and Prime Video today. Adrian, how did you get the idea to do a documentary on Richard Harris? You're just sitting around and you're thinking to yourself, "You know what? I think we need to do a film about Richard Harris." Or was there some bolt of lightning inspiration that hit you about this person?

Adrian: Well, actually, I've made a few documentaries about filmmakers. I did a BBC series called Moving Pictures and made documentaries, then stories, and then I made a documentary about Anthony Hopkins around the time of Hannibal. I was friends with Damian and I knew Jared a little bit.

Jared: Damian is my elder brother, Alison.

Adrian: He's a very good director. Actually, they're all in the industry, the Harris boys. I said, "I've always liked your dad. "I saw Camelot when I was a kid and I thought that it was as good as Man for All Seasons and Lawrence of Arabia. For me, it was a very seminal film. Damian said, "Come and meet him. He's seen the film about Hopkins. I think you may get on," and sure enough, we met and we did and nothing happened. Unfortunately, he passed away. Then Jared and I had become friendly, and we started talking about it. I should let Jared pick up there because that's when it started to happen.

Jared: You left out my favorite bit about your meeting with Dad, which is that he agrees to do the documentary with Adrian but only if he accepts that he's going to lie half the time,-

Tiffany: [chuckles]

Jared: -which Adrian liked the idea of, but the BBC got cold feet about.

Tiffany: They're sticklers about that.

Jared: Yes, and then before he was able to set it up somewhere else, Dad passed away. There was been nothing significant done about him in terms of biographies or anything like that, Adrian and I were just talking about how to do this then when your subject is no longer there to speak for themselves. That took a while to put together, and there was a journalist called Joe Jackson who'd done these interviews with Dad. It took a long time for us, but he allowed us to license a very small part of these interviews that he had.

That along with everything else that was in the archive and Adrian's idea about it being about this man's children who were trying to figure out who he was, which I feel is one of the universal points that the film manages to hit, which is on a very truthful level, it's difficult to know your parents, to know who they are. It takes a while for you to be able to get to that point where you start to discover them as individuals and people rather than as archetypes as parents.

Tiffany: Going through this process then you're discovering who he was, not only to you but to everyone else. I'm sure that those are two. We can talk about the difference between Richard and Dickie in a little bit, but what I'm getting in here is, of the things that you learned in that process, what do you think surprised you the most?

Jared: What surprised me the most? That's difficult. One of the things I was surprised about was the wealth of material that was in the archive that Adrian is able to use. We've since donated the archive to Cork University. What came up often was that he kept so much material from his life and from his career, but he didn't look after it. He chucked it into suitcases. He wasn't a sentimental person in that sense, but he obviously, he did, he kept all of our school letters, all of our reports from home, and stuff like that. That was a surprise.

Tiffany: Adrian.

Jared: Go ahead, Adrian.

Adrian: For me, actually, the person that I met 20 years ago was not the person that I'd seen represented in the media and press. As a filmmaker and somebody that's done quite a lot of films about individuals, what I'm always interested in is trying to find some truth. Often, that person doesn't know the truth about themselves because they've been mining a certain thing for so long, whether it's a singer. They see themselves and they're often confused by their own image that, ironically enough, they've created.

I felt very much that Richard was in that category, that beyond the persona that he'd put out there, also, there was somebody that was familiar with Irish poetry that had a real understanding of music and how to interpret that. There was somebody that could write and direct. There was somebody that actually had really interesting things to say about acting.

I remember looking at some of the things when Lindsay Anderson died, Richard gave a little scene interview, which you can find on YouTube actually if you squirrel away beyond the Letterman's and Carson shows where he performs and does the things they expect him to do, you know, humor funny. Yes. Beyond that, where his understanding of Lindsay Anderson's understanding of violence and how to portray it and you can see that in If and the film they did together This Sporting Life.

He [unintelligible 00:07:17] and that's why this man, this director could do that and why collaborating together they were so good at doing it because Richard had that in him and Lindsay knew how to bring it out. I thought, "Those are the things that interest me." Actually, Joe Jackson's tapes were important, but that section is all from that interview. There's a lot of parts where I tailored things that I'd heard Richard saying with his interview, in order to give him a voice-- that's my dog. I do apologize about that. He's a Pharaoh Hound. He's a rescue and he's very territorial.

Tiffany: Quite all right.

Adrian: Basically, what I'm saying is I wanted to show a different side of who Richard Harris was. That was no easy journey because although there was a lot of material, a lot of it was MacGuffins placed by himself very often. Actually, the film has a moment where something, he probably wouldn't have wanted to be seen, is discovered. He was very complicated and how he interpreted himself and that's what I think we achieved, hopefully, with the film.

Tiffany: One of the things that we hear him say in the film is, "I am a very excessive person, everything I did with an overindulgence of passion." Was that a MacGuffin, as you put it?

Adrian: No, I think that was a truism. In other words, that was very truthful, but that was only one side of what he did because he did refer to himself being the jockey on a horse that was out of control. I loved the lines, his poetry in describing who he wasn't. That was only one side of it because Richard, like many of us, was different people at different times. I had my favorite Richards. I don't know whether Jared ever felt like that as his son. It was very hard because he was lots of different people.

He was a young guy that started acting very late that was rejected by the English acting fraternity and decided to sock it to them in many ways with real anger and focus, and I love that. He amongst other Celtic actors did a great job, and then he became a Hollywood star. There was a different type of Richard and then a musician and a singer with Jimmy Webb, who's an amazingly talented man, who tells really moving stories and told me that Richard was one of the loves of his life.

We didn't put that in because we weren't trying to flatter and we did very rarely had people blowing smoke up wherever-- in many documentaries spent the whole time going, "This guy was great. He changed that." "He radicalized our attitude to this. Wasn't he amazing?" "Was it--" Well, we believe that Richard was honest enough to be a real person, and being an actor and a famous person was not nice necessarily the top of his list. In fact, far from it more often than not.

Tiffany: Jared, I wonder if when you heard, in the past and probably even here now, the vague generalities that people might-- a conception of him as a person that they might have if you chafe against that sometimes.

Jared: Yes, because it's all the press talk about. That's the only focus that they have. I run into it all the time particularly among the English media when I'm promoting projects. It was a part of his image that he put out there. I remember him telling me-- he had a movie called Man in the Wilderness which is when he started to make movies himself, and he could choose what he did, A Man Called Horse, Man in the Wilderness, films like this, Cromwell. The ticket sales started to drop, so the producer, Sandy Howard, told him, " Go out there and create some headlines."

He went out and punched some policemen so that he could get in the headlines again and then people would go and see the movie. It's very much part of an image that he fed. In the end, it consumed everything about him, so no one dug any further. Of course, as a creative person, there was much more to him, but I also knew him as a person, as a human being, as a father, as a friend. There was so much more to him than that.

Tiffany: It was the reality he created, is what I'm hearing you say.

Jared: It was a public image that he fed, yes. In the end, I think, to his own detriment because people were only focused on that. The press would only focus on that.

Tiffany: Adrian, what we're talking about here speaks to that difference between Dickie and Richard, which is for Americans maybe not as well known, the difference in personality there. If you can explain just for folks who might not know the difference there, not only in terms of his personality but just how he's referred to in the British press.

Adrian: For me, and without wanting to overstep, because I'm a documentarian, I met Richard a couple of times, but I didn't know him intimately. What I felt quite strongly, having read everything about him and watched his movies again and listened to as much as possible and talked to his sons over the years, was that actually his heart was in Ireland. The truth of his story laid in the Emerald Isle as it were. Although he had a huge career, he took Camelot around Australia, hugely successfully, which gave him an [crosstalk].

Jared: And the United States.

Adrian: And the United States.

Jared: He toured Camelot for almost a decade.

Adrian: Yes, but what I felt for the film that I wanted to talk about, which was who-- I'm trying to explain the things that Jared's mentioning about why his hell-raising and all of that was that where he came from and why. Where he came from and why was in Kilkee, but it also turned out to be in some ways in Leenane, which is where he shot The Field and to a lesser extent, actually Limerick, where he was born, but there was a house there that's referred to in the film.

I actually felt that there was not a thriller, but something that was unrevealed that was right under people's noses about who Dickie Harris was. Richard Harris was referred to as Dickie by his family, by his friends, by everybody, and still is by a lot of Irish people because they knew the young man who was going to be a rugby star and an international probably.

They knew the joker who had a crack, but they didn't know the actor that had made it struggling through Earl's Court and pushing his way onto stage, and the such like. That was very important, and that dichotomy, Jared's mother had picked up upon which was very significant in her book, her autobiography.

Jared: Love, honour, and dismay.

Adrian: That's where Richard--

Jared: She identified this thing first that in Ireland, they only refer to him as Dickie Harris, and still to this day, they only call him Dickie. Everywhere else in the world, he's called Richard. She made the observation that Dickie Harris never left Ireland and Richard never went back. I think it was one of the smart things that Adrian does in the way that he structures the narrative, which is that Richard Harris, as my father said, was a-- he said that one of the greatest roles he ever played was Richard Harris, that it was to some extent an invented persona.

When did he invent the persona? Why did he invent the persona? It comes about at that moment the two years that he's lying in tubercular bed and that dream of his life is dying of being an international rugby player, and he has to find a new purpose.

Adrian: Which I held back. In a way, we are giving away the film because I held it back to people that don't know who he is about why he was who he was. It all ends up at the end of the film, answering the questions that he's posed himself without fully giving an answer. It was really funny when we were at Venice-- we were lucky enough to be invited to the Venice Film Festival with our film, which was great. We really didn't expect it.

Jared came, it was thrilling to be there with Timothée Chalamet and the like, but Blonde was there. One critic, I thought, interestingly picked up and said, "There's two films that you must see here because both of them show you how an actor and a famous person creates their image and who they are." One is Marilyn Monroe, and the other is Richard, aka Dickie Harris.

Tiffany: Jared, I wonder how people who don't know Dickie Harris might see glimmers of that in the Richard Harris that they do know. How would that show up for people?

Jared: You see it in the-- There's a period where he decides that he's fed up with acting and he goes to work at Malachy McCourt's bar. He enjoyed the company of people in bars. He liked to hang out with just regular people. That fraternity is very Irish. The fascination with people and individuals that's more interesting than watching something on television or something. They love meeting new people and finding out their story and sharing their stories, true or not. The more outlandish, the better over pints.

The love of literature is extremely Irish. When we'd go on holidays together, he would hang out with everybody in the family and enjoy the company and the energy of that for about three or four days and then he'd get fed up and go up to his room. He'd always travel with a suitcase full of books or novels. He'd go up to his room and he'd sit and he'd read for a couple of days. I would see him--

Tiffany: Do you see any of that in yourself?

Jared: No. That was very much part of his upbringing specific to Ireland. Also, that condition that he's up in his room reading these books on a holiday, that's of course, what he did for two years. He educated himself. His education when he was at school was squandered because he was a rugby player, and all of his classes were taught by the rugby coach. They didn't bother to teach him mathematics or any of them, geography, French, whatever. They just discussed rugby tactics the whole time.

His school reports were terrible. During those two years, he educated himself. That was a throwback to that part of his life when he found comfort. There was a retreat for him if you like.

Tiffany: Adrian, I wonder as American audiences see this film as an exploration of a complicated man, what do you hope that they will take away from it more than anything else? [chuckles]

Adrian: It's a really good question because you could ask why are we making a film now about Richard 20 years after his passing. One was, as we've discussed because we wanted to show that there was much more to him. I think that we potentially succeeded in that. For me personally, it was also to show people that even if you're a movie star and you've had huge success, that doesn't really make life any easier to live and that actually Richard, with all his demons, had to face them in his own way.

He did that gloriously, whether unsuccessfully or successfully. He's lived his life like few people do in every moment. He enjoyed the smallest things, whether that had been reading his books and smoking cigarettes in his room, or going out and having a Guinness in a pub when he was in a pair of pajamas later in life. Or when he was younger, you wouldn't be able to keep up with the amount of things that he was doing. I think that the message of the film is to be yourself, really, at the end of the day.

If anyone was themselves-- there's very few people can do that, and Richard could. Sometimes it may look like a throwback and something that's not particularly admirable in this day and age, but he was very true to his time and that period. I admired that. I think that anybody that watches the film with an open mind will really get an understanding of somebody that was truly [crosstalk].

Tiffany: Adrian, sorry. We're going to have to leave it there. Adrian Sibley, films director, Jared Harris, Richard Harris's son talking about The Ghost of Richard Harris premieres on BritBox and Prime Video today. Thanks for the conversation, gentlemen.

Adrian: Pleasure.

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